The Reiki Journey

Reiki is one of the alternative therapies that have arisen out of Indic spiritual ideas. Indic ideas about Brahman, the life energy that pervades every particle of the universe and the different practices linked to focusing on that energy inside ourselves is the basis of different practices varying from Yoga and meditation to Acupuncture and Reiki.

Often people call all these as "unscientific" or "without evidence". However, I think that all these can be seen as another manifestation of what is called "placebo effect", which is a core part of scientific investigation. Whenever we scientifically compare the impact of any therapy through randomised controlled trials, we need to keep account of the Placebo effect, that is the number of persons who will heal themselves with or without the therapy. This means that there are a number of persons who heal themselves, or that our bodies have mechanisms and capacity for self-healing.

Origins of Reiki

Reiki originated in the 1920s by Mikao Usui in Japan. The word Reiki is made up of "Rei" (spiritual), and Ki (life energy).

The Chinese ideas about the blocks and lack of equilibrium in the body-channels of life energy (Chi) is, in my opinion, another approach to a similar idea.

In Reiki the healers use a light touch or keeping the hands near the body to influence the "Ki" in individual's body for unblocking energy channels and thus create equilibrium.

In my opinion, for persons dealing with mental or psychological difficulties, chronic conditions, and life-threatening conditions such as cancer, therapies like Reiki can be a valuable support to more conventional medical treatments. Reiki and other alternative therapies can also be good as a part of people's self-wellness approaches. 

Sadguru on Reiki

Sadguru is a well-known spiritual Guru in India. Recently, I heard him speak on Reiki during a podcast, where he warned about the dangers of Reiki because he said that "life-energy is a delicate and complicated thing and trying to influence the life-energies of people can be dangerous".

I was a little surprised at his ideas since I feel that human beings across cultures and civilisations have been practising different techniques for influencing the life-energy for thousands of years. If we accept his ideas then perhaps we may not even do meditation on our own? 

I was talking about his views to my niece Meghna, who has been engaged in practising and teaching Reiki for many years now.

She said to me, "There is often a lack of understanding about Reiki. Sadguru speaking about it is not new, it came out many years ago when I was in Singapore. I have written a book chapter about my personal life journey and what drew me to Reiki."

Meghna's Journey With Reiki

I asked Meghna:  Is there something about Reiki you'd like others to know that is not commonly known.

She said: I believe Reiki is one of the most wonderful complementary therapies and simple to learn personal wellbeing tools.

What a lot of folks do not know is that Reiki has been recognised as a valid complementary therapy and widely integrated into patient care plans to promote relaxation, alleviate stress, and reduce pain. Over 1,000 hospital-based Reiki programs exist in the United States alone, and the therapy is formally recognized by major global healthcare frameworks, including the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom. I myself was part of a voluntary program with the Red Cross Society for the disabled in Singapore where we used to weekly offer Reiki to their patients.

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Some months ago, Meghna has contributed a chapter in a book about Reiki, titled "Reiki Lights - Collected Stories of Transformation". Her chapter is titled "From Doing Reiki to Being Reiki", which explains how she looks at the Reiki practice - a process of her own inner transformation that she uses to help others as a healer and as a Reiki teacher.

About her initial experiences with Reiki she writes: "I realised what a profound self-healing tool Reiki could be, if guided by the right teacher. I approached these practices with the same level of excitement as a child in a candy store. I built a regular self-practice with full body healing techniques as well as distance healing for the inner child when I felt I was working through more deep-seated patterns. I became more disciplined about carving out time at the end of my day ..."

About its impact in the initial phase of her journey she says: "There was an expanding awareness growing within, almost like a quiet voice speaking to me, which inspired the more true to myself choices I started making." 

After facing many challenges in her life-journey, she writes about her present life in Kerala (India): "The Reiki Principles have been a steady compass throughout my journey; guiding my way of being, inspiring me to show up present, authentic, vulnerable and deeply grateful. Practising radical acceptance and surrender is not something I have mastered; it is something I return to, every single day. It has been a journey of constant rediscovery, realignment and remembering. Every day I am learning to be still, and to trust what my heart already knows." 

You can read more about Meghna's Reiki journey and learn more about her Reiki work from her website.

In The End

Reiki, mediation, yoga, mindfulness and similar spiritual practices are important practices to keep us grounded and in contact with our inner core and to what is really important in our lives.

All of us have our ups and downs, moments when everything is going well and moments when challenges come knocking on our doors. I believe that spiritual practices make it easier to deal with those challenges.

***** 

 

The Wandering Gods

When and how did the ancient humans decide to create the sacred spots where their Gods or prophets will live? With time, they decided to create elaborate homes for their Gods but sometimes, the Gods were left out in the open or travelled around with wandering holy-men and sometimes with the holy-women or were carried out of their homes periodically, in processions. I call these the wandering Gods.

This post focuses on some of the my experiences about the wandering Gods.

Most of my experiences of such events are linked with my travels in different parts of the world, especially in India. (Click on the images for bigger pictures)

Sacred Spots for Ancient Humans 

I think that ancient humans chose at least two different kinds of sacred spots.

(1) Some of those sacred spots were along the ancient pathways, for the travellers. At these spots, usually they did not build elaborate structures. Often, these were simple stone-towers or coloured clothes tied on or around trees. Sometimes these sites were close to the water sources.

For example, in Mongolia I saw the stone put together, often accompanied by flower trees and colourful scarfs, along the important pathways, criss-crossing its land. I was told that each stone in that place is sacred and you are prohibited from taking away even a single stone from those places.

 

I think that many persons have started believing in building such stone-towers. I saw them in a forest in Arizona (USA), as well as, in the river bed behind our home in Schio (Italy).

