More of my unexpected tour of British identity

Following on from my previous confessions about my YouTube binge watching, I jotted down a few notes that will not be of great interest to those who would prefer to find some glimpses into the spiritual world of Vrindavan and Radha-Krishna. As intimated in the previous post, issues of identity are at the crux of this disquieting distraction.

It really has been a long year. I haven't been writing a at all on my blog in months. I don't know if Radharani has some perverse intent in having me bury myself in YouTube for the past several months. Perhaps the most evident result is that I get to see how deep my samskaras are. After all, I spent the first seven years of my life in Old Blighty and returned there for a significant boost of Britishness in my late 30's. I never assimilated or really wanted to, but evidently, that aspect of my identity was fortified in the halls of SOAS. The thing that made me "not-British" really was my indifference to the pub culture.

It was the marriage of modern technology and a weakness of spirit that led me to frittering away copious amounts of time observing the world of the Western imagination, as told in cinema and television. The ultimate lesson that I take from it personally is the seeming utter futility of absolute identity transformation, but that is another story, even though it is the one that is ongoing and lies at the deeper levels of all this bhakti-yoga sadhana.

The variety of stuff that I watched was great, from black and white films dating from the war period and early 50's, which portrayed the England into which I was born. Some of them were classic propaganda. Unfortunately I did not keep links for all the different material that I looked at. In terms of British imperial history, especially in relation to India, I found Niall Ferguson's 6-part documentary to be particularly useful. "Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World" particularly since it highlights the British Empire as "Globalization 1.0."

I saw a discussion of the current Brexit crisis in which one commentator said that the 19th century idea of the British that they had arrived at the very pinnacle of human evolution with their empire was at the root of the current crisis and that it needs to be given up. And indeed much of what I did watch contained a subtle appeal to the nostalgia for Empire and made a conscious or unconscious effort to retrieve that essence of the British character that was the key to that great success. The loss of self-confidence that came with the end of the Empire is the defining feature of post-imperial Britain.

This is a time characterized by a loss of formality, a loss of faith in the aristocratic tradition. Brexit is probably a painful call to evoke that kind of pride in British supremacy and achievement. They were the emperors because they were the best.

Merchant-Ivory type film adaptations of Jane Austen, Trollope, Dickens and other Victorian novelists all seem to appeal to this "golden age," in which a fantasy England of rolling green hills, vicars in beautiful countryside cottages and manors surrounded by flower gardens. And the styles and manners were so gloriously posh!

I managed to get through a couple of episodes of Fry and Laurie's Wooster and Jeeves. That is perhaps the classical parody of the wastrel scions of the ruling classes in the interwar period, the Empire in a period of decadence.

Overall, I came to the conclusion that all the British detective fiction, starting with Sherlock Holmes with his multiple on-screen incarnations, that seems to offer the best clue into the British persona and culture: the love of figuring things out, the conviction that the truth can be uncovered and that the truth sets one free. Holmes himself sets the standard, but perhaps as much as Jeeves and Wooster, Lord Peter Wimsey is a caricature of the ultra-disciplined aristocrat for whom solving a murder mystery is an eccentric hobby or blueblood diversion in which he can indulge himself. The murder mysteries show that intellectual superiority, how they all love solving a puzzle, from Holmes to Agatha Christie to Agatha Raisin, Inspector Wexford, Inspector Morse and Inspector Dalgleish, Father Brown and Lord Wimsey geniuses all. The moral of all these murder mysteries is that those on the side of truth are more powerful than those on the side of falsehood. They are smarter and whatever their class, more heroic.

Of these, Inspector Morse somehow epitomizes the genre in this post-Imperial Britain. Morse is set in Oxford, which offers unlimited opportunity to contrast the highbrow cultural achievements of not only England but of Europe in general with the decadence under the surface. These programs are extremely cleverly written: woven into the fabric of the whodunnit is the complex cultural context, the cultural references taken not, as in American TV, from the current transient and insignificant puffs and bubbles of popular culture, but to the very bedrocks of Western civilization -- opera, the great Requiem chorals, Shakespeare, Virgil, Aristotle... often arcane and amusing educational novelties.

Undeneath it, Morse's Oxford is a turgid cesspool of ambition and corruption underneath the civilization veneer. There is one with Sir John Gielgud ("Twilight of the Gods") in it, where he is particularly brilliant as an almost senile Oxford Chancellor. But there are many classic portrayals of the Oxford Don engaged in intrigues of ambition combined with the antinomianism of privilege. It is a brilliant series.

