One of the most popular and revered epics among Indians is the Ramayana. The other is the Mahabharata. Most interestingly, modern Indian politics has been churned up using Rama, the central character of the Ramayana, in the past more than four decades, which also saw the rise of Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The rise of the mythical Rama and the historical rath yatra of BJP leader L.K. Advani and the subsequent capture of power by the Hindutva forces were no coincidences. With the demolition of the Babri Masjid, the invocations of Rama reached a crescendo. This was a moment that was going to have far-reaching political consequences. Also, a consequence of this demolition was that archaeology has been brought into the courtrooms, and one scholar even argued:
“… the new role that archaeology is assuming in courtrooms in India is destabilising the standing of the ASI [Archaeological Survey of India) as the authority of archaeological knowledge and the protector of the nation’s material past. It has also produced a category of assertive public that successfully demands production of archaeological knowledge towards ideological ends” (Varghese, 2024:109-129).
Shereen Ratnagar in her article in Current Anthropology succinctly pointed out:
“Despite its recourse to scientific (laboratory) investigation, archaeology is a social science, researching the cultures of past societies through their material culture residues. No social science proceeds in an ideological vacuum … Thus archaeological methods and paradigms are bound to be ideologically inscribed in some way” (Ratnagar, 2004:239).
No wonder then that Rama and his Ayodhya were subjected to archaeological, historical and judicial investigations by specialists from their own ideological positions. One may recall that the one-man commission of High Court Judge M.S. Liberhan was formed on 16 December 1992, ten days after the demolition of the Babri Masjid, which observed that a handful of malevolent leaders invoked the name of Lord Rama and turned peaceful communities into intolerant hordes (Liberhan Commission of Inquiry, 1992:919-920).
Eminent archaeologist H.D. Sankalia had observed that there was at no time “an attempt to question the historicity of Rama or his times or the various incidents in the Ramayana or to regard Rama as less than a god” (Sankalia, 1982:1-2).
In another significant article published in 1977-78 in the Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute Sankalia held that Ayodhya began to grow from a village or a small town in 1000 BC – 800 BC, dependent on livestock-breeding, hunting and paddy cultivation. It continued to grow in the times of Buddha and Asoka, and stupas and monasteries were built. Ayodhya was for many years a Buddhist town and it got its first Deva temples under the Gupta kings. Sankalia stated emphatically:
“It must have been apparent that if this was the likely development of Ayodhya, then the present Ramayana, even the Critical Edition, gives a one-sided picture of the city … There is no reference to the Buddhists and Jains, who, we know from their literature, as well as from Chinese travellers, did live in the city, as early as the 5th century BC” (Sankalia, 1977-78:917-18).
Hence, the Ramayana has its bias and should be viewed from a critical angle and the researchers had been trying to perform this task by using all the modern tools and techniques of research.
Research on the Ramayana
In a small but significant book in Bengali entitled Ramkathar Prak Itihas (1977) [literally meaning the prehistory of Rama-Katha], renowned scholar Sukumar Sen set out to trace the evolution of the Ramayana and its many versions across space and time often crossing the boundaries of India. In categorical terms, he distinguished his work as that of a historian rather than a religious believer. He wrote that his historical method relied on hard evidence and logic while a religious believer went by faith, not evidence and logic. Sen however, did not see any quarrel between the two groups. He wrote that both belief in history, and belief in religion, were true in their own domains but that history and religion were not in agreement (Sen, 1977:1). In the preface, Sen even sought an apology from the believers and, quite interestingly, wished that they did not read the book (Sen 1977:iii).
Sen starts with the Rig Veda and traces the journey of the Ram-Katha through Buddhist Jataka and Jain stories. The most interesting aspect of these Jataka stories was that Rama and Sita were described as uterine siblings. Secondly, one of these stories did not feature the kidnapping of Sita by Ravana (Sen, 1977:6-9). The Jain texts of Ram-Katha were no less interesting. For example, in the Jain Rama-Katha, Rama’s mother was Aparajita and it was Lakshmana who killed Ravana and became famous as Astam Basudeva. In the Buddhist Jataka story, Rama was the central character while in the Jain text Lakshmana was the central figure (Sen, 1977:12). In the Buddhist and Jain stories Rama, Sita and Lakshmana were vegetarians.
