Ramayanaand Political Imaginationin India SHELDON POLLOCK FROM DECEMBER 1992 THROUGH JANUARY 1993, morethan 3,000 people werekilled in "communal"rioting across India, fromSurat to Calcutta,from Kanpur to Bangalore. The likes of thisrioting had not been seen forgenerations; in Bombay,for example, morethan 600 people died, and the citywas broughtto a standstillfor a week and a half.These recentevents were related to but exceededeven the gruesomeslaughters that took place in the last quarterof 1990, when a communal"frenzy" took hold thatwas thenviewed as unprecedentedin post-PartitionIndia (Engineer1991a, cf. 199 lb). It is impossible,even irresponsible,to generalizeabout the causes of what were verydisparate acts of violence,unquestionably inflected by local factorsthat usually had littleor nothingto do withantagonism between Hindu and Muslimcommunities. Yet howevercomplex the causal nexus of these eventsmay be, the occasion and excuse-the symbolicnexus-is simple. This nexuswas firstannounced in the act thatprecipitated the earlierviolence, the "ChariotProcession" (rathydtra) undertaken by the then-presidentof the Bharatiya JanataParty ("Indian People's Party,"BJP), L. K. Advani, in October 1990. In a Toyotatruck turned into an epic chariot,Advani traveledfrom Somnath in Gujarat to Ayodhyain northIndia, the putativebirthplace of the hero-godRama. As court documentssubmitted subsequently by the BJP's ally, the Vishva Hindu Parishad ("World Hindu Council," VHP), put it, Rama is an immemorialobject of worship basic to Hinduism,and thisworship was beingimpeded by the presenceof a mosque built on the site of his birthplacetemple ([Vishva Hindu Parishadl 1991:4, 70). It was this ydtrathat led, with the forceof logic, to the event that inaugurated, the most recentriots, the actual demolitionof the mosque on December 6, 1992, not by a mob but by whatappears to have been a. trainedgroup of Hindu militants. Far fromdamaging the BJP, this most dangeroussymbolic act since Partitionhas onlyserved to enhanceits stature;it is now thinkablethat this organization-which calls for, among other things, the immediate "nuclearization"of India's war capability-may become the next rulingparty of the country. SheldonPollock is George V. BobrinskoyProfessor of Sanskritand Indic Studiesat the Universityof Chicago. In differentincarnations during 1991 thispaper was presentedbefore challenging audiences at the Universityof Hyderabad, College de France, Universityof Chicago, Universityof Washington,and the Joint Committeeof South Asia of the SSRC/ACLS and the South Asian Insitute,University of Heidelberg, all of whom I would like to thank. Some of the data in this paper appear in preliminaryform in U. P. Shah MemorialVolume (Baroda, forthcoming). TheJournal of Asian Studies52, no. 2 (May 1993):261-297. ? 1993 by the Associationfor Asian Studies, Inc. 261 This content downloaded from 128.112.203.157 on Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:49:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 262 SHELDON POLLOCK It is the symbologyof these eventsthat I want to examine in what follows. For whateverideological cohesion the BJP secured, and the primaryimpetus for politicalmobilization-in the name of a Hindu theocraticpolitics and againstthe Muslim population-derived in large part fromthe invocationof a specificset of symbols:the figureof the warrior-godRama, his birthplacetemple in Ayodhya, and the liberationof this sacredsite. The readyavailability to reactionaryIndian politicsof centralcultural icons like the Ramayana text has proved challengingto understandand explain. It seems incomprehensiblethat a divisivecontemporary political discourse is so accessibleto, or maybe shapedby, what is commonlyviewed as a narrativeof the divinepresence and care forthe world. It seems improbablethat a heroictale of love, loss, and recoveryfrom the classicalpast should be invokedto empowerand give substance to the politicsof the present.It seems perversethat what have usuallybeen taken to be the utopian impulsesof social harmonyresonating in the symbolof Rama and his dominion should be directedand directabletoward dystopian,indeed, homicidalends as happenedin late 1990 and again in late 1992. There is a long historyto the relationshipbetween Ramayana and political symbology.From an earlyperiod the storysupplied, continuouslyand readily,if in a highlydifferentiated way, a repertoryof imaginativeinstruments for articulating a rangeof political discourses.In fact,it may be doubted whetherany othertext in South Asia has ever supplied an idiom or vocabularyfor political imagination remotelycomparable in longevity,frequency of deployment,and effectivity.This is a history,however, that for premodern India, at least, remainslargely unwritten. About the earliestcourse of the