Author: P Ananthakrishnan
Publication: The Pioneer
Date: September 20, 2007
One of the most celebrated quotations of Marx
is the one about historyrepeating itself first as tragedy and then as farce.
Had he beenwatching the television debates on the controversy regarding Ram
Setu,he would have concluded that the real tragedy is that history hasfinally
attained the steady-state of farce. The nonsense that is bandiedin these discussions
is staggering even when one takes into account thefact that so-called specialists
are barely allowed to speak and, whenthey are, they are commanded to give
their answers in binary, yes/no terms.
A case in point is the discussion on Ram in
Tamil tradition. Onehistorian said Ram had never been a popular god in Tamil
Nadu and he wasmore a literary figure than a religious one. He went on to
add thaticonographic evidence of Ram in Tamil country was scarce and people
evenfeared that if they worshipped Ram, tragedy would strike them. Anotherworthy
stated that Ram was worshipped by a small group of Vaishnavites.Inevitably,
the Aryan-Dravidian divide came up. The Great PoliticalThespian of India,
M Karunanidhi, had the last word. He asked,rhetorically, "Who is this
Ram? From which engineering college did hegraduate?"
I am not sure, but certainly not from one
of the "self-financing"colleges of Tamil Nadu. If he had, he would
not have been able to make aplank to cross a brook, leave alone build a bridge
to span a gulf.
Is it really that Ram was scarcely known in
Tamil country?
Before answering this question, let me make
my position very clear onthis issue. I am not exactly a believer. And I am
of the view that theSethusamudram project must go ahead, if it has no serious
ecological,geological, technological and, what is more, bribe-related implications.
The Ramayan finds a mention in at least two
places in the Sangamcorpus, which is traditionally dated between 200 BC and
200 AD. In onereference, Ram orders chirping birds to silence. In another,
the monkeyswear, in a monkey-like manner, the jewels discarded by Sita while
shewas being abducted by Ravan. It is worthwhile to note here that boththese
incidents find no mention in the Valmiki Ramayan. The ease withwhich these
incidents have been woven into the poems indicates that theRamayan story was
well known in the Tamil country during the Sangam period.
The next reference to Ram occurs in the epic
Silappadikaram - "TheTale of an Anklet". It was written in the Second
Century AD by IlangoAdigal, a prince who became a Jain monk. It is an unforgettable
literarymasterpiece that was made into an eminently forgettable Tamil film
byKarunanidhi himself. In this epic, shepherdesses sing ballads in praiseof
both Ram and Krishna, clearly identifying them as avatar s of Vishnu.
The works of the Vaishnava saints the Alwars,
collectively known as"The Sacred Four Thousand," have innumerable
allusions to Ram and theRamayan. The Alwars prospered between the Sixth and
the Tenth CenturiesAD. As Vasudha Narayanan points out in her excellent essay
on theRamayan (available at www.ramanuja.org), in the work of one Alwar alonethere
are 106 allusions to Ram and the Ramayan and there are six "sets"of
poems (about 63 verses) where the words are spoken by the Alwar inthe guise
of a character form the Ramayan. This Alwar, it must be noted,is not a Brahmin.
The Saiva saints, the Nayanmars, most of whom
are contemporaries ofthe Alwars, also stud their verses with episodes from
the Ramayan. Thenwe have the greatest Tamil poet of them all, Kamban.
His Ramayan is correctly considered the acme
of Tamil literaryachievement. In about 10,000 verses Kamban, who, again, is
not a Brahminand is a grand scholar of Sanskrit and an unabashed admirer of
Valmiki,establishes that, for his bhakta s, Rama is the One who is the origin
ofall. This, it must be remembered, is a sure departure from Valmiki, forwhom
Rama was only a Maryada Purushottam.
Thus, it is clear that the Tamil country has
an uninterruptedtradition of worshipping Ram at least right from the Second
Century AD.
The iconographic evidence of Ram in Tamil
Nadu is too numerous tonarrate here. There are temples to Ram that date back
at least to theNinth Century AD. Some of the greatest Chola bronzes are of
Ram - a fewof them are on display at the National Museum in Delhi. Some of
themasterpieces are worshipped to this day, without interruption, from theday
they were consecrated. Today, there is hardly any major city inTamil Nadu
that doesn't have a Ram shrine. Hanuman, of course, pervadeseverywhere. One
of the biggest statues of Hanuman is enshrined in aChennai suburb, where festival
days result in horrendous traffic snarls.
Curiously, this hoary tradition of Ram worship
in the Tamil countryhas led to historian Suvira Jaiswal claiming in March
2007 that (in thewords of The Hindu) the Ram cult took birth and evolved in
the South,the "Dravida" country, and later got assimilated into
the religiouspsyche of the North! This has evoked a testy response from, of
allpeople, a Tamil, Dr Nagaswamy, a respected art historian andarchaeologist,
who says that the Ram cult must have originated in theNorth, perhaps as early
as the Second Century BC.
There is nothing more ridiculous than calling
Ravan a Dravidian hero.Ravan is in fact a top-of-the drawer Brahmin. He is
the great grandsonof Brahma himself, the grandson of Pulastya Maharishi and
the son ofVisravas, another rishi. There is another point to be made here.
Thebeautiful temple at Rameswaram is dedicated to Shiva. According to theSthalapurana
the Shivalinga in the temple is supposed to have beeninstalled by Ram himself
for worship. Why did he want to worship Shiva?It was to expiate the sin of
Brahmahatya (killing a Brahmin).
There is indeed another great, real divide.
This is between the Tamilsand the Tam Brahms of Delhi, who are generally seen
in these infernal TVdiscussions. The Tam Brahms of Delhi has lost their Tamil
roots longago. I doubt many of them will be able to read Tamil with some degree
ofcomfort. They have absolutely no clue about the Tamil traditions,culture
or literature. So long as they dominate the TV scene, there willonly be sound
and fury - sound from the Tam Brahms and fury from theDefenders of Dravidian
Faith - signifying nothing.-- The writer , a retired civil servant is an author
and novelist.
