A Southern Music by T.M. Krishna

Author:T.M. Krishna
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: null
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers India
Published: 2017-03-17T04:00:00+00:00

18

The Shrine and the Song

The music and the culture we are dealing with are Indian in origin – and I am writing about these in English. It makes sense, therefore, to look into the etymology of some of the words I will use in this essay. While some words hold identical meanings for all individuals (for example, action words), words signifying emotion, indeed emotion itself, rarely mean the same to everyone. Besides, when we deal with feelings and emotions, words usually fail us. It is not easy to translate ‘that which is felt’ into a communicative form – language.

So it is that every emotion-related or feeling-related word expresses a different idea for each user. But the ones that interest me are not those of feeling or action; they are the indefinable words that betoken the many forms of ‘trust’. Due to this mystical quality and their close relationship with our emotions, these words of trust have and will remain ideationally unique to every individual. To add to the complexity of the situation, every culture too looks upon these words through different lenses. It is in this socio-individual relationship that these words, as well as the images and ideas within them come alive and influence our inner life.

A word that could evoke trust in its most intense form is ‘god’. The origin of this word has been widely debated, but one of the hypotheses is that it comes from the German ‘guth’, and that is about as much as we know. Most dictionaries describe it to mean a superhuman force, an object of worship, the Supreme Being in monotheist faiths, the Creator or even just an idol. Through these different interpretations, we gather that god is a powerful entity, the originator of life, an object of worship as an idol or an idea. This very understanding puts the concept of god beyond the realm of normal life, an object of utter wonder – a sense born out of the feeling that god does not and need not obey the rules of nature, indeed that god controls its very existence. God created this realm, yet is beyond it.

Connected to this idea is a closely related one – divine. This is derived from the Latin ‘divinus’, which is traceable to the ‘divus’, both meaning godlike. We cannot but notice that the Sanskrit ‘div’, meaning to be bright or to shine, is the root from which is derived, among other words, deva (celestial, heavenly). The Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology expresses the meaning of divine as ‘belonging to or proceeding from a god, holy, excellent in the highest degree’. It not only signifies god or godliness, but also qualifies the attributes of god and hence is descriptive of god’s nature. We establish our rules of engagement with that omnipresence through religion.

Derived from the Latin ‘religio’, meaning binding or obligation, ‘religion’ is also closely linked with the Latin ‘lagire’ (the root of ‘ligature’), which again means something that binds. In these descriptions of bond

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