How to lose yourself?

The world is increasingly getting obsessed with self-promotion and a thinking that it alone can bring about peace and progress. The growing selfie culture is a manifestation of this daily obsession, backed by technology of the day. Often, a ‘perfect’ identity is carefully curated on social media with a focus on the self.

Swayed by the glitter of social media, there appears to be no actual pursuit of knowing the inner self. Eventually, this relentless self-promotion is leading to distress. The fear of having less and the desire for more has contributed to a balance sheet of unhappiness

It’s perhaps the right time to re-read the teachings of the Buddha, who argued thousands of years ago that the self is an illusion -- and that our belief in it is the cause of most, if not all, of our sufferings. Poring over ancient Buddhist texts, Jay L. Garfield, Maria Heim and Robert H. Sharf have teamed together to dismantle notions of the self in How To Lose Yourself: An Ancient Guide to Letting Go (Princeton University Press).

Their suggestion? “Better to lose yourself!” The writers contend that Buddha had argued for letting go of the self, which allows us to see more clearly the innumerable causes and conditions that come together to create our experience and that make us who we are. “When we allow our fantasies of self to dissolve, we discover instead the radically interdependent nature of our existence.”

Opening up another flank of study on the ancient religion, Douglas Ober contests the commonly held belief that Buddhism “all but disappeared” from India after the 13th century and 14th century and saw a revival only in the mid to late 19th century. In his book, Dust on the Throne (Navayana), he notes that Buddhism had always been there, and that two centuries of archaeological excavation and textual scholarship now point to a long, enduring, and “unarchived” Indian Buddhist afterlife that extends to the modern day. Ober’s exhaustive research told him that Buddhism had an indelible influence in shaping modern India.

As he writes in the Introduction, ‘A Dependent Arising’, the theory of Buddhism’s “disappearance” from the subcontinent is “little more than a useful fiction, deployed to wash over a more complicated historical terrain involving periodic Buddhist resurgences and trans-regional pilgrimage networks.” He shows that Indian’s modern Buddhist revival began nearly a century before 1956, when the Indian government celebrated “2,500 years of Buddhism” and when B.R. Ambedkar led half a million followers to convert to Buddhism.

Ober argues that the “revival of Buddhism” in colonial and postcolonial India led to a slew of movements from Hindu reform movements, the making of Hindu nationalism, Dalit and anti-caste activism, as also Nehruvian secular democracy. He tells the stories of individuals and communities that kept Buddhism alive, not least the incredible account of J.K. Birla, eldest son of entrepreneur B.D. Birla, who financed major Buddhist constructions in pilgrimage centers like Rajgir, Sarnath, Bodh Gaya, and also in new centers of “urban Buddhist activity”, including Calcutta, Bombay and New Delhi.

While Ghanashyam Birla, J.K. Birla’s younger brother, sided with Gandhi and Congress, J.K. and his father firmly supported the extreme Hindu right and the Hindu Maha Sabha, although as Ober notes, “they never stopped supporting Gandhi either.”

Efforts to resurrect Buddhist archaeological heritage are an ongoing process to help connect its monumental past with its philosophy.

In his book, Casting the Buddha (Pan Macmillan India), Shashank Shekhar Sinha traces the Buddhist heritage sites and the cities they are located in to understand their larger geographical, sociocultural and historical contexts. It is an illustrated history of Buddhist monuments in India, spanning 2,500 years. For the purposes of this book, Sinha writes in the Introduction, ‘monumental history’ plays on the word ‘monument’ and discusses Buddhist edifices, sites, and connected histories.

A closer look reveals how the “lives of the monuments” resonated with the people and communities around them including monks, laity, kings, traders, guilds, landlords, agriculturalists and villagers.

Over time these structures have acquired different forms and meanings and have also become important “sites of social and cultural interactions.” The buildings are “complex ecosystems” which capture the changing times and give an idea about belief systems, rituals, stories and folklore. For instance, writes Sinha, the sculptured panels on the gateways of Sanchi not only depict events from the life of the Buddha but also the Jataka tales and the mythical bodhisattvas.

Ober contends that Buddhism was an indispensable part of the daily lives of Indians from many walks of life. “They spent their days reading and reinterpreting Buddhist scriptures, attending and delivering dhamma talks, building and rebuilding Buddhist shrines.” The lives of Ambedkar, Birla, Kosambi, Mahavir, Sankritayan and many other figures “help us realize that there is no one single identity at the heart of modern Indian Buddhism... [it] continues to have an important but often unacknowledged role in Indian society.”