According to another scholar of ancient Indian history, culture and literature, Kshiti Mohan Sen, the major characters of the Ramayana – Rama, Sita, Lakshmana and Bharata – have become archetypes of moral code of conduct for Indians for many generations (Sen, 2005:62). Anthropologist Irawati Karve explains lucidly in her classic book Yuganta:
“The entire Ramayana … is in praise of an ideal man. Whatever was good in the world was embodied in Rama, and it was to present this ideal to the world that Valmiki wrote the Ramayana. As Rama is the ideal man, so is Sita the ideal woman. In fact, the whole Ramayana is filled with idealized characters – the ideal brother, the ideal servant, ideal subjects, even ideal villains” (Karve, 1969).
Before Kshiti Mohan Sen (1880-1960), one forgotten Marxist anthropologist Bhupendranath Datta (1880-1961), the younger brother of Swami Vivekananda, viewed the Ramayana as a brahmanical version of the class struggle between the Kshatriyas and the Brahmins in ancient India and he noted that Jain scriptures describe Lakshmana, not Rama, killing Ravana. (Datta, 1942:39).
Famous Bengali litterateur Rajsekhar Basu carried out one of the most authentic translations of the original Ramayana from Sanskrit to Bengali in the year 1946. Basu’s preface to the translation has many interesting details, which may surprise the present generation. For example, Rama and Lakshmana, during their exile in the forest, used to hunt animals for meat just like the Europeans (Basu, 1946:iii), which is a far cry from their supposed vegetarianism. Rama himself also killed a saint named Sambuk as advised by the Brahmin, Narad, because despite being a Sudra, Sambuk had dared to meditate, and this, according to Narad, had led to the death of a Brahmin child. Rama beheaded saint Sambuk without any provocation (Basu, 1946:454). One may recall here that Rama received immense help from a Nishad (one of the most backward castes) named Guha during his stay in the forest (Basu, 1946:105-107). The whole of Rama’s monkey army led by Sugriva and Hanumana (now the monkey god) belonged to forest-dwelling communities. Without them, Rama could not have won the war against his enemy Ravana. Rama also killed his ally Sugriva’s elder brother Bali, keeping himself concealed and shooting an arrow in his back, while the two brothers were engaged in a duel and Bali seemed to be winning (Basu, 1946:216-219). When Bali accused Rama of violating the basic rules of a duel Rama justified his act saying that Bali was punished for marrying Sugriva’s wife. Rama even compared killing Bali with the slaughtering of a hunted animal. Anthropologist and historian K.S. Singh, in his article entitled ‘Tribal Versions of Rama-Katha: An Anthropological Perspective’, aptly observed:
“In killing Bali surreptitiously Rama cited among various reasons, his keeping of his younger brother’s wife as a sinful act. Rama did not object to Sugriva keeping Bali’s wife Tara, who was also his wife’s elder sister, after his elder brother’s death” (Singh, 1993:54-55).
Scholarly research on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata has had a rich tradition in India. K.S. Singh, in the introduction of the book Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India published in 1993, said that the epics were not only religious texts but also historical documents, anthropological treatises. The popularity of the Ramayana serial on television was not its appeal to fundamentalism but derived from the fact that the epic enabled most of the Indians to relive their childhood. Also, the Ramayana, being basically a love story preserved orally through the centuries, had an appeal not only among the higher castes but also among the various tribal communities of India (Singh, 1993:2). Without going into the details of the Adivasi versions of the Ramayana historian Romila Thapar wrote:
“The Ramayana does not belong to any one moment in history for it has its own history which lies embedded in the many versions which were woven around the theme at different times and places, even within its own history in the Indian subcontinent … The appropriation of the story by a multiplicity of groups meant a multiplicity of versions through which the social aspirations and ideological concerns of each group were articulated. The story in these versions included significant variations that changed the conceptualisation of character, event, and meaning” (Thapar, 2014).
