The Third Voice

Martin Kampchen

Recently, India was in the grip of a controversy which deeply fascinated me.

It was the conflict around the mythic Ram Sethu which the monkey army of Lord Rama built from South India to Sri Lanka to save Sita from the clutches of the demon Ravana.

The coral reefs and rocks extending from Rameswaram to Sri Lanka are seen as remnants of that bridge, while scientifically speaking they are a geological formation, and not man-made.

The Government has been dredging a canal through that narrow passage between India and Sri Lanka, called the Palk Straits, which would allow ocean ships to pass through, thus shortening the distance of, say, from Kolkata to Mumbai, by 780 km.

This dredging would entail that the Rama Sethu has to be partly damaged. In order to defend that step, court proceedings were initiated calling in question the historicity of Ram Sethu and of Valmiki’s Ramayana in which these events are narrated, and, indeed, quite unnecessarily, the existence of Lord Rama himself.

Immediately, one particular political party was up in arms and began a movement in defence of Lord Rama and his bridge as a structure sanctified by God. A national debate ensued.

Its result was the general consensus that religious beliefs, or religious passions, must not be aroused; further, that Rama indeed exists, and his existence needs no proof; and that the Ram Sethu also exists, at least as a mythological verity, and should not be disturbed.

Only a few writers did probe deeper, namely gauge the difference between historical fact and mythological fact. Here I found a coinage by Romila Thapar helpful; she wrote of a “Semitisation of Hinduism”. By that she implied that under the influence of Western education, mythology, as for example the Ramayana, was being devalued as it lacked historical evidence.

Proven history alone is being considered “true”. The Ramayana and other mythological works are true merely on the level of literature and legend, while history presents a higher form of truth.

The semitic religions, Christianity and Islam, have a founder whose historical existence is proven and whose historicity is of the utmost importance to the self-understanding of these religions.

Originally, however, mythology in India professed its own form of truth which needed no props of historicity. Myth contains a symbolical truth which may have a higher degree of reality than even history. Myth fuses the historical reality of various lives and various events into one complex narrative.

Myth thus is condensed, heightened, intensified history. Rather than devaluing mythology as “unhistorical”, all Indians ought to be proud that they possess an unbroken tradition of mythology and myth-making spanning several thousand years.

Even today the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are being retold and dramatised, altered and added on to suit different audiences and occasions. Had this spirit of legitimate pride prevailed in the present controversy, the myth-making qualities of the Hindu faith could surely have coped with the partial destruction of the Ram Sethu. It would have created a myth justifying and explaining such physical alterations.

To me, India’s mythological or narrative tradition has always been something to marvel at, something I have urged Indian friends to become conscious of and to cherish.

I realise that people who have imbibed the two great epics are capable of continuously living on two levels of reality: on the level of everyday life, and on the mythic level which interacts with the level of everyday life.

In the course of everyday decision-making their actions are directly informed by the examples of mythology. When they encounter new situations, they search for an evaluation system informed by the Mahabharata and Ramayana.

These friends do not only search for moral guidance, they also want intuitively to fit in their own experiences into the social archetypes of mythology. By doing so, their own unknown and rather insignificant lives assume dignity and sometimes grandeur.

Through myth, their lives receive meaning; and through such meaning, their struggles and sorrows are being transformed into something greater.

These struggles communicate with the eternal struggle of mankind, and their sorrows participate in the eternal sorrow and pain of man. This dimension does not sharpen one’s struggle and sorrow, but indeed it possesses the therapeutic potential of consolation and release from suffering.

Persons who dip their emotions into that deep ocean of stories, return from it with a sense of sharing them with all of humanity and with all ages. I am convinced that the enormous strain of making a decent living in an Indian city is to a large extent softened by this mythologising faculty of the Indian mind.

Equally, this mythologising faculty is a major factor for non-resident Indians to continue identifying themselves with India, and for feeling an identity as Indians. Let us pursue these ideas a little further.

Sixty years after Independence, India is more than ever before at a crossroad. Does her thinking population sell itself wholesale to the temptations of modernity and emerge as the superkids of the computer age, or does it pursue and consciously continue an Indian tradition which has been its mainstay for many centuries ?

By “Indian tradition” I, here, mean something more extensive than “family values” and more than conservative “moral values”; I certainly do not refer to anything emotionally narrow and socially repressive.

I mean a particular ethos: an idealising tendency which is both naive and pure-hearted; and a universalising tendency which moves beyond history and beyond any narrow dualism of good and bad, and beyond the conventional distinctions of reason.

This tendency makes the Indian mind so deeply philosophically inclined. Yet, such idealism and universalism rarely moves into the realm of abstraction. It remains within the orbit of practical human life, of heroes and heroines, of gods and goddesses. It remains within the orbit of stories.

To me, the most tangible element of that Indian ethos is its genius for narration. The Judaic-Christian tradition has commandments and precepts as its guidelines, while Hinduism prefers stories. It teaches by heroic examples. It prefers the person-to-person contact when it comes to education.

Story-telling originates in the family - a grandmother tells stories to her grandchildren - and is thus directly connected with the high value placed on family-life in India.

Through stories, individuals become bound to their community to their family, to their linguistic community, to their faith community and ethnic community. Through story-telling individuals become connected to the past to their ancestors and to their gurus.

Through story-telling, in short, individuals are being emancipated into becoming members of various communities.

Through these communities they receive emotional and social security, they are tied into a hierarchy of cultural and moral values. Integrated into a web of stories, individuals are unlikely to be attacked by the feeling of existential emptiness and meaninglessness which is the disease of Western society.

The writer is a German Tagore scholar residing in Santiniketan. This essay is based on a talk he recently gave in London. He can be reached at [email protected]