As Indians relived the past to find a better present and future, writes Ober, “a classless, casteless, egalitarian society,” they found the Buddha. That as a society we have not yet been able to eradicate discrimination and poverty means the debates on issues like “caste, inequality, morality, social order, and belonging” are not over. The quest to grasp the historical Buddha and understand his ‘inherent mission’ must continue, and this says a lot about our modern times and predicament.

Dust on the Throne
by Douglas Ober
Navayana, New Delhi.
Extent: 389, Price: Rs. 699.

How to lose yourself
by Jay L. Garfield, Maria Heim, Robert H. Sharf
Princeton University Press, Oxford.
Extent: 195, Price: $.17.

Casting the Buddha 
by Shashank S. Sinha
Pan Macmillan, New Delhi.
Extent: 384; Price: Rs. 359. 

First published under Bibliography in The Hindu dated May 23, 2025.

Be a woman once

Writing is an intellectual pursuit, but it’s also creative labor and a social and political statement. In doing so, one becomes a witness to one’s own self, which gets revealed in parts. The advocate in Banu Mushtaq slips into the shoes of an activist to bring alive the lived reality in the Muslim households and to narrate the eerie calm that pervades inside those four walls.

Many shades of male dominance and female submission are reflected in Mushtaq’s vast oeuvre of short stories, a dozen out of which have been translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi to critical acclaim, winning the English PEN and landing a spot on this year’s International Booker shortlist.

The 12 stories in Heart Lamp exquisitely capture the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities. Originally published between 1990 and 2023, these stories are portraits of family and community tensions that are precursors to all forms of caste and religious outbursts.

In calling out patriarchy and questioning traditions prevalent amongst predominantly traditional households, Mushtaq emerges as a tireless champion of women’s rights. For its style which is intensely observant and colloquially reflective, ‘after laying the egg of light at dawn, the black hen of ignorance exited, rushing into the darkness to peck at grain’, the collection of stories is sure to sustain readers’ interest.

Each of the 12 stories does bring the incessant human pain and misery to the surface. However, the final story, Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord! is one that serves to linger. It is not an apt closing to the collection but a touchy beginning, an open letter that dares God to be a woman once to address their plight. Written like a letter addressed to Allah, it seeks respite from male domination: ‘if you were to build the world again, do not be like an inexperienced potter. Come to earth as a woman instead!’ Either it is too naïve to understand what women endure or too cruel to acknowledge their plight.

Deepa Bhasthi’s translation has introduced Mushtaq’s progressive stories far and wide. Bhasthi has done her best in retaining the linguistic sense wherever possible. Translation of a text, according to the translator, is more than merely an act of replacing words in one language with equivalent words in another.

Heart Lamp is linguistically rich, giving the reader a different feeling. The long list of individuals has stretched support in making this book achieve the distinction that it deserves.

Heart Lamp
by Banu Mushtaq
translated by Deepa Bhasthi
Penguin Books, New Delhi.
Extent: 216, Price: Rs. 399.

First published in New Indian Express on May 18, 2025.

The will to ignorance is as strong as the desire to know

If ignorance is indeed bliss, as a poet once wrote, it also can be said that human beings “are creatures who want to know and not to know.” The world, writes Mark Lilla in his timely book, Ignorance and Bliss, is going through a phase in which the denial of “evident truth” is rising. It’s a world where “mesmerized crowds still follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds out common sense and expertise.”

Holiday from reality

A professor of humanities at Columbia University, Lilla’s arguments that people seem to favor ignorance are compelling. In these murky days when everything seems to be at sea, Lilla offers an amazing insight on the human being’s incorrigible “will to ignorance,” a term coined by Nietzsche. It seems after spending a lifetime searching for knowledge, humans have taken “a holiday from reality.” No wonder, resistance to knowledge is now being backed by an ideology that is supportive. In the face of such developments, those devoted to reason and logic have started to feel like refugees.

Quoting from George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, Lilla asks: “It is a common sentence that knowledge is power; but who hath duly considered or set forth the power of ignorance?” While some people are naturally curious about learning why, there are many others who are indifferent. There are reasons to avoid knowing about particular things, and many of those reasons not to know are perfectly justified. And then there are those who have developed a disinterest for gaining knowledge simply because they believe what they already know is the truth.

