Role reversal

SO it is now official and incontrovertible. A 3.2 billion letter long human genome, unfurled by scientists for the first time, records the entire history of mankind over a period of four billion years. And surprise, surprise, it reveals that all human life on earth is born of woman. A recent paper in Science, by J. Craig Venter and some others (of Celera Genomics), thus confirms what the worshippers of Adya Kali have been saying all along; that all human beings, (brown, yellow, white or black) have descended from one primordial black Mother, and that it is quite possible that people from different racial groups may have more in common than individuals within the same group.

Our Shakta texts and contexts have always maintained that Kali is an independent and powerful deity, unassociated with the powers of any male god. "Thou art Kali, the original form of all things ... ," says Mahanirvana Tantra: "... And because thou art the origin of and devourer of all things, thou are Adya (primordial) Kali... Thou art the beginning of all..." Her only known, periodic, consort is Shiva, whom she almost always dominates and often incites with wild anti-social behaviour.

Because young humans have to be nurtured longer than other mammals, most of us first learn of power and control from a woman. In Tantric iconographic representations of the two genders (represented by Kali and Shiva), Kali is the dominant partner. She is depicted standing upon or dancing over the prostrate body of Shiva and is, thus, the opposite of Shiva's other consort: the benign and maternal Parvati. Perhaps Kali is one whose very existence can explain the recent and not so-recent behaviour of the members of many all-male, right wing fraternities from the Ku Klux Klan to the Shiv Sena. Men who dared to be different and protested against the subjugation of women and other marginalised groups were perhaps trying to re-establish the atavistic fact of men's dependent status in the original matriarchal society. The outrageous Mother Kali, with her nudity, her dishevelled appearance and her orgiastic drinking and dancing, still turns the tables on accepted social behaviour. She has always asserted the right of all her children to be free and co-habit happily peacefully and with empathy. Feminists, like those described by Carolyn Heilburn, are in the process of regaining their lost power as daughters of the Black Mother.

"... She has become braver as she has aged, less interested in the opinions of those she does not cherish, and has come to realise that she has little to lose, little any longer to risk, that age above all, both for those with children and those without them, is the time when there is very little reason to fear, or hide or not attempt brave and important things." (Writing A Woman's Life)

Kali, the Black Mother, restores faith in reversals of all kinds, creating empathy and the ability to detect bias and hypocrisy in ourselves and in others. She exposes injustices that seem normal and are, therefore, invisible by standing the standards of male judgment upside down.

Let us ask a few audacious questions the Black Mother would have asked; since progress, as Benjamin de Casseres said, is nothing but the victory of laughter over dogma.

* How would it feel if actors, writers, politicians and social activists were identified by their wives or marital status as their female counterparts often are?

* What if males were prejudged as the actual torturers and burners of brides (which according to police investigators they usually are) instead of the mothers-in-law and sisters in-law, which breeds the perennial feminist-baiting question: aren't women women's worst enemies?

* What if Indira Gandhi had orthopaedic problems such as the late President Dr. Shankar Dayal Sharma and the present Prime Minister, and collapsed in public? How would our media have reported it.

* What if Rabri Devi has another child while in power? Would the media treat it the way they have Tony Blair's recent fatherhood, by interpreting it as a sign of his virility and power and giving him higher ratings in popularity?

* If men menstruated, would the government have distributed safe and sterilised sanitary napkins free of cost, as it does condoms today?

Perhaps meditating long and hard on our common Black Mother's reversal of socio-political roles would help carve healthier paradigms of power and governance, in India today. It can certainly help unite universal opposites, beginning with the unification of the artificially polarised worlds of male and female, the sacred and the profane. Of course it is not easy to obtain. There will always be a tension between the old ideas system from which energy has evaporated but which has the heaped up force of custom, money and state institutions backing it, and a primordial half-remembered cluster of ideas alive and crackling with energy but at the moment a swirling and incoherent mass, suggesting itself through action.

Thereby hangs a new tale. Or several of them.

MRINAL PANDE

The author writes in Hindi and English and is a freelance journalist.

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