Literature of the gods
by- Roberto Calasso & Devdutt Pattanaik, in conversation with Ananya Vajpeyi: Presented by the Helen Hamlyn Trust
In one of the first discussions in the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival, the two guests were prominent in their separate ideas about the manifestation of Gods in literature and in contemporary culture as a whole. However, they rarely engaged with one another in debate, leaving Vajpeyi to attempt to instigate an argument that, although present beneath the ideas, was never realized. In response to the question of the identity of Gods,
Calasso focused on the human condition stating that there was a distinct difference between those who recognize the “numan” (the divine) and those who don’t, and stated that ‘the Gods might get bored of us, and retire to another place’. When directed with the same question, Pattanaik was more methodical in his answer, stating that the specific identity of the Gods is strongly subjective to individual cultures, going on to state that the Gods were ‘an idea…a notion of perfection’. Pattanaik stated that on a fundamental human level, we have always ‘looked for meaning’, but that today, we find it in a ‘mobile phone and a Mercedes’, instead of in a ‘ritual or chant’. Pattanaik was arguing that it is forms that change, and gave the example of the recent death of Michael Jackson as a contemporary style of ritual – the celebration of a God. Specifying the question of modernity, Vajpeyi then asked the two about the internet, and its relation to the issue of the Gods. Calasso responded that the mind was ‘the God before the Gods’, and that the internet, as the vast collection of human minds, along with the modern improvements in worldwide literacy was an enormous revolution, but prospectively ‘a dangerous one’. Pattaniak stated that both the internet and the Gods are accesses to infinity, but ones which humans must experience individually.
