Vishnu’s Tenth and Last Reincarnation — Decoding Avatar
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The Avatars of Vishnu
The ancient Hindu scriptures have forever reiterated that whenever the world would be on the brink of disaster and mankind faces extinction, whenever the vessel of sin is about to spill over to create death and destruction, the divine Lord Vishnu would considerate his duty to manifest himself in mortal, palpable form to save mankind from the impeding doomsday. That was the only way the human civilization would find continuance and reach salvation.
This is so eloquently quoted in the verses of the Bhagvad Gita, the sacrosanct and most definitive Hindu religious text.
YADA YADA HI DHARMASYA GLANIRBHAVATI BHARATA |
ABHYUTTHANAMADHARMASYA TATHATMANAM SRAJAMYAHAM ||
- Bhagvat Gita (Chapter IV - 7)
Loosely translated it means thus: Whenever and wherever there is decline of dharma (righteousness) and ascendance of adharma (unrighteousness), at that time I manifest Myself in visible form. For the protection of the righteous and destruction of the wicked, and for the sake of establishing dharma again, I incarnate Myself on earth ages after ages.
According to the Puranas, since time immemorial till the end of human civilization this act of reincarnation, of manifestation shall occur only ten times. Of which, through mythology and history we have learnt nine such appearances have already been made. They include,
1. Matsya, the fish, appeared in the Satya Yuga.
2. Kurma, the tortoise, appeared in the Satya Yuga.
3. Varaha, the boar, appeared in the Satya Yuga.
4. Narasimha, the half man/half lion appeared in the Satya Yuga.
5. Vamana, the dwarf, appeared in the Treta Yuga.
6. Parashurama, Rama with the axe, appeared in the Treta Yuga.
7. Rama, Ramachandra, the prince and king of Ayodhya, appeared in the Treta Yuga.
8. Krishna (meaning “dark coloured” or “all attractive”).
- Gautama Buddha (meaning “the enlightened one”) appeared in the Kali Yuga (specifically asSiddhartha Gautama).
In “ghor Kalyug” the tenth and final avatar Kalki (“Eternity”, or “time”, or “The Destroyer of foulness”) is expected to appear at the end of the era.
That brings us back to our basic premise. Despite the fear of being lynched by Hindu Fundamentalists, I propose that Cameron is alluding to that tenth avatar of Vishnu becoming manifest as the US marine (the character played by Sam Paddington) in Pandora’s universe. The deliberate choice of the blue skin instantly, magically and metaphorically relates our protagonist to two previous avatar’s namely Rama and Krishna. The use of the word Avatar hence could never be an accident.
As I had mentioned in one of my earlier blogs that cinema is a conglomeration of myths and archetypes. With his brave new Epic, Cameron reaches the dizzying heights of dignity of the Epic poets from Homer to Valmiki to Vyasa for having created a truly post-structuralist, post -modern work of epic proportions both in terms of story telling and redefining how the human eye can perceive a constructed image in motion.
This Avatar fits into the shoes of his predecessors with perfect poise by taking the side of those who are morally correct and are being threatened of being dispossessed of a land that truly belongs to them. With epic sweep Cameron alludes to cross cultural history and mythology with such fecundity. In the larger perspective the Avatar is meant to be the savior, the messiah of his own race and people. The beauty of the script lies in how dexterously Cameron makes the outsider embrace the faith of the oppressed (a la Moses for Jews) and stand up for their rights. Krishna belonging to the Jadu tribe did the same thing for the Kshatriya race of Pandavas. So did Ram for the monkey kingdom( the tail wagging Navi’s are an allusion to that). Through majestic master strokes on his canvas, Cameron saunters like the mythical magician constantly alluding to the Advait and Mayavad school of Hindu philosophy, smattering it with the native wisdom of African tribes, the dispossessed Native Americans, the oppressed Tibetans , the uprooted Maoris and so on and on. The subaltern people of all centuries seem to have found a voice in what is most ironically a product nurtured in the environs of the imperialistic American hegemony (read Studio system of Hollywood). The innate connect to nature through worship of the spirit, the celebration of Mother Nature being the ruling deity is all oriental perspectives. The final touch comes with the transmigration of the souls when the soul of the protagonists human avatar is transmigrated to his Navi avatar. It is perhaps the ultimate triumph of seeing the film from the Hindu perspective.
