Rama: God or Man?

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it possible for anyone of us to accept the crown this day and move on to the

jungle the very next, for no fault of ours, just for the sake of upholding the

promise that the father made to the step-mother in the distant past, which she

utilises now to turn the tables on? That too when the father says, �You

need not listen to me; you may fight and get your kingdom back,� and the

gurus d to that view? Quite unusual human traits grip us before we

complete just the first two books of the great epic, Bala and Ayodhya Kanda.

This man�s penchant for righteousness takes us not by surprise but by

shock. He refutes his master Vasistha, turns his request down to come back and

take the crown; chides the eminent sage Jabali when he proffers pure reason and

logic that permit Rama to come

back to Ayodhya to accept the crown. �Dasaratha was none to you,�

he argues and says, �nor were you related in anyway to him. The king was

not you, while you are not the king (Dasaratha); therefore do what is

recommended (to you). The father is only an efficient cause of a creature; it

is only the sperm and the ovum conjointly retained by a (prospective) mother

during the nights favourable for conception that constitute the material cause

of a human being in this world. The aforesaid king has departed to the

destination where he was bound to go (viz., back to the five elements from

which he had sprung up). Such is the natural way of created beings, while you

are being harassed for no purpose.� (Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhya Kanda,

Canto 108, Sloka 10-12) �Rama you need not be bound by what Dasaratha

promised to Kaikeyi. It was not your promise; and Dasaratha

was responsible along with your mother just for your birth and no more. The

entire population of Ayodhya and we and Bharata desire that you are the one who

should be installed on the throne of the country. Therefore, there is no reason

why you should continue to remain in exile.� Any of our present-day

statesmen would need no more than this argument to retain his seat of power.

But not so for this man! He hits him back with an equally potent logic and

wisdom and says, �The advice that you have tendered on this occasion in

order to make available to me the pleasures of sense, which are agreeable (to

all) is not (really) worth following, although appearing as such, and is

unwholesome, though appearing as wholesome,� (Ibid, Canto

109, Sloka 2), cites the Vedas and other scriptures and questions,

�Wherefore, then, shall I, who knows all this, not carry out the behest

of my father which was based on truth and solemnised through swearing by truth,

true to (my) promise as I am? Neither from greed (of sovereignty) nor even from

infatuation nor again from ignorance shall I, overpowered by obtuseness of

understanding, violate the sanctity of my father�s pledge (given to

mother Kaikeyi) true to my promise, (as I am).� (Ibid, Sloka 16 and 17)

�I stick to my promise and it is my word which is dearer to me more than

my own life,� he declares later to Sita in the forest when she tries to

stop him from killing the ogres at the request of the Rishis there.

�apy aham jivitam jahyam tvam va site salaksmanam na tu pratijnam

samsrutya brahmanebhyo

visesatah� he says. �For truth is always dear to me. I can even

give up my life or you together with Lakshmana but not my plighted word given

especially to the Brahmanas.� (Ibid, Aranya Kanda, Canto 10, Sloka 18)

And remembers to add, �mama snehac ca sauhardad idam uktam tvaya vacah

paritusto 'smy aham site na hy anisto 'nusisyate sadrsam canurupam ca kulasya

tava sobhane.� �O Sita! I am fully pleased. For a person is never

advised unless he is dear. And it is becoming and proper not only for you but

for your family too, O beautiful lady! You are dearer to me even than life,

being my companion in Dharma.� (Ibid, Sloka 21) �I hold my life

dear

like everyone else, but you are dearer to me than my life. You are my companion

in the performance of Dharma. Lakshmana is dearer to me too than my life. But

if such a situation arises, I would rather stand for truth, than for my own

life, or you or Lakshmana. I would give up everything, including my life and

you both. But not truth.� Unimaginable. A person who displays so many

traits which are in the likeness of every common man, declares in no uncertain

terms that the chief driving force in his life is Truth and nothing but Truth

and lives for it. And, finally, when he had to give up Sita, it was for the

sake of righteousness; when he had to give up Lakshmana, it was for the sake of

this truth and when he gave up his own life in the river Sarayu, it was in part

due to this very same penchant for truth that remained with him until the very

last moment. That is why even Western scholars like J L Brockington, who did

extensive research on Valmiki Ramayana and are of the view that Valmiki did not

portray his Rama as an avatar; and the Bala and Uttara Kandas are later

additions by poets other than Valmiki, still choose to call Rama, the

righteous. In fact, Brockington calls his book by the name �The

Righteous Rama.� Rama - The story of a history A man or an avatar?

