The Long Search; No. 1; 330 Million Gods

<v Ronald Eyre>The long search is open to anybody. <v Ronald Eyre>You don't have to go to Benares, India to start it, though we did. <v Ronald Eyre>It doesn't have a tidy beginning, middle and end. <v Ronald Eyre>You're on it the moment you start wondering where you were before you were born, where <v Ronald Eyre>you'll go when you die and what you're on Earth for in the meantime. <v Ronald Eyre>If you knew the answers, you wouldn't ask the questions. <v Ronald Eyre>But other people's answers should be worth collecting. <v Ronald Eyre>And so should other people's questions. <v Ronald Eyre>That's what we're going to try to do. <v Ronald Eyre>You're probably wondering who I am and what gives me the right to launch one of these big <v Ronald Eyre>film series. After all, when they've happened before, there's been a known <v Ronald Eyre>authority doing what I'm doing. <v Ronald Eyre>And I agree with you that you don't immediately look to a London based, Yorkshire-born,

<v Ronald Eyre>displaced theater director to guide you through other people's religious beliefs. <v Ronald Eyre>But that's to expect the wrong thing. <v Ronald Eyre>I'm not here as any sort of authority. <v Ronald Eyre>I'm more of a bridge. <v Ronald Eyre>Authority, this time, has to rest in the people we come across and talk to and <v Ronald Eyre>visit because it's their way of life we're looking at. <v Ronald Eyre>[background chatter] <v Ronald Eyre>It's one thing to sit at home and discuss Hinduism, but quite another to go <v Ronald Eyre>out to India and try and find it. <v Ronald Eyre>For a start, who do you trust? <v Ronald Eyre>Scholarly people talk history. <v Ronald Eyre>Devout people push their own brand of devotion. <v Ronald Eyre>Busy people haven't time to talk to you. <v Ronald Eyre>Simple people don't have the words for it. <v Ronald Eyre>And the holiest people keep their mouths shut. <v Ronald Eyre>In Benares, I came across Mr. ?N.K. <v Ronald Eyre>Sharma,? A tourist guide who turned out to be a pundit. <v Ronald Eyre>He was my first guru. <v Ronald Eyre>...possibly be more confused, because we're starting with many already, right?

<v Ronald Eyre>The next move for us is really to try and concentrate and make that concentrate on 1 <v Ronald Eyre>thing. <v Sharma>That's correct. That's correct. <v Ronald Eyre>Because otherwise we'd go mad, and noise and - [fade to background chatter and traffic] <v Ronald Eyre>My first brush with a Hindu god was in this street on his feast day. <v Ronald Eyre>He had the head of an elephant sat cross-legged, was made of painted clay <v Ronald Eyre>and came in different sizes. <v Ronald Eyre>This was Ganesha, the remover would obstacles. <v Ronald Eyre>We were going to need Ganesha. <v Ronald Eyre>Are you a devotee of Ganesha yourself, Mr. Sharma? <v Sharma>No, particularly not. I'm a devotee of Kali. <v Ronald Eyre>Of Kali? <v Sharma>Kali. <v Ronald Eyre>What does that mean? <v Sharma>Kali is the wife of Shiva. <v Sharma>In her terrific aspect, not tolerating any wrong. <v Ronald Eyre>She's- when you see pictures of Kali, she looks she's got a bloody tongue.

<v Ronald Eyre>And she's carrying heads. <v Sharma>Yes. She appears very terrific. <v Ronald Eyre>Yeah. <v Sharma>And many people tell that she's not a good goddess. <v Sharma>Actually, she is terrific. <v Sharma>To finish bad. <v Ronald Eyre>Yeah, she's a violent goddess. <v Sharma>Yes. Violent goddess. <v Ronald Eyre>Yeah. <v Sharma>But she's violent to finish the- what is bad, what is wrong, what is worse. <v Ronald Eyre>But if I said to you, what is God? <v Ronald Eyre>You're not going to tell me that it is any 1 of these people are you? <v Ronald Eyre>Or these god- these uh um sub gods. <v Ronald Eyre>You're not gonna say it is Genesha or it is Kali. <v Ronald Eyre>If I say to you, what is God, how would you put it? <v Sharma>There- there are different stages of belief. <v Sharma>And the highest of these deities we call Brahma. <v Sharma>And that in English you can call it supreme. <v Ronald Eyre>Hm. <v Sharma>Supreme. <v Ronald Eyre>1 supreme god. <v Sharma>Supreme being. <v Ronald Eyre>This is a potter's yard and you can find little shattered images of clay gods all <v Ronald Eyre>over. This is not a put-up job, but at our feet, as we sat down, was a part <v Ronald Eyre>of uh a head of Lakshmi, wife of Vishnu.

<v Ronald Eyre>Are you telling me that an image, a clay image <v Ronald Eyre>really contains God? <v Sharma>No. Uh there is not a god actually in it, <v Sharma>but it is a symbol of God. <v Sharma>These statues are just like a pointer. <v Sharma>Suppose I want to point to something like this. <v Sharma>How long I should keep my finger like this? <v Sharma>As long you have not seen the object. <v Sharma>But as soon you have seen the object, I remove my finger. <v Ronald Eyre>But aren't there some people, you point- you point because you want them to see <v Ronald Eyre>something, and they never- they never understand what you're pointing at. <v Ronald Eyre>So the whole of their lives, they're actually looking at your finger? <v Sharma>That's correct. And part of their God is not in a hurry. <v Sharma>[laughs] God is not in a hurry. <v Sharma>I- images are just like kindergarten boxes. <v Sharma>They give you a start. They're not required in advance systems. <v Ronald Eyre>Educational toys? <v Sharma>Educational toys, yes. <v Ronald Eyre>Are there rules of conduct in Hindu scriptures?

