pradheep
6th April 2007, 03:57 AM
Dutton's choice of names, insofar as he had decided the Hindu Gods furnished the Canyon with some critical esthetic meaning, might well appear to be very reasonable. Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma constitute what is called the Hindu trinity: as Brahma is the Creator and Shiva the Destroyer, so Vishnu holds the fort in the middle as the Preserver. Of Vishnu's ten incarnations, Rama and Krishna are the two most well-known ones, and the story of Rama, as embodied in the epic Ramayana, is the most widely known story among Indians. It is Rama's victory over Ravana, the demon king of (Sri) Lanka, that provides the occasion for the grand celebration of Diwali, the so-called Festival of Lights that encapsulates and distills Hindu mythology. Indeed, the story of the Ramayana travelled far beyond India's frontiers, and ancient traditions of the performance of the Ramayana are still found in Thailand and Indonesia, as well as in Indian diasporic communities in such places as Trinidad, Guyana, and Fiji. Finally, Manu is held by Hindus to be the ancient law-giver, and of the various shastras or law-books, none was as widely influential or prescriptive as the Laws of the Manu.
Had Dutton assigned the names of the great Vedic gods, such as Indra or Agni, or the names of deities -- Ganesh, Kali, Durga -- more popular in vernacular traditions to the peaks and buttes of the Grand Canyon, he might well elicited comments of utter bewilderment. Dutton's own account of the Canyon furnishes some clues as to how he was thinking. From Point Sublime, where Dutton spent many hours (thus "Point Sublime"), one could detect a long and rather wide promontory that separates the Shinumo Ampitheater from what Dutton called the "Hindoo Amphitheater". He does not say why he called it the "Hindoo Amphitheater", but his remarks on Vishnu's Temple are rather more revealing. Noting the presence of a butte more than 5,000 feet high, "so admirably designed and so exquisitely designed that the sight of it must call forth an expression of wonder and delight from the most apathetic beholder", Dutton found this "finest butte of the chasm" to have "a surprising resemblance to an Oriental pagoda": "We named it Vishnu's Temple." In this species of reasoning, a Vaishnavite temple is no doubt an instance of "an Oriental pagoda", to be amalgamated easily into a generic form of Oriental temple architecture, and until well into the twentieth century, Americans routinely described Hindu temples as 'pagodas': one need not snivel at this kind of Orientalist ignorance. Dutton's remarks on Shiva's Temple are yet more profuse and pointed: describing it as a "gigantic mass", Dutton thought Shiva's Temple to be the "grandest of all the buttes, and the most majestic in aspect, though not the most ornate." But Shiva's face did not present the most benign aspect: the summit looked down 6,000 feet "into the dark depths of the inner abyss" over a succession of impossibly difficult ledges. The butte stands, Dutton wrote, "in the midst of a great throng of cloister-like buttes, with the same noble profiles and strong lineaments as those immediately before us, with a plexus of awful chasms between them. In such a stupendous scene of wreck it seemed as if the fabled 'Destroyer' might find an abode not wholly uncongenial."
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Diaspora/hindus_wildwest.html
Had Dutton assigned the names of the great Vedic gods, such as Indra or Agni, or the names of deities -- Ganesh, Kali, Durga -- more popular in vernacular traditions to the peaks and buttes of the Grand Canyon, he might well elicited comments of utter bewilderment. Dutton's own account of the Canyon furnishes some clues as to how he was thinking. From Point Sublime, where Dutton spent many hours (thus "Point Sublime"), one could detect a long and rather wide promontory that separates the Shinumo Ampitheater from what Dutton called the "Hindoo Amphitheater". He does not say why he called it the "Hindoo Amphitheater", but his remarks on Vishnu's Temple are rather more revealing. Noting the presence of a butte more than 5,000 feet high, "so admirably designed and so exquisitely designed that the sight of it must call forth an expression of wonder and delight from the most apathetic beholder", Dutton found this "finest butte of the chasm" to have "a surprising resemblance to an Oriental pagoda": "We named it Vishnu's Temple." In this species of reasoning, a Vaishnavite temple is no doubt an instance of "an Oriental pagoda", to be amalgamated easily into a generic form of Oriental temple architecture, and until well into the twentieth century, Americans routinely described Hindu temples as 'pagodas': one need not snivel at this kind of Orientalist ignorance. Dutton's remarks on Shiva's Temple are yet more profuse and pointed: describing it as a "gigantic mass", Dutton thought Shiva's Temple to be the "grandest of all the buttes, and the most majestic in aspect, though not the most ornate." But Shiva's face did not present the most benign aspect: the summit looked down 6,000 feet "into the dark depths of the inner abyss" over a succession of impossibly difficult ledges. The butte stands, Dutton wrote, "in the midst of a great throng of cloister-like buttes, with the same noble profiles and strong lineaments as those immediately before us, with a plexus of awful chasms between them. In such a stupendous scene of wreck it seemed as if the fabled 'Destroyer' might find an abode not wholly uncongenial."
http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/southasia/Diaspora/hindus_wildwest.html