Notre Dame Cathedral and my visit of 2006
It was with much agony that
I read about the devastating fire at the famed Notre Dame cathedral and the
damages thereof. To me, the Notre Dame does not belong to the French alone. It
belongs to humanity at large. All heritage sites are remnants of the legacy of
our forefathers. Human beings of all nationalities, races and faiths, along
with all other living organisms- share a common ancestor and any achievement of
a branch of our clan is the legacy of all of us.
Notre Dame Cathedral. Standing more than 400 feet high with two lofty towers and a spire, this marvellous church is considered a supreme example of French Gothic architecture
The astounding sites of
Machu Picchu of Peru, Pyramids of Egypt, Bagan of Myanmar, Angkor Wat of
Cambodia, Great Wall of China, Roman Colosseum of Italy, Acropolis of Greece,
Stonehenge of England, Borobudur of Indonesia, and the Ajanta caves of India
all are reminders of the achievements of our ancestors and they need to be
approached with great reverence.
The Notre Dame is no
exception to the above. It belongs to humanity.
Notre-Dame de Paris
Architectural - French Gothic- details of the facade showing details of the portal of the Last Judgment Central portal of the west facade.
I visited Paris in the
summer of 2006. It was my first visit to Europe.
I had stayed in London for a
few days and visited Edinburg as also Glasgow. One fine afternoon, I landed in Charles
de Gaulle airport and took a taxi to the Holiday Inn Montparnasse
located on a leafy street in the heart of Paris. The driver was a Sri Lankan
Sinhalese who was very disturbed over the political happenings in Sri Lanka at
that period. It was three years before the LTTE was totally annihilated by the
Sri Lankan army in 2009.
In front of the Louvre museum
Apart from my visits to some
of the must-see places in Paris that included the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre museum, Arc de Triomphe, Les Invalides, the
tree-lined Avenue des Champs-Elysees and a Seine Cruise, I did visit the Notre Dame Cathedral as
well.
More than the beauty of the French Gothic architecture,
this symbol of French identity and pride had witnessed the coronation of
Napoleon Bonaparte, the beatification of Joan of Arc and in modern times, the
funeral masses for Charles de Gaulle and Francois Mitterrand.
Quasimodo, the bellringer of
Notre Dame and Esmeralda the beautiful gipsy immortalized in Victor Hugo’s
novel, “The hunchback of Notre Dame” lived here. The book has many translations
in Malayalam too.
I had with boyish curiosity
wandered around the cathedral and saw the amazing panels in Gothic
architecture. The central portal of the west façade had caught my imagination.
It had the “last judgement” depicted over it with amazing details. At that
time, I had only a 3.1 megapixel Sony Coolpix digital camera to take snaps of
these wonderful panels. Smartphones were yet to be popular. The camera had cost
me close to a whopping Rs 25 K, bought from Dubai in 2003 through a friend
while I was working in Southern Africa.
Seine Cruise. River Seine runs nearly 800 km through France on its way to the English Channel
By the Eifel Tower
I remember my visiting the Aux
Tours de Notre Dame, a restaurant very near Notre Dame for a tea after an
exhausting walk. It was a much-overpriced a place with one cup of tea costing 6 euros. I told my Pakistani friend with British
citizenship half jocularly that this restaurant proved that the twine shall
never meet between the East and the West. Seeing his blank look I clarified as follows. While the restaurant
owner here makes 1800 Euros (Rs 135000) by selling 300 tea, his counterpart in
Kerala makes just Rs 600 for the same business. The Frenchman can easily get a
return ticket to India and manage a month’s expenses with that money while the
Indian could hardly get a cooking gas cylinder with his earnings doing the same
job!
Aux Tours de Notre Dame, a restaurant near Notre Dame .
I hope the French will
bounce back soon with all the help from the world community and preserve the
treasures for posterity. We have a responsibility to stand with them in this
hour of need by expressing our solidarity.
As rightly said by the great
man, André Malraux; “In
a world in which everything is subject to the passing of time, art alone is
both subject to time and yet victorious over it.”
Let us preserve the art of
our forefathers.
South India
17th April 2019
PS: André Malraux, cabinet minister
for cultural affairs, under French President Charles De Gaulle, was one of the
most colourful personalities of the 20th century. His autobiographical
work, Anti- Memoirs that has over 100 pages dedicated to India, is a
brilliant work in literature. Malraux a great admirer of eastern philosophy
with particular reference to Hinduism and Buddhism had visited India many times
between 1929 and 1974.