Similar to those stone-towers in Mongolia, are the tree shrines, that are so common in India. There was a small Hindu temple in central part of Mozambique, where I had seen a beautiful tree shrine around a huge Peeple tree. The image below has a tree shrine from a rural area in Madhya Pradesh (India).

 

(2) Other, more important sacred spots were places where the hunter-gatherers came together for big clan meetings. Often these were near rivers and streams or on the top of mountains. Prehistoric caves where rock art has been discovered were also chosen as sacred sites. These became sites of seasonal or periodic fairs and pilgrimages.

For example, the vast area around the confluence (Sangam) of Ganges and Yamuna rivers in Prayagraj (India) is visited by millions of persons during the 6 or 12 yearly Kumbh fair.

 

Specific Energy Fields For the Sacred Spots 

There is another aspect of the selection of sacred spots, about which my knowledge is limited - areas with auspicious or positive energy fields.

I have read that many ancient temples were built in areas that had a special kind of energy and thus, many of the more recent churches were built in their places when the old pagan religions were abandoned.

For example, I had read that the beautiful Santo Stefano church in Bologna (Italy) was built at the site of an older temple dedicated to Venus. People talk of the positive energy of this church. 

Some years ago, while on a walk in the forest behind the Bashistha temple in Guwahati (India) in India, I had met a Sadhu (ascetic) who had told me about the special energy that comes out of the ground and the rocks. I had put my hand on that spot but I was unable to feel any energy, which was there according to that Sadhu.

Perhaps, ancient humans, shamans and mystics are more open psychologically to such experiences of energy-fields and thus, chose specific sites for their prayer places. Or as the Sadhu had told me, "You have to learn to quieten your mind, then you can feel it." 

Gods Come Out of Their Abodes for a Procession

There is another sacred tradition that continues from old times - that of the Gods in procession. Sometimes, the icons and symbols of Gods are brought out of their temples or churches and are carried out in processions.

For example, when I lived in Bologna (Italy), I remember the annual procession in the evening, when the Madonna statue was taken out of the Bertalia church and carried out in a procession along the streets and parks.

 

Another example is from Delhi (India), where floats carrying statues and persons dressed as Gods travelled on floats for the annual Ram Lila in which the story of Ramayana was enacted.

 

I remember a more complex example of such procession in Cidade Alta in Salvador de Bahia (Brazil), where the descendents of the slaves brought from Africa, who were forced to convert to Christianity, had merged their African Orisha Gods with the Christian saints.

 

In Himachal Pradesh (India), in the mountains around the town of Kullu, each mountain village has its own deity in a temple, many of whom come from older folk-traditions. Around the festival of Dusshera every year, all of them are carried out in procession to Kullu, where they live in temporary temples along with all the other deities.

In Karnataka (India), they have a tradition of men carrying in annual processions the Gods in their temples on their heads without holding it with their hands, while persons dressed as warriors carrying swords accompany them for protection.

 

Finally, in another example from Kerala (India) I remember the tradition of Theyyam in which there were men dressed as Gods, who invoked the Gods to descend in their bodies, to give benedictions and to answer questions.

Herders Moving Their Homes And Temples   

As hunter-gatherers were replaced by people owning cattle, they usually shifted their homes with the seasons, looking for grasslands and fodder for their cattle. They also took their Gods when they moved homes. 

I saw a group of herders in Mongolia, who had travelled from their villages to an area next to a lake, where they were setting up their home-tents and their temple.

 

Wandering Triptychs & Tripitaks

Travelling story-tellers, ascetics and mystics, was another group of people who carried sacred icons with them to the different communities. For the wandering Gods, sometimes, their sacred images were depicted on scrolls or portable temples, which could be folded and carried easily.  

The term Triptych (literally 3 tablets) comes from Latin and Greek, it is used frequently in conjunction with Christian sacred images. A triptych has 3 panels, one bigger central panel with two side panels which are attached to the central part like a door. Thus, the panels can be closed and it becomes a box, which can be carried around easily, similar to the idea of the wandering Gods.

The foldable Catholic Triptych in the image below is from Victoria & Albert Museum in London (UK). 

 

There is a similar term, Tripitak (3 boxes), used in Buddhism. It comes from Pali language, one of the languages of ancient India, which was used by Buddha for his preaching. It denotes an ancient Buddhist book containing all the  discourses of Gautam Buddha, which is divided into three main parts - Vinaypitak, Sutpitak and Dhammapitak, and was perhaps carried around by monks.

Conclusions

The idea of writing this post came from my musings on the similarities between the words "Triptych" and "Tripitak". I hope that you have enjoyed reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

Growing up in India, it is easy to get used to the idea of "God is every where" because in our daily life we can see people praying to cows, trees, mountains, rivers, all the time. At the same time, we can see the wandering Gods - men leading cows bedecked with flowers around the cities, children & adults dressed up as Gods asking for alms, people carrying sacred images or symbols in bowls and buckets to ask for alms on specific days of the weeks at red lights.

I want to mention 2 books that I had read in the 1980s, that have influenced my ideas about religions and gods - Jean M. Auel's series of books (Children of Earth series), starting with the "Clan of the Cave Bear" about the life in a Neanderthal community. Another book that helped me to understand how religions start and grow is "The Source" by James A. Michener in which he looks at different layers of history around a water-spring somewhere in Israel.

Not just about the origins of religions and ideas of Gods, these are great books and if you have not read them, try them.

*****

Safety & Efficacy of Traditional Medicine

Twenty years ago, in 2006, I was involved in the organisation of a regional meeting on traditional medicine in south Asia, which was held in Bangalore in India.

