(Notes toward a study in Nepali Utkarshabhava or Sublime)
Arjun Poudel
Suddenly upon the left side of our road, a crackling was heard among the bushes; all of us were alarmed, and in an instant a tiger, rushing out of the jungle, pounced upon the one of the party that was foremost, and carried him off in the twinkling of an eye … then I know not what happened till I returned to my senses, when I found myself and companions lying down on the ground as if prepared to be devoured by our enemy, the sovereign of the forest. I find my pen incapable of describing the terror of that dreadful moment.
“Autobiography of Lutfullah, a Mohammedan Gentleman.” Leipzig, 1857, p. 112. Qtd. in William James, Varieties of Religious Experience (Routledge, 2002) P. 131
We Hindus often invite our puret (priest) to help us with our pooja karya (religious work performed by an individual, family or community). After the puret arrives early in the morning, he first takes a bowl of rice flour called rekhi to the area set apart for the karya and starts tracing lines pointing to all of the eight horizontal directions. These are the directions of the hindu sacred geography and are known as Purva, Pashchim, Uttar, Dakshin, Agneya, Bayabya, Nairitya and Ishana (East, West, North, South, South-east, South-West, North-west, and North-east respectively). Finally, the puret connects all the eight extremities of the crisscrossing lines into a square shape of the pooja mandapa (roughly, an altar of worship).
I have long been struck by the resemblance between the respective geometries of a puja mandapa and the board used in a game of bagh-chal. Just as most of the points or nodes in a bagh-chal board are occupied by tiger and goat pieces, on each of the points in a puja mandapa is placed either a leaf-plate (tapari) filled with a heap of rice grains called seedha or an urn containing some water (jala), flowers and leaves of mango, bel and other trees or grasses. The central node or point is reserved for a fireplace that is used for hawana (offerings for Lord Agni that include grains, pure ghee etc.), the surrounding points being dedicated to the nava-graha (nine planets) and other important entities of our universe. In a word, a pooja mandapa is a two-dimensional representation of the three dimensional space of our universe.
As we all know a Hindu Pooja is, like most other ceremonies, a sublime occasion. Here I use the word “sublime” not so much in a sense the Christian West has used over the last several hundred years as in the original Greek sense of heightening. The first great writer on the aesthetics of sublime, Longinus, entitled his work Peri Hypsos, which was later translated as On Sublime and the Greek term hypsos (sometimes transliterated also as hypsous) means height, including the height of triangles in Euclidean geometry. The ceremony of a pooja is sublime because the devotion, attentiveness, apprehension (that something might be amiss or even go wrong), inner as well as outer senses of purity and cleanliness, all occur in a heightened state for the whole duration of the ceremony. The puret keeps reminding the yajaman (client) to be fully engrossed in the present and to remain focused on his words and gestures. Even those assisting the karta (performer of the pooja) are constantly in an elevated state of attentiveness as to what materials or accessories may be required next for a smooth conduct and completion of the ceremony.
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The goat-herds, or their leader at least, in the thinly-populated Himalayan foothills and valleys of the bygone centuries and millennia needed to be no less circumspect than the organizer of a Hindu pooja. Imagine a small clearing in the midst of a densely forested landscape that is inhabited by tigers, lions, leopards, wolves and other carnivores. Imagine also that the residents of a nearby settlement bring their goats to graze in the grassy clearing. A number of these goat-herds armed with sticks and knives surround the goats on all sides and remain watchful for the entire duration the goats are allowed to graze. Meanwhile, many of them keep themselves busy removing smaller trees and bushes so that the clearing gets wider for the next season. In a situation like this, encounters with the carnivores can easily be imagined to be frequent and often lethal – thus keeping each goat-herd in a state of mind that we have learnt (from the Greeks) to call sublime.
Armed though the goat-herds may be, more often than not they find themselves running away for their own lives if the sovereign of the jungle does indeed appear in all its ferocious grandeur and with a determination to satisfy its hunger. Once the big cat grabs a goat between its jaws and walks away, the goat-herds reassemble themselves to console each other for having had to pay a costly tax to the sovereign of the domain. Then they make another collective resolution to rise up to the occasion if such a sublime encounter occurs again.
As the clearing gradually expands into a meadow, the village’s stock of goats also grows into hundreds and potentially thousands in number. While the stock is grazing, a dozen or so goat-herds stand guard at different points on the buffer separating the meadow from the deep forest. And as they engage themselves in further widening the meadow or collecting fodder for cattles back at home, their leader shouts now and then from a distance reminding them not to leave any gap large enough for the animals of prey to steal a stray goat. One day, as it happens, this leader of the goat-herds comes up with an organized plan for guarding the goats in the form of a drawing on a sort of slate, let us say. Such a drawing would naturally outline all the four corners of the meadow and with the passage of time the leader learns also to specify on the map the numerous positions where he wants the goat-herds under his command to stand guard.