<v Sharma>The first thing I should tell, that Hinduism is not a strict, rigid <v Sharma>religion. It is a philosophy of life. <v Sharma>It is a way of life. Everybody is free to behave <v Sharma>as his mind, his conscience deems fit, and it <v Sharma>is good as long it is not harming anybody. <v Sharma>It is always good and nobody has to say anything. <v Ronald Eyre>Do you mean that we're all Hindus really? Going various ways? <v Sharma>I think uh at the highest state there is nobody beyond <v Sharma>Hinduism. Everybody is a Hindu. <v Ronald Eyre>It was odd to hear Mr. Sharma use the word Hinduism and insist at <v Ronald Eyre>the same time that Indian religion is no 1 thing with 1 founder. <v Ronald Eyre>1 Bible and 1 organization. <v Ronald Eyre>Perhaps he was trying to be kind to a Westerner. <v Ronald Eyre>So he used to tidy, all-embracing, Western label. <v Ronald Eyre>Millions of people. 1 sacred Ganges. <v Ronald Eyre>Millions of gods. 1 God.

<v Ronald Eyre>I was starting to pick up clues. <v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Ronald Eyre>This is how it looked in the middle of the day. <v Ronald Eyre>At dawn, there'd been less soap and more praying. <v Ronald Eyre>But the early morning worshipers also did their laundry. <v Ronald Eyre>And in among the midday laundry, there was no end to the prayer. <v Ronald Eyre>Where do you draw the line? <v Ronald Eyre>Is there even a line to draw? <v Ronald Eyre>If this religion is a way of life, there isn't. <v Ronald Eyre>I gazed into that river, and remembered the irreverent explorer who said <v Ronald Eyre>that the Ganges is considered pure because no microbe can stay alive in it. <v Ronald Eyre>Yet just to report, devout Hindus told me that Ganges <v Ronald Eyre>water kept in a bottle never goes bad. <v Ronald Eyre>Pious locals cook and wash in nothing else. <v Ronald Eyre>It's a great healer. <v Ronald Eyre>The Ganges, in other words, is a goddess. <v Ronald Eyre>She purifies everything and everyone she touches instantly and utterly.

<v Ronald Eyre>Poor people save all their lives for just one chance to immerse themselves <v Ronald Eyre>in her. With your own eyes, you can see the garbage and you can see <v Ronald Eyre>the faith. Both are real. <v Ronald Eyre>That's the dilemma. <v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Ronald Eyre>The steady coming and going of pilgrims in Benares never stops, <v Ronald Eyre>nor does the chanting that's amplified day and night up and down the river. <v Ronald Eyre>But every few years there's a planned concentration of bathers at 1 <v Ronald Eyre>time and in 1 or other of the holy places along the river. <v Ronald Eyre>This is in Allahabad, where the Ganges joins the Yamuna. <v Ronald Eyre>This meeting lasted about a month in all and tents sprang up on the mudflats <v Ronald Eyre>to house the rallies and the prayer meetings and the mobile sick bays and the <v Ronald Eyre>offices for lost property and lost people. <v Speaker>[background chatter].

<v Ronald Eyre>On an ordinary day here in Haridwar, there's a 10-minute walk from the town <v Ronald Eyre>center to the river. <v Ronald Eyre>When these pictures were taken, there were 7 million bathers and it took 5 hours. <v Speaker>[celebratory noises]. <v Ronald Eyre>All right. How do you put in a nutshell what's going through the minds of a million <v Ronald Eyre>assorted bathers? <v Ronald Eyre>Or the mind of even 1? <v Ronald Eyre>You suddenly get an aerial picture of the whole of India crisscrossed <v Ronald Eyre>by streams of people making for holy rivers and holy rivers

<v Ronald Eyre>making for the sea. <v Ronald Eyre>We made a plan. 3 quarters of the population of India live in villages. <v Ronald Eyre>So 3 quarters of the trudging pilgrims who go in search of the Great River <v Ronald Eyre>set out from, return to, and live most of their lives in somewhere <v Ronald Eyre>like this. Bhith Bhagwanpur, in north Bihar. <v Ronald Eyre>It's a remote village, 30 miles from the border of Nepal and a 5 hour <v Ronald Eyre>Jeep ride from the nearest small town. <v Ronald Eyre>No electricity, no telephone and a way of life that's been going on <v Ronald Eyre>pretty much the same for hundreds of years. <v Ronald Eyre>Shivesh Thakur was born here. <v Ronald Eyre>It was through him that the village opened itself up to us. <v Speaker>[background chatter]

<v Ronald Eyre>The Thakur household is a series of rooms around an enclosed courtyard. <v Ronald Eyre>His mother, brother, sister in law, 2 nephews and 3 nieces live <v Ronald Eyre>in one family house. <v Ronald Eyre>Shivesh himself is a younger son. <v Ronald Eyre>When he was 7, his father died of snakebite. <v Ronald Eyre>His elder brother sent him to university. <v Ronald Eyre>Now Shivesh is professor and head of the Department of Philosophy in the University <v Ronald Eyre>of Surrey, England. <v Ronald Eyre>Across the road lives his aunt. <v Ronald Eyre>Nearby live 4 uncles. <v Shivesh Thakur>Well, I've got as many uncles as you'd like. <v Shivesh Thakur>The whole village is a series of uncles in a certain way, because, you know, they all <v Shivesh Thakur>mean things to me, and I mean things to them. <v Shivesh Thakur>Most of them literally aren't your uncles. <v Shivesh Thakur>But that's the sort of relations between this means simply another way of saying it's the <v Shivesh Thakur>whole village is one community. <v Ronald Eyre>What's the population of Bhith Bhagwanpur?

