Anecdotes from Ram Rajya

Abhijit Guha

It is held by the pious Hindus believe that Rama was an ideal king who maintained justice and looked after his subjects with love and extreme devotion. Another interesting thing about Ram Rajya was its reference by political leaders of modern India. Prime Minister NarendraModi, speaking at the inauguration of the National Academy of Customs, Indirect Taxes and Narcotics (NACIN), said, ‘The institute would play an important role in the collection of taxes’. According to him ‘there is a need to follow the system of tax collection that prevailed during Ram Rajya. The Sun collects water-moisture from Earth and then showers it for its good and prosperity. India’s tax collection system should be similar. The government undertook several reforms for the objective.

Ramayana narrates this picture of Rama as the ideal king. Rama was so honest that he even made to pass his devoted wife Sita pass through fire to test her chastity since Sita had spent a long time in Ravana’s kingdom, Lanka. Sita passed well through the fire test of Rama. But Rama was not even satisfied. He sent Sita underground to test her again, which revealed two things: (1) Rama’s mistrust of Sita and (2) his populist approach towards the satisfaction of his subjects, which helped him to stay in power. Rajsekhar Basu in the ‘Introduction’ of his brilliant treatise ‘Valmiki Ramayana’ raised this question quite succinctly. He stated emphatically:

‘The lakhs of people in India did not care to overlook the inconsistencies in the character of Rama and accepted whatever was narrated by the storyteller with devotion. But the Valmiki Ramayana is mainly a collection of poems. It is neither an ancient story nor a devotional text, and for this reason, we could not fully suppress our logic and rationality. A question, therefore, was raised in our minds. It was good that Valmiki wanted to depict Rama as very dutiful, but was it necessary to harass Sita twice? Although Basu rescued Rama by saying that the Uttarkanda of Ramayana was later incorporated by other unnamed authors, so Valmiki should not be blamed for the punishment of Sita by Rama after the war (Basu, 1946:3-4).

Rajsekhar was quite emphatic on how difficult it was for him to judge from a modern and ‘neutral standpoint’ the various inconsistencies depicted in the Ramayana. Basu cited examples like (i) the unethical killing of Bali by Rama and later (ii) after the killing of Ravana, the harsh language in which he refused to accept Sita and finally (iii) the killing of the Dalit saint Sambuka to protect and preserve the rules of the varna hierarchical system in which the Sudras were not allowed to meditate for higher gods in the ancient era.

The story of Sambuka was depicted in the Uttarakhand of the Ramayana. The story ran like this.

After the establishment of a new kingdom named Madhupuri, Satrughna (the son of one of the queens named Sumitra of Rama’s father king Dasaratha and the twin brother of Lakshmana) set out to see Rama at Ajodhya and stayed with Rama for seven days and then left to rule his own kingdom under the order of Rama. Rama was running his kingdom, and one day a Brahmin came to Rama crying with his dead son and started to blame Rama for his ‘sins’, which might have been the cause of the death of his son. The Brahmin threatened Rama that he and his wife would commit suicide if Rama did not give life to their dead child. Hearing the lamentations of the Brahmin, Rama consulted his saint advisors, like Basitha, Markandeya, Kasyap and Narada, and then killed the Sudra saint Sambuka, and the dead son of the Brahmin was revived.

