Ram Setu: Faith, fact and fiction

By Ashok Malik
 
Ram is make-believe, Dwarka did not exist, the Saraswati is a myth. But how much have the Archaeological Survey of India and its political collaborators done to honestly excavate India’s antiquity?

For an entity contemplating an early election, the UPA Government’s propensity to create controversies is remarkable. In an affidavit filed before the Supreme Court, the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) has insisted that there is no "historical record" to validate the Ramayan and, as such, Ram is a fictional character.
 
The case commenced after a petition filed by Mr Subramanian Swamy, the Janata Party president, seeking curbs on the Sethusamudram Shipping Canal Project. It argued that the project would cut and destroy the ‘Ram Setu’, saying it was an ancient monument revered by Hindus as the bridge Ram built to journey to Lanka.
 
It is important to note the Government’s affidavit represented a shift in the debate. The ASI could have stopped at saying that the Ram Setu was a naturally occurring formation, not man-made. Yet, it crossed its brief and labelled Ram himself as fictional. This upset even those who were not necessarily adherents of the Ram Setu.
 
There are three issues that flow from the affidavit. First, the familiar bunch of Jawaharlal Nehru University alumni and Delhi editorial writers has defended the ASI’s affidavit as a citation of "science". Actually, this unifocal attack on the faith-based aspect of the anti-Sethusamudram protests suits the establishment just fine.
 
The Government has never quite explained the environmental imbalance that can be caused by smashing an ancient (natural) structure. Christian fishermen off the coast of Tamil Nadu — who have no reason to venerate Ram’s bridge — already fear for their livelihood.
 
That aside, projections have been made about the economic non-viability of Sethusamudram. It is possible that all of these are wrong, but the Government has not bothered to politically sell the issue. Instead, the overriding reasons for pushing ahead seem to be granting lucrative dredging contracts to flunkies of the DMK and its Ministers.
 
Second, while the Prince of Ayodhya did not live 1.7 million years ago — as some have claimed — is the Ram story all myth? Granted, an oral story-telling tradition has ample scope for exaggeration; Ram probably did not fly back from Lanka on an airplane called the Pushpak Viman. Yet, is there no kernel of truth or historicity to his legend?
 
Consider a Greek analogy. For centuries, the Illiad and the saga of the Trojan War were dismissed as Homer’s imagination. The Greeks, under foreign rule, were told the cherished epics they raised their children on were nonsense; to borrow from the ASI’s affidavit, they "cannot be said to be historical record to incontrovertibly prove the existence of the characters or the occurrence of the events depicted therein".
 
It took Heinrich Schliemann, a classical history buff and amateur archaeologist, 20 years of excavation in the 1870s and 1880s to establish that Achilles and Hector did actually fight to the death outside the gates of Troy. Where are India’s Schliemanns? Not in the ASI.
 
Professional integrity demands archaeologists and historians attempt to authenticate popular legends. From the life of Jesus to the times of David and Moses, the Bible has lent itself to such endeavour in the Christian and Judaic worlds. In Britain, identifying the real King Arthur and mapping his kingdom has been an honest intellectual pursuit. What is the ASI’s record?
 
A serious, rigorous archaeological expedition that attempts to cross-verify the story as told in the Ramayan will take years, perhaps decades. The ASI has not even begun the task. Nevertheless it is happy to announce Ram is a fabrication. The case of India’s other great folk hero, Krishna, is illuminating. Even after evidence is available of a city submerged off the coast of Gujarat — roughly corresponding to scriptural accounts of the destruction of Dwarka by a tsunami-like wave — attempts are made to undermine the findings. There is cussed insistence that the "underwater city" is not, in fact, Krishna’s capital. It may not be; but how do the Culture Ministry’s bureaucrats know?

Source: Daily Poineer

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