Rites of Ram’s Memory

THE PRANA-PRATISHTAPANA of Sri Ramachandra is one of the greatest land­marks in a prolonged struggle to recover Bharatavarsha’s spiritual freedom. The fact that the usage of the word prana-pratishta has become pervasive in the English lan­guage media is a definitive indicator of this freedom. Its significance has parallels in the foundation of the Vijayanagara Empire, the rise of Maratha power, and the tri­umph of Hindu civilisation in 1947, when the combined forces of Islamic regimes and the colonial British were conclusively de­feated. The 1947 victory though, came at the cost of partitioning the undivided sacred geography of Bharatavarsha.

When an honest history of the present time is written say, 50 years later, reclaiming the Sri Rama Mandir will be regarded not merely as a significant event but as an epoch. What makes it more pronounced is the fact that it is a struggle that was waged uninter­ruptedly for five hundred years. It is unparalleled both in the realms of time and space: we see no comparable epoch in any civilisation or coun­try since the dawn of human civilisation. The reclamation of the Rama Mandir is the most recent testimony to an ageless truth at the core of Hindu history: the intrinsic capacity of Hindu society to heal itself and rejuvenate its lost vitality in spite of repeatedly undergoing unspeakable trauma. Among others, the Ramayana and the legacy of Sri Rama are the profound and original sources of this vitality.

The Rama Mandir has been reclaimed because Hindu society has preserved the memory of its destruction for such an astonish­ing length of time.

If the Ramayana is one of the world’s greatest epics, and is Bharatavarsha’s adi-kavya (the first poem), the story of reclaim­ing the Sri Rama Mandir is likewise an epic saga. It is the ultimate homage offered by the collective Hindu consciousness to both Maharshi Valmiki and Sri Ramachandra. This saga operates on multiple layers and merits a comprehensive telling. All I can do in the space of this essay is offer some broad contours.

THE LITERARY LAYER

The timeless and universal appeal of the Ramayana has expressed itself through abundance, variety and durability. No other work of Bharatavarsha has produced so many offshoots and retellings in so many languages. No other literary work of Bharatavarsha has inspired all sister art forms—painting, sculpture, music, dance, and drama. No other work of Bharatavarsha has endured for a mini­mum of seven thousand years in an unbroken manner. Even purely on the monetary plane, the Ramayana has provided livelihood for hundreds of generations of creative and non-creative people alike.

More than a thousand years ago, the fabled scholar-poet, Paramara Bhoja Raja spoke these immortal words about Valmiki: “madhumayabhanitinam margadarsi maharsih (Valmiki Maharshi is the path-maker for honeyed expressions of poetry).” Bhoja’s junior contemporary, the 11th-century Kashmiri aesthetician and poet Kshemendra, offers a similar oblation: “namah sarvo­pajivyam tam kavinam cakravartinam (O Valmiki, the Emperor of poets who remains the refuge of all poets, we bow to Thee).” The 15th-century Kannada poet Naranappa (fondly known as Kumaravyasa) pays an oblique tribute to the Ramayana’s en­durance and profusion when he declares in his Karnata Bharata Kathamanjari that Adishesha himself groaned under the collective weight of the numerous Ramayanas, which is why “I, Naranappa, chose to tell the story of Sri Krishna.”

Our literary history shows that everyone who drank deeply from Valmiki and authored their own Ramayanas (or episodes therefrom) also became immortal like him. Their works became classics, derived from this eternal classic. From Kambar to Tulsidas to the 20th-century poets Viswanatha Satyanarayana (Ramayana Kalpavrksamu, Telugu) and KV Puttappa (Sri Ramayana Darsa­nam, Kannada).

The literal meaning of the word ‘Ramayana’ is breathtakingly simple: “Rama’s journey”. But the history and vicissitudes of the Ramayana’s journey outside India is an exquisite tapestry of cultur­al fusion that shaped and refined the whole of Asia spanning more than a millennium. Sri Rama went wherever the Ramayana went.

In 1971, the Department of Culture of the Ministry of Education of the Government of Indonesia organised the first International Ramayana Festival. Its stated purpose was “to promote closer coop­eration, harmony and peace… to create a favourable atmosphere for mutual understanding and friendship.” The official who stated it was Mohammed Noor, the then governor of East Java, Indonesia. A 100 per cent Muslim country.

