The Children of Nature: The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi

Susan Visvanathan

Description

An autobiographical interpretative work, The Children of Nature is an attempt to understand the role of spirituality and its social relevance. Susan Visvanathan also tries to comprehend the volatility of the town of Tiruvannamalai: abode of Ramana Maharshi. Using published material as well as diaries and letters from Sri Ramanasramam, the author uses the method of collage to splice together many moments in telling of history. Battling her own illness, Susan meets people, makes friends and learns that solitude has a grammar which is completely acceptable within community life. Ramanasramam becomes home to her, and a place she associates with a sense of well-being and life. The book tries to explicate the extent to which a person’s experience of the divine can be explained by social anthropology. What are the limits of interpretation, how can boundaries of a discipline get extended when its object of study is often a moment of subjective revelation, and how far is it possible to understand the interweaving of the sacred and the profane in the lives of ordinary human beings.

Sujets

• Espiritual
• Maharshi
• Spiritualism
• Spiritual
• Anthropology
• Divine
• Maharishi
• India

Informations

• Publié par: Roli Books
• Date de parution: 01 juillet 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9789351940340
• Langue: English

Extrait

THE CHILDREN OF NATURE

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THE CHILDREN OF NATURE
The Life and Legacy of Ramana Maharshi
susan visvanathan


Lotus Collection
© Susan Visvanathan, 2010
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publisher.
First published in 2010 The Lotus Collection An imprint of Roli Books Pvt. Ltd. M-75, Greater Kailash II Market, New Delhi 110 048 Phone: ++91 (011) 4068 2000 Fax: ++91 (011) 2921 7185 E-mail: [e-mail] Website: www.rolibooks.com Also at Bangalore, Chennai, Jaipur, Mumbai & Varanasi
Cover Design: Massand-Zimmermann Studio
ISBN: 978-81-7436-805-8

Dedicated to
Sundar, Mani, Murthy, Rafael Salan, Annie and Mathai Zachariah, Meera, Sandhya and Malli, Bharati, Joelle, J.J., Michael, Suryanandan and Mahalakshmi, Rajam Viswanathan, Ratna Raman and S.R. Iyer, and Mariam Paul, for their wisdom and love, many thanks.

I gratefully acknowledge India Magazine 1996, IIC Quarterly 2004 for publishing Chapter one from an early draft of this book, as ‘From Death to Devotion’ in 2003-04 Spring issue, and reprinted by Penguin in the IIC Collection entitled Journeys , Delhi; 2004;
French Information Resource Center and Rupa for publishing Activism and Detachment in ‘Trajectories of French Thought’ 2003-04;
Think India Quarterly for publishing Pilgrims and Travellers in Volume 9, Number 4, October-December 2006;
Indian Anthropologist for publishing Dreams and Death in Volume 38, Number 1, January-June 2008;
Samyukta for publishing an earlier version of chapter eight as ‘Tsunami New Year’ in their Journal of Women’s Studies , Volume 7, 2008 and Indian Journal of Human Development for publishing a section of the conclusion in Volume 3, Number 1, January-June 2009.

CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A VISIT TO RAMANA ASRAMAM
ACTIVISM AND DETACHMENT
DREAMS AND DEATH
RAMANA MAHARSHI
TSUNAMI NEW YEAR
RETURN TO THE SOURCE
ONE HOT SUMMER
MID-SUMMER
CONCLUSION
INDEX
REFERENCES

