Now that there’s a new god — Ram Lalla Virajman — it’s perhaps time to adjust to a new Ramayana. There are about 300 versions of the epic, from various Indian and Southeast Asian belief systems and perspectives. The one on which the new concept of Rama has been constructed—itself entailing a striking duality—does not flow organically from the human-like hero ascribed to Valmiki, a text that itself came out of the accretions of an older oral text. It’s tied in a closer way to the divinised Rama of the Bhakti movement, but imparts a mutation even on that. The duality exists at the level of iconography. There’s the infant Rama, the actual deity. At another level, saturating the popular space is the warrior prince returning triumphally to Ayodhya, a gladiatorial, muscular figure, drawn in sharp and angular manga lines; it’s a new martial aspect that’s valorised. In either case, he is not a calming object of devotion, a sign of an other-wordly divinity, but very much of this earth, tied to birth, to worldly concerns, to land.
Even after December 22, 1947, when Ram Lalla appeared miraculously on the then disputed site, his emergence as a ‘national icon’ was not immediate. It was on August 5, 2020, through a Sanskrit shloka, no less, that Ram Lalla was consecrated as a ‘unifying national icon’. The iconography of infant Rama is of relatively unknown provenance, and probably borrowed from the Bala Gopal deity found in many Hindu homes—who needs to be bathed, clothed, given bhog, and put to sleep; in short, taken care of. The Vaishnavites worship their deity in all stages of life, as a child, as the beloved—recall Meera, or the 18th c Telugu devadasi Muddupalani who wrote erotic poetry around Radha-Krishna that offended delicate British sensibilities—and as an ultimate embodiment of truth, the very atom of being, as by the subaltern mendicant-bards of Bengal, the Baul-Fakirs. And tarka—the way of deliberation and dissent—is itself one of the most hallowed Indian paths.
Ram Lalla is nowhere virajman in all this. He’s our new child-god, shorn of his administrative values, if not of his quiver and bow. Rama, as he was known and adored by Hindus through history, was a just king and a warrior extraordinaire who fought for the restoration of moral order (against Brahminical excesses, in some readings). He is not merely an avenger of personal dishonour, but a totem of stoically calm sacrifice, of ethically borne suffering, of brotherhood. That holds over and above the ethical ambivalences available in Valmiki, as evidenced for instance by the slaying of the Shudra ascetic Shambuka. Indeed, the nobility rings through precisely because the complexities make it that much more real. He is the one who puts the welfare of his subjects, even their irreverent questioning, above all else—including his relation and duties towards his wife, Sita. Woman-oriented readings—whether traditional, as in Bihar, or in the art world or academics—view the epic from Sita’s perspective, and naturally see Rama rather differently from pop tellings.
This traditional Rama, consistent with Valmiki’s, is clearly no abstract deity made of flawless ether, but a human type that aspires to the ideal—‘narottaman’—and succeeds only relative to other humans; his figure necessarily entails the idea of failing in the process on critical points, as the Sita perspective would readily clarify. That is why even believers saw in him a ‘human’ manifestation of Vishnu, unlike Krishna who could always pull off a miracle or two. That is why, for Vaishnavas, Krishna has always been the more cosmic figure. The non-Vaishnava streams reserve their adoration for Shiva or—as in the older Sakta stream embedded deep in the Indian soil—the Mother Goddess, as Kali or in her various other forms and manifestations. But for his followers through the ages, this is how he lived at the level of cultural consciousness, transmitted orally through generations, even with all the latter-day interpolations. Human and hence short of perfect, but aspiring to perfection, in terms of yearning for justice and ethical responsibility.
That’s why Rama, when he’s reclaimed in the modern Indian political arena first, it’s not L.K. Advani’s revanchist rath yatra, but Mahatma Gandhi who does the honours: it’s the perception of him as a symbol of justice that was of value. That’s what the promise of Ram Rajya was supposed to mean, even if it was embedded in and conveyed through Hindu symbolism. For, this Rama carried a symbolic power beyond the Ramayana—it was pervasive, indeed unifying, and above religiosity. That’s why an Allama Iqbal could call Ram ‘Imam-e-Hind’. In the ’80s-90s, the no-holds-barred warrior Ram arrives, pushing the older Rama, the good and just king, to the background. Advani’s Ram is no Ram Lalla even—that deity is a face, a legal deus ex machina. Instead he is the pure avenger of modern pop culture. Thus it is that Ram was politically weaponised.
What then is new? The infantilisation of Ram, who now needs the protection of the State. And who now will be above everything, including the Constitution, a new air where there cannot be any questioning as there could be in Valmiki’s Ayodhya, where a king exhibited remarkably democratic traits! On the banks of a decked-up Sarayu, it is not the just Rama of older vintage who has been instituted, but the new infant Rama—a nativity play about belonging and unbelonging, not about accountability or ethical governance. If Ram Rajya was a concept specific to Gandhi, Ram Lalla belongs to the Modi era—a kind of concretisation of a pre-Ramayana Ram. However much the Congress jumps in to sing ‘Jai Siya Ram’, reviving an old Uttar Pradesh greeting, they have been bypassed. No matter how much they point to the unlocking of the ‘site’ by Rajiv Gandhi and try to resurrect Narasimha Rao, they will be considered the B-Team with a borrowed idea, without an alternative vision.
History may treat this as yet another chapter in the Indian republic’s tryst with identity. This time written by the BJP, which was not at the high table when the Constitution was being framed. Will this bring closure? Or do we have to yet again hear someone exclaim on his last breath: Hey Ram?
(This opinion piece is the longer version of what was published in the print edition)