Anthropologist T.B. Naik, in his paper “Rama-Katha among the Tribes of India”, described vividly the stories of the Ramayana among the various tribes of India from the west to the east. The Bhils in the Panch Mahal district of eastern Gujarat have a very popular version of the Ramayana called the Bhilodi Ramayana and according to the local tradition Valmiki Rishi himself was also a Bhil named Valio. This version begins with the search for Sita by Rama, Lakshmana and Hanumana. Ravana’s men employ some Birhors to catch Hanumana since the Birhors are expert monkey trappers but they fail to do so. Then Hanumana himself suggests they make a net with holes thrice the breadth of a human finger to catch him. Hanumana is caught with that net but Hanumana pleads with the Birhors not to kill him and that he will kill himself. The narration of Hanumana setting Lanka to fire follows and finally he goes to Rama and asks him about the disposal of his body after his death. Rama says that those who trapped you, the Birhors, will eat you and your kind. Since then, it is believed, the Birhors had been killing and eating monkeys (Naik, 1993:47-48).
One of the remarkable versions of the Ramayana comes from the Gonds of central India. Molly Kaushal, a professor at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), described in detail the Gond Ramayani, which according to her can be seen as “Ramayan in inverse” or “Ramayan inverted” in which Lakshmana, not Rama, is the main hero and Lakshmana, not Sita, undergoes a trial by fire to prove his honesty and chastity. Kaushal writes:
“Despite obvious similarities with the Ramayan storyline, though inverted ones, the Gondi text is not about the Ramayan. It is a text, which encodes the Gond discourse on human body, sexuality, life and death, social and sexual anxieties and has strong philosophical and psychosocial undercurrents running throughout the text” (Kaushal, 2021:2).
In his article ‘Tribal Versions of Rama-Katha: An Anthropological Perspective’, N.N. Vyas noted the distinctive interpretation of the Ramayana by the tribals of India and added that this interpretation was derived from their experiences living in the hilly and forested regions. Vyas collected his ethnographic evidence mainly from the tribes of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In these tribal tales the king, Dasaratha, is depicted as a deceitful person and the birth of Sita coincides with extreme drought due to which the parents are forced to dump her in a field. She is discovered by Janaka while ploughing the field. Furthermore, Dasaratha reveals his autocratic nature when he announces out of the blue that Rama and Lakshmana will go to the forest and Bharat and Shatrughan will rule his kingdom. The tribal version has a different interpretation of Rama and Lakshmana chasing the golden deer on the request of Sita in the forest. It is Sita’s desire to eat the flesh of the animal that lead the two brothers to killing the deer. They aren’t collecting and eating wild fruits when they spot the deer, as the other versions have it. The rest of the story matches the Valmiki Ramayana (Vyas, 1993:13-14).
According to K.S. Singh, in a Mundari version of the Ramayana, Rama is not the embodiment of righteousness or an ideal person or an avatara as projected by Goswami Tulsidas, but an ordinary person with human weaknesses and strengths. Ravana, on the other hand, is described as a noble hero who belonged to one of the clans of the Munda tribe, Timling (Singh, 1993:50-51). The tribes of the northeast also have their own interesting versions of the Ramayana. The Mech (one of the oldest indigenous groups of Assam and North Bengal) “traced the Hindu-Muslim conflict to their version of Rama-Katha, according to which Lakshmana ate beef, became a Muslim and begot two sons, Hasan and Hussain, who were killed by Lava and Kusha” (Singh, 1993:53). More recently, famous litterateur and a former professor of Comparative Literature Nabanita Dev Sen, in her Chandankumar Bhattacharya memorial lecture, showed that there existed a distinct tradition of the Ramayana cherished and preserved orally by the women in India in four languages, namely Bengali, Marathi, Maithili and Telugu. In all these versions of the Ramayana, Rama is almost absent. In fact, he is portrayed as an irresponsible person who caused immense suffering to his honest wife Sita (Sen, 2002:3-4). Ajay K. Rao writes in a recent book entitled Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology:
“What we see in the parallel project of the political use of the epic and the inauguration of a royal Rama cult in sixteenth-century Vijayanagara is that, in the precolonial period, the othering of Muslims does not appear to have been a factor in the development of Rama devotional and liturgical traditions, despite the fact that the epic provided conceptual resources for such a usage, with narratives of othering occurring in other regions and in literary and inscriptional genres” (Rao 2015:123).
By and large, research on the Ramayana and Rama from Rajsekhar Basu (1946) to K.S. Singh (1993) to Nabanita Dev Sen (2002) brings out the portrait of Rama not only as a devotional figure but also as a human being, a king with all his follies and faults.