Apart from the deeply spiritual and religious saga (though this film purports to be guised in the form of wholesome entertainment and no apologies offered for it), it is in many significant ways a scathing indictment of America’s economic and political global policies of colonizing the world. The rare mineral found in Pandora is the main cause for conflict in this film. The allusion to the Gulf wars and invasion of Iraq for oil is simply too strong to overlook. The sheer avarice of the multinational corporations is indicted in no uncertain terms. All this through a richly layered sub- text.
By creating an alternate universe, Cameron has virtually opened up the Pandora’s box from which all venom is spewed out to eventually leave the jar become a crucible of hope that it was originally meant to be.
After this cinema will be divided into two eras — Before Avatar/After Avatar.
I feel truly blessed to have lived long enough to witness this reincarnation unfold before my eyes.
Tags: avatar, Movie Review
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Abhay Deol
Dibakar Banerjee
Hansal Mehta
Khalid Mohamed
Kundan Shah
Rahul Dholakia
Anish Kuruvilla
Jaideep Varma
Manish Gupta
Navdeep Singh
Bhavani Iyer
D. Santosh
Onir
Ashvin Kumar
Ramu Ramanathan
Sudhir Mishra
Pankaj Advani
Revathy
Saurabh Shukla
Sachin Kundalkar
Shilpa Shukla
Sujoy Ghosh
Suparn Verma
Santosh Sivan
Shashank Ghosh
Shivajee
Pavan Kaul
Partho Sen-Gupta
Prroshant Naryannan
Sam Langoria
Satish Kasetty
Nice post Sudipto…. I had a similar hunch when I saw the trailer for the first time, but refrained from commenting as I still havent been able to get tickets…. and it is true, the world has opened to wider concepts… even if JC did not make a movie on vishnu’s avatar, pretty sure he would ve heard about it and keep is as a sublime base…
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Whoa…nice thoughts and well written post but even Mr. Cameroon has not taken his film this seriously. Anyways I have this sneaking suspicion that he watches a lot of cliche ridden Indian movies before deciding on the story for his movies
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yes true, Fribzi Video Library, Hyderabad supplies him with all the VCDs and DVDs.
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Long before the release of this movie I had read somewhere that the movie is heavily influenced by the Hindu Mythology.
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and its highly possible.. with the rising number of blogs and discussions, people are finding relevant ones out of the tons of crap… aligning their ideas, and there is a rise in seeing that these idelogies fit into each other… (the unnecessary sound bytes are thankfully and convieniently cut away cuz somebody is not always shouting on ur head) ….
there is a conscious rise in mixing theories and models with what has been called out in religious sayings, and making analogies…. which is being shown up/spoken about … either to make a point or cuz it just lingered on their minds …
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May not be the only case of making points and supporting the arguments. These also show how the old sayings and things are still relevant today. It also tries to unify science and religion into one.
Coming to the Avatar, looking at the first preview of the blue people with tails and they being referred as monkeys were too much a coincidence to the Ramayan where Raam is shown as blue in pictures, took the help of the monkeys with tails in the war.