Recently, I have read some discussions about research on the safety and efficacy of traditional medicine. They reminded me of a speech given my friend Dr Bala on this theme in that meeting. Therefore, I have decided to share some extracts from his speech in this post.

Background to the Regional Meeting Held in Bangalore in 2006 

I was asked to organise and coordinate a meeting on traditional medicine practices in South Asia by a group of international NGOs. Similar regional meetings were held in that period in other parts of the worlds. Final reports from those meetings were put together and provided to the department of Traditional Medicine in the World Health Organisation (WHO) in Geneva.

However, my participation in the whole process was limited to the meeting held in India, since I was busy in other research work in that period. My friends from People's Health Movement in India had played a fundamental role in organising that meeting. 

Dr K. Balasubramaniam (1926-2011) from Health Action International Asia-Pacific (HAI-AP) had given the keynote address at that conference. Dr Bala, as everyone called him, had done pioneering work in access to essential medicines and was a key and respected figure in the international People's Health Movement (PHM) in those days. That meeting was also an opportunity to meet some of my old friends including Dr H. Sudershan from Vivekananda Girijana Kalyana Kendra, Dr Mira Shiva & Dr Ravi Narayan from PHM-India.

That conference was my first real encounter with traditional medicine. It was also the first time that I had visited an Ayurvedic medical college and understood the kind of training Ayurvedic doctors receive in India.

In this post, I would like to share some extracts of the keynote address of Dr Bala focusing on "Evaluation of Safety and Efficacy of Traditional Medicine". His keynote was much wider in scope. For example, he devoted a significant part of his speech to the subject of "Preserving and safeguarding biodiversity sustainability and traditional knowledges". 

In the coming days, I want to share some more papers from that conference. If you wish to read more documents from that meeting, I invite you to check the final report of that conference, which can be freely downloaded.

***** 

Evaluation of Safety and Efficacy of Traditional Medicine 

Dr K Balasubramaniam, Sri Lanka

I believe that this conference will focus on herbal remedies which constitute the therapeutic armamentarium of traditional systems of medicine in the region.

The World Health Organization (WHO) has defined herbal medicines as "Finished labelled medicinal products that contain ingredients from aerial or underground parts of plants parts or other plant material or combination thereof, whether in the crude state or as plant preparations. The same WHO document adds "Medicines containing plant material combined with chemically defined active substances, including chemically defined substances and isolated constituents of plants are not considered to be herbal medicines".

It will therefore, follow that chemically defined isolated constituents of plants used in modern medicine are not herbal medicines, it has been estimated that these medicines derived from plants constitute about 25 percent in modern pharmacopoeia.

The World Health Organization posed a question 2002 whether a herbal medicine can be used clinically if no harm has been found after the use of that herbal medicine for generations and there is no documentation of such an effect. For an answer to the question, reference is made to an earlier WHO document published in 20003 which states "Absence of reported or documented side effect is not an absolute assurance of safety of herbal medicine. However, a full range of toxicology tests may not be necessary. Tests which examine effects that are difficult or even impossible to detect clinically should be encouraged. Suggested tests include immuno-toxicity, geno-toxicity, carcinogenicity and reproductive toxicity", It adds the following caveat, "only when there is no documentations of long historical use of a herbal medicine or when doubts exist about its safety; should additional tests be performed.

A rigid framework that has been prepared for modern synthetic drugs will never be possible for herbal medicines. There has to be some flexibility in toxicological requirements for herbal medicines.

Accordingly, a group of experts met in Chandigarh, India, to develop a suitable framework for carrying out toxicological studies on herbal medicines. The framework developed was broadly accepted by the Indian Council of Medical Research and the WHO. The actual tests to be carried out in the Chandigarh model are given in tables 1 & 2 (click on the tables for a bigger view).

The tests recommended by the WHO are given in Table 3 below (click on the tables for a bigger view).

WHO has called on clinical researchers to conduct clinical evaluation of traditional medicines within the specific framework of rigorous clinical pharmacological principles without ignoring or trampling on the concepts of the traditional systems of medicine.

I wish to take this opportunity to present an alternate view for evaluation of traditional medicine.

Traditional systems of medicine are a summation of several thousands of years of human experience in the selection of plants for preventive and curative healthcare. Practitioners of traditional systems of medicine argue that the efficacy of herbal remedies is due to the synergistic activity among the several ingredients of herbal mixtures. Complex mixtures of plants or herbs form the basis of traditional medicines. The mixtures are usually subject to crushing, heating, boiling, etc. It is possible that this process may change the chemical structure of the active ingredients in the plants.

Clinical pharmacologists and other scientists working on medicinal plants, on the other hand, focus all their attention on isolating and identifying biologically active ingredients in medicinal plants and herbs. When a promising new biologically active chemical ingredient is isolated, it goes through all subsequent investigations identical to those for a new synthetic chemical ingredient.

Traditional healers do not accept that the efficacy is necessarily due to the active ingredients in the plant.

According to the active ingredient approach the modern clinical pharmacologists, take the knowledge from the plant but throws away the wisdom of centuries.

If there is acceptable historical evidence that traditional herbal remedies have been effective in the treatment of certain diseases, but neither their active ingredients nor the mechanisms are known, is it ethically or morally acceptable to not use that treatment? Examples of successful treatment by traditional medicines will be useful to answer these questions,

In the fate 1980s children attending the Dermatology Department, Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London showed marked improvements in their eczema symptoms. These improvements were due to oral treatment with aqueous decoctions of a mixture of 10 Chinese medicinal herbs. Clinical experimentation and pharmacological testing revealed that a mixture of the 10 herbs were necessary and that the efficacy could not be attributed to any single active ingredient from any one of the 10 Chinese herbs, A placebo controlled double-blind clinical trial using the 10 Chinese herbs was carried out on 47 selected children with non-exudative eczema. The conclusions of the trial were to validate the standard of current conventional clinical trials utilized in the UK that the traditional Chinese therapy was efficacious.