<v Shivesh Thakur>I would think around 5 and 6 thousand. <v Ronald Eyre>What do most of the villagers do for a living? <v Shivesh Thakur>It's a farming community, uh almost entirely. <v Ronald Eyre>Do you think they have a hard life? <v Shivesh Thakur>Um if you, by hard times, you mean are people able to <v Shivesh Thakur>spend as much on food and luxury items that they do out here in the <v Shivesh Thakur>West, then of course, they have a very hard time. <v Shivesh Thakur>They don't have anything like that. But if you live in a village, it's a <v Shivesh Thakur>self-sufficient community, it grows everything that it needs, or virtually everything. <v Shivesh Thakur>I mean, it can't- can't grow kerosene and it needs a <v Shivesh Thakur>little bit of kerosene to light to lamp, for instance, a lantern, or ?hurricane?. <v Shivesh Thakur>But otherwise the village can carry on living at its present standard of living. <v Shivesh Thakur>It doesn't matter what happens to the rest of the world. <v Shivesh Thakur>During parts of the year, of course, there is no question of getting about.

<v Shivesh Thakur>Not many people do or want to. <v Shivesh Thakur>The rest of the time its people either walk from one place to another or take a bullock <v Shivesh Thakur>cart or a horse cart. <v Shivesh Thakur>And uh now, of course, uh this is the technological breakthrough, there are lots of <v Shivesh Thakur>bicycles here. <v Shivesh Thakur>There's a tea shop also, which we passed. <v Shivesh Thakur>When I was growing up in this village, there was no tea shop. <v Shivesh Thakur>In fact, there weren't many people who drank tea. <v Ronald Eyre>What did they drink? <v Shivesh Thakur>Pardon? <v Ronald Eyre>What did they drink? <v Shivesh Thakur>Um they drink water. That's the thing to drink, no? <v Speaker>[background chatter] <v Ronald Eyre>There are 4 schools in Bhith Bhagwanpur, and once a year, like most schools <v Ronald Eyre>and colleges in India, they celebrate the Festival of Saraswati, goddess <v Ronald Eyre>of art and learning.

<v Ronald Eyre>At the boys school, the image of the goddess sat on top of a grassy bank <v Ronald Eyre>that represented the Himalayas with cotton wool for mountain snow. <v Ronald Eyre>[birds chirping] <v Ronald Eyre>By tradition, Saraswati rides on a white swan and in her 4 arms <v Ronald Eyre>she carries a musical instrument, a pen, a book <v Ronald Eyre>and a crystal. <v Ronald Eyre>Shortly after 8:00 in the morning, on the first day, the Sanscrit master, the equivalent <v Ronald Eyre>in the West might be the Latin master, and 1 of his pupils came to make the first <v Ronald Eyre>offerings: sweets, fruit, flowers, water to wash in, <v Ronald Eyre>a change of clothes, colored cosmetic paste to mark the face, as if the goddess <v Ronald Eyre>were a real woman and a real guest. <v Speaker>[singing] <v Ronald Eyre>By the way, the food wasn't thrown away.

<v Ronald Eyre>After the goddess, it was offered to the second-best guests: that's us, and <v Ronald Eyre>then to the boys. [bell rings] <v Ronald Eyre>[background chatter] <v Ronald Eyre>The center of this ritual, I was surprised to find out, isn't the master. <v Ronald Eyre>It's the boy. He's the 1 who addresses the goddess in Sanskrit and the master <v Ronald Eyre>is there just to prompt him. [background chatter] <v Shivesh Thakur>Now this process is literally um trying to breathe life <v Shivesh Thakur>into the goddess, by a certain ritual observations, so by <v Shivesh Thakur>reciting the certain sorts of verses and doing correct things as prescribed <v Shivesh Thakur>in the tradition. <v Shivesh Thakur>Uh the boy, on behalf of this school, is inviting the goddess to <v Shivesh Thakur>come and take her seat into this image. <v Shivesh Thakur>And from that point on, uh for this prescribed time, <v Shivesh Thakur>she actually becomes the seat of that goddess.

<v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Ronald Eyre>What did the Saraswati festival mean to you as a boy? <v Shivesh Thakur>It meant a great deal of fun, a lot of excitement. <v Shivesh Thakur>And of course, also I think um expectation <v Shivesh Thakur>of great things happening by way of reward because, as you know, <v Shivesh Thakur>Saraswati is the goddess of learning and like the child I was, <v Shivesh Thakur>I believed that if I took a couple of my books and put it in front of the image, <v Shivesh Thakur>then somehow after the festival, after the puja, once I brought those back- <v Shivesh Thakur>books back home, now I would just have to leaf through the books and I'll get the <v Shivesh Thakur>contents of the whole thing in my mind straight away. <v Ronald Eyre>It worked, too, didn't it? <v Shivesh Thakur>I suppose. [laughs] I don't know whether, you know, that is <v Shivesh Thakur>what works, but- but something seems to have <v Shivesh Thakur>worked. <v Speaker>[singing].