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totally agree… I felt the same thing when I saw the trailer for the first time… it looked like it was taking a depiction out of the ramayana to create a bigger story …. thankfully cameroon is based out of US… making smthing even remotely similar might have made him face troubles in India…
and it is true.. science and religion for the core basis has been coming out to be the 2 sides of the same coin… of course over the ages there are a lot of people made crap that came over religion, but science is ultimately more or less proving disproving the religious sayings… guess eons back when there was no official science board across the globe, religionous studies would ve been science of those days… (only the proven facts… of course like the game of chinese whispers a lot might ve gotten misinterpreted in the name of blind belief and passing it down to generations ..)
but yes Avatar reminded me of Ramayan pretty immediately as soon as I saw the first set of Blue peoeple with bows and arrows…
Interstingly while still on the topic of merging the ideals, there was this interesting blog that I read about “Dasavatar”by Kamal Hassan (my quest to understand what might have been going on in KH’s head while making the movie)… not that the blog was all great, but it made some relevant points of what might have been the idea while making the movie … it had some reference to the chaos theory and butterfly effect and then tried to connect dots in the movie… pretty interesting, let me see if I can find that blog again…
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I watched Dasavatar just a few days ago and after reading your comment I googled dasavatar with buttefly effect and chaos theory. Some interesing things i found.
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There’s a joke going on in twitter. The Pandora planet guys have a piece of real estate on Planet Earth. Its called Na’vi Mumbai
…
By the way, the earthlings had created their lab to be able to live easy without masks. However, they had to use oxygen masks to live in the Pandora atmosphere. At the very end of the movie, they are being thrown out of Pandora planet, none of them however are shown wearing any masks. Is it a glitch or did I miss something?
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Moses for Jews, Krishna for Kshatriyas and not very recently, Tom Cruise for Japanese in The Last Samurai
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Don’t forget Kevin Costner and Colin Farrell for Native Americans in Dances With Wolves and The New World, respectively!
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Most of us had the same thoughts while watching the movie it seems.. Good work
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The Wikipedia post on Kalki has a modern interpretation which reads as follows :
Shree Veera Brahmendra Maha Swami, writing about 1,000 years ago in “Divya Maha Kala Jnana” (literally: “Divine Knowledge of the Time”) claims that Kalki would arrive when the Moon, Sun, Venus and Jupiter have entered the same sign; such occurrences are not rare and the next is expected in the year 2012 or afterwards.
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you have a point..Hollywood is indeed looking out for inspiration from all the sources possible especially our shastras and puranas..and it is a fact..i had alluded to it in my recent post that somehow got declined by PFC..There i had mentioned about all the ten avatars of Vishnu as u have done..
What u say oz!
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Really good post.
Haven’t watched the movie yet.
When I was reading a criticism post on the movie (by UH), i felt the same about the tailed beings that he mentioned there.
Great to see you too commenting on the same…
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great going sudipto….loved the post…
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Interesting post(from a atheist). God in a negative avatar(for humans – adharma is another concept altogether) has always been the talk, started from the time Upanishads were written to the ‘Global Warming’ – Green Peace days on earth.
Kalki is corely Indian and human in form, but the new age Kalki should be a World Figure…should go with the slogan ‘Time To Destroy!!!’…..
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“Cameron reaches the dizzying heights of dignity of the Epic poets from Homer to Valmiki to Vyasa for having created a truly post-structuralist, post -modern work of epic proportions both in terms of story telling and redefining how the human eye can perceive a constructed image in motion.”
Epic story telling??
are u sure u r talking about Avatar. As great as the movie was it was not even a good piece of story telling. Which is ok, because it was not meant to be.
I just wish Peter Jackson would have made LOTR in 3D. Now that would have been a true epic, because that guy knew how to teell a story.
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I wished him to be doing Hobbit though Gulliremo Del Toro is not far away and I certainly trust him.
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It wasn’t Peter Jackson that made LOTR such a memorable movie, but the plot and the characters of Tolkien’s epic. Cameron would have made LOTR (both in 3D & 2d)even better than it already was..but I’m not sure Peter Jackson would have made Avatar any better with this script.
