On Thursday, The Indian Express reported how a Kerala academic was forced into silence by bullies. They said, Dr M M Basheer, a reputed literary critic and a retired professor of Malayalam at the University of Calicut, could not write on the Ramayana since he was not a Hindu. The gentle professor was alarmed that some persons could ignore his contributions as a public intellectual and limit him to his religious identity. The loss, certainly, is not Basheer's. It is Kerala's public sphere that has been deprived of the insights this scholar, who has studied the Ramayana tradition for years, could have provided. The lumpen lot who missed the point of Basheer's ruminations on the Ramayana seems unaware that the Ramayana is no single text, but a whole tradition. Adi kavi Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana, which Basheer chose for commentary, is a great poetic rendition of the story of Ram, the king of Ayodhya. King Ram is not just the avatar of Vishnu but also a representative human being. Many other versions of the Ramayana followed, with twists and turns in the story. The more popular bhasha versions would offer an uncritical view of Lord Ram and be soaked in bhakti (devotion), as was the mood of the time of their writing. The beauty and the greatness of the Ramayana tradition is that it offers a rich and varied array of texts and interpretations about humaneness and godliness. Even modern writers have mined the tradition to produce new texts that interpret Ram katha in the modern context. Clearly, those who targeted Basheer are either unaware of the diversity of the Ramayana tradition or are uncomfortable with it. They chose to pick on the religious identity of the writer because they were disturbed by his scholarship. The state must not indulge these self-proclaimed custodians of Hinduism. People have the right to profess their views and beliefs. But faith should not be made an excuse to bully people or promote a sectarian agenda. By all means criticise, but with civility. The Ramayana is the collective heritage of all of India. No one has the right to claim it exclusively for one community. There have always been many Ramayanas and many ideas of Lord Ram. Best that it continues to be so.