Many have been the Western as well as Indian scholars who have gone into the

question of whether Valmiki saw his Rama as an avatar or as a human being, the

best of all that mankind had seen until that time. Brockington is one of the

many eminent scholars who have analysed the Ramayana of Valmiki threadbare,

analysed the structure, gone into the grammatical and linguistic aspects,

studied the pattern of the verbal system, construction of sentences, et al,

which go into the mould that a poet adopts for himself, that goes to bear the

stamp of his own particular style and have come to several important

conclusions. How far and to what extent the conclusions can be accepted, per

se, is another question. But the conclusions are nonetheless important, though

we may have to rework on certain points, question the logical validity, test

the theory propounded by him with contradicting external - but at the same time

undeniable � evidence and see the result for ourselves. They form a very

sound and plausible basis for us in our quest for what might

be closer to the truth. According to Brockington, Valmiki could not have

composed the Bala and Uttara Kandas, which were enriched by oral tradition down

the generations of bards who recited and interpreted the �core

book� that consisted only of five cantos, namely, Ayodhya, Aranya,

Kishkindha, Sundara and Yuddha Kandas. �The original story,� he

states at the very beginning of his book �The Righteous Rama� and

continues, �began no doubt with some version of the court intrigues which

open the Ayodhya Kanda, now the second book of the epic. Here we are introduced

to the aging king of Ayodhya, Dasaratha, his

wives Kausalya, Bharata, son of Kaikeyi, and Lakshmana and Satrughna, sons of

Sumitra�� and at the end he concludes that the story, which

Valmiki could have composed somewhere between the 3rd and the 5th centuries BC,

was spread by bards reciting it to the masses, adding a few more details every

time. �And that�s how,� he concludes, �what started

as a story of a king slowly transformed into a religious text, narrating the

descending of the Lord on earth, assuming human form, depicting Rama the king

as an avatar of Vishnu.� �This concept of an avatar was not

there,� argues Brockington, �when Valmiki composed his grand

epic. �Roughly put, the essence of his arguments would boil down to

this. Then, after the composition of the epic, as it has to happen, bards got

the epic by heart, recited it to the masses and moved

about the country from the northernmost corner of this vast continent to the

southernmost tip, adding a few scenes in each geographical junction where they

stayed for a while, to tell the people that �Rama was in their place,

close to them,� so that a sense of belonging is created and the story

can be appreciated and can become more absorbing. With the passage of time,

generations and crossing of geographical boundaries, the epic grew up, evolved

and took shape.� Brockington breaks this entire evolution into five

stages, the first one being the �creation of the core book�.