Lilla provokes readers to think about this. In the Introduction, he writes that Aristotle taught that all human beings want to know. “Our own experiences teach us that all human beings also want not to know, sometimes fiercely so.” The most obvious resistance to knowing is rooted in fear. People resist any aspect that is related to their morality and religiosity being questioned, because they are afraid of getting exposed. By questioning such firm beliefs, people run the risk of upsetting ideas they’ve built their lives around, with no guarantee of any satisfactory replacement. However, if ever questions have to be raised without any chance of them being resisted, it has to take place in a state of total ignorance.

Imagined pasts

Ignorance and Bliss is all about how ignorance ought to be viewed and how indeed it should get valued. It views ignorance independent of bliss, and for good reason. At this time when politics is filled with lies and fake news, the question worth asking is whether the root cause of the problem lies with the public.

Gaining knowledge is an emotional experience and resisting knowledge is an emotional experience too. How to live with such contrasting emotions in a given time is the focus of the book, and our present predicament. The intimate struggles with aspects of self-knowledge feature prominently in it. Even self-knowledge depends on resisting other kinds of knowledge about the world. The chapters in the book concern fantasies, exploring that power in us which inspires resistance to acknowledging reality.

Lilla explores several human sentiments like innocence, nostalgia, emptiness, and taboo, to get some clarity on the knowledge/ignorance dilemma. Clarity is hard, because the search for an answer often remains subjective. Knowledge and ignorance co-exist. Those who feel ignorance is bliss may actually have a “distaste for the present” and go rushing to “restore an imagined past,” says Lilla. On the contrary, the more we know leaves us with the challenge to know more. A quest that never ends.

Fascinating and challenging, the book makes a compelling argument that a will to ignorance is as strong in us as any desire to have knowledge, and that we are caught between the will to know and the will not to know. Such are the times that wanting not to know appears to be much stronger than wanting to know.

Ignorance and Bliss 
by Mark Lilla
Hurst, New York 
Extent: 219, Price: Rs. 1,765.

First published in The Hindu on May 15, 2025

The religious congregation with a distinct identity

Punjab is known for its sprawling deras – places where self-proclaimed religious heads recite sermons and run the institution as a personal enterprise. These gurus build their brand through charity work including the organization of blood donation camps and mass marriage ceremonies. Politicians of all stripes are now warming up to the possibility of co-opting dera congregations. Unsurprisingly, deras are increasingly playing a critical role in times of political crisis.

Today, there are some 9,000 deras in Punjab that are patronized by about 80 per cent of the state’s population. These institutions are believed to pocket much of what is given to them by way of religious donations. While most are a heady mix of the esoteric and the political, they are also reflective of the sacred geography of the land. The rising popularity of alternative religious sects has sparked much academic and popular interest in the deras, which have, over the years, emerged as seats of alternative spiritual power. Each with a charismatic baba adopts distinct rituals, ceremonies, traditions, slogans, symbols, auspicious dates, customs, prayers and religious rituals.

Given the traditionally hierarchical nature of Indian society, the popularity of deras centered on singular messianic individuals is understandable. Many have emerged in response to prevailing caste-based social discrimination and the exclusion of marginalized castes from the mainstream religions. Those that cater to the large Dalit population, an estimated 32 per cent in the state, especially, give their following a sense of social identity. There is also a vast reservoir of individuals without options for whom deras provide a progressive focus and a viable way forward. Together with mammoth physical infrastructure, these bodies provide social mobility and a sense of belonging for those deprived of it. The attraction of the deras, then, needs to be understood as part of a complex social process. There is of course much variety in the character of the deras – with the highly influential Dera Sachkhand Ballan and the controversial Dera Sacha Sauda both being part of the spiritual landscape.

Sects are a feature of religions across the world, and this is true of Punjab too. In a sense, the deras act like tributaries of the main channel, whether it is Sikhism or Brahmanical Hinduism. Far from being boxed within a narrow framework, they carry within them the richness of diverse philosophical realms. The Deras by Santosh Singh offers a compelling sociological perspective on these institutions which continue to evolve and stay relevant. Spread across seven chapters, the book presents a fascinating view of how deras negotiate the contemporary scenario. It provides an ethnographic narrative on the burgeoning of this specific culture and also examines how related aspects of social welfare are gaining precedence.

An absorbing study on a subject that greatly influences the character and politics of contemporary Punjab, The Deras puts forward the view that the mushrooming of these bodies has to do with the fact that subaltern identity has yet to be mainstreamed with aspirations for inclusion and equality yet to be fulfilled. The dera phenomenon then needs to be viewed as a push towards the generation of social capital, which eventually contributes to the emancipation and empowerment of the marginalized.

The Deras 
by Santosh Singh
Penguin, New Delhi 
Extent: 196, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in the Hindustan Times on May 1, 2025.