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But you fail to understand that LOTR was a book that people didnt gave any chance of being adapted successfully on the screen. If you have read the book you would understand how hard was to make a coherent understandable movie out of it. It was an epic achievement and that why the whole LOTR series is revered so much. What Peter Jackson did was to make technology slave to his storytelling.
As awesome as JC’s movie is the thing on display is the technology, so while it may be very very good it would never be great like Star Wars or LOTR.
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I dont think Cameron would have made more memorable LOTR series. Peter Jackson’s style is truly suited for the epic tales. He made a better King Kong movie. Cameron is a sci-fi director. PJ is good at fantasy.
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hahahaha what crap,,,,,,is this a joke. Vishnus tenth avatar is ex marine….i cant stop laughing!!! Youll find dozens of such short stories in sci-fi , i dont think you need to knw hindu mythology to come up with such a story….btw it borrows more from GAIA philosophy of earth being a conscious thing.hope the author doesnt quote another hindu mythology saying gaia sprung frm shivas doping sessions with plants.
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Author has written what he felt. May be Cameron didn’t mean it that way but this is the beauty of art form that people relate it to different ways.
Try to read literary criticisms etc. and you’ll find how they include tons of philosophies, biblical references, connotations etc. even if author didn’t mean it. You may find it ludicrous but that is how it goes.
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I agree that author has interpreted the movie in his own way. But calling the story telling to be epic is stretching it, by a lot. Everyone is surely entitled to his opinion but surely this biased??
Have read many reviews of Avatar, on rottentomatoe and elsewhere and surely everyone agreed that story telling and script were basic. Which as I said is ok, because the purpose of the movie was something else.
What I feel is that this movie will go the way of Titanic( universally acclaimed when released, but rather forgotten 10 yr hence) rather than Terminator ( which has succeeded in becoming a classic).
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In a way yes, it is like “Hey you seen Avatar, you must watch it, if not your missing something”. And like Titanic, you don’t really have to work hard to understand the story.
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Honestly did not find any philosophical layers in Avatar. Matrix had it, Minority Report had it, 2001 had it. Avatar to me was more of an escapist fantasy, splendid visuals, great graphics, but nothing too cerebral. Not that i have an issue with it.
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Yup. Its not so philosophical rather the things and the messages it depicts are cliched and borrowed ones and only act as a veneer. This movie minus its visuals is just another standard Hollywood (summer) blockbuster.
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BTW, Minority Report just reminded me about the missing post of noughties 2002.
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Am keeping off list related posts for some time, too tedious to write, and not really worth the effort
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u can find Hindu Concept is behind Star Wars…Avatar hollywood used the concept of tree worship which can see in hindu temples in kerala and tamil nadu…and vaishnava tilak used for avatar…vishnu – Blue colour which is krishna & ram colour we can read it from puranas…
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hahahahahaa are u fucking kidding me? Face it – Avatar had a weak script…like in all James Cameron movies … but they all are awesome films because of the way they are executed …Cameron makes such striking visuals it makes up for the pedestrian dialogues and wafer thin stories …
There is no point dissecting Avatar so much … there is absolutely no allusion to Jake Sully being an incarnation of Vishnu. Yes, Cameron did use the word ‘Avatar’ as a hint towards desi mythology, and Lord Krishna, but that’s about it. It was only a hint…in fact Avatar is based on the Gaia theory of ‘living earth’. Anyone could make this story – hero goes to war, understands the other team is way better, and joins them to overthrow his original army. You don’t need to be Hindu myth literate to pen down such a story, or understand it.
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The entire concept of AVATAR of the Hindus is bogus, as good as the sci-fi flick created by Cameron. It was deliberated by some mad Brahmins who feared the destruction of his “Shastras”. By creating the subsets of Hinduism, Brahminism continued to flourish.