If these children had to wait till the clinical pharmacologists had screened the 10 Chinese plants for active ingredients and tested them for biological activity, they would never have been given the chance of getting effective treatment with a mixture of 10 Chinese herbs.

Potential cytotoxic drugs are tested for their activity against experimental or human cancer cells. Efficacy depends on the ability to kill specific cancer cell types without affecting normal body cells. Studies on the effects of certain Ayurvedic herbal preparations for possible cytotoxic activity revealed that these herbal preparations did not kill the cancer cells but transformed them into normal healthy cells. These drugs, therefore, have a different mechanism of action, Classical testing methods would have missed this important anti-cancer activity.

I wish to pose a philosophical question. Is medical science one universal and uniquely expressed (western) paradigm – a biomedical paradigm? If it is possible to conceive of alternative methodologies, theories and practices in other domains such as music, logic, linguistics, art and politics, is it not possible to consider possibilities of alternative methodologies in medical science, knowing that doctors practice medicine within a biopsychosocial paradigm?

The guiding principles by which knowledge is built up in the biomedical paradigm are those of the scientific method where hypotheses are clearly stated, then tested and accepted or rejected as truth "until further notice" or "within the stated confidence limits” using only experimental or quasi-experimental designs – a deductive approach to problem solving.

Is it possible for research scientists to examine other methodologies, for example, using experiential methods – an inductive approach, to evaluate traditional herbal remedies?

There is an enormous amount of research on medicinal plants in research institutes in developing countries and the transnational drug industry.

Based on the WHO definition of herbal remedies and the herbal remedies used by practitioners of the traditional system, I wish to pose the following questions:

The Indian Council of Medical Research has taken the plant Pterocarpus marsupium from its use in folklore and Ayurvedic medicine to Phase III clinical evaluation for the treatment of diabetes mellitus using well accepted pharmacological principles. It was handed over to the industry for pharmaceutical development and marketing. This product will be marketed to practitioners of modern medicine. Table 4 (click on the tables for a bigger view) lists examples of modern drugs derived from plants that have been used in the traditional systems of medicine by ancient people around the world.

The question I wish to pose is as follows: "Will this type of research and development to isolate therapeutically active chemical ingredients achieve the objectives of this conference which is to promote the continuous development of traditional medicinal in the region to maximize its contribution in preserving and improving public health."

Let me make it clear that R & D to isolate therapeutically active ingredients from medicinal plants is of critical importance. There is no doubt about it.

But what I wish for you'll to discuss is the need for research to evaluate the safety and efficacy of the herbal remedies used by practitioners of the traditional systems of medicine. For example table 5 gives a 5 list of Ayurvedic remedies for some common ailments (click on the tables for a bigger view).

Is there a need to develop appropriate methods for clinical evaluation of traditional herbal medicines: methods and criteria not to be limited to the methods and concepts of modern biomedical science.

Interestingly much of the scientific literature for traditional medicine uses methodologies comparable to those used to support many modern surgical procedures: individual case reports and patient series with no control or even comparison group.

*****

For a full version of the keynote address by Dr Bala at the South Asia Regional Conference on Traditional Medicine, held in Bangalore, India in 2006, including the list of references, I invite you to download and read the conference report, that I had prepared. Please write to me at sunil.deepak@gmail.com if you would like any of the presentations made at the meeting.

***** 

The 100 Sarees of Ms Roy

You never know where an online research will take you. Recently, an online search took me to a website where Indian women talk about their sarees and their memories linked to them. I spent a few hours reading about different kinds of saree-textiles, their designs and traditional weavings.

At the end, I have a new understanding about the kind of relationship persons can have with textiles, about which I had not thought earlier. It also brought back some memories from my childhood about my mother's sarees.

Let me start this by telling you about how I landed on that website.

Starting from Sonali Sen Roy

I was looking for information about the childhood of Sonali Sen Roy, who had become famous during the 1950s for her story with the Italian film director Roberto Rossellini.

Sonali was born in Banaras in the British India, her father was a doctor in the United Province and her mother was the elder sister of well-known Indian film maker from the 1950s, Bimal Roy.

The search took me first to Sonali's elder sister, then to her daughters and then to one of her grand-daughters, Ms. Bhattacharya Roy. Some years ago, Ms Roy had taken part in an online challenge of presenting 100 different saris, where she had talked about some of her family stories.

100 Sarees Pact Website

 The 100 Saree Pact website collects the stories of sarees, it describes its mission as, "This blog is an invitation to join and share the magic. Celebrate life, celebrate relationships, celebrate your past, your heritage, your memories, your moments, your connections through saree wearing. Enjoy the stories shared already, be enthralled ! Bring your sarees and their stories out into the world. Let them spread the happiness and positivity that we have all been surrounded with."

100 Sarees of Ms Roy

Ms Roy presented her 100 sarees on this blog during 2015. Her sarees come from different sources - the ones she bought, the one brought as gifts by her husband, the family heirlooms, the ones on loans from aunts and cousins ... Each saree is accompanied by a brief or a long description including some of her family memories.

For example, in one post, she talked about her maternal grand-mother, Sonali's elder sister: "This sari belonged to my Dimma (mother’s mother). She usually wore whites, greys, beige or very light colours. This is one of the few coloured saris I saw her wear, mostly when she went abroad. I lost her when I was still in college and hence a very occasional sari wearer but I did get two of her saris. This sari is special for another reason too. I wore it one of the first times I went out with my (then to-be) husband ..." 

