Ramayana । রামায়ণ

When PM Narendra Modi sent out his closest bureaucrat, Nripendra Misra, from the PMO to Ayodhya to head the Shri Ram Mandir Construction Committee in February 2020, he was clearly signalling that Ram Mandir was his highest priority.

Few can deny that India is seared right through, over several vexing issues, among which is whether the two sacred epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, are actually history or just myths. There is hardly any middle ground, as rationalists and left- liberals are absolutely certain that the epics are only myths, while a large section of Hindus refuse to believe they are not historical.

Two recent news stories about Ram from two extremes of India, Ayodhya and Ram Setu, would have caught one’s attention. Where Ayodhya is concerned, the Pandora’s box had actually been opened long ago, in December 1949, when KKK Nair, the not-so-secular district magistrate of Faizabad, facilitated the sudden ‘appearance’ of Ram-Sita images inside Babri Masjid.

The atmosphere is so charged after the ceremony for the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya that it seems well nigh impossible to discuss positive aspects of this epic in the life of India without flare-ups. But we are not here to debate whether it is myth or history, or even bits of both, nor condone or condemn the destruction of another place of worship. Here, our focus is on the historic unifying role of an epic that is viewed by some as a sharply divisive text.