Comment

In the name of faith

ONCE again, the saffron brigade led by Lal Kishanchand Advani has gone into overdrive. Lok Sabha elections are round the corner, a government unsure of its own beliefs is managing the affairs of the state, and the seat of power is looking within reach. Can there be a better time than this to whip up religious passions of the majority Hindu community, renew efforts to fashion Hinduism into a mirror image of Semitic religions, and make a triumphant come-back to govern the country again? This is, as it were, the last chance for Advani to make a bid for prime minister’s chair because even he cannot demolish the walls erected by aging.

So, it’s time for him to bemoan that India does not have blasphemy laws a la Pakistan and some other countries where the crime is punishable with a death sentence. Only a man who all his life aspired to become a Hindu Jinnah can be so blissfully ignorant of the faith he professes. The fact of the matter is that first, India is not a Hindu state and, second, even if it were one, no blasphemy laws could be enforced here since the notion of blasphemy is foreign to Hinduism. Perhaps the self-proclaimed prime ministerial candidate (though his party colleagues like Yashwant Sinha contest the assertion) needs to be told that Hinduism, despite creating a society that refuses to grant its members freedom from caste oppression, ironically offers utmost freedom to its followers in matters religious. An atheist, an agnostic, a believer in the divinity of Rama or Krishna or Vishnu or Shiva, or a nonbeliever – all have an equal right to consider themselves Hindu. Out of nine major philosophical schools, only Yoga and Vedanta feel the theoretical need to have God as an intrinsic part of their systems. Poorva Mimamsa, whose best known representative Kumaril Bhatt appears in an apocryphal story regarding his unsuccessful intellectual duel with Adi Shankaracharya, is openly disdainful towards the concept of God.

Addressing a press conference in New Delhi on September 13, Advani thundered that by doubting the historical existence of Rama, the Manmohan Singh government had poured insult and scorn on millions of Hindus living in India and abroad. In the same breath, he rhetorically mentioned the names of Swami Vivekanand and Sri Aurobindo to buttress his point. As usual, he was being economical with truth. In a collection of his lectures on Ramayana, the late H.D. Sankalia, who was perhaps the most respected Indian archaeologist during his lifetime, quotes a conversation between a disciple and Sri Aurobindo as given in the book Evening Talks with Sri Aurobindo published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram, Pondicherry in April 1961. It will not be inappropriate to reproduce it here.

Disciple: Did Rama live, or is he merely a creation of Valmiki?

Sri Aurobindo: There is no ground to believe that Rama is a historical figure.

Disciple: But the account of the conquest and other things?

Sri Aurobindo: Do you believe a king marches to Lanka with an army of monkeys? Valmiki may have taken it from tradition, or from imagination, and created figures which so well suited the Indian temperament that the whole race took them into its consciousness, and assimilated them.

Some even believe that there were Ramayanas before Valmiki’s and that even in the Veda you find Rama symbolising the divine and Sita standing for the earth. It also may be that Valmiki brought it over from some Daivic plane to this earth.

Rama might have lived but one cannot say anything definite.

How is what Sri Aurobindo says any different from what the Manmohan Singh government stated in its original affidavits before the Supreme Court that it so shamefully withdrew on 14 September 2007 under intense pressure from the BJP? Would Advani have recommended death sentence for him under the blasphemy laws that he so pines for had the revolutionary-turned-Yogi been alive today?

Self-appointed custodians of the Hindu honour like Advani do not want to come out of their medieval mindset although they must be aware that times have changed. During the past century or so, despite the notion of blasphemy in Christianity, critical studies of the Bible have regularly appeared in the West applying criteria of historical research to the holy book. Doubts have openly been expressed regarding the historicity of Christ. The controversy over the Shroud of Turin, revered by millions of Christians all over the world, is yet to come to a conclusion.

Indians have never shied away from intellectual debate and discussion. For nearly two millennia, they have been involved in intense and continuous clashes of different philosophical viewpoints. In the Upanishads, a disciple is never seen afraid of contradicting his guru. In fact, the various Upanishadic philosophies have evolved only through this process of constant questioning. But how would the BJP leaders, so innocent of the great Indian culture and its intellectual traditions, know all this? They have to win the next election by hook or crook, and this remains their sole concern.

There is no denying the fact that the Hindus believe that Rama was an incarnation of Vishnu, lived some hundreds of thousands of years ago, and that his rule (Ramarajya) was the ideal. Yet, his actions were criticised by the great Sanskrit poet-playwright Bhavabhuti as early as in the seventh century in his play Uttarramacharitam. The criticism has been voiced through his twin sons Lava and Kusha, and Prithvi (Mother Earth) who question Rama’s killing of the monkey-king Bali, and his not accepting the purity of Sita even after she had come out of the fire ordeal unscathed. Earlier still, Kalidasa’s Sita called Rama a mere king (Raja) when she was banished by him. Rama’s deification occurred in the course of the evolution of the Bhagavata cult.

