This entry is dedicated to a wonderful person who is gifted with the rare talent of converting everything into gold.
One of the more abused characters in the world of Indian epics is Rama, son of Dasharatha and husband of Sita. The focus of this entry is on the words underlined.
Modern day interpreters of Indian mythology have come up with interesting labels for Rama. The feminists especially, love to hate Rama while the intellectuals see him as a promoter of upper caste hegemony (sic). Perhaps, the most (in)famous label applied to him is the one that the feminists apply to him, and which the Indian Left prominently endorses: wife-torturer/insensitive husband/MCP/fill in the blanks. The most “compelling evidence” for arriving at this label, they say, is to be found in the Uttara Kaanda of Ramayana.
So let’s see what the Uttara Kaanda says.
Brief Story of the Uttara Kaanda
The Uttara Kaanda begins where Ramayana ends, so to say. There’s some dispute about the authorship of Uttara Kaanda, but that’s irrelevant here; let’s assume for the sake of convenience that Valmiki himself wrote it.
The story begins with a post-exile, victorious Rama being coronated the king of Ayodhya. Then follows a reasonably long span of Rama Rajya–an extended period of prosperity where the citizenry is happy. Rama, the dutiful king ensures that every citizen is happy, no one has reason to blame him or his administration for being unhappy, he personally attends to every grievance, etc, etc. I’ve italicized this sentence with a good reason. Read on.
And so you have the Calm before the Storm.
The incident of a washerman abusing his wife, threatening to turn her out of his house because of her extended stay at her mother’s place is brought to Rama’s notice. What is spectacular about this seemingly-insignificant incident is the rationale he gives to his wife for turning her out: do you think I’m Rama who took his wife back after being separated from her for more than 10 years?
Rama the king, sees in this incident a probable sign of his failure as a king. Remember, his primary duty as a king was to ensure that not one of his citizens had cause to be unhappy–if they were, he would do all it took to make them happy.
And so he renounced a pregnant Sita. He sent her to the forest, left her under the tender care of Sage Valmiki. Later, when he performed the Ashwamedha yaga (=horse sacrifice), he ordered his artists/craftsmen/sculptors to build a golden idol of Sita because the rules of the yaga mandated that a householder had to perform it along with his wife.
I won’t bother to narrate the rest of the story because it isn’t pertinent to what I have to say.
Rama as a Husband
What kind of a husband was Rama?
Before I attempt to answer this question, I’d like to share something a person I consider my guru, told me. The chief distinction between the nature of Ramayana and the Mahabharata is in their narrative style: while the Mahabharata contains generous doses of elaborate sermons at several junctures, it is hard to discern a fraction of this kind of sermonizing in Ramayana. My own perception is that in this difference lies the subtlety of Ramayana. And it is apt, for Ramayana is derived from Rama+Aayana, or roughly, “Journey of Rama.” Concepts such as ethics, philosophy, dharma, etc are embedded in the lives rather than in the sermons/speeches, of the characters in Ramayana. The behaviour of the characters in Ramayana in the face of trying situations themselves convey these precepts very subtly.
The person who truly understood Rama as a person, as a king, and as a husband was Sita. A telling instance is when she as a newly-married bride, tells her assessment of Rama to Arundhati; she uses the word Anukrosha to describe his character. The word Anukrosha is derived from Anu+Krosha, which literally means “one who weeps with you,” (Krosha=Weep) or generally speaking, it means, empathy, compassion, and tenderness, which I think is more important than mere verbal proclamations of everlasting love. Anukrosha also means the ability/quality to experience an other person’s pain as if it were your own.
Several instances of Rama’s character as a husband can be gleaned from his despair when Sita is kidnapped. He gazes at the moon in the hope that Sita at the same time would do similarly, and at least in this expression, he can meet her. He is reminded of Sita at every instance in his quest to rescue her: the mountains, in the character of Jatayu, who is blessed because he fought Ravana to rescue her, in the rivers, and the air. Personally, I find the greatest expression of his spousal love in the incident where he chases Maricha who has taken the form of a golden deer. Despite his knowledge that a golden deer cannot physically exist, he goes behind it for the sole reason that Sita asked for it. And that incident is perhaps the greatest irony of Ramayana: he is separated from Sita because he loves her dearly.
It is also important to analyze Rama’s role as a husband keeping in perspective the socio-historical context. His own father had three wives and innumerable other…err…concubines. Which tells us that the society of that time accepted this kind of an arrangement. Trying to impose the mores of our own time to an entirely different, historical period to analyze Rama’s character is fallacious, to say the least. Yet, Rama in such a period married and stuck to only one woman throughout his life. The golden idol of Sita at the Ashwamedha yaga is significant here. If Rama had so wished, he could’ve remarried if only to fulfill the condition of the Ashwamedha yaga. Instead, he chose to symbolize–in the form of a golden idol–and reaffirm that only Sita was (is) his wife.