Writer Raja Rao, in 1936,
arranged a meeting of Malraux with Pundit Nehru in Paris. Malraux, asked Nehru
an interesting question: ‘Why did Hindus expel Buddhists from India?’ Nehru,
the historian as he was, admitted that he had never thought about this. Dr.Peter
Tame, a researcher who wrote about the above conversation argued thus. “Actually Hindus didn’t expel Buddhists, but
the Brahmins didn’t like the Buddhist philosophy very much as it was liberal
and not rigid. The Brahmins thought it was an attack on their privilege.”
Comments
All the best!
I read this quote in your blog: "Writer Raja Rao, in 1936, arranged a meeting of Malraux with Pundit Nehru in Paris. Malraux, asked Nehru an interesting question: ‘Why did Hindus expel Buddhists from India?’ Nehru, the historian as he was, admitted that he had never thought about this. Dr.Peter Tame, a researcher who wrote about the above conversation argued thus. “Actually Hindus didn’t expel Buddhists, but the Brahmins didn’t like the Buddhist philosophy very much as it was liberal and not rigid. The Brahmins thought it was an attack on their privilege.”
I have a different take: I do not think Buddhism jibes well with the general tropical abundance of the Indian natural environment and the Buddhist asceticism jars in the Indian psyche that dances when it is happy and mourns with deep pathos (KaruNam or vipRalambha SR^n*gAram. Buddhism says: sabbe sankhara anicca, sabbe sankhara dukkha, sabbe dhamma anatta. Such nihilism cannot do well in river valleys abundant with fertile soil and good rains.
In addition, the Buddhists were interested in proselytizing and so their energies went with sending monks with the caravans to central Asia, west Asia, etc. through the Silk Route. That is why the Buddha was always staying in the gardens of rich merchants and giving sermons. Most of India was and is agricultural, and both Buddhism and Jainism, being against using animals in farm work, favored the merchant classes who also were their patrons because the merchants wanted peace above all for good business, and both SRamaNa religions were against war. In KEraLam too, the Buddhists and Jains were centered in the areas near the forests because they wanted the forest products which were obtained through "collection" rather than "production" which was more full of himsa than mere collection. All these created a schism between the two rational religions on one side and "Hinduism" on the other which was more in harmony with agriculture and use of animals.
A great Indologist, I think it was TVR Murthy, once said: Buddhism is Hinduism for export." What he meant was the the roots of Buddhism are in the Upanishad-s, and by removing the complexities of rituals, many gods, the complex caste system, etc. Buddhism was made more applealing to non-Indians who were looking for a simple theology.
So, I do not believe that Buddhism needed any push to go outside of India: they actually wanted to go out of India. And then came Kumarila Bhatta, and later Sankara, whose argumentation showed serious fissures in the Buddhist philosophy. So, it was unpopularity and the defeat in argumentation that spelled the end of Buddhism in India.
I confess I am no historian. I am just speculating on the basis of my understanding of Buddhism as a rational, simple faith which failed to face the complexities of the real lives of agriculture-based people AND my feelings about my fello-Indians. Even in KEraLam, the Nampootiri-s succeeded because their faith system jibed well with agriculture. They had a calendar which could predict the conditions for planting, etc. The settled near rivers and rice was the center of their life and they did much to maximize production. Otherwise the war lords, courtesans, and others would not have gifted them much land as the early records show. And there was an anti-arts streak in Buddhism too, which went against the intensely artistic tendencies of the Indian psyche. There is a quote by Dr. Kunchuni Raja in the preface to Mani Madhava Chakyar's book on Koodiyattam that shows the Buddha asking followers not to take part in dance and drama events!
Anyway, thanks for pointing out that exchange between Nehru and the French writer.
DKM
Your observation that Buddhism spread among traders more than among the agriculturists is worth more study. I have often wondered as to why Buddhism did not catch up with the imagination of the Hindus as much as it did in the South East Asian countries.
Your observation on the Namvboodiris in Kerala also seem very pertinent in the context.
By the way, I could not still lay my hands on " Mani Madhaveeyam" the biography of the great Guru.
Thanks again for the insightful notings worth pondering!
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