Even Rabindranath Tagore did not consider Rama an essentially historical figure. He viewed him as an ideal human being (narachandramah as described by Narada in the opening chapter of the epic Ramayana) as conceived by the poet Valmiki. Suniti Kumar Chatterjee too concurred with this view.

Moreover, is the present Sri Lanka really the same Lanka that has been described in the epic? Historians and archaeologists do not think so. T. Paramasiva Iyer, in his 1940 book Ramayana and Lanka, put forth his hypothesis that Ravana’s Lanka, if there ever was one, was located in Madhya Pradesh near Jabalpur. The Adam’s Bridge or Rama Setu is over 30 miles long and runs west-north-west to east-south-east. As Lanka was surrounded by sea, Rama built a bridge which was 100 yojanas long and ran due north and south from the foot of Mahendragiri in the north to Suvelagiri (a hill adjoining Trikuta) on whose slopes Rama marshalled his vanara hosts.

According to Iyer’s calculations, 100 yojanas would either mean eleven and a half miles or 450 miles. The existing bridge is neither. Moreover, there is no hill in Rameshwaram nor anywhere near Mandapam. There is no hill in Manaar Island and none in the northern half of Sri Lanka. Therefore, it is obvious that Sri Lanka has nothing to do with Ravana’s Lanka. Iyer was the first scholar to have said that Ravana was a Gond chief and that Indrana Hill surrounded by the great Hiran river on three sides was the Trikuta. It rises 650 feet above the haveli or high-level plain comprising the broad valleys of the Hiran and Narmada. According to the Jubalpore Gazetteer quoted by Iyer, ‘During the monsoon months, the haveli presents the appearance of a vast lake…’ It is quite probable that in the olden days, the Hiran, which hugs the Indrana Hill on three sides, spread out as a shallow lake all round the hill.

Iyer points out that the ordinary or Dhur-Gonds are known as Ravana-Vamshis in central India and they are quite happy with the nomenclature. In his opinion, it is very likely that Ravana’s Lanka, under the name of Trikuta, was the capital of Kalachari Haihayas known as Trikutakas till 900 AD. He quotes the clue given in Ramayana by Sampati’s son Suparshva, who had seen ‘a shiny black man with a sun-bright woman’ passing through the gorge at Mahendragiri. If Ravana was dragging Sita, Lanka could not have been as far away as Sri Lanka and was located nearby.

H. D. Sankalia accepted the argument and improvised upon it. He quotes Gond folk songs recorded by George Grierson in the late 19th century and shows that they are full of praise for Ravana. As Ravana is held in high contempt by the large majority of Indian populace, there is no reason for the Gonds to hail him unless they are actually his descendants. In any case, Sri Lanka was always known to Indians of the olden days as Simhala or Tamraparni, and not as Lanka. According to Sankalia, Lanka is a Mundari word which means an ‘island’ and people of Sonpur on the Madhya Pradesh-Andhra-Orissa border traditionally regard it as ‘Pashchim Lanka’ (western Lanka). So, when the present Sri Lanka is not the Lanka of Ravana, where does the question of Rama Setu existing between Rameshwaram and Sri Lanka arise?

But, no sane and sensible discussion is possible with the protagonists of the Rama Setu movement since Advani has framed the terms of political discourse in a palpably irrational manner. For him facts don’t matter. What matters is the faith of ‘millions of Hindus’ as defined by the saffron brigade. It was this brigade that informed the Hindus that Rama was born exactly on the same plot of land where the Babari Mosque stood. Once again, it is the same brigade that has informed us that the Adam’s Bridge is in fact Rama Setu built by Rama’s vanar sena. For years, the RSS tried to fabricate evidence quoting NASA pictures in order to prove that the formation was a man-made one. Why it wasted its efforts is unclear because if one were to go by what Advani proclaims, such evidence is just not needed. All that is needed is a fiat issued by the VHP and the BJP declaring the natural formation as Rama Setu. Once issued, it instantly becomes the ‘faith’ of ‘millions of Hindus’. Even at the press conference of September 13, Advani resorted to his old stratagem. He declared: ‘The controversy whether the formation is nature-made or man-made is just not relevant. The important thing is that millions of Hindus believe that it is the bridge built by Rama.’

It is not surprising that in the face of such brazenness the Manmohan Singh government helplessly gave in and withdrew the two affidavits with an alacrity it is not known for. What is truly amazing is that the self-proclaimed ‘consistently’ secular parties of the Left too rushed in to criticise the government for filing the affidavits. One fails to understand what crime one commits if one doubts the historicity of Rama or Krishna. There are hundreds of thousands of Hindus who worship Shiva. Does his divinity rest on the fact that he was born on earth or not?

But how does this matter to those who want to use Rama only to attain political power?

Kuldeep Kumar