Famous Bengali litterateur Rajsekhar Basu carried out one of the most authentic translations of the original Ramayana from Sanskrit to Bengali in the year 1946. Basu’s preface to the translation has many interesting details, which may surprise the present generation. For example, Rama and Lakshmana, during their exile in the forest, used to hunt animals for meat just like the Europeans (Basu, 1946: iii), which is a far cry from their supposed vegetarianism. Rama himself also killed a saint named Sambuk as advised by the Brahmin Narad, because despite being a Sudra, Sambuk had dared to meditate, and this, according to Narad, had led to the death of a Brahmin child. Rama beheaded Saint Sambuk without any provocation (Basu, 1946:454). One may recall here that Rama received immense help from a Nishad (one of the most backward castes) named Guha during his stay in the forest (Basu, 1946:105-107). The whole of Rama’s monkey army, led by Sugriva and Hanumana (now the monkey god) belonged to forest-dwelling communities. Without them, Rama could not have won the war against his enemy Ravana. Rama also killed his ally Sugriva’s elder brother Bali, keeping himself concealed and shooting an arrow in his back, while the two brothers were engaged in a duel and Bali seemed to be winning (Basu, 1946:216-219). When Bali accused Rama of violating the basic rules of a duel, Rama justified his act, saying that Bali was punished for marrying Sugriva’s wife. Rama even compared killing Bali with the slaughtering of a hunted animal. Anthropologist and historian K.S. Singh, in his article entitled ‘Tribal Versions of Rama-Katha: An Anthropological Perspective’, aptly observed: 

“In killing Bali surreptitiously, Rama cited among various reasons, his keeping of his younger brother’s wife as a sinful act. Rama did not object to Sugriva keeping Bali’s wife Tara, who was also his wife’s elder sister, after his elder brother’s death” (Singh, 1993:54-55).

Scholarly research on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata has had a rich tradition in India. K S Singh, in the introduction of the book Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, published in 1993, said that the epics were not only religious texts but also historical documents, anthropological treatises. The popularity of the Ramayana serial on television was not its appeal to fundamentalism but derived from the fact that the epic enabled most of the Indians to relive their childhood. Also, the Ramayana, being basically a love story preserved orally through the centuries, had an appeal not only among the higher castes but also among the various tribal communities of India (Singh, 1993:2). Without going into the details of the Adivasi versions of the Ramayana, historian Romila Thapar wrote:

“The Ramayana does not belong to any one moment in history for it has its own history which lies embedded in the many versions which were woven around the theme at different times and places, even within its own history in the Indian subcontinent … The appropriation of the story by a multiplicity of groups meant a multiplicity of versions through which the social aspirations and ideological concerns of each group were articulated. The story in these versions included significant variations that changed the conceptualization of character, event, and meaning” (Thapar, 2014).

Anthropologist T B Naik, in his paper “Rama-Katha among the Tribes of India”, described vividly the stories of the Ramayana among the various tribes of India from the west to the east. The Bhils in the Panch Mahal district of eastern Gujarat have a very popular version of the Ramayana called the Bhilodi Ramayana and according to the local tradition, Valmiki Rishi himself was also a Bhil named Valio. This version begins with the search for Sita by Rama, Lakshmana, and Hanumana. Ravana’s men employ some Birhors to catch Hanumana since the Birhors are expert monkey trappers, but they fail to do so. Then Hanumana himself suggests they make a net with holes thrice the breadth of a human finger to catch him. Hanumana is caught with that net but Hanumana pleads with the Birhors not to kill him and that he will kill himself. The narration of Hanumana setting Lanka to fire follows, and finally, he goes to Rama and asks him about the disposal of his body after his death. Rama says that those who trapped you, the Birhors, will eat you and your kind. Since then, it is believed; the Birhors had been killing and eating monkeys (Naik, 1993:47-48).

One of the remarkable versions of the Ramayana comes from the Gonds of central India. Molly Kaushal, a professor at the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), described in detail the Gond Ramayani, which according to her can be seen as “Ramadan in inverse” or “Ramayan inverted” in which Lakshmana, not Rama, is the main hero and Lakshmana, not Sita, undergoes a trial by fire to prove his honesty and chastity. Kaushal writes:

“Despite obvious similarities with the Ramayan storyline, though inverted ones, the Gondi text is not about the Ramayan. It is a text, which encodes the Gond discourse on human body, sexuality, life and death, social and sexual anxieties and has strong philosophical and psychosocial undercurrents running throughout the text” (Kaushal, 2021:2).

