India: A History. Revised and Updated (12 page)

THE
MAHABHARATA
VERSUS THE
RAMAYANA

The
Ramayana
, second of the great Sanskrit epics, has been subjected to the same sort of revision processes as the
Mahabharata
. So much so that attempting to tease India’s past from such doubtful material has been likened to trying to reconstruct the history of ancient Greece from the fables of Aesop, or that of the Baghdad caliphate from
The Thousand and One Nights.
The
Ramayana
’s story is, however, simpler than the
Mahabharata
’s and its purpose is clearer. No one under Lord Rama’s sway would swap a king for ten harlots, let alone for a thousand slaughterhouses. For in the form we now know it, the
Ramayana
may be seen as ‘an epic legitimising the monarchical state’.
⁸

When it took this form is uncertain. A condensed version of the story is told in the
Mahabharata
, but it would appear to be an interpolation. It is certainly no proof that the characters in the
Ramayana
preceded those in the
Mahabharata.
The opposite seems more probable, in that Lord Rama’s capital of Ayodhya lay astride the
Uttarapatha
and five hundred kilometres east of the Kuru/Pandavas’ Hastinapura. That, in its final form, the
Ramayana
is definitely later than the
Mahabharata
is shown by the prominence given to regions which are unheard of in the latter. Indeed, while the main wanderings of the exiled Pandavas seem to have been restricted to the immediate neighbourhood of the Doab, those of Lord Rama and his associates are made to extend deep into central and southern India. No doubt much of this was a gloss by later redactors, but it is still precious evidence of the continuing spread of Aryanisation during the first millennium
BC
. If the
Mahabharata
hints at the pattern of settlement in the north and west, the
Ramayana
continues the story eastwards.

Thus while the
Mahabharata
belongs to the Ganga-Jamuna Doab, the
Ramayana
is firmly rooted in the middle Ganga region. Rama’s Ayodhya was the capital of an important
janapada
called Koshala, roughly north-eastern Uttar Pradesh, which some time in mid-millennium would absorb its southern neighbour. The latter was Kashi, which is the old name for Varanasi (Benares). In a popular Buddhist version of the epic, Varanasi rather than Ayodhya actually becomes the locus of the story. And much later, in Lord Shiva’s city, in a quiet whitewashed house overlooking the Ganga and well away from the crowds thronging Dashashwamedh Ghat, the seventeenth-century poet Tulsi Das would pen for the delight of future generations the definitive Hindi version of the epic. Varanasi would make the
Ramayana
its own, and to this day slightly further upstream, on rolling parkland beside the ex-Maharaja of Varanasi’s palace, the annual week-long performance of the
Ram Lila
(a dramatised version of the epic) remains one of the greatest spectacles in India.

This suggests that whereas the
Mahabharata
survives in the popular imagination as a hoard of cherished but disjointed segments, like the scattered skeleton of a fossilised dinosaur, the
Ramayana
is still alive – indeed kicking, if one may judge by the events of the early 1990s. Casting about for an evocative issue around which to rally Hindu opinion, it was to the sanctity of Ayodhya and its supposed defilement by the presence of a mosque that fundamentalist Hindu opinion turned. Loudly invoking Lord Rama, in 1992 saffron-clad activists duly assailed the Ayodhya mosque and so plunged the proud secularism of post-Independence India into its deepest crisis of conscience.

That Ayodhya/Varanasi score higher in the sacral stakes than Hastinapura/Indraprastra may also have something to do with the different cosmic perspectives of the two epics. A clue is provided by the language of the
Puranas
, whose genealogies undergo an unexpected change of tense when they reach the Bharata war. From one of Sanskrit’s innumerable past tenses the verb suddenly switches to the future; in effect, subsequent generations as recorded in these genealogies are being prophesied. Given that the lists were not written down until centuries later, the succession of future descendants may be just as authentic as that of past antecedents, indeed rather more so since later names extend into historic times and can be verified from other sources. But the point that the authors of these lists were trying to register was that the great war marked a watershed in time. It was literally the end of an era. The
Dvapara Yug
, the ‘Third Age’ of Hindu cosmology, came to a close as Pandavas slew Kauravas in the great Bharata holocaust at Kurukshetra, ‘the field of the Kuru’; thereafter the dreaded
Kali Yug
, the still current ‘Black Age’, began.

Although the battle does not mark the end of the epic, the impression gained is that the
Mahabharata
is essentially retrospective. It celebrates a vanishing past and may be read as the swansong of an old order in which the primacy of clan kinship, and the martial ethic associated with it, is being slowly laid to rest. In the eighteen-day battle nearly all the Kauravas, plus a whole generation of Pandavas, are wiped out. Yudhisthira, ostensibly the principal victor, surveys the carnage and is overcome with remorse; the rivalry and conflicts endemic in the clan system are repudiated; with the intention of returning to the forest, Yudhisthira asks his followers to accept his abdication. Krishna will have none of it: the ruler must rule just as the warrior must fight; release depends on following one’s
dharma
, not indulging one’s grief. Reluctantly Yudhisthira concurs, performing the royal sacrifices of
rajasuya
and
aswamedha.
But regrets continue, and when Krishna himself dies, it is as if the last remaining pillar of the old order has been removed. All five Pandavas, plus their shared wife Draupadi, can then gratefully withdraw from public life to wander off into the Himalayas.

