Reviews
Annam
Bahu Kurvita
by
Two things that the British did to India – apart from
whatever good they may inadvertently have done to the
country – that are unforgivable and deserve condemnation are
this disruption of our agricultural economy and the
downgrading of Sanskrit as a “dead language”. Both were done
deliberately and with evil intent. The disruption of our
agricultural economy turned India into a destitute nation;
the downgrading of Sanskrit served to hoist a tremendous
inferiority complex on the people. Fifty years after we
attained Independence we are still struggling to regain our
lost heritage.
The secret is
finally out. For all the BJP’s claims of being a party with
a difference, a party rooted in Indian thought, the Vajpayee
government’s first budget is as steeped in Anglo-American
economic theory as the budgets of its Congress and UF
predecessors. Critics have panned the budget for being
“directionless”.
An oft-quoted Sanskrit verse declares that “the gift of
wisdom is the most superior of all gifts; the greatest
empirical gift is food.”
This book under review is a scholarly
exposition of the great tradition of annadana that was
prevalent in ancient India – Bharat – under the benign rule
of Sri Rama and later Yudhishthira. Far from being a
restricted activity confined to the limited requirements of
a particular community, annadana is revealed by the authors
to occupy a central position in the social, political and
religious life of the Indian people.
Annam Bahu Kurvita, thus enjoined the sages of yore. Grow
more food, have more food, give more food. How this was
done, is what way was foodgrains to be shared, what happened
to those who did not share, all this and much more has been
discussed in this book.
In my ancestral home in Gujarat, everybody was provided for.
Even as hot water was poured into the morning dough, small
balls of jowar were placed around the "thaal" for hungry
ants. And in the blistering hot afternoons, water and food
were given to the mentally ill, the orphans and old people
from the village. At dusk, the cows nuzzled at the "chapatis"
we held out to them, and after dinner, the bones were put
aside for the dogs of the mohalla.
“Most of us
college-educated Indians were taught that inefficient
technologies and low productivities pervaded through long
ages in practically all parts of India,” states Dr. J. K.
Bajaj, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, a Chennai
think tank. In the 1920s Gandhi’s Young India presented some
proof of a rich and prosperous pre-British India.
The book is a tribute to the Indian traditions of growing
and sharing of food.
|