<v Ronald Eyre> We're not now talking about idolatry, <v Ronald Eyre>are we? We're talking about looking through the pieces simple clay, to a more <v Ronald Eyre>abstract, ungraspable thing. <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes, you are looking considerably beyond the- the- the piece of <v Shivesh Thakur>clay. The piece of clay is a symbol. <v Shivesh Thakur>And you invoke the symbol uh in order <v Shivesh Thakur>to address and communicate with something that that symbol represents, <v Shivesh Thakur>which is divinity. <v Ronald Eyre>I can understand that you with your mind and training could have that thought, I wonder <v Ronald Eyre>how generally shared by very simple, devout people, or do they really <v Ronald Eyre>superstitiously think that that goddess- um that piece of clay <v Ronald Eyre>is something more than clay? <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes. <v Shivesh Thakur>Um. Yes, I can see why you ask this question, because it- it sounds like a very <v Shivesh Thakur>sophisticated point to grasp. <v Shivesh Thakur>I think I would be very surprised if you ran into many people, <v Shivesh Thakur>who believed that literally that clay was the goddess?

<v Shivesh Thakur>Uh because they're perfectly aware, for instance, that a new clay image <v Shivesh Thakur>is bought every year and installed in this place and then it's thrown <v Shivesh Thakur>away, so it's not clay you're worshiping, it's what the clay presents. <v Ronald Eyre>So you're brought up to be used to disposable gods. <v Shivesh Thakur>Disposable clay, disposable stone, disposable iron, <v Shivesh Thakur>whatever material you use. <v Shivesh Thakur>But what these bits of material represent, that's not disposable and that's not <v Shivesh Thakur>something you can grasp or see or feel or touch. <v Shivesh Thakur>[children responding to prayer] <v Ronald Eyre>How many gods do the Hindus have? <v Shivesh Thakur>[laughs] That's a very tricky one. Sometimes you get in ?inaudible? <v Shivesh Thakur>330 million gods. <v Shivesh Thakur>So if you'd like, that's the answer. <v Ronald Eyre>330 million?

<v Ronald Eyre>I've been thinking about the 330 million gods of India. <v Ronald Eyre>Who counted them? What are their names? <v Ronald Eyre>Does it mean that with 365 days in the year, the gods have <v Ronald Eyre>their festivals at a rate of about a million a day? <v Ronald Eyre>Or are the 330 million gods just 330 million <v Ronald Eyre>different expressions, different facets of 1 universal God <v Ronald Eyre>with the number 330 million thought up to astound the mind? <v Ronald Eyre>Or would we be right to include among the gods all living <v Ronald Eyre>things, all plants, all animals, all parents, all teachers, <v Ronald Eyre>all guests, everything that lives. <v Ronald Eyre>Because a lot of the people we've talked to during this search do claim to see the <v Ronald Eyre>universal God reflected in all living creatures. <v Ronald Eyre>Now, if you start thinking about the gods in that way as including all living things, <v Ronald Eyre>the number 330 million is a wild underestimate of the number

<v Ronald Eyre>there must be. <v Ronald Eyre>What are the best known of the traditional gods? <v Shivesh Thakur>I suppose the most famous, of course, is the Trinity of Brahma, <v Shivesh Thakur>Vishnu and Shiva. <v Shivesh Thakur>Brahma is the creator. <v Shivesh Thakur>Vishnu is the preserver or one who maintains the universe in its <v Shivesh Thakur>equilibrium and Shiva, whose job it is to destroy the world <v Shivesh Thakur>when the world begins to be thoroughly beyond repair. <v Shivesh Thakur>The Hindu idea of creation is not of 1 final creation. <v Shivesh Thakur>It's a cycle. It's something that goes on all the time. <v Shivesh Thakur>Something in the world that we know is being destroyed now and something <v Shivesh Thakur>in the world is being recreated now. <v Shivesh Thakur>So normally this works for long periods of time, and when I say long I don't in <v Shivesh Thakur>a few years, I mean a few million, million years.

<v Shivesh Thakur>Uh but there comes a stage when, so this story goes, uh the world just <v Shivesh Thakur>can't be maintained. It's completely beyond repair. <v Shivesh Thakur>So it's got to be destroyed and another 1 created in this place. <v Shivesh Thakur>So Shiva does the destroying, if you like, and Brahma recreates another world out <v Shivesh Thakur>of that same material. <v Ronald Eyre>The traditional way of representing the power of a god is to give <v Ronald Eyre>him a goddess. She's called his Shakti, his consort, his <v Ronald Eyre>powerhouse. She can be playful. <v Ronald Eyre>She can be tremendous. <v Ronald Eyre>She can be terrifying, like the great goddess Kali. <v Ronald Eyre>Of all the people in Bhith Bhagwanpur, the one who impressed me most was <v Ronald Eyre>the one who had given up most. <v Ronald Eyre>He is a Sannyasi, which literally means one who renounces and <v Ronald Eyre>this man has renounced everything: his name, his past, his possessions.

