About a fortnight back, I had picked up Valmiki Ramayan
from the bookstore, primarily to read it to my daughter. That the weekend was
to be followed by Dusshera and Valmiki Jayanti was not on my mind. Valmiki
Ramayan is to my mind a great work of Indian Literature. It is the first big
book I had ever read, sometime when I was in class IVth. It is considered to be
first epic in the human history, first poetic story.
The book
was written in the backdrop of early human history. I would rather presume that
it reflects the time when Human civilization was in the initial stages of
moving out from the forests, with one set of people still staying in the
forest, still away from the concepts of reading and writing, farming like
Vanars; another who moved into agricultural world, still close to nature and
counting on the early discover of fire to keep themselves safe, being on the
periphery of the forests; and the third which was arrogantly destroying the old
ways of life, negating the nature, and building the big, huge infrastructure,
and shiny capitals of greed. Valmiki’s
Ramayan is reflective of those times and his. He wrote it in the times when
society was not yet broken into faultlines, Varnas
had not yet become rigid as castes. In those days, a wise man was a wise man, a
writer, like Valmiki, was a writer and not a Dalit writer. Brahmin was the one
who sought the truth and that was the reason, once Valmiki wrote the first
couplet of human history, he, Ratnakar, most likely a non-brahmin, was designated a Mahrishi (The great sage) Valmiki, by
none other than Narada, the priests and guru of the Gods. It would be dishonor
to Valmiki to celebrate him as anything but a seeker of truth, and the first
litterateur.
Valmiki
neither claims to be a prophet, nor he claims the story to be true. Ramayana
and Ram as the Hero of the epic, became close to Hinduism and people started
identifying it with Hinduism. I am not saying that we must, as Indians, as
Hindus, not take pride in it. I am saying more than Ram, we must take pride in
Ramayan, and the great writer who wrote it. This duality between literature and
religious book while initially propagated and popularized it, later it also harmed it in some ways. This literary
fiction and its faults were used for Hindu bashing. The fault-lines of Story Ramayan, which is a great work of art, has been used to discredit Hindus, Characters criticized as if they were real people, guided by current social conventions and norms, by
competing faiths who were amused by the extent of acceptance of Hinduism in the
absence of any decree, any deception or any force.
It is a
great book of fiction, a long story which carries several sub-stories within,
masterly stitched together to resemble reality. It does carry the thought and
sensibility of Valmiki as a writer. I am not writing this essay as any
alternate reading, a fashionable term used by non-believers to define faith for
the faithful. I am writing this as a tribute to possibly the first writer in
the history of humanity. Possibly at the time when we moved out of the caves,
and some of us still were in caves, Vanars; one set moved away from the Forests
and established great, though grotesque cities of gold as a testament to greed, like Suvarna-Lanka (Golden Lanka) of Raavan and another civilization, stayed close to them, settling on the periphery of
the familiar forest life, choosing a farming life, cattle-rearing and the pursuit of knowledge-
those early days when we moved from pictures on the walls of the caves to
alphabets and words. In those early days, Valmiki wrote this and thereby
established an illustrious line of individual which will someday have Ved Vyas, Yeats, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Virginia
Woolf, Rushdie, Marquez and Dinkar and Chetan Bhagat. It is not about
religion and let us not make it so.
Like
writers of the later days, Valmiki was progressive and way ahead of his time. His Ram
represented his thoughts and ideas in what he did and even in what he did not
do. The story represents a conflict between the truly intellectual society and
a brash, bragging society- selfish, self-oriented, boisterous Rakshashas. Ram,
the Hero for Valmiki was one woman man (ek-
Patnivrata). No, he was not writing for his time. He was writing for the
times ahead. His time was not for monogamy. Ram’s father, Raja Dashrath, had
four wives. Valmiki won’t make or have his characters make noisy protests about
it. He doesn’t make it a propaganda like some modern writers would. He would
carefully, craftily bring in Ram as the new-age man, who is committed to his
wife. He sets an example of love and family by setting up Ram as a model for monogamy, in the age of polygamy. This was possibly revolutionary for those times. The fact that polygamy
still continued till such time that it was made illegal by law, also indicates
that unlike say a Quran or Bible, while Ramayan of Valmiki was a reformative
and progressive story, it was that and nothing more, a story with a message.
You don’t get killed, or cursed or go to hell
for not behaving as Ram. It is like the love of Gatsby is moving, inspiring,
close to the heart, but it is not binding on any man to love a woman thus and
to die protecting her honor thus.