Historical, anthropological and literary research on the Ramayana reveal that remarkable variations exist and that Adivasis and women of India have their own take based on their cultural ethos and world views. If one has to understand the Ramayana in its true spirit then this cultural variation has to be recognized and respected. The Ramayana is not just the story attributed to the poet Valmiki, whose version itself is based on the many stories he heard. Homogenization, standardization and universalization of the Ramayana go against the Indian reality. The various indigenous communities and women of India have their own versions and interpretations. The Ramayana is a plural text of a multicultural country. While the main storyline provides for a kind of unity, the various versions of the epic embrace the diversity, and that is India. One who does not recognize it denies the culture and history of India.
(I am indebted to Subhra Bhattacharya of the Anthropological Survey of India and Sanjay Kar of the Institute of Development Studies, Kolkata, for making available the papers on whose basis the article came to be written. I am also grateful to anthropologist Dr Suman Nath for the inspiration through his writings in The Wire on the Rama narrative.)
References
Basu, R. (1946). Valmiki Ramayana (Summarized and translated in Bengali). Calcutta: M.C.Sarkar & Sons. Preface, pp 1-7.
Datta, B. (1942). ‘Origin and Development of Indian Social-Polity’ in Man in India. 22:22-63.
Dev Sen, N. (2002). ‘Meyeder Ramayan Gaan’. Fifth Chandan Kumar Bhattcharyya Memorial Lecture held on 29t April 2001 at the Presidency College, Kolkata.
Karve, I. (2017). Yuganta: The End of an Epoch. Orient Blackswan Hyderabad.
Kaushal, M. (2021). Lakshman’s Trial by Fire: Does the Gond Ramayani Invert the Ramayan? https://indianculturalforum.in/2021/08/12/lakshmans-trial-by-fire-does-the-gond-ramayani-invert-the-ramayan (Accessed on 03/05/2025).
Naik, T.B. (1993). ‘Rama-Katha among the Tribes of India’ in Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, pp 31-48. Eds. K.S. Singh & Birendranath Datta. Anthropological Survey of India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Rao, A.K. (2015). Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology. Oxford: Routledge
Ratnagar, S. (2004). ‘Archaeology at the Heart of a Political Confrontation: The Case of Ayodhya’ in Current Anthropology. 45(2):239-249.
Report of the Liberhan Commission of Inquiry (1992). Conclusions (Chapter 14). New Delhi: Government of India
Sankalia, H.D. (1977-1978). ‘Ayodhya of the Ramayana in a Historical Perspective’. Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute.
Vol. 58/59, Diamond Jubilee Volume (1977-1978), pp 893-919.
Sankalia, H.D. (1982). The Ramayana in Historical Perspective. Delhi: Macmillan India.
Sen, K.M. (2005). Hinduism. Penguin Books UK.
Sen, S. (1977). Ramkathar Prak Itihas (in Bengali). Kolkata: Jigyasa.
Singh, K.S. (1993). Introduction in Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, pp 1-9. Eds. K.S. Singh & Birendranath Datta. Anthropological Survey of India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Singh, K.S. (1993). ‘Tribal Versions of Rama-Katha: An Anthropological Perspective’ in Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, pp 31-48. Eds K.S. Singh & Birendranath Datta. Anthropological Survey of India, Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Thapar, R. (2014). ‘The Ramayana Syndrome’. Helter Skelter Magazine. https://helterskelter.in/2014/04/the-ramayana-syndrome/ (Accessed on 05/05/2025).
Varghese, R.A. (2024). ‘Archaeology for the courtroom: the Ayodhya Case and the fashioning of a hybrid episteme’. Journal of Social Archaeology. 24(2), pp 109-129.
Vyas, N.N. (1993). ‘The Tribal View of the Ramayana; An Exercise in the Anthropology of Knowledge’ in Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, pp 10-14. Eds. K.S. Singh & Birendranath Datta. Anthropological Survey of India. Calcutta: Seagull Books.
Forward Press also publishes books on Bahujan issues. Forward Press Books sheds light on the widespread problems as well as the finer aspects of Bahujan (Dalit, OBC, Adivasi, Nomadic, Pasmanda) society, culture, literature and politics. Contact us for a list of FP Books’ titles and to order. Mobile: +917827427311, Email: info@forwardmagazine.in)