<v Ronald Eyre>The villagers call him Mahatma, Great Soul. <v Ronald Eyre>He's borrowed his hut, his bed, his lamp. <v Ronald Eyre>He owns a change of clothes, a water pot and a few books, <v Ronald Eyre>though he says they aren't his either. <v Ronald Eyre>Mahatma ?Gee?, what did you do for a living before you withdrew from the world and became <v Ronald Eyre>a Sannyasi? <v Mahatma>I was living with my guru in the ashram. <v Ronald Eyre>Uh I was thinking about life before that. <v Mahatma> Before that? [laughs] <v Mahatma>Before living this, I was in <v Mahatma>law practice. I was in the court. <v Ronald Eyre>Is it something that embarrasses you to talk about, your past?

<v Mahatma>It is, better if- if <v Mahatma>we don't want to know my past. <v Ronald Eyre>You would prefer me not to ask? <v Mahatma>Yes. <v Ronald Eyre>Why should a man leave society, leave his home? <v Mahatma>To be nearer to God. <v Mahatma>With the object to have peace of <v Mahatma>mind. <v Ronald Eyre>And the idea is that this peace and this nearness to God cannot be achieved <v Ronald Eyre>while a man is in society. <v Mahatma>Yes, that ?inaudible? experience? <v Ronald Eyre>Ex-lawyer, ex-socialist politician, ex freedom fighter, <v Ronald Eyre>ew-man on the run from the British police, and not writing his memoirs. <v Speaker>[singing and ceremonial music plays] <v Ronald Eyre>Still celebrating the goddess Saraswati, but this time of the girls' school.

<v Speaker>[ceremonial music plays] <v Ronald Eyre>It seemed to strike me, ?to everybody but me? as odd, that performers at a girls' school <v Ronald Eyre>concert should all be men. <v Ronald Eyre>What's the mark on that man's forehead mean?

<v Shivesh Thakur>He's a devotee of the Vishna. <v Speaker>[ceremonial singing]. <v Ronald Eyre>His song, I discovered, is in honor of the god Shiva. <v Ronald Eyre>So what you've got here is a devotee of 1 god, singing this song about <v Ronald Eyre>another god, at a festival in honor of a school goddess. <v Ronald Eyre>These can't be jealous gods. <v Ronald Eyre>If, by the way, you're getting the impression of a whole community moving amiably

<v Ronald Eyre>from one pious celebration to another, that's how in some ways it was <v Ronald Eyre>for those few weeks. <v Ronald Eyre>The bad times would come later. <v Ronald Eyre>Black days in the calendar, the astrologer's warning, drought, <v Ronald Eyre>the monsoon, floods. <v Ronald Eyre>Weeks of anxiety. <v Ronald Eyre>Soon this landscape will be scorched by the sun. <v Ronald Eyre>Then it will lie under perhaps 10 feet of floodwater, marooning the temple and most <v Ronald Eyre>of the houses, and destroying the roads. <v Ronald Eyre>At the moment, everybody here has something to eat. <v Ronald Eyre>But the next village is rationed to eating 3 days a week. <v Ronald Eyre>I asked the headmaster of the girls' school how he managed to be so cheerful. <v Ronald Eyre>He answered, "We are disaster-proof men." <v Ronald Eyre>All the same, any action they can think of to avert control and defuse

<v Ronald Eyre>disaster, they take, even the most ancient. <v Speaker>[ceremonial singing]. <v Ronald Eyre>While we were there, 4 Brahmin priests spent a day from 8:00 in the morning till <v Ronald Eyre>4:00 in the afternoon, chanting Sanskrit hymns and performing a fire ritual <v Ronald Eyre>to ensure a good harvest. <v Ronald Eyre>A local Sanskrit scholar told me that this unbroken charmed had been going on somewhere <v Ronald Eyre>in India for at least 3 thousand years, and all we were doing was plugging <v Ronald Eyre>into an endless sound and releasing it over the land. <v Speaker>[ceremonial chanting]

<v Ronald Eyre>I was told I should think of the fire as the mouth of God. <v Ronald Eyre>It devours the offerings and turns them into smoke. <v Ronald Eyre>In the same way, our prayers are devoured and turned into power. <v Speaker>[speaking Sanskrit]. <v Ronald Eyre>Shivesh, are you sure it doesn't make any difference that very few people can understand <v Ronald Eyre>a word of what's going on? <v Shivesh Thakur>It's the same as in the West. <v Shivesh Thakur>When you need an electrical engineer, sophisticated equipment, <v Shivesh Thakur>when you get an electrical engineer from whatever is available, he comes and does the <v Shivesh Thakur>job. We don't fiddle with it. <v Shivesh Thakur>And so the pundits, they are scholars. <v Shivesh Thakur>They knew what was happening. <v Shivesh Thakur>And the village came and listened reverently and respectfully, waiting <v Shivesh Thakur>for the results, which they know will come. <v Shivesh Thakur>They may not, but as far as they're concerned, they believe it will.

