Loony Tunes

Everything is grist to the mill of the Bhakti cult. So are we surprised when slander is offered to the Lord? It is really praise concealed under an abusive garb, even though the latter may sound like a ‘barb’! Such is the ardour of the devotee separated from the Lord that it prompts a superficially contradictory outpouring of angry love.

The closer the poet feels himself to his beloved, the angrier or more bizarre may be the accents of his Ninda-Stuti or Dvesha-Bhakti, which is devotion thinly disguised as hate.

Such camp camaraderie never fails to draw knowing nods from appreciative audiences.

That may explain why people at a recent concert of devotional songs rendered by noted vocalist Jayathirth Mevundi seemed so moved when he began a Tukaram bhajancomparing the Lord of Pandharpur, Sri Vitthal, to a big ghost!

Whoever goes there gets possessed, the abhangwarns, allegedly alluding to the possessiveness shown by the Lord for devotees’ souls but reveling really in their madness for Him.

Nor do the possessed ever return to normalcy; for “the forest is full of flying spirits that madden the mind,” the lyric adds with mock horror: “Don’t anyone go there; for those who went, never came back!” Stay back if you want to suffer the endless cycles of birth and death is the message concealed in the denouement.

But the poet ignored his own warning, and never ‘returned’ after emancipation! Those desirous of clinging to their little identities and unending life-hassles have been warned! There’s a subtle method in this ‘madness’.