In India, and for Hindus, the myths are how we explained the world and everything in it. And from those first musings about the true nature of things came countless epics, sub-epics, stories, fables, philosophies and prescriptions that have teemed our lives and consciousness till this day.
No one lives in India that hasn’t a conception of an epic or myth swimming silently in the deep recesses of his subconsciousness, whether he knows of it or not. It’s almost like we carry the blueprint of the universe, however poetic and fantastical, in our brains somewhere, while going about our mundane machinations to get rich or famous or whatever else drives the modern Indian.
And for someone looking at more than a child-friendly rendition or an austere treatise in an extinct language of these myths and epics, chances are that he will have to turn to a Western scholar. Only Western scholars have had the application and objectivity to take our epics and study them, in the truest sense of the term, and discover connections — or equivalences, as the Italian scholar Roberto Calasso calls the series of tied-in truths contained in the Rig Veda, the book of primordial poetry that forms the bedrock of Hindu thought.
In the last book I loved, Ka, by Roberto Calasso, the bizarre, baffling, convoluted, infinite world of Indian myth is re-imagined in a cinematic stream of revelations that makes me–an Indian involuntarily obsessed with his civilization’s creation myths–want to read that book over and over again, each time seeing something different, something additional, something subtler. So much so that I have worn the cover right off the book, know by photographic memory where a certain passage lies, and yank awake in the middle of the night to refer to a particular fable even as my mind is still fuzzy about whether I’m thinking or dreaming. For, in truth, the stuff of myth is such that dream, reality, thought, fantasy–they all merge and melt into one another, producing only a vast and limitless consciousness in which gods and creatures that they rode span the primordial skies of our imaginations, in order to somehow make sense of our waking lives, our deed-filled days.
If love for a book were to mean an actual affection for the physical aspect of the very thing–its cover, its back, its spine, its pages, its print and typeface, its illustrations and indices, the sheer weight of the object, the familiarity of it lying among the bedclothes, the immeasurable riches of its contents, its assigned meaning to my sanity and well-being–then I do truly love this book. I love it as a book. I love it as a thing. I love it a living being. I love it as a person.
Which is why I will never throw it away. I will re-read it till the world ends, or at least that world contained in it fades and implodes into itself, or just becomes clear as day and cold logic to me. I will re-read it till I can feel the palpable throb of that mythic imagination inform my being. And then, when I’m done, I will read it again. For the world never ends; the soul never dies. It is merely reborn, re-created, re-imagined. Ka quotes the Rig Veda: “The world is nothing but the impression left after the telling of a story.” And my world is nothing more than my after-impressions of Calasso’s imaginings. And so the cycle continues. Consciousness creates consciousness. Without end, without beginning.
Someone will make a film of it. Or should, at any rate. It would be the murder of the most direct form of inspiration, a silencing of the most powerful expressive urge if one were not to try and render onto celluloid the imagery that Calasso conjures–of eagles flying across milky seas with serpents in their beaks that are actually their aunts, or a horse’s tail that is actually a snake for every strand of sable, or a queen who must fornicate with the fast-shrinking phallus of a dead horse to ensure her king’s enduring prowess; of the world being born from an an act of reckless incest, or the simple fact that the Buddha was quite a carnivore and irascible. What can I say, other than that these are a few of my favorite moments within Ka.
Ka means “Who?” in Sanskrit. As in “Who dreamed this universe up?” “Who is the soul?” Who? Who? a question resounding through time, never to be answered, only to be understood. For there is no answer. The question contains the truth.
Finally, a scholar has allowed his natural dramatism, his Italian flamboyance perhaps, to wash like a tide over his rendering of a scholarly work. He has allowed himself to think like a movie and recreate the trembling truths of these inimitable products of human thought: the Vedas, the Upanishads, the Puranas, and the Gita. In a book that for me is as precious, as invaluable.