In another post, she talked about the saree worn by her mother for her wedding: "The magenta Benarasi was bought from Indian Silk House. The zari work is exquisite, with three different kinds of butis all over and an intricate border and pallu. Even after almost 40 years, the zari hasn’t lost its sheen. Ma wore it only a couple of times after her wedding though ..."

There was one post, which might have been about Sonali, though she did not specify it: "She was for me a strand of red corals that my mother has always treasured and which I have worn on a couple of occasions. She was for me a letter she wrote to my mother when she lost my father and another she wrote at the time of my wedding, with an alpana-like doodle at the end. She was for me a frantic hunt for a fresco on a hot and humid afternoon in Santiniketan. I never saw her. For me, she lived in the many black and white photographs, and a few more recent ones in colour, from the family album and the many stories I heard about her from Ma and her siblings ..." 

Sarees as Repositories of Weaver-Traditions, Cultures, Memories

I don't have any emotional bond with any of my clothes - I buy most of them in the supermarkets, and when I am tired of them, give away some of them and throw out the others. There is no emotional relationship between me and the clothes. I guess that this would be true for most of us today.

On the other hand, reading about Ms Roy's posts about her sarees, gave me a glimpse of the different weaving traditions, the traditional motifs they use, the festive occasions on which special sarees are worn, the memories associated with them and how some sarees become family heirlooms. Even when they are old and worn out, their borders and embroidered parts may be kept and used for other sarees.

It is a completely different relationship with our clothes, something that we lose when we shift to today's factory made products and the consumer culture.

My Childhood Memories

In our old Delhi house, where we lived in one part and my maternal grand-parents in the other part, every year before the wedding season, a couple of men arrived from Banaras carrying on their heads, silk sarees wrapped in white cotton blankets. I think that they were middlemen and sellers, they did not weave themselves.

I remember standing there with other children, as they showed bright coloured silk-sarees with shimmering and richly embroidered zari borders and Pallus (the end of saree hanging over the shoulders).

Every year some of my aunts or uncles or cousins from the extended family was getting married and thus, the family-women needed new sarees. I remember some of sarees bought by my mother. When they became old, sometimes they were exchanged for pots and pans from another group of women visitors.

In The End

Going through some of Ms. Roy's posts and reading about her stories about specific sarees was a rewarding experience, it made me think of some of my old memories. It also brought out the importance of different textile museums and persons who are trying to conserve the priceless weaving traditions of communities such as sarees, kimonos and other traditional dresses.

Even in Italy, till some decades ago, families had traditions such as knitting, cross-stitching, embroidery and lace-making for their daughters' weddings. We still use some of the heirlooms from my mother-in-law's family at our home.

However, all those things are from the past, and often today's generation is dismissive about them, they would rather buy something new from the supermarket, as I do!

***

Aurangzeb's Tomb

As I read about the Aurangzeb controversy in India, I was reminded of my trip to his tomb in January 2020, just before the Covid pandemic.

I am no fan of Aurangzeb, I think that he was a bigot and perhaps even a psychopath. However, in this post, I want to write about my visit to his tomb and to explain why I think that the idea of destroying or desecrating his tomb is wrong.

At the end, I also want to talk a little bit about India's syncretic Ganga-Jamuni culture in relation to the Aurangzeb controversy.

Visit to Aurangzeb's Grave

I was in Aurangabad and had gone to visit the Ajanta caves. Living abroad, I always feel that I am losing touch with the India of ordinary people, thus, whenever possible, instead of taking cars, I try to travel by the public transport buses.

Coming back from Ajanta, I was sitting in front in the MSRT bus and talking to the driver, when he told me that the bus will pass through Khuldabad, where Aurangzeb was buried in 1707 CE. I told the bus driver to drop me there.

Khuldabad is a little town in the Aurangabad district, a little bigger than a village. The bus dropped me in a crowded market street and when I asked about the Aurangzeb tomb, people pointed to a simple looking mosque in a side street.

I was a little surprised that the Mughal emperor had his tomb in such an insignificant mosque in such an insignificant place.

Inside the mosque, his grave was immediately after the entrance, to the left side. The grave was surrounded by a marble-lattice (sangmarmar ki jaali) enclosure. There was no makbara or a monument, and his grave was just an open strip of ground, exposed to the rain and wind. A tree was planted in it but it seemed to be having difficulties growing.

The board near the grave said that Aurangzeb had died in Ahmadnagar, but was brought here, 130 kms away, because he wanted to be buried near the tomb of the 14th century sufi saint Zainuddin Shirazi. According to his wishes, no monument was built around his grave.

The marble enclosure and floor were made two centuries later by Lord Curzon and the Nizam of Hyderabad.

The Mosque and Dargah of Zainuddin Dawood Husain Shirazi

The structure has different buildings, including the dargah of the sufi saint Zainuddin Shirazi, with his grave covered with a red chadar.

Near the sufi tomb there was a board with a list of 15-18 names starting from Prophet Mohammed  and leading to the name of Zainuddin Shirazi.

The caretaker had explained about that board and how the sufi saint of Irani origins was linked to the Prophet, but I don't remember it. At that time I had thought that I will write about it in my blog but then Covid arrived and I forgot all about it.

Near the saint's tomb, there was also a special niche made in the wall holding some relic or important Islamic symbol from Mecca.

The caretaker had also explained why that relic or symbol was considered holy, but I do not remember it now. Saint's tomb was located a proper makbara.

The mosque was located on the other side, in front of the saint's makbara (image below).

In the courtyard behind the makbara on one side, there were other religious structures, which looked like shrines of some kind. I have forgotten the details about them. You can see them in the image below.

