Onam is a harvest festival. But its core is political. It embodies the perplexities inherent in good governance. What provoked the gods into ‘corrective’ action was not any challenge to social or religious dharma that king Mahabali posed. It was his righteous governance. His rule created a righteous society unblemished by untruth, treachery and double-speak: a political order singularly free from violence and oppression. Strangely, in the Onam story, deception and violence are introduced into an ideal situation by gods!
Why would a king’s righteous rule cause unrest in the heavenly pantheon? What has kept this question in dreamy abeyance is the euphoria of the righteous king’s return, creating a festive ambience. Festivals are not rational or philosophical occasions. So, this perplexing aspect of Onam stays bedimmed by the festive air.
The significant thing about Onam is the annual return of the righteous king to his subjects. This affords the logic for breaking out of the harsh, weary routine of life, into celebrating an ideal order of existence that once was. Hence the old proverb: Go for broke, if that’s what it takes to celebrate Onam. This ritualistically-regulated, cyclical return of the righteous king is envisaged as a palliative. It is exhilarating precisely because routine existence is harshly different from the gaiety and sanity of that dim, distant, golden age of Mahabali. Read thus, Onam assumes a touch of historical realism. Could Onam be a warning that good governance is conceivable only as an exceptional privilege, a periodic palliative to the harshness of our political predicament? Isn’t it because this subliminal intuition finds larger resonance that Onam has become a near-global festival, given the everywhere-ness of the Malayalee diaspora?
The historical enigma at the core of the Mahabali myth merits attention. In the Indian world view, the purpose of an avatar is to combat and contain adharma, or unrighteousness. The Mahabali myth embodies a contrary pattern. Here divine intervention aims precisely at the opposite: the suppression of righteous rule. It is the king’s instinctive generosity that proves fatal for him. For being charitable, he loses all; but is compensated with the right to an annual return. What is the meaning of this departure from tradition?
The unique significance of the Onam myth is the convergence in it of the historical and the metaphysical. The King represents the historical-political. Lord Vishnu symbolises the metaphysical. The general pattern in the traditional world view is the non-convergence of the metaphysical and the historical. History, as a result, comes to be seen as a cyclical recurrence of events.
The cyclical view of history is conducive to the perpetuation of the status quo. It envisages no radical shift or breakthrough. Cyclically, there can be momentous deeds and events, but no breakthroughs. To progress is, in the cyclical pattern, also to move closer, at every step, to the starting point, inaugurating another version of the same pattern. But this is not the pattern on which the practicality of politics is predicated. Politics is a domain of freedom of choice and responsibility, of meaningful historical action. Looking at the political pattern of Kerala—marked by a rhythmic alternation of governments between the not-so-Left and the not-so-Right, it might seem that the cyclical pattern reflects the essence of history; but it only ‘seems’. There is the BJP knocking at the gate. The BJP too may settle down to the same pattern; but it is also free to choose a different orbit. History is linear in essence, but also cyclical in existence.
The linearity of historical progression is a cause for worry for the custodians of the status quo, for it validates change and presages the emergence of the unforeseen. This is serious enough to necessitate divine support to avert destabilising eventualities. But, the cyclical repetition of the status quo belies the dynamism of history, which is instinct with an urge to progress towards the not-yet. Else, we would have still been living in caves.
The Onam myth encapsulates therefore a compromise of sorts between the historical and the metaphysical. Its radical aspect is that it acknowledges the undying significance of the historical-political. The king cannot be eliminated from history even by the gods! But kings will not be free to practise good governance in a social order subsisting under the canopy of religions. Every religion has been indifferent or inimical to righteous government for the common man.
The contemporary world has won, thanks to the ascendancy of secular technological materialism, a decisive victory over the metaphysical. For all practical purposes, gods of religions are dethroned. In their place, new deities have arisen: the ruling deities of the Market, the alternate cosmos of man as mere consumerist. Now a god does not have to descend from heaven to crush righteous governance. That regulatory function is exercised with brutal effectiveness by gods of the corporate pantheon. No contemporary counterpart of Mahabali will dare to displease them. We shall never again have a Mahabali. We only crave to revive our spasmodic hopes of good governance.
The secular, political counterpart of Onam is Independence Day. It is a cyclical rejuvenation, with pomp and splendour, of our immortal longing for freedom and righteous governance. Good intentions aired by prime ministers from the Red Fort are verbal re-visitations of Mahabali. What shall we do without them, and how endure, given what it means to survive in these difficult times?
Valson Thampu
Former principal of St Stephen’s College, New Delhi
Email: vthampu@gmail.com