Among the various things that I watched to get a look at contemporary Britain were several hand-wringing documentaries on Britain's excessive intake of alcoholic beverages. One sportscaster trying to get his intake down to 14 units a week, groups of young women in Scotland drinking themselves silly every Wednesday, a rugby team in the north country football hooliganing it up in a Red Bull, and so on. There are literally a ton of these investigations of alcohol in Britain.

But other programs I had seen had already shocked me: the ubiquity of liquor, not just in the beer and Guinness culture of the common folk, but in all the upper-class melodramas and murder mysteries. Each moment of the day is associated with some tipple: sherry at this hour, brandy at another, a shot of Scotch when one needs a lift from terror, and so on. Along with tobacco and the tea-ceremony, this is central to the rituals of the British way.

And a further indulgence would be to comment on the role of religion. When I was in England I noticed very little interest in religion in general, except where tradition mandated a choir and evensong in one of the heritage cathedrals, Westminster school and all that. But I would not be surprised if the most frequent scenes are weddings and funerals where the weighty lines of the Anglican rites are repeated with great solemnity and sobriety.

Because of all the deaths, religion is omnipresent in the murder mysteries, but nobody really believes in it -- like Morse. Rituals are there still, for what they are worth, and there are people like Gielgud's Chancellor who believe in them fervently, like Confucians, precisely because they add gravitas to inherited status, but even they are cynically agnostic. Religion is ultimately something that feeble minded people engage in to buttress their meaningless lives, but strong-minded people rise above such worthless crutches.

And the vicars themselves, especially in the big empty carcasses of old religious haunts, are also alienated and full of doubt, despite their educated manner, like a C.S. Lewis. Either that or they are sinister manipulators with air-headed true believers spouting religious cliches that no one pays attention to. Father Brown is a bit of a sympathetic exception, as G.K. Chesterton was probably the last English Catholic to make much of an impact, and his sleuthing priest always finds some Catholic moral dogma to insinuate into his solving the riddles that underlie the seedier or sinful side of life.

There was a lot more, and I suppose I could have thought a little more deeply about what was going on in my mind. I think the points I want to take away here are that the British empire was built on competence and moral discipline. This is what even their Indian subjects such as Bhaktivinoda Thakur admired.

I think that underlying my search here was the doubt that Western civilization was indeed superior to Indian. The teachings I had imbibed from my Swamis had not fully convinced me that there was no value to a culture based on skepticism of belief in one absolute transcendent and spiritual Truth. There is no doubt a great power in the products of the Enlightenment, but ultimately, like Bhaktivinoda Thakur himself concludes:

bidyāra bilāse kāṭāinu kāla,

parama sāhase āmi

tomāra caraṇa, nā bhajinu kabhu,

ekhana śaraṇa tumi

I spent my time confidently taking pleasure in mundane learning

I never worshiped Your Lotus feet, O Lord. Now You are my only shelter.

paḏite paḏite, bharasā bāḏila

jñāne gati habe māni

se āśā biphala, se jñāna durbala

se jñāna ajñāna jāni

As I studied, my hopes grew, for I considered material knowledge to be life’s true path.

How fruitless that hope, how feeble that knowledge! I know that knowledge to be ignorance.

jaḏa-bidyā jata, māyāra baibhaba,

tomāra bhajane bādhā

moha janamiẏā, anitya saṁsāre,

jībake karaẏe gādhā

All material knowledge is a power of illusion; it impedes one's bhajan;

it causes infatuation in this temporary world, and thus makes an ass of the conditioned soul.

sei gādhā haẏe, saṁsārera bojhā,

bahinu aneka kāla

bardhakye ekhana, śaktira abhābe,

kichu nāhi lāge bhāla

I became just such an ass and for so long carried the burden of material life.

Now in my old age, I have lost all strength and no longer find pleasure in anything.

jībana yātana, haila ekhana,

se bidyā abidyā bhela

abidyāra jbālā, ghaṭila biṣama,

se bidyā haila śaila

Life has now become an agony; all that knowledge has proven itself worthless,

ignorance has penetrated my heart with the intolerable, burning pain of a pointed shaft.

tomāra caraṇa, binā kichu dhana,

saṁsāre na āche āra

bhakatibinoda, jaḏa bidyā chāḏi

tuẏā pada kare sāra

O Lord, I seek no other treasure in this world than Your lotus feet.

Bhaktivinoda abandons everything to make Your feet his life's essence.