On Perumbadavam's Narayanam

The parallels between life and journey are many. Often, we are encouraged to view life as a journey, not towards a particular destination but as an act in itself. The reason for this analogy is obvious. Like in a journey, in life we will encounter many things that we may or may not appreciate. Again, as in a journey, we will find the going sometimes smooth and at other times rough. The point is to keep walking, to continue the journey while absorbing the colorful and colorless experiences. The good and the bad, like the smooth sailing and bumpy ride, are part of life. Like a traveler, one should learn from them and take them in stride.

Narayanam by Perumbadavam Sridharan
Source: Mathrubhumi Books

Perumbadavam Sridharan's Narayanam dwells on the theme of the journey to interpret the life of Sri Narayana Guru. In his thematic and episodic review of Guru's life (through fictional psychology) the novelist delineates four layers of meanings to Guru's life/journey from a precocious young boy Nanu to become Sri Narayana Guru, a multifaceted personality whose influence, on the intellectual and social history of modern Kerala, has been unparalleled.

For Sridharan, the life-journey of Guru starts when he leaves his home to become a wandering ascetic. Here, the meaning of the journey is tapas. Often translated as 'meditation', it is more accurate to render it as solitude, and the etymology of the word in Sanskrit points to the verb 'to burn'. Tapas is a state of solitude where the ascetic 'burns' his ties to the worldly life, by renouncing social ties and by mortifying his body through various meditative practices. The novelist is right in equating the first stage of the journey with tapas because, the young Nanu decides to 'burn' the bridges that tied him to the world, both social and carnal.

The second meaning of the journey is athmapida, or the torture of the self. This is different from self-torture where a person actively inflicts pain on himself. The novelist, Sridharan, draws parallels with the experiences of Semitic prophets such as Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, who went through the phase of self-mortification through fasting and other ascetic practices in which their resolve was sorely tested by the lures of the Devil. The young novice Narayanan accepts that this phase of athmapida is an essential one on the road to enlightenment and like those seekers of Truth who preceded him, he too faces the devils inside him with resolve and determination.

The third meaning of the journey, as the novelist renders it, is mochanam or emancipation. Even as a child, Nanu witnessed and experienced the injustices of the caste-system. Born into an Ezhava family, Nanu's caste was sandwiched between the higher castes such as Brahmins and Nairs and lower-castes such as Pulayas. Owing to their position between the highest and the lowest, Ezhavas suffered the ill-effects of ayitham (a form of untouchability) from Brahmins while simultaneously practicing it against the lowest castes such as Pulayas (please refer to Ambedkar's idea of caste-system as graded inequality). Ezhavas were both the victims and perpetrators of the injustices of the caste system. For people like Nanu's father, caste discrimination and untouchability was the order of life and felt nothing unjust about it. Even if they did, they didn't dare raise their voices. However, for Nanu, the whole system was patently unjust and absurd and his life as an Advaitin only reaffirmed his conviction that the caste system and untouchability had no divine or scriptural sanctions. For an Advaitin (non-Dualist or monist) like Sri Narayana Guru, the theory of Advaita propounded that 'being' is the manifestation of the Being, the One. Whereas the ideology of caste-system ranked and graded the people based on their caste which it asserted was awarded to each individual as a result of their putative deeds in the past-birth.

The final phase of the journey is moksham or liberation, one in which the Guru dies after a protracted illness. In this phase of his life-journey, Guru relived the solitude, pain and the thirst for social justice before finally departing from this world. However, in Sridharan's narrative, death is neither the cessation of life nor of the journey. Like destinations on a journey, death is also something that you reached but only to leave again. The transience of life is repeated and death is the final transient that is soon transcended. In the end, Guru comes face to face with the Truth he has been searching for his entire life.

In the scheme of the eternal journey of the Being through its various manifestations through beings, the journey doesn't end here, although the story does.