Monthly Story, July 2022

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Image → Claudio Schwarz

Archetype → Magician

Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Kusum waited patiently for the bus conductor to punch the calculator for her balance; she had already done the mental math. She was used to calculating ahead of everyone in general. The painful hours waiting for the temple committee to figure out that her idea was, in fact, the most efficient… The years lived for her husband to finally comprehend her complex maneuvers to get ahead in life… These had made Kusum grow accustomed to waiting for others to catch up. After the conductor had moved to the next passenger, Kusum opened up her purse and peeked inside out of sheer nerves. Yes, the six-digit cheque was still there, safe.

Money had a strange dimension to it. It freed and weighed you at the same time.

Kusum felt the weight of this money particularly. She had taken it out of temple head monk Gunasāra’s drawer the day his unconscious body was rushed to the hospital. Being the chief donor’s wife, and the temple treasurer, Kusum had borrowed money from the head monk several times. He charged her a minimal interest and she returned the favour by overlooking many discrepancies in the temple accounts. That day too, Kusum had come to ask him for a loan to fund her daughter’s dream to start a hair salon in the city. But, in the calamity of the shaken-up temple rushing Gunasāra to the hospital, Kusum realised that she didn’t have to ask for the money. It was simply there, in Gunasāra's drawer—already stolen, as far as Kusum was concerned.

Throughout the week that followed, Kusum revisited her decision. Each time, she reminded herself how it was for a good reason. After finding her daughter Nimali on the bathroom floor—shaking and crying in hysterics holding chunks of cut-off hair—Kusum found a whole new part of herself awake. It was a part that awoke in every parent, when finding their child kicked in the gut by life, broken, and crownless. Kusum was ready to do anything to help Nimali live her dream—even if it meant finding amounts of money that she couldn’t acquire in the decades spent accounting.

Everything had a good reason. Life always evened out all checks and balances.

As the bus came to a halt, Kusum saw Nimali waiting for her. She asked Kusum a string of questions from what took her so long at the bank, to where they’re heading now. “I got you a place,” Kusum said, while crossing the street at the junction; She thrust her hand out at the careless motorcyclist who almost missed the red light. “A place? For wha...FOR MY SALON?’ Nimali asked, tripping on the sidewalk. Kusum smiled furtively and stopped in front of the crowded city mall. “Where???”, Nimali asked, wide eyes darting around in disbelief. Kusum pointed at the vacant storefront on the city mall’s ground floor. It faced one of the city’s busiest roads. She laughed out loud finding Nimali’s weight swung abruptly around her midriff, as the girl cried uncontrollably. “Come now..,” said Kusum. She tried to tuck what’s left of Nimali’s obliquely cut hair behind an ear, avoiding the stares of passersby. “How did you…?” Nimali asked, looking towards the large space. “Come, we must meet the building manager and put down the lease balance. Did you bring your ID?” asked Kusum, starting to climb up the mall stairs. “But, how?”, Nimali asked, wiping her face. “What are we accountants good for?,” Kusum asked without meeting her daughter’s eyes. “Saving up…?” Nimali asked, half frowning, half smiling.

The hardest part of weaving the bridge between reality and dreams was explaining it.

Kusum didn’t have to answer. Ecstatic, Nimali had flipped around and put her palms against the glass doors, eyes glistening and mouth open. Kusum smiled, seeing her girl crowned again. She basked in it for a moment until that familiar feeling of waiting for the world to catch up started to creep in from the corners. “Come on, let’s lock this lease in,” Kusum said walking inside with Nimali scrambling to keep up behind.

Read the previous story

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The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons (living or deceased), places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.

A story of slavery and freedom

Histories connecting to slavery are among the worst stories from human history. But, we continue to tell them because they hide important lessons that we can’t afford to forget.

In the Cocos Keeling Islands—a circle of islands with many coconut palms, far off Australia's northwest coast—a very discreet form of slavery took shape and survived until recently as 1984. The man who first inhabited the islands, John Clunies-Ross, started populating them through the mid1900s with labourers of Javanese and Malay origins. They became the workforce for a thriving coconut plantation that Clunies-Ross owned. The Clunies-Ross family maintained control of the islands for five generations with sons succeeding the fathers. The Clunies-Ross family had a favourable relationship with the British empire to which Cocos Islands belonged; The administration of Cocos Islands was first handled by Ceylon and later Australia. But, the Clunies-Ross family controlled the education, healthcare, food and most importantly, the currency—the Cocos Rupee. The Clunies-Ross family positioned themselves as the royalty of Cocos Island and used the name ‘Tuan’ which translates to ‘Sir’ in Malay spoken by nearly 70%. Following a method used by many rulers to build trust with a local majority, Clunies-Ross sons imported brides from the Malay aristocracy; they styled themselves Ross I, Ross II, up to Ross V with Malay names like Tuan Pandai, Tuan Tinggi, Tuan John etc.