politicallife of the Ramayanatheme, especially its genetichistory in contrastto its receptivehistory, we know littleat present,in partbecause our sourcesare so few,but also because the sourceswe do possesshave neverbeen read mythopolitically.Little systematic research has been devotedto the politics of the narrativein the thousand-yearperiod fromthe putativeorigins of the Sanskritversion to the floweringof the regional-languagetreatments of the tale (Kamban, Kirtibas,Tulsi Das, etc.). Nor have we learnedmuch about the specific historicallocations of this vernacularlanguage productionitself. We know, for example,that a large numberof dramasand otherforms of narrativebased on the Rama theme in Sanskrit,Prakrit, and regionallanguages were commissionedby, performedbefore, or indeed composedby kings over a thousand-yearperiod: from the court of the Vakataka (less likely Kashmiri) king Pravarasenain the fifth century(Setubandha), to thatof Yasovarmanof Kanauj in the seventh(Rdmdbhyudaya), Bhimataof Kalafijarain theeighth (Svapnadasanana), Bhoja ofDhara in the eleventh (Campz7rdma-yana),to that of Sivaji in the seventeenth(the Ramdyanaof Ramdas). But of the social and politicalontologies of mostof thesetexts, we understandlittle to date beyondthe factthat they occupy a centralposition in elite formsof cultural activity. The gaps in our presentknowledge about the political life of the Ramayana theme, then, make it risky to talk of sudden, discontinuousrevaluation or appropriation.Yet that is what I thinkhappened. For I believe I can show thatat a particularhistorical juncture a Ramayana imaginarycame more centrallyand dramaticallyto inhabit a public political space, as opposed to simply a literary space, than it ever had done before,while at the same time its social and political 'Note also Kulacekaralvar(ca. A.D. 800, but cf. Dasgupta and De 1962:38 in.), a king of the Kongu-Cheraline and authorof some of the most notabledevotional poetry to Rama, to whom Zvelebil is preparedto ascribe the foundingof Rama worshipin Tamil country (Zvelebil 1974:102). This content downloaded from 128.112.203.157 on Thu, 21 Aug 2014 21:49:57 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions RAMAYANA AND POLITICAL IMAGINATION IN INDIA 263 valenceswere endowed with a moreconcrete referentiality than ever before. In fact, aftertracing the trajectoryof the historicaleffectivity of the Ramayanamytheme- tracing,that is, the penetrationof its specificnarrative into the realmsof public discourseof post-epicIndia, in templeremains, "political" inscriptions,and those historicalnarratives that are available-it is possible to specifywith some accuracy the particularhistorical circumstances under which the Ramayanawas firstdeployed as a centralorganizing trope in the political imaginationof India. I should make clear that when I speak of "Ramayana"in the contextof north India and the Deccan in the middle period, I am referringto the basic structure of the storyas transmittedin Valmiki'spoem. This is the textthat lies at the heart of all the materialI discuss below, fromthe externalfrieze on the centralshrine of Vijayanagar,the Ramacandratemple, to Jayanaka'sgreat biographyof Prthviraja III. One may readilyconcur that the Ramayanacan interestinglybe viewed not as a fixedtext but as a "multivoicedentity, encompassing tellings of the Rama story thatvary according to historicalperiod, regional literary tradition, religious affiliation, genre,and politicalcontext" (Richman 1991:16). But thesetellings are alwaysretellings of a texteveryone knows. Moreover, it is hard to find evidenceof effectivityin the realm of literary,let alone public, discourse of these "many" Ramayanas in Rajasthan,Gujarat, or the Deccan in middle-periodIndia. (This holds truefor the highly"oppositional" Jain versions,which were somethingof a local specialty.)In short,the foundationalversion, the versioneveryone knows in A.D. 1000-1400 and forthe wholemillennium preceding this period, is thatof Valmikiand his epigones, where the Rama presentedis kodan.darama,dharmabhrtdm varah, "Rama with the curved bow, the chief of the righteous," and Ravana is always lokaravana, sarvalokabhaydvaha,"He who makes the world weep, who fillsall the world with terror."It is the politicalvalences of thisversion, which I detail laterin thisarticle, that are its most importantdistinguishing feature. Unquestionably,the discourseof the epic had already intersectedwith, or reprocessed,or perhapseven providedan idiom for,the ideologiesof earlyIndian imperialpolities, especially that of Asoka (Pollock 1986:9-24). Yet if one actually plots a historyof the Ramayana in the two realms of the political and literary imaginations,one findsa starkdisparity. For a thousandyears from at least the fourthcentury A. D., the literaryimagination