Strange contemporaries in history

When I turn the pages of history, I sometimes notice something truly remarkable. If I think about it for a while I become confused and distracted, all well-reasoned schemata regarding how to think about the world fall apart, and it seems to me that the relentless efforts of scholars to make some theoretical sense of the great flood tide of human affairs is forever doomed to futility, no more than a child’s prattle or the rantings of a madman. – Precisely when Sri Chaitanya Dev was stirring up a revolutionary fervour of love for the Divine Krishna in Bengal, Leonardo da Vinci was making the first detailed and accurate drawings of a foetus in the womb, and the first engineering drafts of what would become the helicopter several centuries later, while the successors to Vasco da Gama and Columbus were raising their victorious pennants in newly discovered lands to the east and west of Europe. Just when Sri Ramakrishna was sitting at the Kali temple in Dakshineshwar and soothing the hearts and minds of his compatriots with the elixir of his message of a universal, all-embracing religion of tolerance and acceptance bathed in the mystic aura of the Mother, the godless intellectual whiplashes of Darwin and Marx were arousing Europe to a frenzy of both anxiety and activity. And it seems that precisely at the same time the gun-toting hard-riding cowboys, equally innocent of both great currents in the life of the mind, were having a great time creating the legend of the Wild West on the vast plains of North America!

Lenin, Henry Ford and Tagore shared the world’s stage; in the same terrible century men hurled the atomic thunderbolt on the heads of their fellow men, while Gandhi did his life’s work. it takes one’s breath away to think of what might have transpired if they had met and talked at length. In the same age and continent, some were hailing the writer of Principia Mathematica as God’s gift to man, while others were burning wretched helpless women alive by the thousands on suspicion of being witches, while yet others were destroying highly evolved civilizations like those of the Incas out of the lust for gold. We are told that Chenghiz Khan, Roger Bacon and Saint Thomas Aquinas were near-contemporaries. The emperor Cyrus and the Tathagata Buddha, great conquerors both, were separated by hardly a blip on the vast time scale of history; so were Aristotle and Alexander (who knows but eastern philosophy got its first foothold on European soil through the teachings of the ‘naked bearded sages from the banks of the Ganges’ that Aristotle had requested his pupil to bring him?); as were Pablo Picasso, Charlie Chaplin and Mao ze Dong. So were Benjamin Franklin, Jagat Seth and and the great shogun Yoshimune in Japan! – just as, in our own time, some people are sending off exploratory spacecraft towards the boundaries of the solar system, while others living in the same age are stoning people to death on the charge of being heretics and blasphemers, or trying to ascend to heaven up the coils of smoke given off marijuana-filled reefers.

And yet we are supposed to believe that all the myriad threads of this vast swirling mystery without beginning or end are tied together, playing the same harmonious melody, and one great sage or the other holds the failsafe key to the riddle.

[I wrote this essay originally in Bengali 31 years ago, in May 1989, six years before my daughter was born. I was recently reminded of it when she was musing over the phone – as we often do – that she had been struck by the same sort of remarkable coincidences during her own studies in history. I was almost 26 then, she is almost 24 now: that too!

For something else I wrote back then, see this post]

P.S., August 22: I am delighted that the post titled What really mattered has come back to hold a high position on the most-read list just because I provided a link to it. In the absence of meaningful comments, I wonder how many actually read, understood, thought about it and were affected by it, though! And I do wish that my readers - especially the new ones among them - would browse through some of the old posts by themselves, even when I don't provide links. Many of them might be pleasantly surprised. As I have said and not once before, I treat this blog as an extension of my classroom: if you want the full benefit of my work, keep reading this blog, and tell your friends to do the same. For their benefit, not mine.