�It is during the second stage,� he argues, �the complex

inter-relationship of mutual borrowing with the Mahabharata begins.� He

points to the existence of the story of Rama in the Mahabharata, which itself

is an acknowledgement of the exceeding popularity of

Ramayana. �During the second stage also the divergence into Northern and

Southern recensions was taking place, and was largely complete before the

fixing of the Uttara Kanda in the later part of the third stage. It had already

progressed significantly by the time of the Mahabharata borrowings from the

Ramayana�� he continues. In essence, what he argues is this, at

this point. �The story of Rama, which is narrated to Yudhishthira by

Markandeya in the Vana Parva in order to strengthen his flailing spirit,

contains the core events of Ramayana. Since these two epics were not distanced

in time by the passage of comparatively long number of years, the version in

Mahabharata, namely, Ramopakyana, would be much closer in

details to its original. He then points out the number of differences by way of

events narrated, between Valmiki Ramayana and the Ramopakyana. There, of

course, are many differences between these two, the chief among them being the

absence of Agni Pravesa in the Ramopakyana. But then, there are differences in

the events described in the synopsis that appears in the Bala Kanda (which is

supposed to be an interpolation, according to Brockington and many others) and

the main course of events, one of which is the absence of the second

repudiation of Sita! Rama - The story of a history Proof by absence

�The Ramopakhyana in the Mahabharata does not contain many of the

important details that are found in Valmiki Ramayana in its present form. And,

therefore, obviously,� concludes J L Brockington, of whom we have been

discussing in our last post, �these missing details in the Ramopakhyana

were deftly inserted into the text of Valmiki, much later, certainly later than

Mahabharata.� It is his conclusion that the Mahabharata must have been

composed when Valmiki Ramayana was undergoing its changes � or

�evolution�, as it is called � in the second stage (of the

five stages that Brockington has broken the process of evolution into) and this

must have been roughly around the first century BC. To quote him, �Most

probably the

Ramopakhyana was composed around the middle of the second stage, in perhaps the

first century BC.� He then enlists some of the details that are not

narrated in the Ramopakhyana of Mahabharata. �The Ramopakhyana in fact

contains no reference to several of the more obvious additions of the second

stage, for example Dasaratha's account of his slaying of the ascetic youth

(though mentioning Dasaratha�s death), Bharadvaja�s entertainment

of Bharata�s army, Jabali�s and Vasistha�s speeches to

Rama, Sita meeting with Anasuya, Valin�s accusation of Rama and his

reply, Hanuman�s killing the sons of Ravana�s ministers and

Rama�s first encounter with Ravana, to name only the most prominent

episodes and thus the most likely for inclusion,� he says. That is to

say, for example, since Ramopakhyana does

not mention anything about the first war of Rama with Ravana, this could not

have been there in the �original� version of Valmiki and that

this particular scene must have been �created� by some later bard

and has thus found its place in the Valmiki Ramayana in its present form. This

conclusion has a serious implication. Though the researcher does not mention it

explicitly, exclusion of this scene from what is proposed to be the

�original rendition� of Valmiki, one would have to take out,

deprive Rama of the highly commendable, extremely righteous, wonderfully

generous gesture, restraining himself from persisting in his fight against

Ravana when he stands without his chariot, any of his weapons or anyone of his

army, alone, saying, �I know you stand agonised through (continued)

fighting. (Therefore) depart (for the present), O king of the rangers of the

night! Re-entering Lanka and resting (awhile), sally forth (again), (duly)

mounted on a chariot and armed with a bow, then (remaining) seated in your car,

you shall witness my strength.� (Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda, Canto

49, Sloka 143) This is one scene which Kamban has beautifully rendered in

Tamil. It is a very famous and oft-quoted line. �pOrukku indru pOi

naaLai vaa.� Since you have lost your all and stand alone without

weapons, go back now. Take rest and come back tomorrow. Let us resume the war

after you rest and rejuvenate. And if this �first war� is brushed

aside as �interpolation� simply because Ramopakhyana in the

Mahabharata

does not mention it, you are depriving Rama of one of his most splendid

qualities � observing restraint in the battlefield against his sworn

enemy, when the latter was defenceless, helpless and was most vulnerable.

Without hinting at this implication, Brockington simply moves on, �It

does allude to episodes which it is reasonable to infer have been elaborated

rather than inserted � such as Sita�s spirited rejection of

Ravana before he seizes her � but always in a way that is consistent

what may be expected to have lain behind the present expanded version.�

That is, a few scenes were, of course, narrated by Valmiki; but going by what

the Ramopakhyana says, it only leads us to infer that such episodes as

Sita�s highly spirited response to Ravana when he sheds his Sanyasi

make-up and begs for her love, were not �so

spirited� when Valmiki composed his epic; but were elaborated by later

hands, bards reciting the story to the masses have worked up the words of Sita,

and have elaborated � added their own slokas � to the

�original� of Valmiki. However, such elaborations, he suggests,

have been done very well, and in consistence with the �original�

so that the �elaboration� does not stand out and allow itself to

be detected easily. And then he drops the bomb. �To cite just one

significant example, it refers to the arrival of the trio at

Sarabhanga�s hermitage but not to Indra�s previous arrival, which

seems to form part of the process of enhancing Rama�s status culminating

in his identification of an avatar.� We have narrated this

scene at the hermitage of Sarabhanga, when discussing Sita. (See: Being a human

and also What remains � a glimpse). This is one of the strong points

that underlines the idea that Valmiki did perceive his Rama as an avatar,

beyond Bala Kanda (that is, even if it is accepted that the assumption the

whole of the Bala Kanda � along with Uttara Kanda � is taken as

an interpolation, where the concept of �avatar� is presented in

what constitutes the �core book� that Brockington argues about.

He brushes this scene aside pointing to the absence of this �presence of

Indra� at the hermitage of Sarabhanga. Hmm. What

else? A structure without cement We have been discussing that one of the

important conclusions that Brockington draws on the basis of Ramopakhyana of

Mahabharata is that Rama was not depicted as an avatar of Vishnu and that

Ramopakhyana does not portray him that way, which evidences the fact that

Valmiki�s �core book� did not � till the time of

the composition of Mahabharata, which according to him was composed during the

first century BC � contain this concept of an avatar.