Like any
self-respecting author, he subtly places himself in Ram, wherever he wants to
make a point. He quickly makes a point and gets out of it. Today, progressive
intellectuals write about the moral dishonesty of our society which places the stigma
of rape on the woman. Currently a newspaper is running a series of essays by
eminent personalities to counter this. Valmiki wrote Ahalya Udhhar (the
Redemption of Ahalya by Ram) thousands of years back on the same lines. In brief, Ahalya was the wife of Sage Gautama.
There are various accounts of what happened, one says, Indra raped her, another
says, Indra deceived her, by transforming himself into Gautama, her much older
husband, another version says that she realized it was Indra but much later,
and was by then tempted by Indra’s praise to her beauty. Whichever version we
take, Valmiki, takes no side. Whether it was her fault, her foolishness or her
folly, Valmiki refuses to paint her as a “fallen” woman. He calls her divine and
while she is cursed by her husband to stay hidden from the world or stay
excommunicated from the unforgiving society at large (if we translate poetic
description with a more realistic explanation), Valmiki guides Ram, Ram- who is
a part of the Divine, who is God’s own incarnation, to her, smiles at her and
accepts her hospitality. This marks her coming back to life, her being a part of larger world which had stopped taking note of her, as a woman, as a person. I know, many would pounce upon me, on this, citing how
Ram had treated his own wife, Sita after he rescued her from Ravana’s
kidnapping. I shall come to it, and try to explain.
How Ram
gets together Vanars, Hanuman and other, together and as we find in the Uttarkand, even make them stake-holders
in governance, in his kingdom is also another progressive idea for those times
when the society was just forming and frameworks were just getting established.
He takes the Vanvasi with him, gets them the stake in real power and even
considers at times, Hanuman, closer than Lakshman.
Then there is the instance
of Shabari. Shabari is a hunter’s daughter. Moved by the plight of animal’s
being killed, she goes under the tutelage of Sage Matanga. The learned sage
teaches her, and while leaving the mortal world tells her to wait for Ram. She
waits for years for Ram, plucking berries and tasting them for Ram. When Ram
arrives, she, daughter of a Nishadh, a hunter tribesman, offers those
half-eaten berries to Ram. When Lakshman objects, Ram tells him that Shabari’s
affection for him is beyond all the various forms of prayers which people offer
him, for it is simple, true and bereft of any pretension. With one act of his,
Ram, the Hero created by Valmiki, demolishes the caste and class barriers. The
fact that thousands of years down, we still had untouchability and it even
sneaked into a popular translation of Ramayan (Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas) also
proves that Ramayana is not a Hindu religious text as many contend. If it were so, we would have ended both polygamy and untouchability thousands of years back. In Hinduism, even religious texts are not binding, at least not threateningly binding; this was only an Epic.
There is a reason for trying to convert this story, this great work of literature, closely related to Hindu mythology, into Hindu religious text. It is thus identified
with Hindu identity and lashed at, for the behavior of the characters in this
story, which eventually evolves into Hindu bashing. This is something like blaming
American Christians for the derogatory manner in which a character speaks about
the black people in The Great Gatsby.
It should rather go to the credit of such a great force of literature, and the inherent accommodation of contrary views in ancient Indian society, that he
could have such brilliant thoughts in such ancient an age. Raavana was a
Brahmin and even his caste could not save him from the misfortune his arrogance
brought to him. The Dalit scholars of today identify themselves with a Brahmin
and oppose the one who supports the one worked with the tribals, smacks of
their lack of understanding and their attempt at attacking a religion basis a
work of fiction merely because it has characters from Hindu mythology.
Another
important point on which Ram is bashed and thereby, Hinduism is bashed, is the
treatment meted to Sita by Ram, First as she has to walk through a funeral pyre
after she is rescued from Raaavan’s captivity in Lanka, and later, when Ram
abandons her on account of one of his citizen raising question about Sita’s
chastity in long captivity by Raavan. Valmiki justifies the first incident in a
political manner. Ram was to become the king on return to Ayodhya, and there
was so much of bloodshed to rescue Sita. Ram wanted to prove that all that
struggle, the loss of life, was not personal, it was for a larger good-
liberation of people of Lanka from an oppressor, a tyrant. Being divine, Ram
knew it well that Sita is chaste and pious and will not be hurt by the fire. In
the time, when the King was the state and State was the King, through his
protagonist, Valmiki tries to prove, that King is state as a patron, as a
symbol of state, not as a person, as an individual, certainly not as a grieving husband. The
king represents something bigger than his human form and cannot act on the
basis of his human impulses and certainly cannot use the state machinery to fulfill his personal objectives. State resources must only be used for larger
public good only. Through Ram, Valmiki establishes the democracy inherent in
Hinduism, even in those days of Monarchy. This democratic aspect also comes
into picture in the later abandonment of Sita by Ram, when she was pregnant.