By way of contrast, the
Ramayana
may be considered as decidedly forward-looking. It opens new frontiers and it formulates a new ideal. Although nothing is said about a new era or a system of governance specifically designed for it, the implication is clear. When Rama eventually regains his capital, it is not to indulge in remorse or even to reafirm Vedic values but to usher in a dazzling utopia of order, justice and prosperity under his personal rule. The resultant
Rama-rajya
(or
Ram-raj
in Hindi, ‘the rule of Rama’) quickly became, and is still, the Indian political ideal, invoked by countless dynasts and pledged by countless politicians, secularist as well as Hindu nationalist. Likewise Ayodhya itself would come to represent the model of a royal capital and as such would feature in many
subsequent Aryanised state systems. In this guise it would travel far, making landfalls in Thailand where Ayuthia, the pre-Bangkok capital of the Thai monarchs, supposedly replicated Rama’s city, and even in central Java where the most senior sultanate is still that of Jogjakarta, or
Ngajodya-karta
, the first part of which is a Javanese rendering of ‘Ayodhya’.

MONARCHIES AND REPUBLICS

Legitimising monarchical rule, in India as in south-east Asia, was the
Ramayana
’s prime function. But in both places its use for this purpose was dictated as much by current challenges as by residual loyalties to a past order. For in north India of the mid-first millennium
BC
other experiments in the organising of a state were already well underway. Monarchical authority was not, it seems, essential to state-formation. Nor was its absolutism, as heavily promoted by its brahman supporters, congenial to all. Other sources suggest dissent and bear copious testimony to alternative state systems with very different constitutions.

The textual sources concerned are all either Buddhist or Jain. Nataputta, otherwise Mahavira (‘Great Hero’), would formulate the Jain code of conduct in the sixth-to-fifth centuries
BC
, just when Siddhartha Gautama, otherwise the Buddha (‘Enlightened One’), was preaching the Middle Way. This was a coincidence of profound moment. It would make the history of the mid-Gangetic plain in the first millennium
BC
a subject of abiding and even international interest; more immediately, it directs the historian’s attention to aspects of contemporary Indian society that would otherwise be ignored. For the lives and teachings of the great founding fathers of Buddhism and Jainism quickly inspired a host of didactic and narrative compositions which supplement and sometimes contradict orthodox sources like the
Puranas
. Moreover, both men were born into distinguished clans which belonged not to kingdoms modelled on Rama’s Ayodhya but to one of these alternative, non-monarchical state systems. Jain and Buddhist versions of the
Ramayana
story, or of episodes within it, thus show a rather different emphasis. They also incorporate significant information on places other than Ayodhya and on state systems other than monarchies.

These alternative state systems have been variously interpreted as oligarchical, republican or even democratic. The term now used for them is
gana-sangha
, evidently a compromise reached after some early-twentieth-century scholarly sniping, since we are told that ‘in the years 1914–16 a great controversy raged [presumably amongst blissfully bunkered
academics] about the term
gana
.’
⁹
A variant of
jana
, basically it means a ‘clan’ or ‘horde’ which, qualified by
sangha
, an ‘organisation’ or ‘government’, supposedly gives a meaning of ‘government by discussion’. Such ‘governments by discussion’, or more commonly ‘republics’, could of course take many forms. The extent to which all or only some of their constituents participated in decision-making, the institutions and assemblies through which they did so, and the degree to which they elected or merely endorsed a leadership are not clear. Nevertheless, all these matters are currently the subject of debate, partly because of obvious parallels with the contemporary republics and democracies of ancient Greece, and partly because modern India itself has a republican and democratic constitution whose pedigree occasionally generates some warmth.

That a clan-based society should opt for a constitution which was more egalitarian and less autocratic than monarchy seems perfectly logical. In a sense the republics merely institutionalised traditions of consultation amongst the leading clansmen which go back to Vedic times. These took the form of assemblages which ranged from the open
samiti
to the more restricted and specialised
sabha
and
parisad
. As consultative groups the latter would develop into ministerial councils in the monarchical states, while the former seems to have retained its sovereign status in the republics.

Most of the mid-millennium republics of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh (UP) – those of the Licchavis, Sakyas, Koliyas, Videhas,
etc.
– came into being as a result of the usual process of segmenting off from a parent clan. In due course the breakaways claimed their own
janapada
, their territory, and perhaps intentionally, perhaps through neglect or penury, they skimped on performing the full programme of Vedic sacrifices and paid scant attention to brahmanical authority. Surplus produce and booty, when they materialised, would not therefore have necessarily been ‘burned off’ in ritual orgies designed to impress the gods and enhance the sacrificer’s prestige. Instead they would have become available for other purposes, like administration, urbanisation, industry and trade.

This, however, is a simplistic explanation for the emergence of states, and would certainly not have encouraged the formation of monarchies. In brahmanic tradition kingship is said to have been pioneered by the gods. Facing defeat by their supernatural enemies, the gods put their heads together and decided to choose a leader; Indra got the job. A
raja
, in other words, should be chosen by his peers, his role was principally military, and his
raj
had the sanction of divine precedent. Other myths reformulated the concept. One, already noticed, promoted kingship as the only insurance against anarchy. In the evil times ushered in by the
Kali Yug
, men found
themselves obliged to compete with one another for wealth, women and favour. Society was thus reduced to the free-for-all of
matsya-nyaya
(‘the law of the fishes’,
i.e.
of the jungle); and men were accordingly obliged to formulate rules of conduct and to seek a means of enforcing them. The gods, or Lord Vishnu in the shape of that rapidly growing fish, proposed a
raja
; and they selected Manu. He agreed, but only on four nicely judged conditions – that he receive a tenth of his subjects’ harvest, one in every fifty of their cows, a quarter of all the merit they earned, and the pick of their choicest maidens. In other words, authority and law-enforcement were the now
raja
’s main responsibilities; he was chosen by the gods rather than men; and under an advantageous reciprocal arrangement he had a right to a substantial contribution of the good things his subjects produced.