Given all this, it needs no stretch of imagination to think of a hot and leisurely afternoon when the goat-herds’ leader is sitting on top of a mound, a view tower or some such elevated position and moving this way and that the pieces on his slate – the pieces representing the goats and the goat-herd in his charge. All of a sudden, a new idea flashes in his mind: what if the four goat-herds on the four corners of the map before him are each taken as a tiger seeking to capture a goat? In the meantime, his assistant arrives and stands by his side. Then the two together reflect on the new-found idea of a game. A few days later, the game of bagh-chal had not just been born but already become a popular pastime among the goat-herds.
A game of bagh-chal between goat-herds in a situation like this is bound to be much more than just a trivial game of make-believe. As more and more goatherds flock around the bagh-chal board and take turns to play the game, a greater loss of livestock is certain to result since there would be fewer or no people left to guard the goats. A last-minute and often desperate attempt to confront and chase an animal of prey, which has advanced well inside the meadow and reached quite close to the grazing goats, can even cost the lives of goat herds themselves. Whether or not bagh-chal originated in the circumstances outlined above, a breath-taking experience of natural sublime must always have been just a breadth away from the bagh-chal players in the game’s early history, thus making the game far more real than just a momentary pretension that it is today.
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The self-reflexiveness of bagh-chal – i.e. the fact that the game reflects on the circumstances in which its originators, or at least its early practitioners, lived and worked – brings it akin to another Southasian artifact of great cultural importance, namely the Buddhist mandala. In each of the two earlier essays that appeared in these pages, we saw that the bagh-chal board is a square-shaped network of 25 points, arranged in five lines of five points each. There, however, is also an extended form of bagh-chal in which a triangular network of six additional points is appended to the middle points of each line that encloses the original square-shaped board. As we see in the second picture above, this extended form comprising a network of 49 points looks strikingly similar to the Tibetan Buddhist mandala in the first picture.
The mandala came to be recognized in the West as a symbolic and highly meaningful artifact after Carl Gustav Jung, the psychoanalyst and one-time collaborator of Sigmund Freud, interpreted it as representing the human psyche. A number of scientists including two Nobel Prize winning physicists – Wolfgang Pauling and Karl Alex Muller both Swish like Jung himself) – have acknowledged to have been greatly inspired by the mandala in pursuit of their work as scientists. One reason that two-dimensional or surface artifacts like a mandala or the bagh-chal board play an inspiring role for humans engaged in other pursuits is that we humans see ourselves as inhabiting the surface of the earth rather than the three-dimensional space of our universe. Likewise, the sacred geography – be it that of us Hindus as seen in the first paragraph above or of the Judeo-Christian West which sees itself as a descendant of ancient Athens and Jerusalem – is preoccupied almost exclusively with the earth’s surface. In fact, geography is the one discipline that has largely failed to secularize itself as countries and people around the world persist in seeing their territories as sacred and sacrosanct, though cartography, navigation and other branches of it have not just been secularized but also commercialized.
To conclude by returning to our topic of Nepali sublime, our Mt. Everest and the other supremely sublime mountains enjoy that status only from a geographical perspective. We are dwellers of geography and our environment, barometric pressure and other climatic conditions vary depending on how far higher we live from the surface of the sea. The experience of sublime would simply not be there if we view the mountains from the fields of geodesy or geology – fields that are not very far removed from geography. To take geodesy as an example, it is a discipline that measures not the surface distance between any two points or locations on earth but projects such distance when measured through the earth’s interior. To take a more specific example, geodesy estimates how long the shortest tunnel will be if we dig it from the North Pole to the South Pole. The relevant point here is that Mt. Everest would not be the highest and literally the most sublime of mountains in the world if measured from a geodesic perspective, i.e. in terms of how far its peak is from the center of the earth. The earth getting increasingly flatter the further we move away from the equatorial region, some little-known Latin American mountain in Ecuador would be enjoying that status if the determining measure is geodesic rather than geographical.
Thus an important aspect of traditional Nepali sublime has to do with being largely defenseless and remaining for prolonged hours at the mercy of the most ferocious of the wild beasts. One occasion this author found himself in a state most akin to this occurred years ago when, during a nature-walk trip organized on an early morning by Chitwan Jungle Lodge, he and three or four other nature enthusiasts had ventured deep into the wild-life park under the protection of a single guard who was equipped only with a four-feet long stick. Needless to say, this is a very different sort of experience from that of the sailors in the Whaling ship Pequod in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick – sailors who wrestle against walls after walls of relentless sea waves in the high oceans. The other, and much more widely known, part of Nepali sublimity comes when you find yourself either standing face-to-face with or occupying the near-vertical slopes of some of the world’s highest mountains that leave you with a feeling of having no more significant a place in the natural scheme of things than a dust particle does.
[Previously a lecturer at TU and Apex College, Arjun Poudel currently lives and works in Boston, USA.]