Legitimacy

       

 Prafulla Kumar Mohanty

What is legitimate?  If a child is born to a man and woman united in wedlock we call the child legitimate: if not we call the child illegitimate. The word bastard is also used in derisive contempt. Legitimacy seems to be an absurdity when I think of the creation myth of the world. What is legitimate and who decides what is legitimate? The society and the moral and legal systems created by men and women who cannot legitimately vouchsafe their own legitimacy. If God created man who created God? This question has often disturbed me. Is God a being with sexual desire and did He have a spouse and did he create knowingly and willingly human beings and nature with her skylamps and earth arbours? I don’t know. The One, The Rig Veda says, desire was the primal seed and it descended on the One who created it in His mind. The Rig Veda also says the one was  the Purusha – the Cosmic Person- and the Purusha was sacrificed by ’gods’(again something beyond my legitimate comprehension) on a Fire altar. One’s seed formed and produced the Golden Egg, or womb, the Hiryanagarbha. The egg separated itself into two shells. One became the sky, the other became the earth and the yolk became the Sun. The embryo was the female seed fertilized by the male seed, thereby came the entire rationale  of creation. Now the question is, if the cosmic seed caused both male and female, how could they copulate and how could they create life and other forms with what claim on legitimacy?

In the Christian myth Adam was created by God and later Eve was created from the Thirteenth rib of Adam. What is the relation between Adam and Eve then, if they are one surgically separated into another form-female, by the creator? We never bring the question of legitimacy to bear on faith, however, mythical it may be. Moral sanctity is perhaps built into faith beyond questions of legitimacy. When the Queen Mother Satayabati invites her own illegitimate son (if not rape child) to sleep with her widowed daughters –in –law to save the Kuru clan no eyebrows are raised. When Kunti in the Mahabharata in her adolescent  pleasure dome invited the Sun and others  to give birth to Karna and other ‘Pandavas’ legitimacy is raised only  in the  case of karna not other pandavas as she became the wife of Pandu. Karna had already been sacrificed as the unmarried Kunti  wanted  to save herself from social ignominy. Why? No answer.

The question of legitimacy is raised by Shakespeare’s Edmund in King Lear in a grand manner:

           “   Why bastard? Wherefore base?

               When my dimensions are as well compact,

               My mind as generous, and my shape as true.

               As honest madam’s issue? 

               Why brand they us

               With base? With baseness? Bastardy? Base base?

If a marriage certificate makes the issues legitimate something is definitely  skewed with our moral –legal system. A honey child like Edmund is as legitimate as a child born out of wedlock. When Simone de Beauvoir  and Jean –Paul Sartre lived together without going to a church for a legitimation certificate questions were raised but they stood firm to their own system of faith in their life principle. Legitimacy is a crafty social trap created by men in power to decide right and wrong arbitrarily.

Legitimacy is a vast vague term to give a high moral pedestal to institutions which are not confined to sexual relations only. Often ideas are not legitimate, arguments many times are self- justificatory word play more cunning and ephemeral   than substantive. Politicians, thinkers follow the maxim- Winner Takes all – which are legitimized by muscle power. If marriage is legitimate what is divorce? Divorce like the instant Tripple Talaq is also legitimate fortified by patriarchy. The majority principle in democracy legitimizes everything by head count. If five persons legitimize a lamb as dog the dog it is. In civilization legitimacy stems from the legal system made by men only for a period of time.

For instance if an Indian spy steals miltary secrets from an enemy country, it is Legitimate and he is honoured as a hero. But if a foreign spy does the same in India he is hanged as enemy. If an Indian soldier kills a Pakistani soldier he is a true patriot: but can we extend the same logic to our enemies?  For the Pakistani soldier is also a patriot prepared to die for his country. What is the legitimate definition of a patriot then?

In all human institutions the systems always are unidirectional for the convenience of society. A dullard gets a scholarship due to caste compulsions but a brilliant ‘other’ is denied- all in the name of legitimacy. But legitimacy is a far abstract term, much above our functional efficacy.

I feel legitimacy as integrity and illumination of the human spirit. Freedom is the essence of the soul, for it always operates in a spirit of love which is beyond the legal-moral systems. A free soul which loves all life and lives with instinctual fairness is legitimately divine. All contrarian views are illegitimate.