Aranyaka

 There are so many books here in AJ's Madurai house and the only one I picked was an Indian graphic novel called Aranyaka by Devdutt Patnaik and Patil. 

This would be my second graphic novel , the first one being about a Mexican family that moved to California near San Luis Obispo , a beach town , met neighbors and celebrated the Day of the Dead, and the journey of the younger sister battling severe respiratory conditions.

These have a way of transporting you to a new world. I'm sure plain fiction can do this too, but graphics just are so much easier to follow along and allow imagination into.

Aranyaka is a story about a woman who leaves her home - a home that could not contain her character - in search of the forest. She learns how the forest has no rules. That hunger is violent whichever way you see it and yet when hunger is satiated you move on from the fear of hunger. Fear is imagination, in a way. 

In the forest she finds love with a man - a man seeking liberation - trying to be brahman. 

They move into a house - as two different people , making peace at times , and eventually letting go as the forest taught them.

On his side, life is about staying away - abstinence - about knowledge disclosures and finding infinity - what's beyond the beyond. He develops a reputation, finds seekers, collaborators.

On her side, life is about cooking, about craving , about the bodily functions - eating and cooking at will, eating meat, about making pots and keeping in touch with the forest. Her side has a natural disorder. She wonders if her meal making generosity would be challenged by the nature of the students she meets. She realized that no one has intellectual hunger when it was time for actual hunger.

As students come by some seeking knowledge, most seeking comfort, she sees them , understands them and wonders what they are seen for - are their minds seen, what are they seen for?

Between the obvious differences in approaches to life , the two do make peace at times being inspired from either side of their worlds - some students are even sent her way for some purpose.

There's a woman who does things always feeling indebted. There's one woman - who learns all the arts and her mind is not seen, the guy who grazes the cows and questions the hierarchy of why the cows are holier than the deers the tigers kill. 

Then comes a point, where people have to leave and somehow the rule-less-ness that the forest taught her lets her let go with wisdom.

Okay what did I like about this book:

Like the previous graphic novel I read this one too let me hanging a little bit at the end , when the world suddenly closed and I'm still mentally somewhere near Aranyaka.

At first I wanted to judge the book because Devdutt was someone I judged before for what I thought at the time was very loose interpretation of Indian scriptures.  But recent wisdom has taught me to read anything and everything from anyone that I take upon without letting biases interfere, to go for that thing only this person can impart. 

What was interesting about this book was the rule-less-ness - how the so called world of rules can sometimes be unfair, whereas in the world of rule-less-ness , things are fairly simple - if you are hungry you take it - and that's the only rule. It was interesting to compare the so called Godly pursuit with the nature of a woman that served someone everyday with food. It was interesting to see the body image issues of women and the sexual interests and contrast it with asexuality and abstinence. 

What was most interesting was that this book was based on Upanishads, apparently while I was just wondering how a forest life was explored by a city woman.

What I learnt later:

The story is inspired by Vedas and builds upon forest symbolism from Vedic literature. The novel tells the story of the sage Yajnavalkya and his two wives, Maitreyi and Katyayani. Rishi Yajnavalkya is remembered today mostly for his philosophical debate with Gargi at the court of King Janaka. Instead of Yajnavalkya, the authors put the women in forefront and tell the stories of Katyayani the Large, Maitreyi the Fig and Gargi the Weaver. Through these characters, the authors explore the basic human attributes like, hunger for food, hunger for knowledge, fear, and sense of debt.

Some key lines:

"To eat is to stave off death. To kill is to stave off death for a while. To reproduce is to stave of death in futures to come." (9)

"Only someone who has never known real hunger will make villains of all predators and victims of all prey." (23)

"Those who can't imagine tomorrow's hunger must forage without respite."