Reclaiming Sri Rama Mandir: A Landmark in Recovering Bharatavarsha's Spiritual Freedom

Preface

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 the Maratha power, and the triumph of the 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, fifty 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 the 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 the 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 Temple is likewise an epic saga. It is the ultimate homage offered by the collective Hindu consciousness both to 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 to 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: “madhumayabhaṇitīnāṃ mārgadarśī maharṣiḥ — Valmiki Maharshi is the path-maker for honeyed expressions of poetry.”       Bhoja’s junior contemporary, the 11^th century Kashmiri aesthetician and poet Kshemendra offers a similar oblation: “namaḥ sarvopajīvyaṃ taṃ kavīnām cakravartinaṃ — O Valmiki, the Emperor of poets who remains the refuge of all poets, we bow to Thee!” The 15^th Century Kannada poet Naranappa (fondly known as Kumaravyasa) pays an oblique tribute to the Ramayana’s endurance and profusion when he declares in his Karnāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 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 20^th century poets Viswanatha Satyanarayana (Rāmāyaṇa Kalpavṛkṣamu, Telugu) and K.V. Puttappa (Sri Rāmāyaṇa Darśanaṃ, 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.  

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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: 

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: 

Needless, the Ramayana tradition in China was gobbled up by Communism. 

Four years later, India too, organised a mamooth International Seminar on The Ramayana Tradition in Asia in Delhi from 8 - 12^th December, 1975. A whopping 50 top-ranking scholars from the world attended it. 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 Rama 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 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 inbetween.      

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There is an instructive sidelight to this. Of the ten Avatars, only three assumed the human form — Parasurama, Sri Rama and Sri Krishna. Of these, our culture  celebrates the bāla-līlās (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 Bāla Rama’s forehead. And now, the same Bāla 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 nonexistent 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 Arthasastra: “mānād rāvaṇaḥ paradārānaprayacchan duryodhano rājyāṃśaṃ ca — do not to 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 the precepts of the Ramayana and other sacred literature. Sadly, there is no school in our democratic setup that instills 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 it 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 ANANTAKRISHNA SARMA, 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 it. Accordingly, he opened the work, located the verses and began reading it 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 list of dismantling the 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 that 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. 

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A central tactic that the Leftists deployed in their opposition to the Rama Temple  was to dismiss the Rama tradition by recasting it as a 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 a myth, then Rama was a fictional character and therefore, the Hindus had no right over the Janmasthan. In fact, an eminence named M.V. Ratnam went so far as to claim that Rama was actually Pharaoh Ramses II who was born in Egypt! Likewise, perverse and imported sociological theories of caste, patriarchy, feminism, etc., were deliberately force-fitted as aids to this depraved 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 Sarma puts this in perspective: “any 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 synonymn for Hindu hatred, naturally found Sri Rama offensive. This is precisely the subtext of K.M. Munshi’s dire warning in his letter to Nehru: 

What was true of Somanath is truer of Ayodhya. It has always been my considered conviction that the Sri Rama Mandir should have never been degraded to the status of a mere court case or even worse, a “title dispute.” The reclamation of Somanath 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: “rāmo vigrahavān dharmaḥ — Rama is the embodiment of Dharma.” Thus, what is happening in Ayodhya is not just Prana Pratishta. It is dharma punaḥsthāpana — 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. 

|| Sri Rama Jayam ||