A ‘bridge’ that divides

Laurie Goering

To engineers hoping to dredge a shipping canal, the chain of tiny submerged islands stretching across the straits separating India and Sri Lanka are part of an old natural ridge of ocean sand and coral.

But to India’s Hindu nationalists, they are something sacred: remnants of the stone bridge built by an army of monkeys to help Ram, a Hindu hero, cross to Sri Lanka to rescue his kidnapped wife from a demon king.

In India, a land rich in history and religious epics, sacred ground is everywhere, and building just about anything involves dodging ubiquitous shrines, tombs and monuments.

But a plan to slice through Ram’s Bridge, as the ridge is known, has created an epic furore, with the government accused of blasphemy, an ailing Hindu nationalist political party angling for a comeback and Hindu religious leaders trying to retract a demand for a state politician’s head.

“It’s the rationalists versus the believers,” said George Verghese, a longtime New Delhi journalist and author on Indian development issues. “But it’s also rather crude politics on all sides.”

For most of a century, India’s government has pondered dredging a deep shipping canal through the shallow straits that separate India and Sri Lanka as a way of connecting the Bay of Bengal and the Arabian Sea and shortening transit times for ships, which must circle south of Sri Lanka to make the trip.

But when the Government recently settled on a route for the canal that cut through Ram’s Bridge - other routes threatened shrines or worsened ecological damage - Hindu petitioners filed a court objection, citing Nasa photos of the submerged “bridge” and appropriate text from the Ramayana, an ancient epic of Lord Ram’s exploits.

According to the story, Ram enlisted the help of Hanuman, his monkey aide, and his monkey army to throw stones into the straits separating India and Sri Lanka to build a floating bridge. Ram’s army then used the bridge to rescue Sita, his kidnapped wife.

Called in to reply to the complaint, the Archaeological Survey of India filed a statement that the Ramayana could not be considered a historical record to “incontrovertibly prove the existence of the characters or the events depicted therein,” a statement received by hard-line Hindu opposition politicians in the same way conservative Baptists in the US might take a Government suggestion that Jesus could be mythological.

In the resulting furore, the Hindu chief minister of Tamil Nadu state, home to the disputed bridge and a southern Indian population that disputes Ram’s hero status, demanded: “Who is this Rama? From what engineering college did he graduate? Is there any proof for this?”

The leader of the World Hindu Council then insisted that anyone who beheaded the chief minister would be “weighed in gold by the saints,” a statement he later revoked while still insisting that the tongues of blasphemers should be cut out. A host of popular gurus, meanwhile, questioned whether India’s Government had “disowned” its heritage.

With the opposition Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party rushing to fan the flames to try to collect votes, the Government quickly backed down, withdrawing the controversial report and asking for a three-month adjournment of the Supreme Court case.

But the saga, which resulted in two deaths in nationwide protests, has raised questions over where the fine line between fact and faith should be set. It’s a particularly difficult question in a country with a huge demand for new infrastructure projects, a long history and a rich pantheon of gods who play a part - culturally if not religiously - in the day-to-day lives of most people.

“In a country as rich in cultural and historical diversity as India, which has an established history ranging over nearly 9,000 years, the line between myth and reality is often obliterated,” acknowledged the Archaeological Survey of India.

The Ram’s Bridge controversy, Indian academics say, is not unlike the dispute in the United States over whether the scientifically supported theory of evolution or the biblical tale of creationism should be taught in schools.

Chicago Tribune