Stuck in the Middle: Namaha Offers a Gorgeous, Mysterious Vision of Hindu Mythology
By Micah Bhachech
Half of my family are Indian Hindus. Hindu faith, myth, and practice are part of my heritage. They are indispensable parts of my personal history and identity, but I wasn’t really allowed to find my place in that history in the white- and Christian-supremacist culture I grew up in. So I’m thrilled —blessed even— to have stumbled upon Abishek Singh’s Namaha: Stories from the Land of Gods and Goddesses, a stunningly illustrated exploration of several beautiful and mysterious moments from Hindu myth.
Namaha, for lots of reasons, speaks beautifully to those of us —maybe this is all of us— who find ourselves in between. Like many of us, and in more ways than one, I was raised in a world split in two. My cultural and racial identity was dual, but that wasn’t the only split. My fundamentalist upbringing taught me to think of the world as profoundly divided between sacred and profane, Good and Evil, us and them. And my belonging on the “right” side of that equation was always tangential at best. Even as I have worked to reclaim faith, I struggle to release this impulse to condemn the Hindu (and brown) parts of my identity.
One of the most long-lasting religious images in my memory is a mental picture I tried desperately not to think about. When I was a little kid, I spent some sleepless nights trying not to imagine my dadaji (grandfather), a lifelong Hindu, weeping in hell.
I’m half white, light-skinned, raised Christian, and straight-passing. At the time, that all meant that I, personally, was going to be okay. I was saved, but my people —half of them anyway— were damned. And so, half of me was something that didn’t belong, something to run from.
But it is time to find a place for those parts that I was told to reject. And for me, Namaha has been a beautiful tool to explore how faith can belong in my life again. Faith that is mine. Faith that unites the parts inside me instead of separates them.
Namaha is part art book, part poetry collection, and part myth retelling. The word “namaha” comes from a prayer of adoration for the god Shiva: Om Namaha Shivayah. You might recognize it as the final words from a nameless extra in Temple of Doom (the most racist of the Indiana Joneses) as he’s being lowered into lava. Or, if you’re like me, maybe you know the prayer from a corny religious fridge magnet. The way Singh explains it in the book’s first piece, “om” is the sound of the beginning of the universe. “Shivaya” is the end (Shiva is often referred to as “The Destroyer”).
“Namaha” then is everything in between, is life. It’s not a very literal translation —the prayer means something like “hail Shiva.” But that’s how Singh constructs Namaha; he is riffing on ancient texts, prayers, and myths, interpreting, making meaning without insisting on a dogma.
And it makes sense for this book to be named after the middle of a prayer. The structure of its written pieces is not to depict the full cosmic scale of the mythological stories it explores. Instead, it zooms into the middle of them, finds the conversation or moment that Singh is most interested in exploring, and depicts that single moment. These pieces are often discursive.
My favorite piece, “The Knower of Solitude” has Bhagiratha who brought the Ganges to earth asking a god about the nature of solitude. And he doesn’t get a solid answer. That’s the nature of a lot of these pieces —they are inconclusive and mysterious the way a good myth ought to be. Like Singh writes in the afterword, “There’s a wealth of subtle and symbolic systems functioning inside these stories, which are only revealed when we take a closer look.”
These stories, like me, like all of us, are stuck in the middle. We are all absolutely no less beautiful for that. And the way that Singh tells these stories, by emphasizing dialogue and mystery, makes his interpretation feel less like a sermon and more like an invitation. These stories don’t push us to memorize an interpretation or to cling to dogma. They open up space for us to make meaning. It’s a wonderful way to step away from a worldview based on division and rejection and to move towards a place of belonging somewhere in the middle.
But as enchanting as these stories can be, the thing that keeps me buried in this book, stroking the pages reverentially, are the illustrations. Singh is a world-renowned artist. You can see some of his pieces on his website. His care, precision, and passion for this project show in every picture on every page. Namaha has given me one of those rare, wonderful moments when you find something that speaks so precisely to you that you can’t help but sing its praises to everyone who will listen. Namaha has made being in the middle beautiful, and I am so grateful for the window that it opens into a part of myself that I’m eager to discover.
Even if the stories hold no interest for you, I really can’t say enough about how gripping these vibrant, rich images can be. I’ve found my heart racing and my eyes misting while I’ve been drawn into these pieces. That may be the best thing that Namaha has done for me. It has provided me with new images, new pictures of God, without the baggage of burning grandparents. If nothing else, at least now I know a better, more beautiful way to remember my long-gone dadaji.
Next, I’ll be reading Singh’s graphic novel Krishna: A Journey Within and the follow-up to Namaha called Poorna - the great feminine divine when it’s released. Join me in reading these beautiful books and leave a comment below. What’s something that’s helped you dwell in the middle? What book, song, painting, or poem has helped you bring together the parts of yourself?
Micah Bhachech is a high school teacher and writer.