It was a very simple and peaceful place and I could feel its sacredness and spirituality. It was wonderful to sit there and soak in its atmosphere.

How to do Namaz

As a child I grew up in front of a Muslim graveyard and not very far from the big Idgah of old Delhi. I have been to mosques in different countries around the world and I have watched persons doing the prayers (Namaz), but I was not aware of the whole process of how to do Namaz, and its different positions.

Outside this mosque in Khuldabad, I found a board (left) explaining the different positions assumed during namaz, with text in both Urdu and Hindi. I was fascinated by it.

You can see that board in the picture. It makes me think of a set of stretching exercises, somewhat similar to yoga, which means that apart from the religious significance of doing namaz, it might also be good for the body as an exercise. (You can click on the image for a bigger view)

Talks of Destroying Aurangzeb's Tomb

While not being an admirer of Aurangzeb, I do not agree with the idea of destroying or desecrating his tomb, for 2 main reasons:

(1) I think that Aurangzeb paid for his brutality and sins in his own life. He was 89 years old when he died and had been the Mughal emperor for almost fifty years. The last 25 years of his life were spent in the Deccan region of India, fighting different adversaries, especially the Marathas. Imagine spending all your old age, away from your home, fighting different wars, and dying far away from your family and children.

I think that killing other human beings extracts a price from us, it leaves a scar on our soul. The number of soldiers coming back from a war and suffering from PTSD, is one example of this negative impact of violence on ourselves. Imagine killing your brothers and sisters, and imprisoning your father - persons who had loved you and perhaps played with you when you were young. Could he just kill them all ruthlessly without paying a price for it psychologically? What lessons did his own children learn from their father? After being brutal to his father and siblings, did he become afraid of his own wives and children, that they could also kill him?

He sowed the seeds of hate and violence, he reaped the crops of those seeds. Look at his family history - after his death, his son Azam Shah became emperor for only 3 months. Then he, his brother and their children were all killed by another brother, who became the new emperor Bahadur Shah, but he lasted only for 5 years. He was succeeded by his son, who lasted one year and was killed. And their stories of killings go on.

Apart from the killings and destruction of families, Aurangzeb's reign started the decline of the Mughal dynasty and empire, from which they never recovered. Thus, I feel that Aurangzeb paid for his karma in his own life and through his descendents.

(2) I also believe that we can't think of destroying or desecrating sacred places of any religion, also because we have to remain true to ourselves and our beliefs. Personally, I believe in the message of Upanishads, Aham Brahmo Asti, that there is god in each one of us, without any exceptions. 

Aurangzeb's grave is open to the sky. After more than 300 years, I am not sure if you will find his bones. And even if you can find them and dig them out, what will you do to them? Is that going to vindicate you and give you any peace of mind?

Aurangzeb killed many persons, destroyed many temples and religious places, but then I hope that his soul made peace with what he had done and he could forgive himself. I certainly don't think that his actions gave him any happiness. He left behind an inheritance of hate and bloodshed. What would anyone else get today by destroying his grave?

On the other hand, his grave remains as a warning, a place for us to not forget him and to think about his life, about his inheritance and his impact. Hate and violence do not lead to happiness and prosperity, they can only lead to more hate and violence.

India's Syncretic Traditions of Ganga-Jamuni Culture

I grew up surrounded by ideas of living together and loving of different religions and cultures. During my extensive travels in India, I feel that among the ordinary people, those basic ideas of mutual love and respect are still alive today.

The caretaker of Aurangzeb's grave was very generous and kind in taking me around, showing me different parts of the shrines and explaining. I remember sitting with him in the courtyard, talking to him about the changing world and the future of our children and grandchildren, as old men tend to do everywhere. For me, that is the essence of Ganga-Jamuni culture - recognising, respecting and loving our essential humanity.

I feel that today this Ganga-Jamuni culture is under attack not only by the religious hardliners and bigots of the different religions, but also by persons of our civil society when they start differentiating between bigotries - they can only criticise some, and about the others, they prefer to keep quiet, or worse, try to justify, minimise or white-wash them.

 

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If you have read this far, perhaps you would also like to read my ideas about blasphemy (it is in my Hindi blog).

In the picture-credits above, the name of the place has been shown as Khulnabad instead Khuldabad - I regret that. All the pictures are by me.

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Yajnadevam's Indus Valley Script

Reading about the meanings and significance of the figures & inscriptions on Indus Valley seals is one of the enduring areas of my interest. It all started a couple of decades ago when I read some papers by Prof. Maurizio Tosi, head of archaeology department of Bologna university, and one of his researchers, Dennys Frenes. I have already written about it many times, especially in my Hindi blog.

Since then, every time someone claims to have understood those figures and signs from the Indus Valley, I try to read their papers. Most such papers are written by people who are passionate about the subject but do not have formal training to do such analysis.

This post is about a new paper by Bharath Kumar (Yajnadevam) on the deciphering of Indus Valley inscriptions, which seems interesting.

Yajnadevam Paper on Indus Valley Language

The researcher uploaded a 99 pages long paper titled "A cryptanalytic decipherment of the Indus script" on Academia website on 13 Nov. 2024. In the summary of this paper, he explains that through cryptographic analysis, he has found that "Indus script is a proto-abugida segmental" language, which means that it is a writing system that groups consonants and vowels into units.

He also explains that "Indus inscriptions are in grammatically correct post-Vedic Sanskrit" and through his analysis of more than 500 signs, he provides their understandable meanings. He also shows connections between the Indus Valley and the Brahmi scripts.