�Ramopakhyana is contemporary with the middle of the second

stage,� he

contends (the second stage refers to the second of the five stages of the

process of �evolution�, which, according to him, the Valmiki

Ramayana has undergone to reach its present form) and says, �and

precedes the addition of Bala and Uttara Kandas, probably forming the source of

their nuclei. Nevertheless, the religious attitude expressed in its narration of

Rama�s birth is clearly similar to that of the third stage (and also the

beginning of the Ayodhya Kanda and end of the Yuddha Kanda) so again there is a

suggestion of some overlap between the second and third stages.� Simply

put, �Rama as an avatar� (which is the connotation couched under

the long-winding phrase �the religious attitude expressed in its

narration of Rama�s birth�) developed in the third stage in the

process of �evolution�. The Ramopakhyana is a

contemporary of the �second stage version� of Valmiki Ramayana.

�Yet the Ramopakhyana is not likely to have been the innovator in this

respect,� he adds, meaning, though the concept visualising Rama as an

avatar was taking shape parallelly, this �idea� was not triggered

in by Ramopakhyana, because, �the rationale of its inclusion at that

point in the Mahabharata is that Rama is human and that is its overall

attitude.� �Such an idea seems to have been taking shape at that

time,� he infers, �however, the Mahabharata version of Ramayana

did not include it in its text.� Listen to him in his own words.

�It is more probable that ides of Rama�s divinity were beginning

to be current in the milieu in which the Ramayana circulated, without as yet

being accepted into the text, and that the Ramopakhyana

from outside was less inhibited about including them, despite some inconsistency

with its own basic position.� If one goes through this particular portion

in the Mahabharata, one is tempted to buy the argument of Brockington,

blind-folded. As we mentioned earlier, Markandeya narrates the Ramopakhyana to

Dharmaputra in the Vana Parva, when the Pandavas are undergoing their exile.

�Even such a great soul as Rama suffered exile in the jungle,�

Markandeya tells Yudhishthira. The whole purpose of this narrative is to tell

the Pandavas that they were not alone in their misfortune and there were more

or similar instances in earlier times and there were kings who had undergone

periods of misery and suffering. It is with this in view, in fact, the story of

Nala is related to them earlier by sage Vrihadaswa, in order to tell Dharmaputra

that there lived a king who lost his all

� like him � in a game of dice and regained it later, after

undergoing miseries of an untold nature. With such a purpose in view,

Markandeya tells this to Yudhishthira. �O bull of the Bharata race, even

Rama suffered unparalleled misery, for the evil-minded Ravana, king of the

Rakshasas, having recourse to deceit and overpowering the vulture, Jatayu,

forcibly carried away his wife Sita from his asylum in the woods. Indeed, Rama,

with the help of Sugriva, brought her back, constructing a bridge across the

sea, and consuming Lanka with his keen-edged arrows.� (Mahabharata, Vana

Parva, Section 272 � translated by Kisari Mohan Ganguli) On this,

Dharmaputra wants to know the story of Rama and here is how the birth of Rama

is narrated by Markandeya. "Markandeya said, 'Listen, O prince of Bharata's

race, to this old history exactly as it happened! I will tell thee all about

the distress suffered by Rama together with his wife. There was a great king

named Aja sprung from the race of Iksw�ku. He had a son named Dasaratha

who was devoted to the study of the Vedas and was ever pure. And Dasaratha had

four sons conversant with morality and profit known by the names, respectively,

of Rama, Lakshmana, Satrughna, and the mighty Bharata. And Rama had for his

mother Kausalya, and Bharata had for his mother Kaikeyi, while those scourge of

their enemies Lakshmana and Satrughna were the sons of Sumitra. And Janaka was

the king of Videha, and Sita was his daughter. And Tashtri himself created her,

desiring to make her the beloved wife of Rama. I have now told thee the history

of both Rama's and Sita's

birth.� (Ibid) This portion does not speak anything about the

�aswamedha� and the �putra kameshti� sacrifices

conducted by Dasaratha; the emergence of the �payasa� from the

sacrificial fire and the way the king shared it among the queens. It just says

Dasaratha, son of king Aja, had three queens, by whom he had four sons. And it

also does not say anything about the celebrated �ayoni sambhava�

that Sita is. It just says that she is the daughter of king Janaka of Videha.

The narration of birth ends there, which is emphasised by the Rishi�s

saying, �I have now told thee the history of both Rama's and Sita's

birth,� who then moves on to

narrate the birth of Ravana and his ancestry. That lends credence to the claims

of Brockington, indeed. But then, as we have always been emphasising, it is

always necessary to look at the picture in toto rather than basing our

conclusions on a sloka here and a sloka there. That is where the whole

structure of the eminent scholar of Ramayana collapses. A well tessellated

platform; but without cement.

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