Many are up in arms against not only Ram, but Hindus for this act of injustice.
It was unjust. True. Even Sita could not understand this never
ending expectation of people from its leader in a democratic world, and
eventually refused to be a part of it. But then, Valmiki had established Ram as
a model ruler. What could possibly his character in the story have done? Could
Ram have left the state with Sita, and left the state to whom?. Where would
that leave all the bloodshed and war and fighting? So many lives lost, for
nothing? Eventually would a Ram leaving the responsibility of ruling a state
which had set so many expectations on him as divine father, like an ordinary,
family man, surrendering his lofty ideals for domestic duties be in line with the character created to present eventually a role model for governance- Ram Rajya? Would this have
been in line with the character which Valmiki had so painstakingly developed?
Can we imagine Lord Jim of Joseph Conrad, selling used-cars and flirting with girls? Sometimes the
writer gets stuck with the characters he creates, in a way that there is no way out. Every writer knows that. The
best of us will be able to disentangle ourselves with least damage to the
character built with such labor and love. Valmiki does that. So when Sita is
prays to the Mother Earth and is taken in, hounded by such repeated
humiliation, He says even grieving Ram knows that she will be waiting for him in another world, away from the censorious
eyes of people with narrow minds. Valmiki doesn’t justify those people who make
comments on Sita, he is equally sad, as much as his hero. He sends a lesson to
the society which derives voyeuristic pleasure imagining personal lives of
their leaders. It is not a lesson for Ram, it is a lesson for the people of
Ayodhya, who eventually curse Ram, after the gallant victory he had won for them, into becoming
a tragic, Shakespearean hero, ending his days in a lonely, private purgatory,
while performing his public duties towards the larger good.
Ramayan is not a story with happy ending. It was not meant
to be. he first Shloka of Ramayan, considered to be first poetic words written in Human history, tells us where Valmiki wanted to go with the story:
Having uttered these words, Valmiki discovered the beauty of written verse, and the first poetry dawned on human race in all its divinity. Valmiki then set on writing this great epic. It culminated out of sadness, after Valmiki saw two birds and the sudden killing of one of the two birds during their mating dance. He was moved and began writing Ramayana, it was meant to end in longing and sadness. He knew where his story was supposed to go, and that is where it goes.
Ram is good king, but he is not a happy king. He is a tragic hero who has sacrificed his love and family for a larger good. It is a sad story. Failure of Ram as a hero is the success of Valmiki as a writer. That is my opinion. It is a progressive story. It is not a social essay, although like any good writer, Valmiki has placed progressive thoughts on monogamy, sharing of power, engagements with social pariahs, opposing stigmatization of women, casteism.
Let us not judge him on religion and politics. Let us celebrate his writing and poetry and let us celebrate the society in which innovative thoughts were celebrated for thousands of years while the world about us was still settling the arguments through stoning and beheading. But it is not a religious work. If it has any connection with religion, it was about the direction an enlightened, emancipated, intellectual mind wanted it to go. I am not worthy enough to review the first epic of human history, nor intellectual enough to offer alternate reading. I offer this as my understanding and interpretation and as the tribute to the Grand Priest of Poetry, Mahrishi Valmiki.
मा निषाद प्रतिष्ठां त्वमगमः शाश्वतीः समाः ।
यत् क्रौंचमिथुनादेकम् अवधीः काममोहितम् ।।
Translation: Oh hunter, may you never get your honor restored for a thousand years,
For you have killed, an innocent bird, lost in love, mercilessly, without any tears.
Ram is good king, but he is not a happy king. He is a tragic hero who has sacrificed his love and family for a larger good. It is a sad story. Failure of Ram as a hero is the success of Valmiki as a writer. That is my opinion. It is a progressive story. It is not a social essay, although like any good writer, Valmiki has placed progressive thoughts on monogamy, sharing of power, engagements with social pariahs, opposing stigmatization of women, casteism.
Let us not judge him on religion and politics. Let us celebrate his writing and poetry and let us celebrate the society in which innovative thoughts were celebrated for thousands of years while the world about us was still settling the arguments through stoning and beheading. But it is not a religious work. If it has any connection with religion, it was about the direction an enlightened, emancipated, intellectual mind wanted it to go. I am not worthy enough to review the first epic of human history, nor intellectual enough to offer alternate reading. I offer this as my understanding and interpretation and as the tribute to the Grand Priest of Poetry, Mahrishi Valmiki.
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