Ramayana Age Debate: Science, Faith, And The Hindu Way

On 25 June, Dushyant Sridhar, a popular religious preacher in Tamil Nadu, released the first volume of his two-volume version of the Ramayana.

The author's note in the book says Sri Rama was born on 9 January 5118 BCE. This was from research done by astrologer Dr Jayasree Saranathan, based on ancient astronomical configurations.

The date, however, is not central to the Ramayana published by Sridhar. But it was taken as a great offence by free-temple activist Rangarajan Narasimhan. He contacted almost every eminent spiritual preacher of the Vaishnava tradition and shared, in a series of YouTube videos, their objections to the method followed by Sridhar.

In the process, what got exposed were Hinduism's feet of clay.

Most of the criticisms were, for the want of a better word, mere fundamentalism. One has to accept that Rama ruled for 11,000 years and that he existed 2 million years ago. They should not bring in archaeology, anthropology, or astronomy.

One gentleman went to the extent of saying that the Big Bang theory was proposed by a Catholic priest, and hence it was a Christian theory. He said further that since the Catholic religion sees Hinduism as devil worship, the framework of the Catholic theory of the Big Bang should not be used in the context of the Ramayana.

Then there were others who wanted to completely bifurcate science and faith. Somehow, the reality of faith was, for them, superior to the reality of science.

In other words, a majority of the authoritative Hindu spiritual preachers of the twenty-first century behaved in the very same way as nineteenth-century Christian fundamentalists and present-day Bible Belt Christian fundamentalists facing up to the theory of evolution.

In reality, hardly any mainstream archaeologist would accept the timeline proposed by Dr Saranathan. It is not validated by archaeological data.

Archaeology cannot corroborate the Ramayana exactly but can at least provide the broad-based limits within which the epic possibly existed. It has the merit of putting speculation to the test through empirical data.

In this regard, one scholarly work that takes into consideration data from multiple domains and arrives at a reasonable conclusion is the work of author Jijith Nadumuri Ravi.

But it seems the consensus of the authoritative spiritual preachers of Hinduism tends to consider those who reject the literalist interpretations as being ‘nastikas’ and the literalists as being ‘aastikas’.

For centuries, this problem did not arise for Hindus. Even when Hindus saw the material sciences in their modern form enter India through colonialism, they very well understood their Puranas and Itihasas in such a way that they could accept both the Puranic as well as historical reality.

This is actually a great civilisational and spiritual achievement. Here, Hindus became the forerunners of understanding mythology through inner means.

Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung fertilised their frameworks for understanding and using mythology (including Christian mythology) from the Hindu science of the Puranas, which explored the Puranas in the liminal space between the physical and spiritual.

This is not an apologia invented in modern times. Since as early as Thirumoolar (probably the fifth century CE), the liminal nature of the Puranas has been emphasised.

Let us consider the famous takedown of Yama by the sacred feet of Siva. There is a very physical place associated with this Puranic event — Thirukadavoor, near Chidambaram. Thirumoolar, in his Thirumanthiram, states:

One should observe here that Thirumoolar did not make Kadavoor an inner realm. He kept it physical — in its physical geography. He saw the Puranic episode as an inner process and connected both. A Carl Jung would probably be jealous that his civilisation could not produce such a vision in the mainstream.

Similarly, while discussing Pralaya (crudely, the deluge), he underscores the yogic dimension of it. Fire consumes the cosmos. What is that fire, and what is that cosmos?

In these hymns, as also in hymn 343, which speaks of the decimation of the three flying cities by Siva as the burning of the three inner pollutants, Thirumoolar provides a unique framework that is also common for all of India.

In the Ramayana tradition itself, there is the Adyatma Ramayana, which points out the inner nature of the Ramayana. This has also been hinted at by none other than Kamban himself. When he speaks of Rama’s arrows killing the asuras, he uses pan-Indian mystic imagery. It is a belief that the wasp actually stings the worm, and through repeated stinging, it transforms the worm into a wasp.

This imagery is used throughout India in spiritual traditions as a symbolism of the Guru or the Divine through repeated guiding — often through harshness — transforming the mean nature into the Divine nature.

Kamban likens this repeated action to the arrows of Sri Rama, which transform the base-mean nature of asuras and liberate them into the divine nature. This is a clear indication that the Ramayana always happens in the inner realm of the seeker, whether they are a Bhakta or a Yogi.

Nevertheless, it is a historical reality. The Ramayana, as an Itihasa, transforms a historical reality into a transcendental reality that unfolds. It charges individuals and society with divinity.

Such knowledge, which is the typical Hindu view, as also a blessing to human civilisation, is to understand their own sacred lore without tying them to the grindstone of historicity. This sacred knowledge does not inferiorise the quest for historicity using data from the Ramayana or other sacred literature and the understanding of the historical dimension of the epic through archaeological or archaeo-astronomical evidence.

On the other hand, the need for proving the Ramayana through historical data with a preconceived agenda or the denial of historical data to make Rama a contemporary of Stegosaurus indicates the deep colonisation we have undergone.

The tragedy is that while we are moving with a moronic vengeance towards literalism and history-centrism, the so-called ‘Abrahamic’ theology in the West is Hinduising itself with hesitatingly small steps in the direction of freeing its narrative from such history-centrism and fundamentalism.