Continued in Part 2
Tags: Indian Philosophy
Whether Uttara kanda is part of the original Ramayana itself is a major issue. But there are a few of things in ramayana and uttara ramayana that I consider inappropriate. Will wait for part 2, before I put down my thoughts
And yes, thanks for the compliments
as they say, all that glitters…
‘MY KINGDOM IS NOT OF THIS WORLD” SO SAYS THE BIBLE. IN THE SAME WAY RAMA NEVER COULD JUDGE ANYONE AS EVIDENT IN UTTARA KANDA. THROUGHOUT THE EPIC, HE COULD DO ONLY WHAT HE WAS TOLD. FROM BANISHMENT TO HIS RETURN. SITA IS NONE OTHER THAN GANGA AS BHOGAVATHI DEPICTED BY RISHI VALMIKI. TAKING THIS VIEW I DO NOT THINK THAT THE CRITICISM LEVELLED AGAINST HIM STANDS JUSTIFIED. THIS EPIC IS LEAST UNDERSTOOD EVEN IN INDIA. MANY DO NOT EVEN KNOW THAT VALMIKI RISHI HAD WRITTEN A SECOND RAMAYANA DEPICTING HIM IN A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE. ONE IS DWAITA AND THE SECOND IS ADWAITA PHILOSOPHY THE DEEP MEANINGS OF WHICH ESCAPE CURSORY READERS.
My compliments on your post. Perhaps you are aware of- and as puzzled as I am about- a recent tendency amongst Western intellectuals (e.g. Fred halliday, Karen Armstrong, etc) to ascribe to the ‘Hindu fundamentalists’ (whatever those might be) a desire to ‘turn Lord Rama into a vengeful Father God’ - i.e. Yahweh- and thus impose an Abrahamic Monotheism on a previously heteronomously (ie. superstitiously) polytheistic populace. According to this view, the demand that India should be called ‘Bharat’is also a sinister part of the conspiracy because the Bharat after whom our country is named is not (as you and I innocently assumed) the son of Sakuntala but ‘the step-brother of Lord Rama’ (this last piece of idiocy from our own beloved Gayatri Spivak Chakroboty who claims to know Sanskrit and be of Brahmin caste! If you don’t believe me, check her ‘Critique of Post Colonial Reason)
Clearly these guys are getting their facts from some fatuous book our leftist Historians put out at the time of the Babri Masjid controversy. Indeed, the nonsense written and believed about Lord Rama is our rather than some foreigners fault.
The uttara kanda portion of the Ramayana is not really a puzzle. What is puzzling is how a previous generation of great Indians totally got it wrong. Thus Rajaji says that the Uttara Kanda is not canonical but perhaps an interpolation reflecting the tragic lives of our womenfolk- i.e. Rajaji is accepting the Colonialist view that Hinduism is basically about making women miserable, just as Gandhiji accepted Katherine Mayo’s view that India’s main problem- and the reason it could not legitimately take up arms to liberate itself- was MASTURBATION. Only the peasants toiling in the fields- she tells us- have not ruined themselves utterly through self-abuse- but only because the ryots under the benevolent British Raj are too emaciated and undernourished to muster up an ejaculation.
What is the key utterance of the uttara kanda? It is this. The barber says ‘I am not Rama’. But if the barber is not Rama then Ramrajya is just Rama’s Raj not democracy. So long as there are two moralities- one for the Ruler another for the Subjects- there is no democracy. True Ram’s throne was nothing but the love of the people. Tulsi tells us-
Danda jatinha kara bheda jahan nartaka nrtya samaaja
Jeetahu manahi sunia asa Raamacandra ken raaja!
(Much prattles the Machiavellian parrot of Stick & Carrot, Divide and Rule
But Love’s plural dance of Ego-conquest was Ramrajya’s only tool!)
How then could Lord Rama change the husband’s suspicious nature with respect to his wife?- i.e how stop the fool from destroying his own happiness? How change Society’s attitude to the return of the wandered wife? (What if it was not your sister-in-law but your sister who had been abducted or gone astray?) Since Lord Rama was the one most beloved, he had to inflict this pain on himself so that through anukrosha all beings could advance. This is the King as pharmakos- the scapegoat- who takes on all the evils of the realm so as to free his subjects from them. However the Greek and Hebrew pharmakos just ended with the slaughter of some dumb animal. The true pharmakos is to take on suffering not for death- death is easy, ask any suicide bomber- but for the sake of knowledge, for true knowledge- as Aeschylus saw- comes only through suffering.
But what is this saving knowledge? The answer addresses the most basic anxiety humans have- what Freud called the ‘fort da’ problem- object permanence & abandonment issues- the baby’s anxiety that the mother ceases to exist when not visible. Baby’s anger at the mother when she returns- baby’s refusal to play and turning angrily away for not having forgiven the mother for ceasing to exist.
Now Indian poets had long ago made the equation between the viyogini (woman separated from lover) and the yogini (woman in mystic trance) both do not eat, are turned away from the input of the senses, have single pointed concentration etc.
Thus emotional dualism is the same as intellectual monism. Puranic and Upanishadic Religion cash out as each other.
Why is this important? It means there is a bridge between absence and presence, existence and non-existence. Thus Ramrajya does not depend on whether Rama lives or dies, is exiled or enthroned. real or imaginary.
Uttara Kanda is political. Why? Because it prescribes absoulute reciprocity and symmetry between all agents. There are no priviliged frames of reference or points of view. To quote Brahma Sutra aphorism 3.3.37- vyatihaaraha, viśinşanthi hiitaravat- ‘Scripture prescribes reciprocity between worshipper and worshipped’
From the point of view of both information theory and our own mimamsa- memory, love, and ‘identity’ are disequilibrium phenomena- but this negentropy is life and so says Valmiki, though presently breath-blinded, the mirror of salvation.
To end let me quote Aziz Mian Qawwall’s ‘Ram tera gorakh dandha’- ‘Aaa Ram! Aaram.’