Our dear Visitor might want to know why we are keen to say something about Rudyard Kipling, sometimes criticized as the upholder of the British Raj and its Colonialism. I think he was more of a pin-prick, a pain in the neck and a conscience keeper of the British Establishment. Let me explain the reasons why we have assigned a Page to Rudyard Kipling of all the people.
Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books were first published in 1894-95. Since then, generations of adults and teenagers in most parts of the civilized World have been relishing their stories right up to our times. The Jungle Book Stories teach us many important lessons. Firstly, that though animals are not human beings per se, neither are they automatons that think and act predictably under the influence of uncontrollable forces like instinct, or other genetic impulses. Within a given species, each animal is not a replica of all others in the group, and no two animals are exactly alike in the way they think, feel, like or dislike and react to a stimulus. Secondly, animals are also individual beings just like us with their own unique thoughts and emotions.
Parents of Cats and Dogs will bear this out. Thirdly, animals have their own personal feelings, even as we do. They experience a range of emotions like pain, pleasure, sorrow, love, loyalty, fear, and anger to cite some, in individually different ways and degrees just like human beings. Fourthly, it is immoral and unjustifiable by any logic to subject animals to cruelty just it would be in the case of two human beings. These Lessons taught by Kipling to mankind about animals is the first reason.
The other is that tucked away in Jungle Book 2 is a story called “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”. It has hardly received the wide-spread attention it deserves. Sūtrajālam wants to correct that. But why? I would say in short that if someone were to be interested in the Philosophy of the Upanishads, and wanted to know more but had less time, I would recommend this Story. If someone wanted a quick and encapsulated account of the essence of Hindu Philosophy in general and of the Upanishads in particular, this is the Story to read and digest. It is astonishing and quite unbelievable that an Englishman could have fathomed Hindu Philosophy so deeply in the Days of the Height of the British Raj. It is inexplicable that an Englishman, often accused of siding with Colonialism, should have highlighted the most profound ideas of the Upanishads and other Sacred Hindu Texts such as the Mahabharatha, the Ramāyana, the Purānas, Smritiis and the Dharma Shāstras in just one story of a length barely enough to qualify as a short story.
Mowgli and Bagheera
painted upon the birth of my first grandson
Davis, California 2003
I must have read and read the Jungle Book Stories at least four times a year, sometimes with my elder brother Prof M.S. Alvar, and often alone, for over 60 years now without let. Each time, each story has appeared to be as remarkable, exciting, and deeply satisfying as on the first occasion. The Law of Diminishing Returns appears to have failed in this case. All told, the “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” has moved me more profoundly than the rest of the stories on every occasion with undiminished intensity. In my later years, after I had imbibed a degree of the Philosophy of the Upanishads, this story never failed to make me weep with wonder and exultation.
Each time it made me reach the doorway of some profound discovery and, on each occasion, I happened to fall short of the actual transition from the doorway to that promised discovery just as it happened to Sir Puran Bhagat in the story. What better way to end this note than by quoting some passages from “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”?
“That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him–the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he was alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.
Some of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker stood firm. Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much, he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come.
So, thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab…was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colors with the seasons;”
Ramesh Shama Alvar
18 Dec 2020
Bangalore, India
The Sage meditating is drawn by my daughter Kavita. I told her to bring out the essence of ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’ in just one or two sketches. She has done exactly that.
Rudyard Kipling Photograph: EO Hoppe/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Our dear Visitor might want to know why we are keen to say something about Rudyard Kipling, sometimes criticized as the upholder of the British Raj and its Colonialism. I think he was more of a pin-prick, a pain in the neck and a conscience keeper of the British Establishment. Let me explain the reasons why we have assigned a Page to Rudyard Kipling of all the people.
Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Books were first published in 1894-95. Since then, generations of adults and teenagers in most parts of the civilized World have been relishing their stories right up to our times. The Jungle Book Stories teach us many important lessons. Firstly, that though animals are not human beings per se, neither are they automatons that think and act predictably under the influence of uncontrollable forces like instinct, or other genetic impulses. Within a given species, each animal is not a replica of all others in the group, and no two animals are exactly alike in the way they think, feel, like or dislike and react to a stimulus. Secondly, animals are also individual beings just like us with their own unique thoughts and emotions.