Lokesh Chandra (now, 96 years young), a living legend and prolific scholar of the Vedas, Buddhism, and Indian aesthetics describes the historic significance of the event: “[Indonesia] de­serves praise and gratitude of men of culture for providing a fo­rum where the modern man of Asia can evaluate the creative role of the Ramayana through the ages, and its living unity of values in Asian societies… the Ramayana has become the lyric of the men of Asia from Siberia to Indonesia, filling their unbounded Self with ecstasy, with an ocean of bliss.” [Emphasis added]

Mongolia for example, had become profoundly cultured by the Ramayana centuries before it became a ferocious warring nation under Genghis Khan. As for ancient and medieval China, let’s hear it in Lokesh Chandra’s words: “A long tradition in narra­tive and dramatic form created the great episodic cycle of the 16th century classic Chinese novel known as Monkey or the Hsi-yu-chi which amalgamated among other elements the travels of Hanu­man in quest of Sita.”

Needless to say, the Ramayana tradition in China was gobbled up by communism.

Four years later, India, too, organised a mammoth interna­tional seminar on ‘The Ramayana Tradition in Asia’ in Delhi, from December 8-12, 1975. A whopping 50 top-ranking scholars from the world attended. Its printed output edited by the towering scholar V Raghavan runs to nearly 800 pages and is still the best source for us to understand the spread and multifaceted imprint of the Ramayana in Asia.

The waves of devotion flooding into Ayodhya from Korea, Japan,Taiwan, Mauritius, Fiji, and the whole of Southeast Asia are reassertions of this age-old Ramayana-bond with Bharatavarsha. This reassertion became possible because Bharatavarsha recovered her cultural self-confidence by restoring the Sri Rama Mandir. Thai­land has made perhaps the most evocative gesture by sending soil and the water of two of its rivers to the Ram Janmabhoomi temple site. From this perspective, I dare say that if this Ramayana bond is further strengthened, the whole of Asia has the potential to re-emerge as a powerful counterforce to the declining West, which has still failed to grasp the essence of Sri Rama’s story.

THE UNIFYING LAYER

Till date, Sri Ramachandra reigns unsurpassed as the greatest uni­fier of Bharatavarsha. No other figure—howsoever great—before or after him has managed to achieve this feat. His ayana or journey is also the story of our people cutting across social strata. It is also the story of our lakes, rivers, seas, mountains, forests, birds, ani­mals, fruits, and flowers. Along with the Mahabharata, the story of Sri Rama is the very edifice that continues to safeguard and pre­serve our civilisational and cultural integrity whose home is Bharatavarsha’s geography. Unsurprisingly, the ideals and val­ues espoused in the Ramayana became dominant raw materials in our freedom struggle. Our leaders and activists who engaged in the battlefield of hard politics took inspiration from and solace in Sri Rama, Lakshmana, Sita, and Hanuman: from Tilak to Gandhi, from Rabindranath Tagore to Lala Lajpat Rai, and everybody in between.

There is an instructive sidelight to this. Of the 10 Avatars, only three assumed the human form— Parasurama, Sri Rama, and Sri Krishna. Of these, our culture celebrates the bala-lilas (childhood sport) of only Sri Rama and Sri Krishna. Goswami Tulsidas exulted in describing Sri Rama’s extraordinary child­hood. Tyagaraja Swami went into lyrical raptures over the delicate locks on Bala Rama’s forehead. And now, the same Bala Rama’s (or Ram Lalla) prana-pratishta ceremony has been completed. These are not random choices and decisions but the consensual expressions of the collective conscious­ness of a people who have preserved their memory. This alone is sufficient to puncture the mischievous purveyors of a non-existent north-south divide.

We notice this even on the mundane plane. Our tradition recognises the Ramayana also as a Dharma­sastra, and Rama as a king who embodied dharma. In fact, even a hard-nosed author of statecraft like Kautilya gives this warning to princes in his Ar­thashastra: “manad ravanah paradaranaprayacchan duryodhano rajyamsam ca (Do not follow the exam­ple of Ravana and Duryodhana and fall into ruin).” From a very early age, our princes were educated in the mould of Rama and precepts of the Ramayana and other sacred literature. Sadly, there is no school in our democratic setup that instils virtue in the ruler.

The unifying aspect of Rama also becomes evident on a broader canvas. The Rama tradition is a living reality in Bharatavarsha unlike contemporary Greece or Italy. Neither of these societies has any idea of infusing the exalted spirit of their own ancient epics in their daily lives because they lost access to them long ago, thanks to the Christianisation of Europe. Their Athena, Aphrodite, Apollo, Olympus, Zeus, Venus, Saturn, Ceres, Minerva, and Mercury have become museum pieces and tourist attractions. This is why there has never been a mass movement to rebuild, say, the Temple of Jupiter.

But the ultimate proof for Sri Rama’s sacred ubiquity lies in the very names of his most venomous traducers who once wielded immense power and tried to undo his legacy.

