If you flipped through the mainstream print media in the last few days, you might have thought you were in 1528 or thereabouts, when Ram mandir was likely to have been a real issue. Some 500 years later, who knew Lord Ram would still be the stuff of banner headlines?
Now that the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya has been officially opened by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, can India put the temple behind it and move on? It can’t, unfortunately. This is just the beginning and marks India’s official return to the past as its future.
The past as a source of fossil fuel for its future, towards a strong nationalist economy. In this, Modi is succeeding. The economy is growing at over 7 percent and is rated as one of the fastest-growing in the world. The price you pay for this lies elsewhere: in the cognitive aspects of a people. Ayodhya marks the beginning of the Ram phase in Indian politics and society and sanctions the interchangeability of fact for fiction. Or the other way around.
The return of Ram Lalla to Ayodhya via a tortuous legal-and-riots route since 1949 ended with the 2019 Supreme Court judgement awarding the entire 2.77-acre land to the temple trust. The Supreme Court recognised the site as the ‘birthplace of Ram’. With the prime minister inaugurating the temple, Hindu India has sanctified myth as history. You can no longer doubt the historicity of Ram. Or Modi’s intention to be anointed the first priest-king of independent India.
Ram ruled in Treta Yuga. That, according to Hindu scriptural calculations, is some 2,055,100 BCE. But he appeared at the end of it, which, according to some calculations, is roughly 5,000 BCE. We are claiming that India had a rather advanced civilisation many years ago when most historians agree that modern civilisation more or less began with the Bronze Age, about 3,000 BCE, led by the Sumerians—modern in the sense that bronze was discovered with its many applications in tools and transport.
What the validation of Treta Yuga ending with Ram Raj means is that we have effectively—even constitutionally—erased the border between myth and history. This is pretty much the stuff Abrahamic religions are made of, too. Fiction is accorded factuality. There might have been a Jesus of history, but a Christ of faith and miracles? The Christ of Immaculate Conception? In the Quran, there are instances where the Prophet is shown as a sky-traveller. So then why should Hindu myths not be accorded a similar status?
Indeed, if Ram is historic, there is no reason why Ravan, with his ten heads, is not. So of course is Lord Krishna, in Dvapara Yuga, which follows Treta. If Lord Ram, Ravan and Lord Krishna are historic, then it stands to reason that pretty much everything that happened in the Ramayan and the Mahabharat is true. Plastic surgery, missile technology, and Pushpak Viman must have existed. Mythology is sanctified as history.
Jonathan Haidt, a popular social psychologist and author, talks about the idea of sacralisation in one of his lectures. One of the processes of sacralisation is the formation of circles. Any object can be sacralised. In Mecca, the Kaaba is a stone around which people move in a circle. In Indian temples, devotees go around idols. Around the dead bodies of important people, too, we move in circles. The larger the circle, the more important and powerful the item of adoration.
If people go in circles around an object, stone, tree or human, it means a tribe is being formed, a bond is being forged. Those who do not join the circle are outsiders or even enemies. It does not matter if the stone or the cross we sanctify with our circular movement around it is one with a factual history or not. It is more real; it is faith. A piece of fiction. At any point in history, there will be more people dying for fiction or faith than for fact. This is because sacrifices can be demanded from the tribe forged from faith. The bigger the sacrifice, the stronger the tribe. Haidt says such tribalising would both “bind and blind”.
In the last few days, the prime minister has made it a point to visit dozens of temples, especially in Kerala and Tamil Nadu. The subliminal effort has been to transfer some of the power of the myth onto him. Adjacency and association are effective tools for this transference of divinity.
The circle that goes around Lord Ram has become visibly bigger. What has also happened is that the prime minister, like Lord Ram, is now at the centre of the circle. And the circle, chanting slogans of a new Ram Raj, is unifying into a tribe. An organising principle that is at work in Islam and Christianity too. What Modi is doing is to forge a tribal unity of sorts—out of the pluralistic chaos of India. This intent is clear in his ideas like One Nation, One Language, One India, One Election, and One People, One God.
With the opposition in visible disarray and Rahul Gandhi out mostly on his long constitutionals, 2024 is likely to be a Ram Lalla year. A new India is in the works. Fleetingly, it may appear as the ancient India we have read in comics and mythology as children. Except it is all too real. And the opposition has just no idea how to fight a Modi with Ram on one side and Krishna on the other. The shutter is coming down fast on ‘Mohabbat ki dukaan’—with Rahul Gandhi inside it.
C P Surendran, Poet, novelist, and screenplay writer. His latest novel is One Love and the Many Lives of Osip B
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)