The Indus Valley alphabet is in allographs, which means that each letter of the alphabet can have some or many variations. I think that developing allographs over long periods and vast territories is to be expected, because there were no printing presses and scripts needed to be copied manually. Sometimes the allographs can be also be made for practical reasons by making conscious changes in the way some letters are written (for example, related to the surface of writing materials).

One difficulty of deciphering Indus Valley inscriptions has been the short number of signs in the Indus Valley seals - the median inscription length is about 5 signs and there are only about 50 inscriptions that are 10 signs or longer.

Yajnadevam explains that the oldest inscriptions are about 6000 years old, while the most recent ones are about 1700 years ago, and among the more recent ones, Indus Valley signs are sometimes mixed with Brahmi script signs. He also mentions a 3500 years old inscription in Belpahar, Odisha (Vikramkhol cave), which is half-way between Indus Valley and Brahmi scripts. About 83% of the inscriptions are from right to left.

Allographs of specific signs can lead to mistakes of 2 kinds - two different signs may be thought of as allograph of same sign; and, allographs of same sign can be interpreted as two different signs.

He underlines similarities between Indus Valley to Gupta period seals, and links them with specific shlokas from the Vedas. For example, he writes, "The contents of the Indus inscriptions are similar to Janapada coins and Gupta-era seals that they resemble. Long seals seem to use a concise Vedic concept as a motto or slogan." At the same time, he looks for origins from other languages such as Sumerian and old Akkadian.

The image below, presents the different allograph variations for some of the alphabet characters from his paper (click on images for a bigger view).

He concludes his paper with the following: "This is the only cryptanalytic decipherment and the only one that uses well-established mathematical models and methods instead of guessing sign values based on their appearance. This decipherment is the only full decipherment and the only one where every sign and every stroke has been resolved, the only one that is programmatically reproducible, the only one where the decipherment can be followed sign-by-sign by the reader ... We also show how the constraints and habits of the Indus script carry on to Brahmi inscriptions of the early historic era." 

The image below, presents his analysis of a standardised Indus Valley alphabet, along with Brahmi and Devnagari alphabets from this paper. You can draw your own conclusions if there are similarities between the 3 alphabets - personally, I am struck by the similarities in the 3 alphabets for different letters. I am also struck by his assertion that this analysis provides meaningful results for the all the epigraphs he has looked at.

In Conclusion

This paper on the decipherment of the Indus Valley script is almost 100 pages long, out of which around 50 pages are descriptions of individuals inscriptions. I do not have the domain-skills needed to judge its scientific validity.

Probably, over the coming months and years, linguists, philologists and experts of Indus Valley civilisation will look at it and decide if his ideas and results make sense. Many years ago, I remember reading a somewhat similar understanding of the Indus Valley seals in a paper by Ms Rekha Rao on Academia, in which she had proposed that the unicorns on the seals were representations of the Vedic priests.

I am not sure how reliable can be papers uploaded on Academia, without being presented on a peer-reviewed journal. I do hope that Mr Bharat Kumar (Yajnadevam) is working on such a paper for a peer-reviewed journal.

We have limited understanding about the languages and cultures of people living under Indus Valley civilisation. It will be good for someone to finally solve this riddle, so that even from the limited seals and inscriptions, we can learn more about that period of India's history.

With AI, many persons have started saying that AI will help us in understanding Indus Valley script. I am not sure that AI has already reached such a level of expertise. However, AI may also help in expanding the findings of researchers and making sense out of them.

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PS2 (22/06/2026): Yajnadevam has finally explained the issues regarding publishing of his findings in a peer-reviewed journal. He wrote: "... The more consequential the paper, the more thorough and bulletproof it needs to be. There are unimaginable number of objections reviewers can come up with and most reviewers and journals are extremely uncomfortable with papers that challenge the status quo even slightly. They would prefer to reject a paper than having to retract it. ... Of all the subjects in the world, the Indus script is the most difficult to publish on. As Gregory Possehl put it: "Deciphering the Indus script is a field strewn with the wreckage of careers". ... This is a very difficult arena and requires a very special strategy. That's all you need to know for now."

PS 1: On the social media, there are other persons raising questions about Yajnadevam's decipherment of IVC seals. For example, Nityanand Mishra has presented some arguments against it: "I have read parts of YD's paper, his proposed decipherment, and his readings and translations of the IVC inscriptions. While the effort is commendable, some assumptions are questionable. As for the results, they are far from convincing. The deciphered texts do not look like natural expressions or statements in either Vedic or post-Vedic Sanskrit. Sivasenani Nori (a traditional scholar of Sanskrit) made the same observation on the bvparishat list a few months ago: "I glanced at the Sanskrit sentences and they don't sound anything like in Veda or the classics." On the INDOLOGY list too, YD's work has received negative comments. I would like to see if any Vedic or Sanskrit scholar of note has a positive view of the decipherment purely from the perspective of Vedic or post-Vedic Sanskrit. I also found YD's translations to be inaccurate at many places. ... Without a review by peers, it is difficult to buy a new theory. Rememeber Rishi Rajpopat's claim of cracking a 2,500-year-old Sanskrit puzzle. More than two years have passed, the claim still has few takers. The decipherment of Brahmi and Kharoshthi by James Princep (whose decipherment was aided by linguists and built on work of several epigraphists) is universally accepted because there is no doubt about the deciphered readings not being natural expressions or sentences in Sanskrit, Prakrit, Pali, etc. This cannot be said, unfortunately, about YD's proposed decipherment."

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Searching For Lila

I came across the story of Lila Lakshmanan Biro by chance. Half-Indian and half French, she has worked as a film-editor with many of the famous French film-directors like Godard and Truffaut in the 1960s.

