Narratives

Critical Reviews

Well intentioned critiques of culture are much invited.

Many have accomplished what we would traditionally call as bhāshya's or detailed commentaries, but most nowadays lack the skill & patience of such traditionalists more suited toward academic understanding.

The Rāmāyana's real impact thought is on lay people who absorb the entire story as a felt experience in their particular emotional context, 

This is then truly an Itihās -  when the story has run through the storyteller as a felt experience, and they then narrate it from a first-person standpoint, so internalized, that they literally embody the characters in the story.

This is certainly useful as psychotherapy at the individual or collective levels.

Other Narratives

Specific points worthy of highlighting / countering from other, non-Yogic, perspectives :

(need permission to link to some of these sources)

Traveling Theater

The story could very well have been brought into popular lore by traveling theater groups, so diverse is the story with local linguistic & cultural embellishments while trying to stay true to the overall intent..

We are not suggesting that the story may have been entirely cooked up because there are plenty of physical artefacts to attest to its original existence, but it is obvious that the character names have been embellished to drill home its key messages.

Bioregional

The epic in its detailed & vivid descriptions of the flora, fauna, rivers, mountains of Bhārat (the native name for India), can also be seen as a bioregional journey, so evocatively threaded from the Himalayas down to Lanka, this ecological lens revealing the beauty of the Indian sub-continent. Someday a trek beckons !

Geopolitical

The horse in the ashwamedha-yajnya as a mechanism to consolidate Northern power, as this creature could obviously not travel further into the deeply forested / marshy south, and there was no need to - was merely a tool to take over the North and the early formation of a nation-state itself. 

Rāma's journey of building an entire army through clever (or wily) negotiations, is an achievement Chanakya / Kautilya of Artha-Shastra fame would have definitely been proud of, to build a lasting empire, almost from scratch. Kind of like a startup.

The divide-and-conquer approach between Vali & Sugriva, and eventually Ravana & Vibhishana,  is indeed an old trick by colonizers, as a civilization with no centralized control of One God, it is easy to play on regional differences. In fact the country is riven today with splits based on caste, religion, language.

This sub-continental geopolitical drama perspective of the Rāmāyana speaks to the clash of civilizations currently under way across the globe, wherein nation-states are being transformed into civilizational-states beyond mere man-made constitutions, and inspired by their own hoary myths.

There is a certain irony though, to the North-South geographical culture divide,  as Ravana was said to originally hail from the North himself, near Noida around Delhi; for example, note that in this particular village they mourn his passing as opposed to the rest of India subsumed now by the mainstream narrative that he was a Southerner - but that was only in his later life. 

Having witnessed personally Northie-Southie interactions though, the observations on the frictions of these two cultures does ring true.

Gender 

Sitā-yana, or the perspective from the gaze of the female gender, has been explored in recent times. It is a much-needed, strongly female-affirmative lens with which to view the entire epic, to counter the typical male-centric view. 

In particular, down South is well known for matriarchical communities, so the bold approach of Surpanakha, and consequent cutting off her nose & ears to put her in place by the Northerners, while contrasting this with Sita's boundaries being honored by the Southern king is very telling. 

Brahminical

There is then the polemical "Brahminical" construct which Western liberal arts / humanities disciplines have crafted over the years, because albeit this education promotes excellent critical thinking, it has succeeded in deracinating some Hindu kids from their root culture, thus also weaponizing young minds in the service of Woke-ism's cancel culture.

This is because the funding of these institutions - American universities, think tanks, churches - has resulted in them becoming handmaidens for stirring geo-political conflicts.

There is some truth to the claim that in Indian society of the Brahmin construct, but this has been exploited politically to starkly highlight Brahmin achievement in opposition to the lower castes. This is classic Marxist oppressor/oppressed binary theory, which we vilify because it is binary (god/devil type othering), and leaves no room for nuance.

In fact, scapegoating of the Brahmin is also true as there are plenty of counter-examples of the "poor Brahmin" for centuries popular in Buddhist tales even. 

The irony of the "Brahminical" argument is that Ravana himself is actually a Brahmin on his father's side, albeit his mother is not - but we cannot claim that he is only half-Brahmin and thus an upper-caste Kshatriya prevailed over this lower caste creature, because "Brahminical patriarchy", the usual companion meme, ensures the male should dominate.

In fact, Ravana has a direct lineage from Brahma himself - the "god"-father, so to speak, of all Brahmins. So there is really no caste or class conflict here !

In addition, the original author Valmiki in fact was a Dalit, the lowest in the social pecking order, and further he composed the entire epic in amazing Sanskrit which further proves that education was not the sole domain of the Brahmins.

So can we please stop with this tired Brahminical self-flagellation, which has been exploited by the Asura of geo-politics.

The Hindu system has proven time & time again that is capable of self-reform - it just needs some peace to sort itself out, so let it be. 

In any case, in urbanized India, caste divisions for economic progress are all being washed away, and mostly rears its head only during marriages. Okay, it's an endogamous system, but at least economic progress is egalitarian.

Religious Nationalism

Mentioning Hindu-Muslim communal riots in the context of the new Ram temple in Ayodhya, without acknowledging the :

• triggering of the Godra massacre of Hindus trapped in railway compartments, 

• and the indubitable evidence of an ancient temple which triggered demolition of Babri Masjid,

is selective cherry-picking without full context.

