Presenting the Past Anxious History and Ancient Future in Hindutva India

Ramayana: Historicizing Myth and Mythologizing History 49

No one less than Mahatma Gandhi himself, who made a powerful use

of the Ramayana to communicate to the masses of India during the strug-

gle for independence, confesses, "Melodious recitations of the Ramayana,

which I heard in my childhood, left on me an impression which years

have not obliterated or weakened. I find the greatest consolation from the

Bhagavad Gita and Tulsidas's Ramayana. I frankly confess that the Quran,

the Bible and the other scriptures of the world, in spite of my great regard

for them, do not move me as do the Gita of Krishna and the Ramayana of

Tulsidas."^13 The impact of the Ramayana and other such stories on the rural

and illiterate people of India is equally deeper. As Nehru puts it:

Illiterate villagers would know hundreds of verses by heart and their conversa-

tion would be full of references to them or to some story with a moral, enshrined

in some old classic. Often I was surprised by some such literary turn given by

a group of villagers to a simple talk about present-day affairs. If my mind was

full of pictures from recorded history and more-or-less ascertained fact, I realised

that even the illiterate peasant had a picture gallery in his mind, though this was

largely drawn from myth and tradition and epic heroes and heroines, and only

very little from history. Nevertheless, it was vivid enough.^14

With this pervasive presence of Ram in north India that is reflected in
daily greetings {Ram-Ram), invocation in moments of distress (Ram jaane),
promissory undertakings (Ram kasam), and in the pallbearers' chant (Ram
nam satya hai—Ram's name is truth), it is no wonder why Hindu com-
munalists try to appropriate the Ramayana and come up with claims of
historicity. According to V. D. Savarkar, "Some of us worship Ram as an
incarnation, some admire him as a hero and a warrior, all love him as the
most illustrious representative monarch of our race."^15 Another Savarkar-
like writer puts it, the Ramayana is "a scripture of the ancient Hindu Race"
that reveals him "picture after picture of fascinating beauty in the life of
India in that period in our history." He claims that dharma was the essence
of India then and interjects that "for the sake of dharma, my countrymen
of Sind have left their property, their lands, their native soil, and have
migrated to India." This man's picture gets even clearer when he asserts
that "pure-hearted brahmins" who were poor in material wealth but rich
in the wealth of the spirit were "the pillars of the state" during Ramayanic
times.^16
This homogenous Hindu race, according to yet another Hindutva writer,
speaks many languages with a single "vital breath" and has vast and var-
iegated culture with a "central spring of spiritual strength": "the mystic
spirit of India." When Judaic monotheism in its Islamic garb invaded the
land of the Vedas and challenged the outer logic of superior revelations
such as Valmiki's Ramayana, the inner coherence was fast forgotten by its
inheritors.^17 This myth is then projected onto the national history by the
Hindu communalists, giving rise to subsequent sociopolitical myths.