THE IDEOLOGICAL AND POLITICAL LAYER

Rallapalli Ananta Krishna Sharma, the scholar and musicolo­gist who unearthed thousands of Annamacharya songs, under­went a moving experience with his guru, Krishnabrahmatantra Yatindra about a century ago. On one occasion, his guru was looking for some verses in the Ramayana and asked his dis­ciple to find them. Accordingly, he opened the work, located the verses and began reading them aloud. Seconds later, his guru said, “Don’t stop, keep reading.” It was the episode where Sumitra consoles Kausalya who was profusely weeping at the news of Rama’s banishment to the forest. After reading some more verses, Rallapalli paused and looked sideways. His guru’s eyes were brimming with tears.

What is it in the Ramayana that moves lakhs of such people to tears? Rallapalli’s guru was no politician or activist. What is it that made lakhs of kar sevaks travel to Ayodhya knowing that they would face assured death? And what is it that makes our eminent historians and rationalists and progressives and secularists despise the Ramayana with such venom? It has a perfect echo in King Lear’s anguish: “Is there any cause in nature that make these hard hearts?”

On a subtle plane, the whole saga of reclaiming the Rama Mandir is ensconced in the attitudinal difference between Rallapalli’s guru, the kar sevaks (in general, the Hindu society), and the secularists.

In reality, blocking the civilisation­al imperative of rebuilding the Rama Mandir was just one of the major items on the leftist agenda of disman­tling Hindu civilisation wholesale. It is really incredible when we think about it now. What exactly gave such extraordinary confidence to this small but determined coterie to think they could actually annihilate the inheri­tance of Sri Rama? It is an epic poetic irony that in this vile quest, the leftists actually facilitated the destruction of the disputed structure.

A central tactic that the leftists deployed in their opposition to the Rama Mandir was to dismiss the Rama tradition by recasting it as myth. One of the connotations of the term ‘myth’ is that it can be dismissed as unreal. Another sinister motive behind this was to prevent entire generations of Hindus from reading the Ramayana for what it really is: a work of high philosophy and lasting values, and a work that keeps India united. This mythification served them well: it helped them disclaim Rama’s birthplace. Thus, if the Ramayana was myth, then Rama was a fictional character and, therefore, Hindus had no right over the janmasthan. An eminence named MV Ratnam went so far as to claim that Rama was actually Pharaoh Ramses II who was born in Egypt! Likewise, imported sociological theories of caste, patriarchy, feminism, etc, were deliberately force-fitted as aids to this project of destroying the sanctity of an entire race in the Ramayana.

This was unclothed political ideology masquer­ading as literary analysis and historical scholarship. The eminent Sanskrit scholar, N Ranganatha Sharma puts this in perspective: “[A]ny analysis of profound epic works like the Ramayana which does not account for spatiotemporal circum­stances, time-honoured customs, usages and beliefs of an entire population is akin to groping in the dark.” That is putting it mildly.

It is noteworthy that in this whole vile episode, even the colonial British did not inflict the kind of damage that the secular govern­ments did after Independence. Secularism, a synonym for Hindu ha­tred, naturally found Sri Rama offensive. This is precisely the subtext of KM Munshi’s dire warning in his letter to Nehru: “I cannot value India’s freedom if it deprives us of the Bhagavad Gita or uproots our millions from the faith with which they look upon our temples and thereby destroys the texture of our lives. I have been given the privilege of seeing my incessant dream of Somnath reconstruction come true… this shrine once restored to a place of importance in our life will give to our people a purer conception of religion and a more vivid consciousness of our strength, so vital in these days of freedom and its trials.” [Emphasis added]

What was true of Somnath is truer of Ayodhya. It has always been my considered conviction that the Sri Rama Mandir should never have been degraded to the status of a mere court case or even worse, a “title dispute”. The reclamation of Somnath was relatively effortless for two reasons. One, the secularist-leftist-Nehruvian cabal was power­less. Two, the country had Sardar Patel. We observe the truth of this historical contrast in a tangential fashion today. The overwhelming nationwide cultural reawakening that just one temple has stirred is pre­cisely what the secularists wanted to prevent. More than anybody else, they knew that this was bound to happen. But its scale is truly unprecedented.

POSTSCRIPT The Ramayana has an immortal phrase that de­scribes the whole essence of Sri Rama’s character: “ramo vigrahavan dharmah (Rama is the embodiment of Dharma).” Thus, what is hap­pening in Ayodhya is not just prana-pratishta. It is dharma punahst­hapana—the reestablishment of dharma itself. There is no India without dharma, and dharma is the invisible veneer that always kept Bharatavarsha from plummeting into chaos and anarchy.

The absence of Dharma gives us a Pakistan.

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