Parents of Cats and Dogs will bear this out. Thirdly, animals have their own personal feelings, even as we do. They experience a range of emotions like pain, pleasure, sorrow, love, loyalty, fear, and anger to cite some, in individually different ways and degrees just like human beings. Fourthly, it is immoral and unjustifiable by any logic to subject animals to cruelty just it would be in the case of two human beings. These Lessons taught by Kipling to mankind about animals is the first reason.
The other is that tucked away in Jungle Book 2 is a story called “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”. It has hardly received the wide-spread attention it deserves. Sūtrajālam wants to correct that. But why? I would say in short that if someone were to be interested in the Philosophy of the Upanishads, and wanted to know more but had less time, I would recommend this Story. If someone wanted a quick and encapsulated account of the essence of Hindu Philosophy in general and of the Upanishads in particular, this is the Story to read and digest. It is astonishing and quite unbelievable that an Englishman could have fathomed Hindu Philosophy so deeply in the Days of the Height of the British Raj. It is inexplicable that an Englishman, often accused of siding with Colonialism, should have highlighted the most profound ideas of the Upanishads and other Sacred Hindu Texts such as the Mahabharatha, the Ramāyana, the Purānas, Smritiis and the Dharma Shāstras in just one story of a length barely enough to qualify as a short story.
Mowgli and Bagheera
painted upon the birth of my first grandson
Davis, California 2003
I must have read and read the Jungle Book Stories at least four times a year, sometimes with my elder brother Prof M.S. Alvar, and often alone, for over 60 years now without let. Each time, each story has appeared to be as remarkable, exciting, and deeply satisfying as on the first occasion. The Law of Diminishing Returns appears to have failed in this case. All told, the “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat” has moved me more profoundly than the rest of the stories on every occasion with undiminished intensity. In my later years, after I had imbibed a degree of the Philosophy of the Upanishads, this story never failed to make me weep with wonder and exultation.
Each time it made me reach the doorway of some profound discovery and, on each occasion, I happened to fall short of the actual transition from the doorway to that promised discovery just as it happened to Sir Puran Bhagat in the story. What better way to end this note than by quoting some passages from “The Miracle of Purun Bhagat”?
“That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him–the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he was alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.
Some of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker stood firm. Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much, he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come.
So, thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab…was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colors with the seasons;”
Ramesh Shama Alvar
18 Dec 2020
Bangalore, India
“That day saw the end of Purun Bhagat’s wanderings. He had come to the place appointed for him–the silence and the space. After this, time stopped, and he, sitting at the mouth of the shrine, could not tell whether he was alive or dead; a man with control of his limbs, or a part of the hills, and the clouds, and the shifting rain and sunlight. He would repeat a Name softly to himself a hundred hundred times, till, at each repetition, he seemed to move more and more out of his body, sweeping up to the doors of some tremendous discovery; but, just as the door was opening, his body would drag him back, and, with grief, he felt he was locked up again in the flesh and bones of Purun Bhagat.
Some of the children, too, had heard Sona singing to himself, bear-fashion, behind the fallen rocks, and the Bhagat’s reputation as miracle-worker stood firm. Yet nothing was farther from his mind than miracles. He believed that all things were one big Miracle, and when a man knows that much, he knows something to go upon. He knew for a certainty that there was nothing great and nothing little in this world: and day and night he strove to think out his way into the heart of things, back to the place whence his soul had come.
So, thinking, his untrimmed hair fell down about his shoulders, the stone slab…was dented into a little hole by the foot of his brass-handled crutch, and the place between the tree-trunks, where the begging-bowl rested day after day, sunk and wore into a hollow almost as smooth as the brown shell itself; and each beast knew his exact place at the fire. The fields changed their colors with the seasons;”
Ramesh Shama Alvar
18 Dec 2020
Bangalore, India
* The Sage meditating is drawn by my daughter Kavita. I told her to bring out the essence of ‘The Miracle of Purun Bhagat’ in just one or two sketches. She has done exactly that.
Rudyard Kipling Photograph: EO Hoppe/Time Life Pictures/Getty Images
Made with 
Designed by Munnitin-FB and Tata Hugger Productions
for happiness, zest, efficiency and good cheer in good heart
Copyright 2021 – Sūtrajālam.com, All rights reserved.