In ancient Rome, a victorious general was honoured with a special celebration called the Triumph. In the procession he rode in a special chariot, wore the purple, gold-embroidered robe known as the toga picta, and, following tradition, dressed in the ceremonial regalia of the god Jupiter.
Yet amid this royal honour and jubilation there was a custom meant to keep human pride in check. Behind the general in the chariot stood a public slave (servus publicus), holding a heavy golden crown over his head. According to Tertullian, the slave whispered a warning in the general's ear: "Respice post te, hominem te esse memento", "Look behind you; remember that you are only a man." Later, through the famous phrase memento mori ("remember that you must die"), the same thought became a fixture of Western literature and art.
This ancient tradition exposes the eternal gulf between the pride of wealth and the naked truth of death. But the reflection is not confined to ancient Rome. It lives in every layer of social life, and, with great poignancy, inside language itself.
Our Odia language also has an ironic word that strikes at human pomp and pride. Born from some obscure corner of history, from the harshness of life and the fires of want, this sharp and moving word is hadamala. In Gopal Chandra Praharaj's monumental Purnachandra Bhashakosha, on page 9050, the word quietly holds a vast social truth. It carries as much religious and mythological gravity as it does the burning, whetted sarcasm of a hungry, neglected person turned against social inequality.
First, let us understand the literal and common meanings. According to the dictionary, the first meaning of hadamala is asthimala: a garland strung from pieces of bone. This takes us straight to the fierce and awe-inspiring form of Mahakali, on whose neck hangs just such a garland of skulls or bones. It is not merely a symbol of terror. It reminds us of the final destiny of all worldly pride, power and empire. When great emperors and conquerors grow drunk on victory and, though they have eyes, turn blind, the garland at Kali's throat stands as a silent witness, declaring that the final destination of this mortal body is nothing but a few dry bones.
The second meaning is a skeleton, or a state of extreme emaciation, and it is the most brutal face of human poverty. When a man has no grain in his belly, when his flesh withers and only skin stretched over a cage of ribs remains, he too becomes a living hadamala. These living skeletons lying in the hungry corners of society are the emblems of a system that, beneath a false show of prosperity, pushes human beings into a state lower than that of animals.
But the real joke, or rather the greatest farce of the human predicament, lies hidden in the third meaning recorded in the Purnachandra Bhashakosha.
When a poor, destitute person sees the wealthy, the moneylenders and the landlords strutting about with proud, puffed-out chests and heavy gold necklaces, his hungry mind and sharp wit rise in a bitter rebellion. He does not accept that necklace as a gold necklace. He mockingly calls it a hadamala, a garland of bones. Here begins a marvellous drama of human psychology, in which the poor man's sarcasm reduces the rich man's pride to dust.
The greatest oddity of the human race is its love of show. A rich man, whose stomach is always full of good food and who has never known labour, walks down the road with a store-bought gold chain of considerable weight hanging from his neck, and he thinks he owns the whole world. He imagines that this yellow glitter has lifted him above ordinary mortals into something like a god or an immortal. But at that very moment, a labourer sits on the bench of a broken tea stall by the roadside, taking the last drops of tea from his cup, his palms blistered by hard work. He casts a sharp, sidelong glance at the rich man. There is not a flicker of envy in him. What comes instead is a deep, unsparing pity and a fierce mockery. He smiles to himself and says to his fellow workers, "Look, how that sahib is walking around with a hadamala on his neck."
"Whose neck bears so heavy a load of gold,
Can he understand the hungry man's cry?
Whose plate holds an endless feast of nectar,
How can he easily know another's weeping?"
Here a question may arise. Gold is a symbol of fortune, prosperity and beauty, so why should it be called a hadamala? The answer lies in the labourer's hard-won insight. The poor man knows that the weight of gold gleaming on the necks of the rich did not fall from the sky, nor did it come out of the earth by itself. Behind every gram of that gold lie the sweat of hundreds of hungry workers, their wasted bones, and the tears of their families. When the wealthy wear that gold and swell with pride, they are in truth hanging around their necks the exploited bones and spent lives of those very poor people. That is why the poor man catches the cunning of this social irony, calls the gold necklace a hadamala, and in a single moment grinds the rich man's whole display into the dust. It is a remarkable human response, in which words become sharper than swords.
Human pride is a balloon that needs no gun to burst it. One small, sharp, well-chosen word of sarcasm is enough. When the rich man goes out to parade his wealth before society, he thinks he is impressing everyone. He does not know that behind him, from the dark corner of a tea stall or from the dust of the road, someone is laughing quietly at his artificial glitter and thinking what a fool he is. He does not know that the gold he is so proud of will, by the law of time, today or tomorrow, once the body is burnt or buried, dissolve into the soil. Then the gold chain will be of no use at all, and all that remains of him will be a few pieces of bone. This kind of sarcasm is not merely a figure of speech. It is the silent protest of the human mind against social injustice.
The presence of such sarcasm in a language proves that however helpless a person may be, he never puts his conscience and intelligence in chains. When kings, maharajas and the powerful classes walk before society in diamonds, rubies and gold necklaces to display their might, they believe everyone will fear and admire them. They do not know how the common people behind them see that pageantry as a ridiculous play. The word hadamala is a living proof of this. In a single word it joins two opposite poles: on one side the glitter of gold, on the other the emptiness of bone. Gold is a symbol of life, warmth and prosperity, and when it is yoked to bone, all its value collapses in an instant. This is the poor man's moral victory: unable to defeat the rich man's money, he still shatters the rich man's pride with the axe-blow of language.
O hadamala!
"For some, a fearsome garland of bone;
for some, a proud necklace of gold;
for some, the endless pain of want;
for some, the false adornment of luxury."
Thus the word hadamala, which finds its place on page 9050 of the Purnachandra Bhashakosha, reflects an eternal truth of human society. It reminds us that however vast or dazzling a person's outward show may be, everyone must in the end return to the same earth and take the form of the same skeleton. The power of the Odia language to express this timeless conflict between rich and poor through irony is truly admirable. When a poor man smiles to himself and calls a rich man's gold necklace a hadamala, he is mocking not just that one person but the whole unjust social order. Words like this keep a language alive and light a small flame in the dark corners of society, forcing the proud to recognise, if only a little, what they truly are.
This linguistic courage, calling a gold necklace a hadamala, is a distinctive mark of Odia folk wisdom. For the glitter of gold can blind the eye, but a hadamala reminds a person of his final end.
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