As the cycle-rickshaw-man pedalled me leisurely to Laheriasarai from the maharaja’s palace where I lived in Dharbhanga one day late in the evening in the early 1990s, I asked him what would happen, now that L.K. Advani had his Rath Yatra abruptly terminated on Chief Minister Lalu Prasad’s orders. “A Kurukshetra will follow,” he assured me, without any further explanation. He took it for granted that regardless of the fact that I was a ‘Madrasi’ coming from nearly 3,000 km down south, I would totally understand this allusion from the Mahabharata to a great battle, a fight to the finish, an Indian Gotterdammerung where Arjuna destroys the Kauravas and reclaims his kingdom.
That the rickshaw-man took my understanding of India’s greatest classic for granted did not surprise me then, nor does it surprise me now; most Indians, regardless of whether they are literate or not, know practically everything about India’s two great epics in astonishing detail with all their plots and sub-plots as well as the moral import of the actions of their characters.
It doesn’t matter where in India, I have heard the most ordinary of people — vegetable-sellers, tea-shop owners, barbers and so on — falling back on our epics to reinforce a moral point or justify an action of their own or someone else’s. Thus, lying for a right cause they’d fall back on Yudhishtira and a just battle is the one that is a fight to the finish with right vanquishing wrong as on the battlefield of Kurukshetra in the Mahabharata, or Lankapura in Ramayana.
When Indira Gandhi declared a a State of Emergency in 1975, she was often referred to across the country as Shurpanakha, Ravana’s sister and an evil woman, who deserved to be cut to size or destroyed. That even the wise and the honourable can occasionally commit wrong, is clearly brought out in both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. Rama’s killing of the upright Bali is often cited as an example, as also the pusillanimity displayed by the Pandavas as their wife Draupadi was being disrobed by the Kauravas.
When Prime Minister P.V. Narasimha Rao was accused of bribing parliamentarians to support and stabilise his government, it was widely accepted that he was only fulfilling his duty as a leader to ensure political stability to carry through inevitable reforms in the country. To do one’s duty, regardless of the consequences or expectation of reward is, as we all know, a central teaching of the Bhagvad Gita.
Filial piety is something held in high esteem throughout the country, and both the epics reinforce the point well, in ways most people across India understand. While the Mahabharata is somewhat north India-centric, many places in the rest of India are named after those found in the Ramayana. Travelling often through southern Kerala in the 1980s, my driver would stop for tea at Chadayamangalam, a place named after Jatayu the bird king who tried to stop Ravana from abducting Sita and was killed in the process.
While much of the sub-continent has only briefly come together a few times in the past, the two epics contributed to an idea of India in the minds of its people which embraced the whole country. The epics also contributed to the development of common pan-Indian ethical standards. Thus, the message from the epics to take on wrong-doers and finish them off is a recurring theme in Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s talks and speeches while, in her diatribes against him, West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee refers to him as Ravana.
The values contained in our two epics are widely accepted as Indian values with no geographic specificity. Gandhi was amongst the earliest mass leaders to leverage this and use it effectively to communicate with India’s masses. Everyone in India understands that Gandhi’s Ram rajya stood for uprightness of conduct in the ruler and the rights of citizens to question and demand answers to issues they had with the leadership of a country.
While Gandhi never placed Hinduism above any other religion, he communicated the values contained in the Gita and the Ramayana so effectively across the sub-continent that there was no doubt in the minds of most Indians that he was seen and worshipped as an essentially Hindu savant of great wisdom, compassion and austerity. Like Gandhi, both Vivekananda and his spiritual guru Ramakrishna fit into a broadly secular yet intensely Hindu mould. The Ramakrishna order though it consciously attempts, through its symbolisms, to amalgamate all religions, in the minds of those visiting Belur Math there is no doubt that it is a Hindu shrine, not the least because it is situated on the banks of the Ganga.
The pan-Indian understanding of India’s epics and the internalisation of its values undoubtedly made it possible for its people to easily unite politically when freedom came in 1947. Thus, while the integration of India’s princely states into the Indian Union was a great achievement, it was a foregone conclusion that they would come together anyway — for an overwhelming majority of the princes broadly accepted the values that our epics stood for.
At the end of the day one needs to accept that India’s two great epics have held our country together emotionally for ages, even as it remained politically fragmented, as was so often the case. It also ties us to Nepal and Sri Lanka in the minds of most Indians, the latter forever remaining the place where Sita was held and finally recovered after her abductor, Ravana, was vanquished.
To some people, the country-wide understanding of our epics affirms India as a Hindu country excluding all others. But to the likes of Gandhi the lessons the epics hold are ones of love, courage, the sheer diversity of goodness and above all steadfast loyalty and faith in justice. That is what Ram rajya meant to Gandhi as much as Yudhishtira’s refusal to enter heaven without the faithful dog that had followed him to its gates, did. Fortunately, it is the later view of our epics that has so far prevailed. And the best one can hope for is that these will continue to unite us now and always.
