CHAPTER 2
Ramayana: Historicizing Myth
and Mythologizing History
Although the Ramayana has been traditionally treated as a cultural idiom
or a religious text in terms of ethical mores, moral values, social and polit-
ical norms, and religious identities, it is currently being made to repre-
sent the Indian national history and identity. With the increasingly loud
articulations of historicity, the Hindu communalists present a cleansed
epic for the consumption of the modern, liberalizing, pseudonationalistic
middle-class India. The carefully mediated interface between myth and
history attempts at purifying the plural traditions of diverse India and
creating a self-serving Hindu communal metanarrative. Taking a closer
look at these concealed projects, we can probe into the historical back-
drop of the "middle-class Ramayana" and behind-the-screen preparations
of the communal elements involved in its production and performance.
HISTORY AS MYTH AS HISTORY
National history as such is not just an exclusive enterprise of the elites
or intellectuals, because the construction of it does not happen in a vac-
uum but in a particular historical and social environment. Contemporary
historians only retell the old tales in the mood of their times. History, as
Voltaire said, is a myth rewritten by each generation. Refusing, in his pref-
ace, to see "a plot, a rhythm, a predetermined pattern" in history but only
"the play of the contingent and the unforeseen," H.A.L. Fisher opens his
History of Europe with these words: "We Europeans are the children of Hel-
las." He writes in the same chapter,