<v Ronald Eyre>Are there people in the village who think the whole day's business is a waste of time? <v Shivesh Thakur>Oh, I'm certain there are a few people, um quite a few there maybe, you know, because <v Shivesh Thakur>there are all sorts of skeptics in the village and skepticism is as long-established a <v Shivesh Thakur>tradition in India as anything else. <v Shivesh Thakur>So there are skeptics who believe this is just waste of time, you know, we should go and <v Shivesh Thakur>do something about it, rather than have this priest chanting scripture. <v Shivesh Thakur>Uh but I would think the majority of the village do believe that this is something <v Shivesh Thakur>important and efficacious. <v Speaker>[chanting Sanskrit]

<v Ronald Eyre>These men are what usually called in the West, high caste Hindus: <v Ronald Eyre>Brahmins. By that, I don't mean rich or powerful, I mean high <v Ronald Eyre>caste. If you think of a man born again and born again, <v Ronald Eyre>working his way up a spiral, good deed by good deed, good life by <v Ronald Eyre>good life and going up through 1 caste after another, you could say that <v Ronald Eyre>these men are supposed to be near the top. <v Ronald Eyre>And the prayer they repeat every morning is special to them. <v Speaker>[Hindu prayer]

<v Ronald Eyre>Somewhere a morning hymn started. <v Ronald Eyre>We couldn't locate it till we looked up. <v Speaker>[morning hymn] <v Ronald Eyre>The blossoms that he's picking for the village temple, which is dedicated to the god, <v Ronald Eyre>Shiva. <v Speaker>[bell rings] <v Shivesh Thakur>It's rather difficult to recall how I used to feel as a boy, but <v Shivesh Thakur>I think it was- it was one of getting carried away on huge big waves of something or the <v Shivesh Thakur>other. You got there and here were crowds of priests and other people. <v Shivesh Thakur>And suddenly at some precise second or minute, I couldn't understand.

<v Shivesh Thakur>Things went bang and then once the bang started, it was a huge big <v Shivesh Thakur>bang that you got carried away with it and things started happening all <v Shivesh Thakur>over you in your- your bones, in your marrow and everything. <v Ronald Eyre>What is down in that darkness? <v Shivesh Thakur>Uh it's this stone symbol of Shiva and Shakti. <v Ronald Eyre>That you- you wouldn't- you wouldn't be wrong to see something remotely sexual <v Ronald Eyre>in this image? <v Shivesh Thakur>No, you wouldn't be. Uh um we have seen that <v Shivesh Thakur>Shiva is supposed to be the destroyer god, in- in some ways. <v Shivesh Thakur>And yet you see his representation happens to be in terms of the male <v Shivesh Thakur>and female sex organs. That's what it vaguely looks like. <v Shivesh Thakur>And that's, of course, the sign of fertility. <v Shivesh Thakur>So clearly, the idea being suggested to you is, and I hope you grasp it, everyone does,

<v Shivesh Thakur>uh that destruction and creation aren't seen as utterly distinct things. <v Shivesh Thakur>One leads into the other. So the very Shiva that destroys is also represented <v Shivesh Thakur>as this sign of procreation. <v Speaker>[bells and drums play] <v Ronald Eyre>It's odd to think that these pieces of masonry, cold and meaningless in a Western museum, <v Ronald Eyre>were once surrounded by noise and flowers and prayers and drumming. <v Ronald Eyre>There's nothing in these faces to suggest, "Here are men who know they are worshiping <v Ronald Eyre>1 of 330 million gods." As far as you can see,

<v Ronald Eyre>they're worshiping just 1 god, but I'd started with the idea of a vast <v Ronald Eyre>number. And it stuck. <v Ronald Eyre>I'm still troubled about the 330 million gods of India. <v Ronald Eyre>And the trouble isn't the number, 330 million, but the word <v Ronald Eyre>gods. If we could call them Hindu saints, the numbers would be less of a problem <v Ronald Eyre>and it wouldn't seem to be too bad a label. <v Ronald Eyre>After all, Hindu gods, like Catholic saints have their festivals <v Ronald Eyre>and feast days. They are the objects and means of devotion. <v Ronald Eyre>They are regarded as a pathway through to God and seen as reflecting God <v Ronald Eyre>back onto the earth like a mirror. <v Ronald Eyre>When I asked the Mahatma, who lives on the outskirts of Bhith Bhagwanpur, to try <v Ronald Eyre>and help me to grasp what the gods were, the words he used could easily <v Ronald Eyre>have come from a devout Catholic talking about a Christian saint. <v Ronald Eyre>He described the real god, Brahma, as the powerhouse

<v Ronald Eyre>and the 330 million visible gods as light bulbs, <v Ronald Eyre>which were working off divine electricity. <v Ronald Eyre>Of course, the comparisons between the gods and the saints do collapse very soon. <v Ronald Eyre>For a start, you can't place many of the Hindu gods in recorded history. <v Ronald Eyre>Most of them were born before it, and there is no Hindu equivalent of <v Ronald Eyre>the papal office that examines the claims of new saints and <v Ronald Eyre>decides which ones should be admitted in which shan't. <v Ronald Eyre>But just to dislodge the word gods for a bit does lessen the <v Ronald Eyre>feeling of being overwhelmed by a multitude. <v Ronald Eyre>Especially when you were brought up not to believe that there's more gods than one. <v Ronald Eyre>Tell me if I'm wrong, but I gather that traditionally Hindu society splits into <v Ronald Eyre>4 main castes. <v Ronald Eyre>There are the religious leaders, that's the Brahmins, the military leaders,

