Dear Editor,
Please permit me to share a bit of information on the festival of Maha Shivratri (great night of Lord Shiva) which was celebrated on Sunday, February 15th by Hindus across the globe. In Guyana, President Dr Mohamed Irfaan Ali joined Hindus in the celebration at the Cove and John Ashram, an organization which under the name British Guiana Sevashram Sangha, and the secondary school Hindu College were founded in the mid 1950s by Swami Purnanandaji, a Hindu monk from India.
Swami Purnanandaji was a disciple of Acharya Srimat Swami Pranavanandaji Maharaj, founder of the Bharat Sevashram Sangha, “a spiritual brotherhood of Hindu monks and volunteer workers founded in 1917”, committed to providing food and social and medical services to the needy; and promoting education and the Hindu culture. In the early 1950s Swami Purnanandaji came to the Caribbean to help in promoting education and Hinduism. He founded ashrams in Trinidad and Guyana, then British Guiana, and remained in Guyana for several years before departing to establish a branch of the Sangha in the UK.
Prior to the arrival of Swami Purnanandaji, Maha Shivratri was not celebrated or, at least not widely, in Guyana. Swami Purnanandaji and the Cove and John Ashram gave prominence to this festival which now ranks in importance and popularity alongside Ramnavami (birth of Lord Rama) and Janmashtami (birth of Lord Krishna). This is not surprising as Lord Shiva is the key deity that is venerated at the Ashram in the daily Aarti ceremony (waving of lamp fuelled by ghee or camphor before the deity). I recall in 1962 when I was a student at the Hindu College and lived in the dormitory of the Ashram, Lord Shiva was the only deity whose picture was on the altar next to the picture of Acharya Srimat Pranavanandaji Maharaj in the Ashram’s mandir (Hindu temple). Over the years the Hindu College has made great contribution to primary and secondary education and the Ashram has played a major role in promoting Hinduism in the country. It is fitting that President Ali chose to celebrate Maha Shivratri at the Cove and John Ashram.
The significance of Maha Shivratri is reflected in this statement from an internet post: “According to various Hindu Scriptures, Maha Shivratri is the night when Lord Shiva performed the Tandava Nritya, the primordial creation, preservation, and destruction dance. It is also believed to be the night when Shiva and Parvati married”.
In my view, of the three major world religions, Christianity, Islam and Hinduism, Hinduism has the greatest degree of compatibility with science. In fact world-renowned scientists such as Albert Einstein, famous for developing the theory of relativity, and Robert Oppenheimer, “father of the atomic bomb” had a keen interest in Hinduism. At long last, Hinduism and ancient India’s contribution to astronomy, mathematics, medicine, science and technology are now gradually being recognized worldwide. William Dalrymple’s latest book “The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World” and his YouTube lectures are recent additions to the increasing body of knowledge in this regard.
In the remainder of this piece I wish to focus on interpretation of the Tandava, Shiva’s cosmic dance. The late renowned American astronomer and planetary scientist Carl Sagan stated “The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths. It is the only religion in which the time scales (cycles of creation and destruction span billions of years) correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology”.
More specifically, Fritjof Capra, an Austrian physicist and writer, is famous for his book The Tao of Physics (1975), in which he explores the parallels between modern physics and Eastern philosophies, noting “In Hinduism, Shiva the Cosmic Dancer, is perhaps the most perfect personification of the dynamic universe”. He has written “Hundreds of years ago, Indian artists created visual images of dancing Shivas in a beautiful series of bronzes. In our time, physicists have used the most advanced technology to portray the patterns of the cosmic dance. The metaphor of the cosmic dance thus unifies ancient mythology, religious art and modern physics.” More recently he has stated “…For the modern physicists, then, Shiva’s dance is the dance of subatomic matter.”
In June 2004, CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research located in Geneva Switzerland unveiled an unusual new landmark, a 2m tall statue of the Hindu deity Lord Shiva in the cosmic dance pose. At CERN, scientists and engineers, using the world’s largest and most complex scientific instruments to study the basic constituents of matter – the fundamental particles, are probing the fundamental structure of the universe. In July 2012 researchers at CERN discovered the Higgs boson particle, often referred to as the “God particle”. The Shiva statue was a gift from India to celebrate its association with CERN, which started in the 1960’s and remains strong today. It is reported “This deity was chosen by the Indian government because of a metaphor that was drawn between the cosmic dance of the Nataraj (Shiva) and the modern study of the ‘cosmic dance’ of subatomic particles”. A note on the CERN’ website (home.cern) states “In the Hindu religion, Lord Shiva practiced Nataraj dance which symbolises Shakti, or life force. India is one of CERN’s associate member states….The Shiva statue is only one of the many statues and art pieces at CERN”.