What myths tell us

Lopamudra Maitra's book explores their deeper cultural significance

How the world was born: Wondrous Indian myths and legends

Author: Lopamudra Maitra

Publisher: Aleph

Pages: 328

Price: Rs 999

 

It is difficult to go anywhere in this country without tumbling into craters full of myths and folktales, enough to fill the most cavernous libraries of the world. The stories talk about the simplest and the most complex phenomena in the world; about the making of the universe, cosmological events, animals and mountains and trees and oceans and all other things that make up life on this planet.

This book, How The World was Born, is a collection of such stories from across India. It focuses on creation/origin myths from all over India and brings out the diversity in thought and form that exists within the country’s mythological and folkloric traditions.

The thing is that the ancient world is comparable to a quilted blanket of stories. The stories are not just meant for entertainment, as it was once believed, but hold the ideas, fears, belief systems and perspectives of early human beings. And increasingly, as books like this one emphasise, these stories are an important link with antiquity. The narratives make up the vast intangible cultural inheritance of all mankind.

In this book, the author separates the stories that she has collected by the regions they come from. Over and above the region-wise breakdown, she adds a section for stories that are about water bodies, which is a common motif in origin and creation myths the world over.

Myths are deeply layered narratives about some big, fundamental questions that intrigued humankind. Why are we here? How did the universe come into being? Were the first humans dropped from the sky (or thrown out from inside the belly of the earth)?

Questions like these had no answers then (and some still don’t) but myths were born out of such enquiry. They reveal the early ideas of the earliest civilisations and examine some of the most vexing issues that societies once grappled with—about life and death, about divinity and mortality. Joseph Campbell, a pioneering force in the study of comparative mythology regarded myths as the universal search for truth and meaning.

Myths are called sacred stories, not because they talk about religious matters, but because they are precious cargo; much like the objects in a museum or valuable heirlooms in vaults and lockers, these stories are priceless connections with the ancient world. There are aetiological or origin myths that look at the beginning of things, fertility myths that dig into the act of creation and eschatological myths that deal with the end of the world. And then there are cultural and psychological myths that speak of heroism, relationships and life in communities.

Myths tell us how similar the world really is and how ideas and imagination breach geographical and language barriers with ease. Almost every culture talks about the world emerging out of water or the ocean being the source of life. A creation story among the Gond tribes in Central India talks about a creator god being helped by the crow, the crab and the earthworm in building the world. They bring clay from the ocean bed that forms the ground we walk on. The Lushai of Mizoram have a story that says that there was once only water all around until the creator with help from, a somewhat sceptical worm, created a mass of clay from which all people have been born.

Similar stories are found across the country and also across the world—from Mesopotamian, Greek, Native American and other ancient civilisations. In India, water is believed to be the generative energy that powers all life. This idea finds form in the hymns in the Rig Veda, in the Puranic tales of the deluge and the post-flood rebuilding of the world. It is also found in folk myths that speak of rivers and lakes with transformative and life renewing powers and of treasures being buried under the ocean.

Author Lopamudra Maitra writes that myths are woven into the fabric of nature and as much as these stories may amuse us or represent a rather archaic way of thinking, they remind us of the shared sociocultural ethos that has been a part of us for centuries. Their value, as this book shows, lies in more than being served up as fireside tales for entertainment.

Myths and folktales have power and they tell us as much about the world as they do about ourselves. But the stories have context and a life of their own, they change with every retelling, for instance. The stories are also evidence of how an oral culture adapted itself to the written world. They carry the imprint of a timeless time and of the beginning of language and art. All of this also makes for interesting reading. But that is not the remit of this book and perhaps, there will be future books and collections that will do that. Preserving the myths is important, but understanding their role is even more critical.

The writer is a Mumbai-based journalist and co-founder of The Mythology Project