Book Review: India’s unending journey – Finding balance in the time of change by Mark Tully

Since I read this book within a short time of reading the book by Asra reviewed below, the following extract is particularly pertinent for the topic under question

In his commentary on the Mahabharata, Chaturvedi Badrinath writes: ‘There has hardly been anything in human history that has produced greater violence and killing than conflicting perceptions of what truth is.’ It is when those perceptions leave no room for doubt or questioning, when they are held too firmly, that violence follows.

Mark is particularly impressed by the ability of Hinduism to accommodate uncertainty and not insist on certainty, its ability to continuously borrow and absorb from all that it comes into contact with it. Although this book reverberates with his love for India and its people, I didn’t find it to be a love blind to the failings of the Indian society.

Although the following text does look at the positives of casteism, it should in no way be read as a condonation (if indeed that is the noun form of the verb ‘condone’) of the horrible atrocities carried out in its name:

Meritocracy is a cruel concept because success becomes the goal of life and we can never all be given equal opportunities from birth onwards in order to succeed and become a meritocrat. Those who do not succeed in a meritocracy often suffer mentally because the social ethos implies that it was their fault that they failed. …such societies tend to turn into a rat race with those who lose being regarded and regarding themselves as failures.

I talked about feminism in religion in my previous blog update. In that context the following statements by Mark make nice reading

..Kamasutra (an Indian sex manual possibly from as early as the 2^nd Century CE)….Vatsyayana (the author) clearly recognizes that women have sexual desires too, and advises them on how these might be fulfilled. His guidance ranges from telling virgins how to get husbands to a discussion of the female orgasm, which as the psychoanalysts Sudhir Kakar and Wendy Doniger rightly point out in their introduction to their translation of the Kama Sutra, is ‘far more subtle than views that prevailed in Europe until very recently indeed’.

A gentle and free flowing book written filled with the milk of human goodness.