When Gandhiji was asked who Ram is, he responded that Ram is the name of the truth in his conscience. There is no name in Indian culture, religion and civilisation that evokes so many emotions and meanings as his name. Before modern-day politicians hijacked the term and used it as a tool to grab power, Ram was never a divisive figure in Indian culture, until Periyar Ramaswamy Naicker and his Dravidian movement made him into one. The Dravidian movement identified Ram with Brahminical dominance and the Ramayana as a propaganda tool of Brahminism to rule over all other castes.
On August 1, 1956, Periyar planned a march on Chennai’s Marina beach to burn pictures of Sri Ram. He was arrested, and his followers were lathi-charged. In 1974, Ravan Leela was organised by the Dravidar Kazhagam, under the leadership of Periyar’s widow, according to the wishes of Periyar, who died in 1973. Periyar wanted to conduct Ravan Leela in response to Ram Leela. It is ironic that Ram, a kshatriya prince, became associated with Brahmanical hegemony and the Brahmin king Ravan became the victim in Periyar’s Dravidian movement.
The Hindutva movement of the 1980s and 1990s was the next to use Ram’s name. The Ram Janmabhoomi movement became the second occasion in which Ram inadvertently became a divisive figure in our country. From the rural North Indian’s heartfelt greeting of “Ram-Ram” or “Jai Siya Ram”, the name got associated with the war cry “Jai Sri Ram”. Just as an innocuous “Allahu Akbar”—which means God is great—started invoking disturbing associations with religious fanaticism and even terrorism, Ram, a name associated with truth for Gandhiji, became associated with the uncharacteristic aggression of a supposedly gentle religion. This is what politics does to cultural symbols.
In my childhood, Ram was never depicted alone in calendars or temples. Ram without Sita, Lakshman and Hanuman was considered inauspicious and incomplete. The stock calendar picture that adorned the puja rooms was of Ram’s coronation. It invoked tranquillity and benediction. When posters of an angry Ram—an arrow notched in his bow, glaring at an angry sea, ready to annihilate some imaginary enemy—started appearing, the elders in the village were disturbed. This was against tradition and culture. It boded ill luck and misfortune, claimed some. But they didn’t know that the very nature of the civilisation was changing, and India was becoming a place where there was no place for Gandhiji’s Ram, or those of Tulsidas or Ezhuthachan or Kamban.
But is it the first time Ram’s name was used for propaganda in our history? Didn’t Gandhi use Ram’s name with a political agenda? The song Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram was written much before his time, but it was Gandhi who made it synonymous with his vision of Independent India. He insisted that Allah was another name for Ram. Though it resonated with many, such assertions are not potent enough to overcome the training of Abrahamic faiths, which insist on the supremacy of One God—their God, as their book defines Him. Once you bring religion into politics in a multicultural country, there is no escaping it.
Gandhi insisted on the ideal of Ram Rajya for the India of his dreams. But the concept of Ram Rajya had never invoked images of an ideal state in any place other than the Gangetic belt. Hinduism is a diverse religion with no idea of one supreme god or supremacy of one single book. The strength of Hinduism was that it never depended on one holy place, one god or one holy book. Hinduism was and is still primarily an agglomeration of innumerable ways of life, countless legends and village deities. This diversity helped it to withstand bloody religious invasions over centuries. The Islamic invasion of medieval India is perhaps the bloodiest in human history. Yet, the civilisation, albeit with all its warts and wounds, survived and flourished. Not many polytheistic religions have so successfully resisted the onslaught of Abrahamic faiths in the medieval era.
It was challenging to destroy Hinduism because of its mind-boggling localisation of faith and the freedom of thought it propagated. The Bhakti era, which brought Ram into prominence in our traditions, is owed to the crisis that followed the Islamic onslaught. But the Bhakti saints didn’t restrict themselves to one popular god. There was space for different faiths, and the devotional cult of Krishna, Shiva, Ganesh, Ayyappa, Murugan, Durga or localised forms like Jagannath, Balaji or Kamakhya, made sure that the faith was freed from the clutches of priests and became inclusive, cutting across divisions of caste, gender and social hierarchy. It didn’t matter the invaders had destroyed some temples or holy places, or whether the priests allowed others to read the sacred texts, for such faith did not need any readers. The god one prayed to resides in the local temple, in the puja room of one’s home, under the village banyan tree, in the grove at the edge of the village or in one’s heart. Such a culture need not fear any religious bigot or a tyrant to destroy its faith. Such a religion does not depend on one book, god or temple.
Gandhiji broke this delicate balance when he invoked Ram Rajya and started using Ram’s name in politics. His intention may have been pure, but it destroyed the strength of India and its deeply-rooted Hindu culture. To act fair, he had to support the religious movement of Muslims too, and his bizarre support for the Khilafat movement—a move to restore the Islamic caliphate in Turkey, triggered a chain reaction, including the infamous religious genocide of Malabar in 1921.
The seeds of the Partition owe their roots to such mixing of religion and politics. The Dravidian movement was a reaction to the invoking of Ram’s name in vain. And the origins of the Hindutva movement are also in this potent mix of religion and politics that Gandhiji started.
Hinduism is now going through a tectonic change, becoming more Abrahamic in its nature, invoking god’s name as an aggressive slogan, insisting on one holy place and the supremacy of one expression of god, etc. Insisting that the Gita—one among thousands of sacred books of Hinduism—is the pillar of its faith, like the Bible or the Koran, is indicative of its changing nature. Unfortunately, Ram, one among the many gods that Bhakti saints invoked—to reform, unite and soothe a broken society—has now become a tool of aggression and a chariot of political ambition.
If Hinduism becomes a mirror image of Abrahamic faiths, then, with its lingering caste system and social inequality, it will end up as a culture with all the negatives of Semitic religions, but with none of their virtues. Perhaps, the antidote to this mutation lies in the nature of Ramayana itself. No text has so many variations and versions. There are countless Rams. By telling and retelling their stories, as has been done for millennia, we may hope that Hinduism will survive its most significant challenge, from its most dangerous challenger. It is essential for the world that our ancient civilisation preserves its nature of celebrating diversity of views, faiths and perspectives.
(This appeared in the print edition as "Ishwar, Allah Tero Naam")
(Views expressed are personal)
