‘The Telling’

The novel centres around Suttee (‘Sati’), an Indian born girl who had lost her lesbian lover Pao (‘Tao’) to a religious terror group. Suttee has grown up seeing how the religion she grew up in, along with other natural religions, was destroyed by a ‘One God, One Truth and One Earth’ religion of Unist Fathers. A global monotheistic theocracy arises. However the religious structure soon falls with the intervention of ancestral aliens federation - Hainish Ekumen (Hainish - Ekumen is part of the larger universe common in the fantasy-scifi of Le Guin). Though Unists do not like Ekumen, the change becomes inevitable. Soon the monolith created by the Unists crumbles and devolves into numerous competing as well as mutually opposing religious terrorist cults - but all rooted in ‘One True God’ theology. Meanwhile democracy returns and Hainish education centres increase.

Suttee is a scholarly product of these institutions in Terra. Now she goes on a mission to another world – Aka – to knowledge-mine their natural religious system and culture. In Aka she discovers a situation that very much resembles the Unist religion eliminating natural religions in her own planet. A singular ideological state is waging a war like inquisition against the natural traditions evolved in the planet. With the knowledge she had gained from her Terra based Hainish education, she tries to comprehend the natural system of Aka and through her eyes the story unfolds.

Through the novel, Ursula Le Quin describes the destruction of natural religions in two planets. Their destruction on Terra (earth) – a thing of the past – surfaces as a parallel and a warning when Suttee comprehends what is happening in Aka. For a Hindu, the novel is both descriptive of her present and a predictive warning about his future.

Problems in Defining Hinduism

One of the basic issues raised again and again starting from colonial Indologists to every modern day Hindu baiter, academic, political or media person, is the inability o define Hinduism. Hence, often they come to the conclusion that Hinduism is an artificial construct. This conclusion is often a starting point for hatred against Hinduism – both psychologically and strategically. At best, their ability to comprehend a non-monotheistic non-belief based system can extend only up to Buddhism. So, in most of the modern day discourses, Buddhism and Chrsitianity/Islam are shown in Western discourses as two major contradictory religions while Hinduism is discounted.

Ursula Le Guin goes to the root of this problem in her novel. When Suttee tries to categorise the Akan system, what she sees is a system that is similar to Buddhism or Taoism.