Once during their regular evening walk in the grounds of Kala Bhavan, Tagore posed a question to his friend and colleague, the Hindi scholar Hazari Prasad Dwivedi. Why, asked the poet, is Bhishma Pitamah, the grand patriarch of the royal Bharata clan, in the Mahabharata, not considered an avatara, while two other Yadava heroes with no known royal lineage — Krishna, the bender of many rules and his peacenik farmer brother Balarama — are still revered as divine?
Hazari Prasad answered that the difference between Bhishma Pitamah and the Yadava brothers lay in their leadership style. Faced with a moral dilemma(doubt,दुविधा), Krishna and Balarama both decided to depart from rules and break a personal vow to protect the greater public good. But whenever he faced moral challenges, Bhishma, aka Devdutt, chose to uphold his own vow rather than natural justice. Nothing could make Devdutt break his terrible (bhishan) vow of celibacy(unmarried status,ब्रह्मचार्य) (hence the name Bhishma). Not even after his brother’s demise the empty throne needed an heir, or to assert his authority when sons of his physically handicapped nephews — Pandu and Dhritarashtra — were heading for a fratricidal(sibling murder,भ्रात्रवध)war. He also disregarded Draupadi’s plea to intervene and save her honour even as she was being dragged by her hair by her husbands’ clansmen. All through the epic Bhishma is content to quote platitudes(cheap remark,तुच्छता) from scriptures and history that justify his inaction. How can he be awarded an avatarhood after such chicanery(cheating,छल), asks Hazari Prasad?
It is not hard to understand which kind of martyr creates a revered figure for posterity(generation,पीढ़ी) in India. People prefer a doer(Performer,कर्ता) who can willfully break a vow and change the course of wars and battles aiming only to protect the greater common good and restore sanity. Never mind if that means losing face and breaking a grand vow that has created a divine aura around him or her. Take Gandhi after Chauri Chaura, doing a 180-degree turn, when he saw the peaceful movement degenerating into violence. No matter how brave or morally upright someone may appear in the context of history and scriptural rules, if he or she puts saving a personal image over saving humanity, posterity will remember him at best as an awesome but essentially tragic and terrible figure: A Bhishma Pitamah (literally Terrible Grandfather).
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It is not hard to make out what kind of martyr Irom Sharmila is closer to being. The problem is that as the stock of universally accepted ideas has diminished(reduced,कम) in politics the responsibility of someone seen publicly as an ideal activist has increased. People will turn again and again to him or her for answers to questions which, in former generations, would have been beyond the scope of an activist. But if the activist were to recognise the divisions in his or her own psyche, accept the state of doubt and anxiety and change strategy, his or her claim to authority is suddenly seen to have shrunk.
Yes, Sharmila’s decision to break her vow and reclaim her personal space and contest elections may seem whimsical(fanciful,सनकी) to many, but it is not cowardice. Most of the people who have turned away from her have watched contentedly from the sidelines for 16 years as this lone crusader was moved from jail to hospital bed to isolation and back to the hospital. Those who shouted “Sharmila tum sangharsh karo, hum tumhare saath hain” cannot accept that Sharmila has realised that her fasting will not lead to much. Other paths need to be chosen to share one’s message. In our times, only a direct participation in the political process may give someone like her the authority to have the dreadful(fearful,खतरनाक) AFSPA removed from her state.
Heckling Sharmila for saying that she thinks there is not much use in continuing her fast since it has not changed the ground reality in all these years makes no sense. This is a fact most are trying hard to ignore. Her desire to get married to a non-Manipuri man has drawn hostile(unfriendly,विरोधी) reactions in her community. Such hostility has racist undertones and also asserts the definition of female as either a celibate devi or a perennial(everlasting,चिरस्थायी) subordinate to gender (read mostly male) taboos.
courtesy:indian express
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