RAM AS
POLITICAL TOOL
By R.K Dasgupta*
Research has establish
that Ram was a political
Character in Valmiki’s
epic with no historical basis but the Sangh parivar has turned him into a
political tool.
The standard history of India, which
is now valued both by the academic and the general readers, is Vincent A
Smith’s The Oxford History of India (1920) revised by Sir Mortimer
Wheeler, AL Basham, JB Harrison and Percival Spear (1958). In this work
Ramayana is presented as “neither historical nor allegorical, but a poetic
creation based on mythology”(p57) Hermann Jacobi (1850-1937), the German
Indologist, who visited India twice is the first European to write one whole
book on Ramayana – The Ramayana: History, Contents with a concordance of the
printed recensions. (1893; Eng tr, SN Ghoshal, 1960). The work presents the
Ramayana as a work based on mythology. In his History of Sanskrit
Literature (1900) Arthur A. MacDonnell too affirms that the Ramayana
“is based on Indian mythology”. EW Hopkins wrote his epic mythology
(1915) to show that our two ancient epics draw their story from ours
traditional legends.
We may now turn to our own scholars’
view of the Ramayana. In December 1975 the government of India and our Sahitya
Academy organized an international seminar on the Ramayana, which was
inaugurated on 08 /12/1975 and ended on 12/12/1975.The consensus on the nature
of the material of the epic was that it was mythological .On 15/01/1976 Dr.
Suniti Kumar Chatterjee (1890-1977) who had already spoken at the international
seminar gave an address on the subject again. Dr. Chatterjee third address on
the Ramayana was given at the National Library, Kolkata, on 13/02/1976. His
opinion on the historicity of the Ramayana is quoted by Anil Kumar
Kanjilal in his introduction to Dr. Chatterjee’s unfinished work on The
Ramayana: Its Character, Genesis, History, Expansion and Exodus (1978). Dr
Chatterjee says about Ramayana “there is evidently no historical core
below the surface – no scholar of India now thinks that Rama, the hero of Ramayana,
was a historical person, who can be relegated to a particular period of time”.
The motto of Dr. Chatterjee’s book on the Ramayana is a quotation from
Rabindranath`s poem “Bhasa O Chhanda first published in Bharti in
1898.(Included in the third volume of “Rabindra Rachanavali” (1983,pp
1285-1288)
Toward the end of this poem Narada tells Valmiki, “Sei satya ja rachibe
tumi, / ghate ja ta sab satya nahe. / Kavi tava manobhumi/ Ramer janamsthan,
Ayodhyar chey satya jena (whatever you compose will be true; that which
actually happens is not all true. O poet your mind is the birth place of Rama
and you must know that to be truer than Ayodhya) here the Bengali poet raises
Rama beyond history if only to affirm that he is a divine being. Valmiki’s poem of twenty-four thousand anushtuv
verses and forty-eight thousand lines is not a historical tale; it is a
revelation of a oelestial being .The poet indeed frees the Ramayana from
the taint of historicity and for this alone he deserves the adoration of all
worshipper of Rama.
The
Rama of the Sangh parivar, particularly of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad founded in
1964 to promote a cause of a Hindu nation, is a political invention. Since the
Ram shila worship initiated by the RSS in 1989,Rama of Valmiki has become a
political weapon to be wielded by the exponent of hindutva and Hindu
nationalism. On 30/11/1989 RSS volunteers made a desperate attempt to storm the
Babri Masjid and succeeded in hoisting a saffron flag on its top. A Danish
historian, Thomas Blom Henesn, Professor of International Development Studies
at Roskilde, Denmark, says in his The Saffron Wave: Democracy and Hindu
National in Modern India (1999) that for the Sangh parivar “Ram has became
a metaphor for the catholicity of the traditional Hindu forms of devotion” and
added that “this discourse is mainly articulated by the Vishwa Hindu Parishad”.
(p-176)
Sandri B Freitag, Director of the American Historical Association,
writes in an article entitled “Contesting in a Public: Colonial Legacies and
Contemporaries and Communalism” that “what helped elect BJP into office in the
first place was the sustained Ramjanmabhumi campaign on behalf of building a
temple in Ayodhya” (p223). We must remember that even the Congress Prime
minister Sri Rajiv Gandhi permitted on 9th November 1989 the
shilanyas of the ram temple in front of the Babri Masjid .On 11th
November The Statesman called that day as a black day “in the history of
secular India”. Must we forget that the court decision of February 1986
permitting the puja at the Ramjanmabhumi encouraged the Vishwa Hindu Parishad
to campaign for the liberation of what it called the Krishnajanmabhumi at
Mathura
If in the next general elections the BJP gets a majority in the Lok
Sabha, it would certainly throw away its secular mask and support the movement
for the Yudhisthira janmabhumis and such other janmabhumis in the north. This will happen as a
ramification of the agitation regarding Rama.
Dasara is a national festival celebrating the victory of Rama over
Ravana. Hedgewar, the first president of RSS founded in 1925 launched his
movement for the revival on the Dasara day of that year. This has now developed
into ram janmabhumi movement .
We are not concerned here with the political side
of this movement. What the educated Indian, Hindu, Muslim or Christian fears
today is that the movement is degrading the greatest classic in Indian
literature and is tarnishing the image of its hero. As a Bengali, I will read
the Krittivasi Ramayana but I often turn to the Sanskrit epic and
more frequently to the Ramcharitamanas of Tulsidas (1532-1623), perhaps
the greatest classic in our medieval Indian literature. In his introduction to
the translation (1878) of the Ramcharitramanas, FS Growse (1837-1893) says that the Hindi Ramayana
is “ less wordy and diffuse than the Sanskrit” (p1). Tulsidas, however, does
not mention any locale of Rama’s nativity, obviously because, as he says in the
Balakanda of his Avdhi Ramcharit, Rama is “ impersonal, unique, treasure –house
of all perfections”.
Let us remember the composition of Ramacahrit was
begun on 30th March 1574, 46 years after the construction of the
Babri Masjid. The medieval Hindi poet
seems to anticipate Ravindranath’s idea of Rama as a creation of the mind of
Valmiki. The Sangh parivar has
transformed him into a political tool. I call it a form of blasphemy, a profanation
of the Indian people’s divine hero.
The author, an eminent
scholar is former Director, the National Library of India. Collected from the editorial column of The
Sunday Statesman dated 1st
July 2001 by Aftab Alam