In truth, there was always genre fiction. The Sages knew that to approach the Supreme Being, the true, many paths were necessary. So were the puranas – fantastic tales, alive in the villages of India – claimed to be part of the great revelation of the divine.
As a child, the puranas (as well as epics), reborn as comics, guided my reading. The first was Surya, a story of the god who was his sun (and to whom, according to the comic, death, Yama was born). The next, Beeshma, which made me wonder why the gods would deign to rain flowers upon the one who proclaimed he would remain a bachelor. Beeshma was granted the moment to choose his death; so it was on the battlefield pierced by a hundred arrows that he consented to die only after discoursing for many hours (A speech which was passed over in the comic but runs for hundreds of pages in the Mahabharta, or so a friend tells me).
The third was Krishna, with a picture of a blue skinned child on the front, stealing milk (was it milk?) Was it Krishna who shot an arrow into the earth so a jet of water sprang up to meet Beeshma’s lips on the last day of his life? I think so. The old man had asked to drink and so he drank. Of course it was that same battle, where uncle lined up against nephew, friend against friend that saw Krishina reveal himself to Arjuna. The comic was bought for me: The Bhagavad Gita, which presented in simple form the lesson that was granted to Arjuna, who was reluctant to fight. Krishna, Arjuna’s charioteer, revealed himself at that moment to be an avatar of Vishnu. He taught Arjuna what would allow him to steel himself for battle, showing him his actions were part of the great unfolding of the divine.
They made a comic of Shankara, too – the young philosopher who went willingly to his death, according to the story, having composed treatise after treatise (Ramanuja, the philosopher who would criticise Shankara in turn was said to be as old as Shankara was young). That comic was bought for me; I read it, but preferred the story of India’s battle with the grey-skinned demon whose limbs were severed from him one by one. Eventually, his belly was opened and he fell. Am I right to think Indra struck him with a mace that was also a bolt of lightning? A mace made from the bones of a sage?
My favourite of the comics was Sati and Shiva, for its exquisite line drawings – the beautiful eyes of Sati and the majesty of the purple skinned god. I read of a Shiva happy, romantic, relaxing with his bride. Sati would come to be insulted by her father when he failed to take blessings Shiva (I have cut short the story); she gave herself up to immolation (she would be reborn as Parvarthi). Shiva’s rage was magnificent: he pulled out a clump of hair and split it in two. So was Durga born (or reborn) and a thousand demons. They flew down to punish Sati’s father, beheading him and ravaging his kingdom. Eventually, Shiva became calm and allowed the father to come back to life, but with the head of a goat.
These are stories, marvellous stories, to tell those who are not ready for the truth. Watching Hero this morning, I marvel at the prospect of films of the same marvellous quality being made from the puranas of India. And I wondered, too, how one might carve up different ages of reading. I thought: the dreams of heroism, of magic, are dreams of lightness. Youth is that lightness, where the course of the future has not yet been decided not yet the potential one bears within oneself. Who will I be?, asks the child as he reads.
I thought: the legends give youth a future of which to dream. It can only be represented as lightness, as the freedom from gravity, and by magical powers, stronger than any adversary. But when do these dreams come to an end? When is it time to leave the puranas behind? When the adolescent’s body becomes too heavy to dream – or, better, that dream is not a dream of lightness because it cannot leave the body behind. One paralysed dreams of movement; one without wings dreams of flying: this is the difference between the dreams of the child and the adolescent: the first dreams of what he might be, the second of what he is not.
Now the freedom afforded by reading becomes less abstract. Now the world has come into focus: the expanse outside the house of your parents’ begins to reveal its law. It will not bend to you. You are not the hero who will alter its course. Now the drama becomes one of rebellion. You test the limits of the world and have them confirmed. The world is the world. You are brought up against it and its law. Your dreams are those of confinement and struggle. Now you read The Dark Knight or Watchmen: the hero is in the world and struggles with its law.
And if the world is too strong for the hero? When heroism is dispersed across the everyday? That is the time for abstraction, for that reading which confirms that everything you read had been a purana, and that the truth lay in the indifferent light which falls on the streets and the housing estates. Is there is a kind of reading which conforms to that light? To the fact of the world?
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