How on earth is Siddharta Gautama is an Avatar of Vishnu? Every consciousness will eventually reach it’s peak and be swept away by the torrents of existence. By the way, Prince Siddharta was a Shaivite and his enlightenment was based on Shiva’s Tantra which later renamed as “Anapanasati Yoga”
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i saw avataar and thought it sucked big time. cant figure out why everyone in bollywood is raving about it. probably to get their next film funded by the hollywood studio behind it as desi corporates have packed up their bags and vamoosed!!!! ok, so it looked terrific, but 30 mins into the film even that got boring. everything about the film was a cliche. this film has been done before as the emerald forest. its just that JC makes the whole thing looks so damn good, the rest of it gets overlooked. the screenplay was bad…zero surprises! the acting pathetic…everyone was a caricature. it was boring. Period.
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interesting perspective and pov. hindu mythology has enough logics and supporting data to justify almost any theory/hypothesis in the world. avatar is just a little easier to can that ways. but interesting analogy.
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Really far-fetched analogies, shallow knowledge of adwaitwaad, and there is no ‘mayawaad’ (except, perhaps, in BSP), and all in all, a penny for the post, where conclusions preceded arguments and all too devoid of logic.
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This is interesting. Although I saw Avatar as a fairly Hindu mythological tale, I didn’t think of Sam Paddington as the tenth Avatar of Vishnu. It is an interesting take and I think I would even buy it. I dont know what Cameron had in mind when he created Avatar but it’s possible that he had a similar chain of thought. I quite like this take.. Especially because I am currently reading a book on the life of Krishna.
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dear arati,
another interesting aspect of the way he shot the movie was the portrayal of the navis who resemble a wide class of tribals especially the apatanis of arunachal pradesh (minus the tails of course). having served as an army officer in the remote regions of north east arunachal i can vouch for the similarities in the ethnic culture of apatani tribals of arunachal and the navis. not surprising though as arunachal has been an anthropologist’s delight(mainly westerners) for quite some time. the way navi women dressed with holes in their ears is a ditto!!
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Sudipto and others,
Please follow this link and then wax eloquent in various shades of divine blue! This web-page talks about the ‘original source’ of James Cameron’s inspiration.
http://www.worstpreviews.com/headline.php?id=15564
Taensh Gorur Joy Hok ! :wacko:
QED. Enough Said. :banginghead:
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Blueness is the color of Vishnu, the symbolic expression of the protector aspect of Nature (Consciousness) in Vedic Spiritual tradition. The whole creation of Universe bangs out from Vishnu’s cosmic slumber as shown as
Jake’s eyes moving under the lids, like a dreamer in REM sleep …….
Though the name and the theme of the movie is from the Vedic Spiritual tradition, the director protects the sentiments of other religions.
more in
http://matrix-avatar.blogspot.com/
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Interesting and Intelligent article. It feels wonderful to see Atheists from the Indian subcontinent because it proves to the world (and to the Abrahamic religions) that it is OK to be an Atheist and you are not going to go to “hell” and Hindus around you really don’t force you to believe in their god/gods. But I wish you wouldn’t use the phrase “Hindu Fundamentalists” in many contexts even when it is not necessary. There is a a world of difference between the so called “Hindu Fundamentalists” and “Christian Fundamentalists” or “Muslim Fundamentalists”. While the later ones thrive on converting the whole world to their respective religions, “Hindu Fundamentalists” live to protect it. I am not backing them up or anything but it is frustrating that most people think all kind of “fundamentalists” are the same. So if there are no religious conversions (by the two religions that invaded India for centuries) with the help of money, fear, manipulation and wars there wouldn’t be any work for “Hindu Fundamentalists”. Hence Hindus don’t have a history of Crusades or Holy Wars. And one of the Hinduism’s schools of thought is Atheism. I am sure you have better knowledge than me in this area but at least when you throw the phrase “Hindu Fundamentalists” around, explain how they are fundamentally different than other fundamentalists. “Hindu Fundamentalists” and “Jewish Fundamentalists” are significantly different than other fundamentalists. Maybe it is time to coin a new phrase for them.
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