An Unholy Mess

Back to blogging after a yawning gap of 6 months...

Today I was surfing through some episodes of KBC to rekindle my fond childhood memories of Amitabh's inimitable anchoring style and in the process, earn a wee bit of GK! And one question just confounded me and motivated me to write a blog entry.

According to Brahmandapurana, who was the father of Goddess Saraswati??

Narada, Brahma, Shiva or Krishna

The contestant was equally flummoxed then. He easily ruled out Krishna and Narada, but the rest of the options sounded equiprobable to him. Implementing the 50:50, he was left with Narada and Brahma. He chose Brahma which eventually proved to be correct.

Now it was a puzzling scenario for me. I remember my early childhood days when my mother enthusiastically taught me the relations between the members of the Hindu Divine Family. All that was told to me then was that Saraswati was the wife of Lord Brahma!

Quickly I sought the Internet for a clarification. The results I got were dumbfounding. 

"Brahma is one of the three main gods-Trimurti-of the Hindu pantheon. He is the creator of the universe, Saraswati, who became the wife of her own father, was the daughter of Brahma. There are two stories about her genesis in the "Saraswati Purana". One is that Brahma created his beautiful daughter Saraswati direct from his "vital strength" or seminal fluid. The other is that Brahma used to collect his semen in a pot whenever he masturbated fixing his carnal eyes on the celestial beauty Urvasi. Brahma's semen in the pot gave birth to Saraswati. Thus, Saraswati had no mother. 

This daughter or grand-daughter of Brahma is the Hindu goddess of learning. When Brahma saw the beauty of Saraswati he became amorous. To escape from her father's passionate approach Saraswati ran to the lands in all four directions, but she could not escape from her father. She succumbed to Brahma's wish. Brahma and his daughter Saraswati lived as husband and wife indulging in incest for 100 years. They had a son Swayambhumaru. Swayambhumaru made love with his sister Satarpa. Through the incest of Brahma's son and daughter Brahma got two grandsons and two grand-daughters."

Well... This piece could be quite galling for many of you "pure" Hindus as well I believe. While it is quite another issue if these mythological Gods and Goddesses existed at all, even to hear amorous stories involving Divine beings is certainly ridiculous. After all, who else but Gods can serve as moral teachers to the common people? From the times of Stone Age, the feeling of a God has kept people within invisible moral confines. 

The glorious teachings of Hinduism are undoubtedly unparalleled by any other religion. The divinity of such a religion should not be lost upon the up and coming generations. If stories such as this are propagted, the better and higher truths will never dawn upon the fresher minds - instead, it will simply amount to making a Holy Religion the butt of fools' ridicule.

PS: Why do quizzers even ask such controversial questions? What purposes do they solve, other than inciting irritated people to write a blog on them?