Tehelka Magazine, Mar 15, 2008
There are curious parallels in history to the growing intolerance to artistic freedom
APOORVANAND
Social commentator
REFLECTING ON the recent attack by activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) on the staff and students of the Delhi University’s Department of History for allegedly using a textbook with ‘blasphemous’ views on the life of Ram, I was transported back to my childhood.
When attending the Akhand Manas Path (an uninterrupted collective rendering of the Ram Charit Manas), I learnt from the older Manas connoisseurs that the pandits of Benaras got very agitated and angry when they learnt that Tulsidas was composing his Ram Katha in Avadhi, an ‘impure’ language, too profane to describe the high life of Ram, who was after all an avatar of Vishnu. But more than that they were fearful of losing their exclusive authority over the narrative of the life of Ram.
They issued warnings and threats to Tulsi, asking him not to bring his writing into the public domain. He remained undeterred. The pundits then unleashed their goons on him, but his resolve remained unbroken. They then offered a solution: Tulsi’s Manas would be kept for a night in a Shiva temple for the god’s approval. The pandits were sure of their success in this clever game, since who knew better than them that the gods did not exist, so there was no question of a god coming to Tulsi’s aid. Still, to hedge their bets, they buried Tulsi’s tome under a pile of books to hide it from any sympathetic eye. Doors of the temple were closed and locked properly. The next morning, when a curious crowd and confident pandits assembled and doors were opened, everybody was shocked to see Ram Charit Manas on the top, and with the sahi (signature) of Shiva himself on it! There was jubilation in the unlettered crowd, thrilled that Shiva himself put the stamp of approval on an Avadhi granth sought to be banned by the ‘official’ custodians of the story of Ram.
There are other angles to the genesis of Ram Charit Manas, like the history of feuds between Shaivites and Vaishnavites in that era. Tulsi took the liberty of depicting Ram not just as an incarnation of Vishnu as in other versions of the Ramayana, but also as a bhakta of Shiva. It was an audacious attempt of reconciliation on the part of a poet, and for obvious reasons, it angered the leaders of both sects. After all, if boundaries between these two warring sects were to be erased, they were bound to lose their fiefdoms. Also, through his poetic depiction of various characters and events, Tulsi had also criticised the stranglehold of Brahminical practices on Hinduism. Their desperate attempt to defame Tulsi and ban Ram Charit Manas arose from a fear that the common people would be ‘corrupted’ by his version of the Ramayana.
IT IS ALSO VERY INTERESTING that in popular memory, it is Shiva, the destroyer who rescues Tulsi. Incidentally it is also Shiva who protects Ravana with his blessings. Is it not intriguing that Shiva showers his blessings on Ravana who is destined to fight his bhakta Ram? But who is interested in the drama of Ram? Who wants to know why there is no one ending to the saga of Ram in different renderings? Who’ll explain the creative process, which gives freedom to the people of Avadh to sing the songs of Ram and Lakshman, tilling their land as kisans where Sita is a housewife who cooks for them and washes their utensils? Or who is to decide which one of the known Ramayanas is the original one from which all others spring?
But these are not questions that would ever bother those who, even while chanting his name, keep destroying the spaces of contemplation and creation of new ideas. Are they then not like those whom Ram went to the jungles to destroy, for disrupting the acts of contemplation of the rishis there?
Contemplation and imagination is the fulcrum of the life of a university. Universities are not spaces where you manufacture a consensus around an ideology, be it political or religious. Here the task is to controvert the truths that are treated by the societies as given and sacred. It is not our job as teachers to ask our students to believe in something that is infallible. No issue is, therefore settled for us. Everything is to be opened and reopened by succeeding generations of the members of the institution called university. Everything has a space here, however fanciful or outrageous it might be to the ruling morality. It is also not the job of academicians to reconstruct the actual thing, in its original shape, if ever there were such a possibility. It was not without basis that the Department of History was reading AK Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas. Was not it trying to say, as Romila Thapar writes in her book on the sacking of Somnath temple, that its “ intention… is not an attempt at a detailed reconstruction of what happened , but rather to see the sources as presenting various perspectives, either directly or by implication, and to search for clues as to how the event was perceived….(it)…results in a different reading of the event from that which has been current so far.”
History classrooms seek to understand how history is fictionalised, but also how fictions are historicised. Is it at all important to judge which one is more privileged? Haven’t we always claimed to enjoy living in fictional time and space, differing from civilisations that, at the expense of fiction, construct history? Who then insists, in the name of ‘Indian culture’, that there is only one account possible and permissible, and keep invading the spaces of imagination and fiction, everywhere from MS University, Vadodara to the Delhi University? Are they not the descendents of the desperate pandits of Benaras who tried to stop Tulsidas?
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