The currency introduced for Cocos' citizens by the Clunies-Ross family was ‘Cocos Rupee’; it was actually a token that could only be used at the Clunies-Ross family store which controlled the food in the islands. The Cocos Rupee tokens were first made of paper and later from ivorine—a form of plastic that mimics ivory. Only 5000-odd Cocos Rupee tokens were made according to records. These tokens were what ultimately pegged the people of Cocos in a discreet, nevertheless ugly, form of slavery.

Even as the anachronistic notion of monarchy faded with the failure of empires around the world, Cocos Keeling Islands remained under the control of the Clunies-Ross family. In 1974, a UN mission visiting the islands criticised the Australian government for allowing the John Clunies-Ross to continue controlling the currency, education, and health care. For the next date, the Australian government tried to coerce the Clunies-Ross family to hand over the controls, but they resisted. Eventually, in 1978, John Clunies-Ross sold his land to the Commonwealth under threat of compulsory acquisition.

The story of Cocos Islands was not a case of inhuman atrocities that we usually hear in stories relating to slavery; nor of physical or verbal abuse. But, there was a vicious undercurrent of selfishness and control. Power was being distributed through the virtue of birth. Opportunities were controlled. Access was regulated through one family. It was a case of one family imposing the most fundamental conditions of other citizens’ life—a role reserved only for parents and guardians. It was a breach of freedom.

These stories are still relevant today because we see modern forms of slavery in the world continuing this ugly pattern with politically powerful families and self-interested leaders trying to exert unfair control for narrow, egotistic reasons.

Controlling access to basic rights and resources, pushing people into states of dependency, and limiting access to education and self-sustenance are still ways that modern, more subtle forms of slavery continue in the world under the mask of governance.

We discovered a wooden box mounted with a rare Cocos Island Rupee token through an antique dealer in Sri Lanka. It reads ‘Keeling Cocos Islands 1910’. Knowing that Cocos Islands' administrative functions of the British empire were once centred in Ceylon, we can speculate that this rare token ended up here that way.

These tokens are valued by coin collectors for their rarity. But of course, what we find the most intriguing about it, is the story connecting to the question of freedom; the story of how a system of governance should always be in the interest of the public, not one family. We find this token a fascinating piece linking to themes like power, freedom and justice.

#rare #antique #cocosrupee #collectorsitem #treasure #slavery #stories #memories #history #rarecoins #cocosisland #cocoskeelingislands #publicworks #ceylon #srilanka #history #colonialism #modernslavery #box #treasurebox #vintage #politicalhistory #thingswithstories #cocosrupees #rarecoin #coincollector #antiquecollector #collector #cocostoken #treasures

Reading List, July 2022

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Our monthly stories are productions looking to connect people to the magic of stories.

We create supplementary reading lists as a way to give you an insight into the inspirations and thinking behind our monthly stories. These reading lists take you behind the story, revealing the process of its making.

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Rasa → Kāruṇyam (कारुण्यं): Compassion, mercy. Presiding deity: Yama. Colour: grey, Adbhutam (अद्भुतं): Wonder, amazement. Presiding deity: Brahma. Colour: yellow

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Archetype → Magicien

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“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel,” said Maya Angelou. Emotions are the first language. They are our most natural bridge to connect with another. Our understanding of other people is very much connected to our ability to observe, analyze and mirror others’ emotions—a very natural process for us humans who are inherently social creatures. Reaching consensus, communicating needs and sharing ideas, and experiences through empathy is our natural habitat.

Scientists now know that this capacity for empathy requires an exquisite interplay of neural networks enabling us to perceive the emotions of others, resonate with them emotionally and cognitively, to take in their perspectives, and to distinguish it with our own. In the eastern artistic theory of Rasa, compassion (karunā rasa) is an emotional state that often leads to creating empathy. Wrongs that right injustice, worldly sorrows weighing down a young person, longing for life’s dreams are compassion evoking themes that we used in this monthly story to induce empathy towards a morally compromising act. The main character of this story, Kusum, was built using the shadow side of the character archetype magician—the manipulator.