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
A book owes many things to many people. I wish to thank my many teachers and friends, and particularly my family who stood by me over the decades, in spite of the many crises brought about by time and temperament.
My friends at the asramam, to whom this book is dedicated, swept aside their anxiety about having a feminist writer, and allowed me access to the archives and to their minds. Their comfort and kindness is a zone to which I keep returning and my debt will never be repaid.
My family in Kerala, orthodox Mar Thoma Christians, were skeptical about my frequent returns but always happy to see me back in the South. Mathai Zachariah and Annie, Ivy and Raju, K. Kuruvilla and Asha, Geeta and Ari, Salome, Stanley and Jessy, Panthapathrayil Sam and Molly, Sally and Kunjootychayen, Hema and Manoj … thank you for your hospitality and kindness.
While the first visit to Tiruvannamalai, in 1996, was made possible only because Shiv Visvanathan held our three very young daughters while I disappeared into the far South, the remaining journeys were made to recover from the fact that fate decreed our lives were to be lived separately henceforth! I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, he lived a routine too turbulent for me to bear. Our friendship continues over our children’s heads, though we rarely meet.
My sister Esther and my mother Mariam have always been there for me, as has Rajam Viswanathan; they understood me perfectly, that I was first a writer, and then whatever else. My children Meera, Sandhya and Mallika have been the reason for my great happiness and my extended life chances. Being with them, and on their wavelength which rapidly changed year by year as they grew up, has been a source of great joy to me.
To Ratna and Mani, and to Anil Nauriya, many thanks for their calm friendship.
My colleagues and staff at CSSS/SSS JNU have never doubted during these seven years that I was going on field work, and I’m glad that I could read papers based on this work at the Thursday seminar. I’m grateful to JNU for fieldwork grants, to Shri Bharat Kumar for much assistance and to the Centre for Communication and Information, specially Mr Chinmoy Basu, for help with scanning photographs for the book. Dr Mohammed Qasim, my homeopath has tided me through the many years of my illness and is the true representative of the dialogue of religions in his busy clinic in Nizamuddin. I am deeply grateful to Dr Prasada Rao and Dr Vinit Suri for their concern and medical help when I most needed it, and to my yoga teacher in JNU, Sri Ajay Shastri, who helped me with advice and ayurvedic treatments when I needed them.
Chitra Harsha, Jayati Ghosh and Abijit Sen, Praveen Jha and Smita Gupta, Neel Bhattacharya and Chitra Joshi, Ravindra Karnena and Geetika De pitched in for me substantially while I was away on trips to the South, and none of my work in JNU could have been done without their total support.
IIAS, Shimla provided me with wonderful library support, as did JNU, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, and of course Shiv’s books, both loans as well as gifts.
Bettina Baeumer, Fr Gispert, Fr T.K. John, Fr George Keeran, Sarla Kumar, Raphael Salan, friends at the MSH, Paris were wonderful in their encouragement of new writing. I must also thank Dayan Krishnan and Sriram Panchu, Nandini Sundar, Vidya Rao, Shail Mayaram, Shasheej Hegde and Edie and Satish Saberwal. I also thank Leela Dube, Sukh Pamra, Zarina and Idrak Bhatty, Huma Ghosh, Annie Paul, Neena Paul, Apeetha Arunagiri, Vijaya and Setu Ramaswamy, T.V.S. Subramanian, J.P.S. Uberoi, T.K. Oommen and absolutely everyone at Ramanasramam, Tiruvannamalai.
My grateful thanks to Pramod Kapoor, Nandita Bhardwaj, Neelam Narula, Namita Kala, and Supriya Saran for their concern in the production of this book.

1 A VISIT TO RAMANASRAMAM
I met Professor S.C. Dube, the sociologist and litterateur, the author of Indian Village ( 1955), just before he passed away. It was at his home.
He was sitting up in bed dressed in the most beautiful browns and fawns – the khadi kurta and Nehru jacket which that generation wore with such style. He had great difficulty with his breathing, but he smiled at me and in that small room, the world lit up the way it did when S.C. Dube and Leela Dube spoke of their days together: field-work, friends, conversations. S.C. then spoke of the hospital and the Keralaputri – ‘the daughters of Kerala’ – who had nursed him during his illness. He wanted to write a paper on them. He said, ‘It will be about the symbols of integration.’ He was to write on ‘The Sociology of Narrative Forms’ for a textbook for young people that I was co-ordinating, but he said that writing about the nurses who had become his friends, who had shared the stories of their lives, would be of greater sociological interest to him personally. Then he said suddenly, ‘I dread not being able to sleep at night.’
‘Have you tried to meditate?’ I asked him. He stared at me blankly for a moment. He recovered his anthropologist’s composure where nothing is ‘peculiar’ – neither polyandry nor cannibalism – not to speak of vision, trance or mysticism. Professor Dube replied, ‘Meditation? No, I don’t know how to meditate.’
‘It might help,’ I said cautiously.
And then I told him about Maharshi Ramana. I also told him that I had discovered Ramana quite by ‘accident’. I was in grave trouble in 1984 – nine months of lying on my back, absolutely still – a time when I could not go out, work, meet friends, read or write. Towards the end of the ninth month of my pregnancy, I started feeling very frightened, and then one day an old gentleman appeared in my dream and smiled at me. It was a ‘secular’ dream, or so I thought at that time. It was a beautiful dream