Born in 1935, Lila will be ninety years old this year. She lives in an old age home in a suburb near Paris. My artist friend Samit Das, whom I have found on the journey to find Lila, has confirmed to me that she is fine and keeping well.

I first met Lila in a book when she was called Lila Herman. Finding her reincarnations into other names was an exciting search. This is the story of that journey.

 My First Encounter With Lila

I came across her first when she was known as Lila Herman, while doing research about the Roberto Rossellini - Sonali Dasgupta story.

In December 1956, Roberto, well-known Italian director, famous for his neo-realistic films like Rome, Open City and Paisà, came to India to shoot a film. Sonali Dasgupta, wife of Indian producer-director Harisadhan Dasgupta, was supposed to collaborate with Roberto. The two fell in love and this created a huge scandal in India. Hounded by journalists and an upset family, Sonali looked for support. She found some support in Lila Herman.

At that time, Lila was married to Jean Herman, an aspiring film-director. Jean was teaching French in Bombay in those days, was one of Rossellini's assistants for his film. They had a son in Paris in 1955 and then come to Bombay, where they had stayed for 2 years.

That is how I started my search to learn more about Lila Herman, but I found very little. She edited some films in early 1960s and then disappeared. 

Lila Herman to Lila Lakshmanan

The search for Lila Herman was a little complicated because her husband film-director Jean Herman had also disappeared and had become famous as Jean Veutrin, a well-known French mystery-writer. 

She had disappeared because she and Jean had divorced. After the divorce, she had become Lila Lakshmanan and had continued to work as film-editor. However, after a few years, even the trail of Lila Lakshmanan also turned cold.

Lila & Atila Biro

Searching for Lila Lakshmanan brought me to her second marriage to the well-known French architect and artist of Hungarian origins, Atila Biro. She had become Lila Biro.

Her husband Atila was born as Attila in Hungary in 1931, studied in Germany and settled in Paris. As a painter, he chose to write his name as Atila. Many of his works are part of different European art museums.

Atila and Lila married in 1963. Together, Atila and Lila, travelled to Italy, Marocco and many times to India. Atila had a large number of exhibitions in different European countries and the two often travelled together for those events. I don't know if Atila and Lila had any children. Atila Biro died in 1987. You can check some of his works on the Facebook page of Atila Biro foundation.

Lila Biro's Book

In 2012, Lila Atila Biro wrote a book called "Atila, Le soleil des métamorphoses" (Atila, the Sun of Metamorphosis).

The preface of this book was written by Lila's first husband Jean Vautrin (Herman), who wrote about his admiration for Atila's paintings.

I think that Jean and Lila had separated because she was in love in Atila. She married Atila, soon after her divorce while Jean had his second marriage a few years later. However, the three of them, Jean, Lila and Atila, probably continued to be good friends. 

Lila Biro Interview in 2017

In 2017, an event was organised in Paris on visual mapping of modernism in Indian art. In that connection, some art exhibitions and talks were organised, in which clips from some of Lila's films were also included. On that occasion, in an interview to Bombay Mirror by Sumesh Sharma, Lila had shared some information about her life:

"Lila was born in Jabalpur in 1935, where her father Lakshmanan was the director of All India Radio, while her mother was French. As a child, she had lived in Delhi, Lucknow and Bombay. Then her parents separated and 12 years old Lila arrived in a boarding school in England.

She went to Sorbonne to study English Literature when she was 17. Lila successfully graduated and went to study at the French film school ID’HEC, where she met her first husband, Jean Herman, now better known as the French writer Jean Vautrin. She was studying editing as she didn’t think she was creative enough to be a director.

During her last year at the film school in Paris in 1955, she gave birth to her son. Lila’s mother, found a job for Jean Herman teaching French Literature at the Wilson College in Bombay, thus, they lived there for 2 years until the end of 1957.

Regarding the Roberto-Sonali story she said: “I was with Rossellini, when he met Sonali Das Gupta. He was a man who had the accomplishment of perusal; he would be convincing and would get his way with people. When Sonali’s affair became public, she came and lived with me on Carmichael Road."

In the End

In late 1960s, Lila Biro continued to work as editor for different well-known French film directors. Thus, in the films she edited, her name appears as 3 different persons - Lila Herman, Lila Lakshmanan and Lila Biro. I think that she stopped working as film-editor in early 1970s.

About the impact of her work, in 2023, film producer Daniel Bird said: "Lila Biro is a remarkable character who witnessed Rossellini in India, played a key role in the cutting of key titles of the French New Wave, and was a close collaborator of the Hungarian émigré painter, Atila Biro. For me, however, she’s also the star witness in a crime against film grammar: the jump cut. The editing style of Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless is now legendary, but I’ve always wondered what it must have been like in the cutting room when that revolutionary editorial decision was made. Thanks to Lila, that moment is vividly brought to life."

There was another Indo-French woman connected to the films - Leela Naidu. Leela was 5 years younger to Lila. In 1955, when Lila and Jean had come to Bombay, Leela was crowned Miss Femina. I wonder if the two had met and had been in contact in India or in France.

I am also curious about Lila and Jean Herman's connections with the films in Bombay, as the two had just come out of the cinema institute in Paris and must have been very interested to collaborate with Indian film-makers. It was the time when films like Mughle Azam and Devdas were being made.

To conclude this article, here is a romantic picture of a dedication of a painting by Atila to his "ma Lila cherie" (my dear Lila) from 1969 (click on the picture for a bigger view).

I wish I could talk to her and do a long oral-history chat to explore her memories.

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Note: The first image of Lila presented above has been made from 2 images I found on internet. However, I could not find any picture of Lila and Atila together. The second image of Atila's dedication of a painting is taken from the facebook page of Atila Biro foundation.