Essay 6: The Shakti We Refuse to See

There are forms of life we depend upon so deeply that we eventually stop seeing them. Their presence becomes ordinary, their contribution expected, and what they give becomes more visible than what they are.

In the Sauptika Parva of the Mahābhārata, Brahmā asks Rudra to participate in creation. Rudra enters the waters and remains in tapas. Creation does not wait. Other beings come into existence, and with life comes hunger. When Rudra eventually emerges, plants and herbs have arisen through his austerity as nourishment for living beings.

There is something quiet in this part of the story.

Rudra was asked to create, yet what appears through him is not merely another creature seeking a place within creation. It is that which allows other creatures to continue living.

A plant takes root in the earth without announcement. It receives light, water and nourishment. Leaves emerge, flowers open, fruit appears, seeds fall. Other beings come to it for food, shelter and shade. A tree may remain in one place while generations of movement pass around it.

To the eye it seems still, though almost nothing within it is still.

Water rises. Roots extend. Cells divide. Leaves turn toward light. Life continues beneath an appearance of silence.

Perhaps this too is an expression of Shiva and Shakti. Stillness does not mean the absence of movement. Sometimes movement becomes so completely part of being that it no longer needs to announce itself.

The tree simply grows.

It does not ask who deserves its shade. Its fruit does not inquire about the one who eats it. It remains rooted in the earth and participates in creation through what it is.

Yet our relationship with trees has increasingly become one of utility. We speak of timber, fruit, medicine, fuel, oxygen and carbon. Even when we speak of protecting forests, we often explain why forests are useful to us.

There is nothing wrong with recognizing what something gives. The difficulty begins when what it gives becomes the only way we know how to see it.

The tree becomes valuable because it nourishes us, shelters us or serves some purpose in our world.

But the tree belonged to creation before we found a use for it.

This thought does not remain limited to plants.

Human society too has often depended upon people it has refused to fully accept.

There are communities who have performed work that others would not touch. In India, generations of sanitation workers were made to handle the waste created by others while themselves being treated as impure.

A traditional story associated with the Mehtar community speaks of one of Shiva’s gaṇas being sent into the human world to deal with the filth created by human beings.

Whatever historical layers may surround such a story, the image carries a striking reversal.

Humans create the filth.

Someone removes it.

And the remover becomes impure.

Perhaps our idea of purity has always contained this contradiction. We wish to remain untouched by certain parts of existence, so another person must touch them for us. Once they do, we begin to associate them with what we ourselves wished to avoid.

The object is rejected, and eventually the person handling the object is rejected with it.

Something similar appears at another boundary of society.

The Hijra or Kinnar comes to moments of birth and marriage with song, dance and blessing. These are moments of continuity: a child entering the world, two people entering a household, one generation opening toward another.

Yet those who bless these moments have often lived at the edges of the social structures being celebrated.

Someone may stand outside conventional forms of family and still be invited to bless the beginning of one.

Traditional associations between Hijra communities and Bahuchara Mata deepen this paradox. The person society places outside its ordinary order may still remain within a sacred order that society itself does not fully understand.

Sexuality reveals another form of the same contradiction.

Desire moves through almost every human society. It shapes relationships, families, poetry, longing, jealousy, morality and countless forms of behaviour. Yet the sex worker has often been placed outside respectability, as though the person who stands close to desire somehow carries the burden of desire itself.

Society does not reject sexuality.

It lives through it.

What it often rejects is the form in which sexuality becomes difficult to hide behind its usual structures.

These lives cannot be reduced to symbols. Their histories, suffering and circumstances remain their own. Exclusion should not be made sacred merely because a spiritual meaning can be found around it. Human injustice remains human injustice.

Still, the pattern is difficult to ignore.

Again and again, we receive the gift while distancing ourselves from the giver. We depend upon a function and then forget the being through whom that function appears.

The tree becomes timber.

The worker becomes the work.

The person becomes the category.

Perhaps this is one of the ways perception loses its depth.

We begin by naming things so that we can understand them. Eventually the name becomes stronger than what has been named.

Pure and impure.

Respectable and disreputable.

Auspicious and inauspicious.

Useful and useless.

Inside and outside.

Once these divisions settle in the mind, we begin to imagine that creation itself follows them.

Yet Shiva rarely remains comfortably within such boundaries.

He sits in cremation grounds. He covers himself with ash. Serpents rest upon his body. Poison remains in his throat. His gaṇas do not resemble the orderly court of a king. He is ascetic and householder, stillness and dance, dissolution and renewal.

Perhaps Shiva does not dissolve boundaries by standing against them.

Perhaps in his presence they simply lose their certainty.

The cremation ground is impure until Shiva sits there.

Ash belongs to death until Shiva covers himself with it.

The serpent is feared until it rests around his neck.

What changes is not necessarily the object.

What changes is the way it is seen.

And perhaps this is where Mahākāla enters the contemplation.

Society can decide who belongs within it, but Time does not preserve such distinctions forever. The body considered pure and the body considered impure return to the same earth. The person welcomed into the centre and the person kept outside eventually pass through the same movement.

What society rejects does not fall outside creation.

Kāla contains both.

If Shakti is the movement of existence itself, then she too cannot be confined to the places where we prefer to recognize her. She cannot belong only to temples, flowers, fertility, beauty and auspicious occasions.

She must also move through hunger, sexuality, bodily waste, labour, decay, birth and death.

Not because all experiences are equal, and not because suffering should be glorified, but because existence does not stop being existence when it becomes uncomfortable to us.

Perhaps this is the Shakti we refuse to see.

She has not withdrawn from these places.

We have withdrawn our willingness to recognize her there.

The same may be true of those whom society has pushed toward its edges. Human beings may refuse someone a place within their order, but that refusal cannot remove them from the larger order of life.

A thought keeps returning to me.

Society may say, “You do not belong among us.”

And perhaps somewhere beyond the boundaries we have drawn, Mahākāla says, “Then you belong with me.”

Not as compensation for injustice. Not as an argument that exclusion is somehow spiritually necessary. It is only a reminder that human acceptance is not the measure of existence.

No person becomes less a part of creation because others refuse to recognize them.

No tree needs our permission to belong to the earth.

No form of life becomes meaningless because we have not discovered its usefulness.

Perhaps Rudra’s plants contain this teaching quietly.

They grow from the earth without asking to become the centre of creation. They sustain lives that may never know anything about them. Their stillness contains movement, and their existence does not depend upon being witnessed.

We are the ones who arrive later and ask what they are for.

Perhaps that question itself reveals how accustomed we have become to standing at the centre.

Creation may not be arranged around what is useful to us.

Perhaps it never was.

And perhaps Shakti becomes visible again when, even for a moment, we stop deciding where she is allowed to exist.