Selective history in the grand scheme of things is also well acknowledged now - that the millennium-old histories of invasions & colonialism have been suppressed by the (initially) Marxist academics in charge, who only saw oppression selectively - and refused to correct their narratives.

This is politics of Woke-ism now in academia & media.

The pent up urge to right history has caused the pendulum shift to the "right" now; even across the world there is a shift to conservative politics - and there is a reason for it as liberals have swung too far left, 

Indeed, Rama has been made into a God by the tides of time, but the current politics of a Hindu nationalism, unfortunately coopted by the term Hindu-tva, is not really religious nationalism, yet, as Hindu itself is hardly a conslidated religious term. 

Hindus have plenty of faults, and fault lines too, but their memories are millennia old, and their aspirations for a civilizational-state needs an integrated grand narrative, else the country will break under modern imported notions of secularism. and picked apart by neo-colonialists. 

Avoiding this fate requires certain strong, albeit unsavory, decisions to fight - just as much as Krishna himself, in the next grand epic, finally had to embrace to ensure the civilization-state.

Nation-states are barely couple of centuries old, toddlers in the grand scheme of things ! And please note that UK governance is still strongly influenced by the Church of England, which Protestant ideals are still strong in America. So much for secularism - actually more an export product than for domestic consumption apparently.

Of course Religious Nationalism is not the way either, but there is also no way that India can be saved today by liberal ideals whose ideas are applicable only when a society has a well developed internal economy & identity, and able to withstand deconstruction of any of its lived ideals, no matter if some of them stink. 

This would be forcing of the outsider lens on to the lived experience of the insider. 

Dharma

Dharma is not religion, and neither is it just "a way of life" bereft as that phrase is of any nuance, and usually peddled in the same breath with non-violence no matter the situation. 

The original story demonstrates Dharma, not as a frozen normative ideal like monotheistic religions, but Dharma in the sense of having to make tough decisions to further the larger objective of sustainability - the root meaning of Dharma. 

• One example is in the back story where Ravana has to decide what kind of birth he wishes to take - it's his choice to be a bad guy or good guy. The bigger picture here - there is always a back story. 

  • Bigger picture: Don't just take characters at face value - that is never sustainable in relationships, there is always something deeper afoot, to shine a light on.

• Then there is the incident with Vali - knowing fully well this is not a valorous move Rama still makes the move to kill him - all for the bigger picture of Dharma, which is better seen here through the lens of Yoga. The author Valmiki even though he lauds him as god-like, still captures this moment of infamy - just to illustrate tough decisions. 

  • Bigger picture : how to consolidate power is a lesson in geopolitical alliances much needed now.

• Finally, killing Ravana is that Dharma ? What a question - normally a man saving his wife from the clutches of a notorious wife nabber would be considered Dharmic, as a moral illustration for strong societal norms, to build a warrior culture that protects the shakti no matter the cost involved, and consequently the nuclear family which is the foundation for a sane society. 

  • Bigger picture: Modern narrators so focus on individual human rights, a very Western preoccupation, that they forget the collective outcome the core of which is the health of the nuclear family, essential for the sustainability of society.

What is this bigger picture of Dharma and is it worth it ? 

Destroying the mindless stupidity of monotheistic religions is worth it. Much like the Kurukshetra where the antagonists do not give an inch completely unable to accommodate the "other". The age of AI demands a sharpened & nuanced human mind. That is the bigger picture looming us in the face which is our overall thesis.

We do not extend the favor of Dharma to Marxism though, as their violent revolutions pervade all of society, including lay people, unlike being isolated only to the warrior class of kshatriya's. This is very evident in the Mahabharata where the war was isolated to the Kurukshetra. Albeit this clear isolation is not so evident in the Ramayana, it would have likely followed the principles of Dharma.

Karma

Also Dharma is usually paired with Karma as there are consequences to all our actions - which has been illustrated in the Ramayana in many small obvious examples.

The most epic example of karma though pushes Rama's action in his avatar through to the next Krishna avatar, wherein Rama's action of exiling Sita and then she entombing herself to prove her chastity, is visited on Krishna's clan being utterly destroyed by Gandhari's curse.  The Shakti of Sita was oppressed in the Asura of societal mores and erupted in the Shakti of Gandhari.

This is a worthwhile lesson to absorb, especially in a liberal world that grants rights to all without considering responsibilities that come with it!

Reinforcing the Yoga Perspective

The ability to integrate all manner of gods - north or south - into a cohesive portfolio is literally the shining example of the foundation of the civilization itself, from the Rig Veda. This is impossible to conceive of by monotheistic religions and has bred monomania in its followers, much to the detriment of the mostly tolerant Hindu who is now flailing at facing a concerted assault of such Asuric ideologies.

To fully grasp this, read the master narrative on this site, on the Yoga of Ramayana. The whole point of an Itihas as per Yoga is to achieve societal transformation. This is not religion. This is the Yoga Mind at play, focusing on the real game of evolution.

Bharat is the only civilizational-state that can demonstrate an evolutionary approach toward a prosperous nation-state that can thrive in this upcoming Yuga of massive change with Ai.

Yes, there are costs with evolution even in Biology which we well know, but that's the nature of evolution. The Dharma of this can understood when we embrace the whole of it, and not just be fragmented in our vision.

As the central evolutionary thesis of this civilizational-state takes hold, and super-abundance ensues to take us away from the poverty of scarcity mindset, all will sort out in the age of AI.