<v Ronald Eyre>the businessmen and the castes that serves the other 3, the Shudras. <v Ronald Eyre>Can you say what caste these boys are? <v Shivesh Thakur>No, I'm afraid, I can't. I- I just know that they are boys-. <v Ronald Eyre>So boys young- young boys are on a heap and they are just boys. <v Ronald Eyre>Fine. What about the Untouchables? <v Shivesh Thakur>The Untouchables happened to be a subclass of the last on these <v Shivesh Thakur>Shudras, since they were eventually seen as being dirty jobs, it <v Shivesh Thakur>tended to sort of, you know, keep them away from the others and there- thereby, I suppose <v Shivesh Thakur>there is some untouchability and these untouchables, whom Gandhi later called Harijans, <v Shivesh Thakur>who are men of God. <v Ronald Eyre>But what about caste as it is today? <v Shivesh Thakur>Caste in a straightforward sense of the term represents simply <v Shivesh Thakur>an institutionalization of the division of labor. <v Shivesh Thakur>Different people do different things. <v Shivesh Thakur>So calling them by different caste names is one way of identifying

<v Shivesh Thakur>who does what. <v Shivesh Thakur>Um what's gone wrong, or what seems to be wrong today, <v Shivesh Thakur>is that these caste functions have become hereditary. <v Speaker>[religious chanting]. <v Ronald Eyre>The Brahmin tradition, and it's a religious tradition, sees a man's life <v Ronald Eyre>pegged out in 4 distinct stages. <v Ronald Eyre>Somewhere between the ages of 7 and 13, a boy from a high caste family <v Ronald Eyre>is prepared for his initiation, his ritual birth, and he makes his <v Ronald Eyre>entry into the first of the 4 stages of his life. <v Speaker>[religious chanting]. <v Ronald Eyre>To mark this second birth, a sacred thread is slipped over his left <v Ronald Eyre>shoulder and he's taught the prayer of the twice-born. <v Speaker>[religious chanting] <v Ronald Eyre>When you went through your initiation, Shivesh, were you more impressed by the fun of it

<v Ronald Eyre>than by any religious significance? <v Shivesh Thakur>In most ways, but- but I was quite aware that it was something very, very important, <v Shivesh Thakur>which I mustn't take lightly. <v Ronald Eyre>Isn't a boy in those circumstances also aware that everybody of all ages are seemed to be <v Ronald Eyre>gathering to do something for him? <v Shivesh Thakur>For him? Yes. <v Ronald Eyre>That must be very weighty. <v Shivesh Thakur>Already. Yes. This is the- this is part of the idea, that the boys gradually <v Shivesh Thakur>ceasing to be a boy and- and becoming a responsible agent. <v Shivesh Thakur>And the fact that all these people and all these things have been gathered just specially <v Shivesh Thakur>for this occasion, marking something about him, means that he's beginning to see that <v Shivesh Thakur>he's something important from now on. <v Shivesh Thakur>And he must do certain things, behave in certain ways. <v Speaker>[religious chanting and music plays] <v Ronald Eyre>The thread ceremony itself is just the climax of sometimes months of preparation.

<v Ronald Eyre>When it's all over the twice-born are cleaned up, as if they were starting their lives <v Ronald Eyre>all over again. <v Ronald Eyre>If he's a Brahmin, the next step, as it was a few hundred years ago, <v Ronald Eyre>would be for the boy to leave home, join his guru, his teacher, in a forest <v Ronald Eyre>retreat and learn the scriptures. <v Ronald Eyre>It's different these days. Only the symbols are left: wooden wheels for <v Ronald Eyre>a chariot and umbrella and finery to mark his new status in society. <v Ronald Eyre>Stage 2 starts with marriage, probably an arranged marriage, and setting up <v Ronald Eyre>a house with a wife you may scarcely know. <v Ronald Eyre>I remember riding 'round Benares with my guide, Mr. Sharma, and hearing him say, <v Ronald Eyre>"In India, we don't marry the girl we love, we love the girl we married."

<v Ronald Eyre>This is your brother, uh ?Homesh?, right? <v Ronald Eyre>And he's the head of your household? <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes. <v Ronald Eyre>What does that mean in practice? Does that give him great authority? <v Shivesh Thakur>Um well, it means that, um you know, he's the man who has overall responsibility <v Shivesh Thakur>for the growing of the family together and all the things that it's supposed to do. <v Shivesh Thakur>Um all the matters referring to the family would be referred to him in the first place. <v Ronald Eyre>Your brother's main work is farming. <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes. <v Ronald Eyre>Um does that involve, it appears here to involve a good deal of moving about? <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes, it does. Um you know, he would, for instance, start off early in the <v Shivesh Thakur>morning, sort of, um and in the previous evening, he would have looked around what field <v Shivesh Thakur>or what farm needs attention, which needs planning, which needs weeding and so forth. <v Shivesh Thakur>And you'd have talked to his men, you know, servants and others, in the evening, <v Shivesh Thakur>and early morning, you will go round and send them off to the field doing their proper <v Shivesh Thakur>jobs. Uh then sort of later on, around noon or just before, uh

