2 Stolen Cents- The Rama Setu: Sushrut

(no, i did run spell check. What's there is intentional, if artless)
In one corner of the world the liberal media and communist historians (also known as- historians) condemned and watched in horror as the Hindutva parties took to the streets objecting to the development of the Palk strait where shipping lanes would partially destory Adam's bridge, known by India's Hindu Community as "Ram Setu" on grounds that the geological formation was built by Ram ( a mythological king revered as an incarnation of one of Hinduism's 33 crore gods (hahaha 33 crore gods), by Indiashinducommunity) with the assistance of (stifle laugh here and assume serious unsmiling scientific condescension), a Monkey Army led by monkey king, Sugreeva and his shape-shifting, flying, son-of-the-sun general, Hanuman.

Amid this madness, a completely unrelated news story found little or no mention. Here, a secular party long charged by right wingers (and muslim-burners and mosque-demolishers and christian-conversion-stoppers and consistently unfashionable independant thinkers and faceless non-partisan common religious Hindus) with sacrificing majority rights at the altar of minority appeasement, put into action a plan to demolish a site of deep religious significance to Indiashinducommunity, to make way for a new shipping lane which would provide an undisclosed amount of revenue to the nation, at the cost of losing a site of lasting spiritual significance and of the most serious religious relevance over the past 5000 years.

Some thinkers with illusions of perceptive ability saw these as related events when the truth is that these events, though similar to the cursory observer, happened in entirely different places with entirely different actors. Geographically and scientifically the events did indeed overlap but in reality the events took place in at least two very different Indias. The idea of India had yet again spawned an echo self through what may be likened (for the benefit of the pragmatic junta from group 1 as well as the self righteously prudish from group 2) to asexual reproduction.

Now, to address/ rant about the many arguments put forth I must begin with this...

Am i the only one who's surprised by the number of indians (who appear for TV sound bites) who persistently refer to the Ramanaya as a "myth". I always felt Indians had greater religious conviction than that. Bewoulf is a myth. King Arthur is a myth. But the Ramanaya? I may be out of sync with popular Indian sentiment but Ganesh my dhobi and Vishnu my driver both seem convinced that he was very much real (didn't he used to be King of Ayodhya and husband to Sita and slayer of the evil Lankan brahmin king, Ravana?) as the stories indicate.

It is interesting that the Mahabarata which followed several centuries after Ramayana has been vindicated to a great extent by archeological excavations revealing 5 layers of the great sunken city of Mathura said to be the capital of the Yadav rulers of the Gangetic plain, including king Krishna, a similarly mythological character, reinforcing faith with fact, a domain thus far enjoyed by only the newer religions Christianity and Islam. Today many social anthropologists point out that tribal tales and customs follow frighteningly close parallels to events described in the Ramayana. A case in point is the Sabarras tribe in Orissa which despite being outside the main social and cultural fold of Hinduism record events surrounding the life of Rama and other characters in the epic despite the marked absence of any religious significance being attributed to these events or indeed their actors. In the Bellary region one can also observe such patterns. At any rate I dont think that claims of historicity of characters in these tales can so summarily be dismissed as just so much religious mumbo jumbo, as they are so susceptible to doing in thesemoderntimes.

Having settled that I staunchly believe that historicity (defined as 'available non-contested proof of historicity') is irrelevant to the present case. I dont believe that we can rate the merits in people's beliefs? The question is not whether he existed in the temporal plane but only whether millions of Hindus may be permitted to believe, even in absence of incontrovertible facts, that he did. We don't need a state guarantee to protect claims made on fact. The guarantee exists explicitly to protect claims made on faith. A claim resting on faith cannot be met by an argument attacking it on fact.

The true malady I believe, and I am frequently and famously wrong, is the secret shame of being publicy Hindu. Of being visibly "majority". Of being too Hindu. Such luxuries are apparently to be afforded to minorities alone. There is no such thing as being too Muslim. Or too XYZ. Too Hindu is a bit of a problem. Mercifully for our public people (using the popular out-of-my-ass method of statistical research I will number the public Indians at nothing greater than 30,000 which translates into 0.0428% of the total Hindu population, assuming that non-Hindus are for a moment excluded in the initial figure. Naturally the true figure must be even lower) a long tradition of European insistence with examining Oriental traditions through written records to the exclusion of other forms of record, has caught on thus easing the burden of being publicly religious. Associating guilt with belonging to the majority community is India's most successful post-colonial political achievement and our liberal sons are its greatest champions. He he he they blush as pink skinned foreigners narrate how some ill dressed native amused them with stories of Hindu India's (as being pre-Islam invasion India) fantastic claims of mathematical and scientific achievements. These Hindus, they blush, believe they discovered everything from gravity to electricity. (We did in fact discover both. Google Aryabhatta and get back to me.) The dismal ease of this systematic abandonment of our history is matched only by our vapid eagerness to slot ourselves into intellectual fashions to feel secure in our progressive status and a sense of belonging in thesemoderntimes. Such behaviour is everywhere, overt at times subtle at others and it is pathetic and plastic to the point of vulgarity. The free media has seized it with the excitement of Moses on manna and has bashed it around for our viewing pleasure and that odd sense of satisfaction that comes from challenging widespread belief.

I shall conclude this rant with another observation that rather surprised me. The question being tossed around was, "Shall we make the economic development of the shipping trade subservient to religious sentiment and religious beliefs?". It was a rhetorical question. But the correct answer was No. I got the bit about the rhetorical question but try as i might i could not arrive at the desired answer. No matter what, in my ears, after passing through my in built bullshit filter, it only sounded like, "Is Economic greed a greater asset than the spiritual consciousness of a nation?" Or has atheism as governance policy for Hindu issues become so fashionable that we impose it on an unwilling people? No, economics cannot and must not be placed before the moral imperative. Religious beliefs cannot be made subservient to opportunities for gain. The fact is that as the world's oldest surviving civilisation, India is a deeply religious country. And while I might support for the most part the privatisation and modernisation initiatives of our times, I will not stand by and watch the disinvestment of my very beliefs, for economic gain.

-Sushrut