In this reading list, you’ll find stories, books, films, and research that connects to compassion, finding emotional empathy in moments that conflict with the cognitive and the magician archetype from Jungian psychology.

• 1994, I.A. Richards and Indian Theory of Rasa, Gupteshwar Prasad. Sarup & Sons, New Delhi, India. Page 24: This book details the rasa theory with parallels to other theories connecting to the arts and their enjoyment. Gupteshwar notes how being affected by others’ emotions is the primary condition of aesthetic enjoyment. He points to this impersonal identification of emotions as an extension of the ‘karuna rasa’, which is called ‘samvēdhana’ in the original rasa theory, and says it’s the same as what’s knowns as ‘empathy’ in English and ‘einfuhlung’ in German.

• 2016, Mind and creativity: Insights from rasa theory with special focus on sahrdaya (the appreciative critic). Louise Sundararajan, Maharaj K. Raina. The Sage Pub: Rasa theory suggests that there are three aspects or stages to art: the first is the creative process of the artist; the second is the artwork; and the third is the viewer’s response—when the artist’s experience is recreated through empathy. It further details Tādātmya—a state of the reader or spectator who loses for a while his or her personal self-consciousness and identifies him or herself with some character in the story or scene.

• Saradiel is a man who lived in Mawanella, Sri Lanka in the 19th century and was executed for theft and murder. Saradiel’s image is conflicting. Bandit, vigilante, people’s champion, lawbreaker, murderer, hero of the poor….it’s not easy to fit him into one box. Saradiel’s targets were mostly the rich aristocracy and colonial officials; he robbed, killed, and intimidated many. At the same time, he selflessly shared his loot with the poor and fought against injustices that they suffered at the hands of the rich and the powerful. He is sometimes listed among national heroes. But, he is also marked as a dangerous criminal. Despite the sticky image, people still visit his last jail cell, and his tales have been made into many books, films and tele dramas. Saradiel certainly occupies that difficult space between hero and outlaw. In Saradiel’s stories, we see how a criminal by law is capable of evoking empathy even in usually law-abiding people.

• When Carl Jung first identified the ‘Magician’ archetype, he called it the Philemon. In his Liber Secundus we are introduced to Philemon, the ‘magician’. On the nature of magic Jung derived from Philemon he has written, “there is nothing to understand…Magic happens to be everything that eludes comprehension.” The difficulty with magic is precisely the difficulty of existing without reason. The foundation responsible for bringing Carl Jung’s works to the world is called the Philemon Foundation after this archetype that deeply influenced Jung.

• The antihero is a character type that blurs the line between good and evil, and achieves a justified cause in their own way, often questioning morality. They are morally ambiguous and lack conventional heroic attributes. Unlike the ‘hero’—who is an idealized, flawless personality—the ‘anti-hero’ is more human and relatable to the average person, evoking their compassion and empathy.

The antihero

The Rolling Stones - Sympathy For The Devil

Patrick Bateman

The Narrator (Fight Club)

Lestat de Lioncourt (The Vampire Chronicles)

Man with no name (The Dollars trilogy)

Nancy Botwin (Weeds)

• 2009, Royal, Warrior, Magician, Lover—Archetypal reflectivity and the construction of professional knowledge. Darrell Dobson, Teacher Education Quarterly (Pages 154-157): Dobson identifies the magician archetype as one that actively seeks to put that content and methodological knowledge in service to the fullest possible individual and social development every day, and recognizes that such a practice derives from and will provide encounters with the numinous, whether in mathematics, science or art. He identifies the active shadow magician is the manipulator—who has either not mastered his technologies or himself, or both.

• 2012, “Rasa Yatra” — Using film to teach cross-cultural empathy, Martin Haigh, Planet, 26:1, 51-58: Empathy is a key skill for intercultural understanding. This paper evaluates the results of a pilot study for an exercise designed to introduce undergraduate geographers to the problems of interpreting emotional messages from an unfamiliar culture and worldview. Learners are set the task of interpreting the emotional content of this film and of trying to share the feelings of another.

>> Read the previous reading list