Ramcharitmanas and Hindu reform

The occasion was L.K. Advani’s 79th birthday and his family had organised a satsang path of Sundarkand from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, at his house on Prithviraj Road.

The occasion was L.K. Advani’s 79th birthday (November 8) and his family had organised a satsang path (congregational recitation) of Sundarkand from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, at his house on Prithviraj Road. Guruji Ashwinikumar Pathak, brother of Harin Pathak, a BJP MP from Gujarat, had specially come from Ahmedabad to conduct the path. RSS chief K.S. Sudarshan was among the small group of invitees. Before the satsang began, a young Bengali journalist said to me, “I am very happy to be here. In Bengal, we don’t have such readings from the Ramayana and Gita anymore, although I remember that such functions used to take place in my childhood.”

Effect, I thought, of the Marxists’ sustained efforts to erase Bengal’s Hindu ethos. I am well acquainted with the Marxists’ disdain for Hinduism. I had contracted the virus myself during my years of communist activism, and only a deeper study of the Hindu religion and Indian culture helped me detoxify myself later. Indeed, my first experience of the Marxist denigration of Hinduism was in the context of Ramacharitmanas. I was a volunteer at an all-India conference of the Students’ Federation of India, the students’ wing of the CPI(M), in Mumbai in the early 1980s. A poster exhibition had been put up in a large hall to present SFI’s “progressive” perspective on various social and political issues. My attention was grabbed by one poster that depicted the “anti-dalit, anti-woman, anti-poor” and generally “oppressive” face of Hinduism. As proof, it quoted the following lines from Tulsi Ramayana: “Dhola gawanra sudra pasu naari, sakala taadan ke adhikari” (A drum, a rustic, a sudra, a beast and a woman – all these deserve to be beaten.) “Is this what Tulsidas says?” I said to myself in anger. “What kind of religion is this that denies dignity and justice to fellow human beings?” However, my subsequent reading of, and about, Tulsidas had convinced me that these lines were grossly misunderstood.

Since the lines appear in Sundarkand, I was eager to hear what Pathak had to say about this most controversial aspect of Ramacharitmanas. Rather than evading it, he dealt with it elaborately by making three points. Firstly, the meaning imputed to the contentious lines is totally out of tune with the divine philosophy permeating Tulsidas’s Ramayana – that of God’s boundless love for all His creation, without distinction. Secondly, he emphasized that the word ‘taadan’, in the context in which it appears, means the very opposite of its popular meaning – namely, soft and careful treatment. But his third point was most important. “Ramcharitmanas was written in a different age. If some lines in it sound hurtful to any section of our society today, what’s wrong in simply changing them? Therefore, I have replaced the word ‘taadan’ with ‘laalan’ (loving treatment).”

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Here was an exemplary case of textual revision of an important work in Hinduism. By rendering Valmiki’s Ramayana from Sanskrit in the language of the common man in his time, Tulsidas enshrined the epic in the hearts of millions of Hindus in the Hindi heartland. Gandhiji, for whom Ramanama was his “refuge in the darkest hour”, has written: “I derive the greatest consolation from my reading of the Tulsidas’s Ramayana. It takes a foremost place in the spiritual literature of the world.”

Yet, Gandhiji it was who said that even scriptures can, and should, be reinterpreted if they are found wanting. In the context of a debate on the Holy Quran, he wrote: “Every aspect of every religion has, in this age of reason, to submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice if it is to ask for universal assent. Error can claim no exemption even if it can be supported by the scriptures of the world.” (Young India, Feb 26, 1925) Therefore, the Mahatma would have been happy at the revision that has now been introduced in his favourite book.

Nowadays we see a concerted campaign to defame Hinduism – sometimes out of ignorance but oftentimes out of design. Of course, Hinduism is not perfect and infallible. But which other religion is? The need of the hour is for the followers of each faith to show courage and change that which is outdated or out of line with the times we live in.

Before he passed away in August this year, Suraj Bhan, a senior dalit leader of the BJP and chairman of the National Commission for Scheduled Castes, had begun an effort to have all objectionable references to dalits and women deleted or changed from Hindu texts. Some Shankaracharyas had expressed their support to this reformist endeavour. As I returned from the satsang at Advaniji’s house, I was doubly convinced of the need to reinterpret, and in some places modify, those aspects of our religious texts (Hindu as well as non-Hindu) which, in Gandhiji’s words, do not “submit to the acid test of reason and universal justice.”