<v Shivesh Thakur>he'll carry some food and water to them, which is where they have been working. <v Shivesh Thakur>Uh this is the sort of break, if you like. <v Ronald Eyre>Is that part of their wages? <v Ronald Eyre>The food? <v Shivesh Thakur>No, this is quite separate from the wages they will get at the end of the day. <v Ronald Eyre>In money? <v Shivesh Thakur>Uh no, in grains. <v Speaker>[background chatter]. <v Ronald Eyre>We've talked about class and caste a lot, yet from observation, these workmen <v Ronald Eyre>are certainly not as servile to the people who employ them. <v Shivesh Thakur>I shouldn't think so um they- they- they for all practical purposes, <v Shivesh Thakur>they have been absorbed into the- to my larger family. <v Ronald Eyre> This is your mother. <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes. <v Ronald Eyre>She has moved out of the householding stage, I gather. <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes, she has. Um she has uh if you like entered into the

<v Shivesh Thakur>third main stage. <v Ronald Eyre>Which is? <v Shivesh Thakur>Which you could call the stage of withdrawal. <v Shivesh Thakur>So she sort of gradually moves more and more into the background, devoting more and <v Shivesh Thakur>more of her time to religious and spiritual matters. <v Ronald Eyre>How many hours a day does she spend doing that? <v Shivesh Thakur>Um to me, it seems very many hours. <v Shivesh Thakur>Um far too many, but um I don't suppose she thinks she's putting in enough. <v Ronald Eyre>The fourth stage isn't for everybody. <v Ronald Eyre>It means renouncing name, possessions and caste. <v Ronald Eyre>The Mahatma marked the break in his life by disappearing somewhere or other for 14 <v Ronald Eyre>years. He was met again by chance and persuaded back to the village <v Ronald Eyre>on the understanding that he isn't the man he was. <v Ronald Eyre>Shivesh there's no evidence in your behavior, but I gather he's your uncle. <v Shivesh Thakur>Yes, he is my uncle, or um shall we say, being more faithful to the Hindu <v Shivesh Thakur>tradition, he was my uncle.

<v Ronald Eyre>I get the impression of very good relations between very young people and older <v Ronald Eyre>people, maybe pre-stage 1 and the people in stage 3. <v Ronald Eyre>Uh is it a fact that this stage system does make for easier relations between the old and <v Ronald Eyre>the young? <v Shivesh Thakur>Absolutely. I think um the closer relations between <v Shivesh Thakur>the children on the one hand and, say uh people in the third stage should normally be <v Shivesh Thakur>their grandparents, uh is- is utterly close. <v Shivesh Thakur>I don't know what 1 of them would- 1 group of them would do without the other. <v Ronald Eyre>At the end of the Saraswati festival, the images of the goddess from all the village <v Ronald Eyre>schools were put in bullet carts and paraded round the village before being <v Ronald Eyre>flung into the village pond. <v Shivesh Thakur>The idea is that the goddess was, as it were, commissioned for a particular job <v Shivesh Thakur>to occupy that thing of clay. <v Shivesh Thakur>When she has done her job, the concluding ceremony makes that quite clear.

<v Shivesh Thakur>Your job is accomplished. Now we take the life back out of this image and you'll <v Shivesh Thakur>be the godess that you, go wherever you are, whatever your natural home is. <v Shivesh Thakur>She probably does. <v Shivesh Thakur>And then whatever is left over, it's just the ordinary clay. <v Ronald Eyre>So we don't-. <v Shivesh Thakur>A corpse, if you like. <v Ronald Eyre>A corpse? <v Shivesh Thakur>It becomes a corpse. <v Speaker>[ceremonial chanting] <v Ronald Eyre>That may be a corpse and this may be a funeral procession, but nobody can say it's

<v Ronald Eyre>gloomy. <v Ronald Eyre>Is it a religious thing we're watching? <v Ronald Eyre>Or is it a great carnival? <v Shivesh Thakur>What you aren't doing uh both at the same time? <v Shivesh Thakur>Someone from your sort of tradition would- would tend to think, well, it can't be <v Shivesh Thakur>religious, but then why should religion be something so utterly grim? <v Ronald Eyre>Fun and religion don't seem to exclude each other. <v Shivesh Thakur>And that's the way you see it, yeah. <v Speaker>[cheering and celebration] <v Ronald Eyre>Maybe I'm being over tidy, but I've been trying to work out if there's 1 single thing

<v Ronald Eyre>on which all devout Hindus might unite. <v Ronald Eyre>They don't seem to share a creed. <v Ronald Eyre>The beliefs of a devout intellectual would scarcely be recognized by a devout peasant. <v Ronald Eyre>Maybe that what unites them is to be found in ritual <v Ronald Eyre>or action or the daily routine. <v Ronald Eyre>Now, certainly all the devout Hindus I visited had a household shrine. <v Ronald Eyre>They had a ritual bathe. <v Ronald Eyre>They went to the temples. <v Ronald Eyre>But then you come across the Sannyas figure, the man who breaks the ties. <v Ronald Eyre>There the pattern does break down. <v Ronald Eyre>He has no shrine, he visits no temple. <v Ronald Eyre>He is beyond the gods. <v Ronald Eyre>I asked the Mahatma if he could tell me why it was necessary to withdraw from <v Ronald Eyre>social life. And his answer was that he had to in order to get nearer <v Ronald Eyre>to God. And perhaps that is where all devout Hindus <v Ronald Eyre>converge: in their will to come closer to God by whatever means

<v Ronald Eyre>best suits them. Worship and devotion for the ordinary man, knowledge <v Ronald Eyre>on the mind for those with a gift for it. <v Ronald Eyre>No way excluded. No way preferred, so long as the destination <v Ronald Eyre>gets nearer all the time.