https://swarajyamag.com/culture/no-the-guru-iya-parampar-was-never-about-blind-obedience
This morning I forwarded/ Shared the above to links to “Eepa” Sir to read and give his views. He is a deep scholar in the traditional literature of India and I was keen to know what he would make out of TM Krishna’s specious thesis on the ancient Hindu educational institution handed down the generations as “guru-sishya parampara” or lineage.
My remark to Eepa Sir that I forwarded along with the online URLs was this below ⬇️
Sir, The pernicious anti-Hindu propaganda in Indian academia now regards singer T M Krishna as one of its high priests and ideologue . The guru-sishya relationship in Hindu ethos is an institution not a power-play as this perverted Op-Ed suggests . The purpose is clear : the most effective way to destroy Hinduism is to undermine and sabotage the ancient “guru sishya sambhandham”. It is a shame that T M Krishna is at the forefront of this toxic attack on Hindu culture .
Promptly in about half an hour, I received Eepa Sir’s messsge on WhatsApp. He made no comment at all, neither on the “Scroll” OpEd quoting TM Krishna’s views, nor the rebuttal that was published in the “Swarajya” nor on my own view castigating Krishna’s toxicity. Eepa message simply posed two sharp and searching questions to me:
- Do you approve of Drona as a guru demanding Ekalaiva who had been his disciple without his knowlege to give him his thumb as guru-dhakshina?
- And would Drona have taught him if he had revealed his caste?
My response to Eepa Sir was this :
Sir, these are loaded question you ask but IMHO they are frivolous because the answer to them cannot be other than contextual and relative to time .
In Dronacharya’s time Varna was an accepted social system of occupational hierarchy. What he did was very harsh to Ekalavya but then it was to teach a lesson to an upstart student who had through extraordinary “guru Bhakthi” yes, indeed, but nonetheless which also was more than just a bit of dissimulation of personal identity, had used stealthy means to acquire knowledge of “Astra sastra” which was was exclusive domain of Kshatriyas within the then prevalent social contract called Varnashrama Dharma.
But then it Ekalavya too who also was teaching a very fitting and sobering lesson to Dronacharya who was a Brahmin and had had no business really to engage in and master a martial art that was reserved only for the Kshatriyas.
Thus, we must be careful not to draw the wrong lessons from these two Mahabharata characters. They were not being casteist in the contemporary sense of the term . They were both exhibiting their respect for the Varna system , the social contract of their time. By mirroring each other, Ekalavya and Dronacharya were only exposing one another’s blatant violation of that normative social structure.
In today’s context, however, Varna is outlawed as a social structure. And so in today’s context , one could very easily ask these frivolous , mischievously hypothetical questions with no purpose other than to just repeat ad nauseum political propaganda narratives about so-called caste injustice that the Brahmin Dronacharya meted out to the Dalit Ekalavyan.
But, Sir, the Mahabharatha characters even today continue to have great relevance … but in a wholly different sense and worldly setting unrelated to caste.
Ekalavya deceived Dronacharya through usurpation or piracy of patented “intellectial property” akin to “industrial espionage” , or “copyright infringement”, “plagiarism” etc… all of which even in our modern world amount to criminality because they upend the prevailing social contract.
The Mahabharata is timeless . The lessons it imparts are ever relevant to us. Only the context changes.
Sudarshan Madabushi