The Ramayana is the sustained and meticulously built up metaphor of the Indian nationhood. It describes with unmistakable precision the character and dimension, the ideals and aspirations, the conflicts and contradictions and finally, the efficacy and limitations of that concept – irrespective of religious faiths and social practices — a hold deeper enough to embed in the psyche a cross-current of ideas and beliefs merging into a kind of perception, sending its roots beyond the conscious level of being into the fringe of the unconscious and therewith, becoming the song of the entire community, the unmitigated source of joy and hope from generation to generation, unwittingly though.

The Ramayana is the song of the community also in the sense that it has inspired widely diverse tribes and communities to construct their own patterns of psyche or racial memory along the narrative structure of this primary epic, in order to reach out to a higher kind of fulfilment in life. The fulfilment is higher because it concerns itself with an intimate understanding of the more than human yet truly human personality of Rama. The union of the paradoxical qualities of a simple, naive and common man, at times as helpless as any of them, with those of a complex, sophisticated and highest class crown prince, capable of doing things far too great for them, make Rama their own kindred closest to their hearts, and at the same time, the distant figure of their adoration and worship. Nearest to them, yet farthest from them – that creates their abiding interest in Rama.

Rama is ‘Rama’ because He is the source of joy, liveliness and bliss, and the more one gets into Him, the greater will be one’s share of bliss. Polite and graceful, soft and enlightening, Rama is the crowning figure of the Ikshaku clan, inheriting the solar lineage. The Ikshakus were brawny, insightful and developed, and these qualities established this clan’s superiority over the other tribes and clans of Northern India, which made it the best fitted for the task of establishment of one hegemony – political, social and cultural – all over India from the North across the Vindhyas, extending far out into the southern ocean islands.

The active involvement of the great creator of the Ramayana in the episodic proceedings of the poem as a character is again another unique feature of this great epic, and this feature invests the poem with the kind of ‘objective correlative’ — the proportionate semblance of reality to the imaginative tenor — in an original and undeniably satisfying manner not to come across in any one of the European epics. Valmiki is, therefore, more often than not, a great seer, a vaat, a maker; for that matter, even Valmiki is worshipped together with Rama as the divine spirit. Because he himself plays a role as an actor in the complex world of enactment taking place in the vast universe of his esemplastic imagination, the character and the incidents that they are involved in get imbued with a definite kind of verisimilitude, and no wonder, that the very process of creation demands that imaginative realisation must precede the actual happening. Hence, was the precedence of the composition of the Ramayana to the birth of Rama!

References to disciplines – direct or oblique – point to patterns of culture then flourishing in the great Indian peninsula. Sita is the emanating product of the upturned soil of the ploughed field, daughter of Janaka — the eternal grower or the builder of an agriculture based civilisation; since civilisation goes hand in hand with revolution and creation, it can as well be male dominated. Dasaratha — the controller of a combined fleet of ten chariots at a time — achieved a further stage of that civilisation through his insight and foresight in the development of warlike skills and valour. Rama combines in him the earthly humility and the resolute strength of his warlike heritage. For an inclusive civilisation, therefore, Rama and Sita become each other’s choice and they become united in marriage — though Rama courts the initial wrath of a Shaivite Parashurama by transcending the heavy Shaivite code in materialising His match with Sita.

The descriptions in the Ramayana clearly point to the prevalence of three distinct types of civilisations — the predominantly agriculture base in the Ganges valley, the mercantile civilisation in the oceanic south and the anthropomorphic upsurge in the forests and the hills in between. Ravana, with his mercantile grip spread in all directions, ultimately recognises the superiority of the agriculture wealth, and steals away the supreme skill of it represented by Sita for his ravishment. The clash between Rama and Ravana becomes inevitable. In the clash, Rama with the aid of the anthropomorphic forces represented by Hanuman and numerous others, annihilated the mercantile Ravana and restored Sita back to her freedom.

Rama’s mission of establishment of His hegemony as had been ordained by His royal father was over with this victory and He realised that the superior life invigorating skill of agriculture belonged no more to Him, to His clan, as an exclusive right; it belonged to the entire breadth of the great Indian peninsula; He could not, therefore, appropriate Sita selfishly, and had to give up His rights upon her to avoid public venom. Sita was, therefore, abandoned to trace her way back into the fecund world of Mother Nature, with the future seeds in the forms of Lava and Kusha in her womb.

Further, Rama had earlier called up the Great Mother Nature — Goddess Durga, whose powers and influence work in every direction, to tame the superior but selfish intellect of Ravana, the ten-headed rakshasa. It is interesting to note that the poet had very appropriately provided through Shiva’s ironical boon that Ravana would remain invincible to all other powers, save the power of eternal feminine principle, that which the Motherhood of Nature stands for. Durga represents this eternal feminine principle – the principle exemplified by Mother Nature, and Her worship, therefore, begins with the worship of Nava Patrika, the group of nine plants essential for life dressed up in the image of a woman! The Ramayana, as such, remains a panegyric of the powers of Mother Nature.

Hitendra Nath Sarma