In his article ‘Tribal Versions of Rama-Katha: An Anthropological Perspective’, N N Vyas noted the distinctive interpretation of the Ramayana by the tribals of India and added that this interpretation was derived from their experiences living in the hilly and forested regions. Vyas collected his ethnographic evidence mainly from the tribes of Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. In these tribal tales, the king, Dasaratha, is depicted as a deceitful person, and the birth of Sita coincides with extreme drought, due to which the parents are forced to dump her in a field. She is discovered by Janaka while ploughing the field. Furthermore, Dasaratha reveals his autocratic nature when he announces out of the blue that Rama and Lakshmana will go to the forest and Bharat and Shatrughan will rule his kingdom. The tribal version has a different interpretation of Rama and Lakshmana chasing the golden deer at the request of Sita in the forest. It is Sita’s desire to eat the flesh of the animal that leads the two brothers to kill the deer. They aren’t collecting and eating wild fruits when they spot the deer, as the other versions have it. The rest of the story matches the Valmiki Ramayana (Vyas, 1993:13-14).

According to K.S. Singh, in a Munda version of the Ramayana, Rama is not the embodiment of righteousness or an ideal person or an avatara as projected by Goswami Tulsidas, but an ordinary person with human weaknesses and strengths. Ravana, on the other hand, is described as a noble hero who belonged to one of the clans of the Munda tribe, Timling (Singh, 1993:50-51). The tribes of the northeast also have their own interesting versions of the Ramayana. The Mech (one of the oldest indigenous groups of Assam and North Bengal) “traced the Hindu-Muslim conflict to their version of Rama-Katha, according to which Lakshmana ate beef, became a Muslim and begot two sons, Hasan and Hussain, who were killed by Lava and Kusha” (Singh, 1993:53). More recently, famous litterateur and a former professor of Comparative Literature NabanitaDevSen, in her Chandankumar Bhattacharya memorial lecture, showed that there existed a distinct tradition of the Ramayana cherished and preserved orally by the women in India in four languages, namely Bengali, Marathi, Maithili and Telugu. In all these versions of the Ramayana, Rama is almost absent. In fact, he is portrayed as an irresponsible person who caused immense suffering to his honest wife Sita (Sen, 2002:3-4). Ajay K Rao writes in a recent book entitled Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology:

“What we see in the parallel project of the political use of the epic and the inauguration of a royal Rama cult in sixteenth-century Vijayanagara is that, in the precolonial period, the othering of Muslims does not appear to have been a factor in the development of Rama devotional and liturgical traditions, despite the fact that the epic provided conceptual resources for such a usage, with narratives of othering occurring in other regions and literary and inscriptional genres” (Rao 2015:123).

By and large, research on the Ramayana and Rama from Rajsekhar Basu (1946) through K S Singh (1993) to Nabanita Dev Sen (2002) brings out the portrait of Rama not only as a devotional figure but also as a human being, a king with all his follies and faults.

[Acknowledgements: The author is grateful to Anil Varghese, editor-in-chief, Forward Press, New Delhi, for publishing the article on this topic, and a large part of the text has been taken from the article published in the Forward Press on 17/05/2025.]

Bibliography
* Basu, R. (1946). Preface, pp.1-7. Valmiki Ramayana. (Summarized and translated in Bengali).M.C.Sarkar& Sons. Calcutta.
* DebSen, N. (2002). MeyederRamayanGaan. Fifth Chandan Kumar Bhattcharyya Memorial Lecture held on 29th April 2001 at the Presidency College: Kolkata.
* Guha, A. (2025). Many Ramayanas. Forward Press. (An online news magazine): New Delhi. (https://www.forwardpress.in/2025/05/many-ramayanas/ accessed on 24/05/2025.
* Kaushal, M. (2021). Lakshman’s Trial by Fire: Does the GondRamayani Invert the Ramayan? https://indiancultural forum.in/2021/08/12/lakshmans-trial-by-fire-does-the-gond-ramayani-invert-the-ramayan/ (Accessed on 03/05/2025).
* Naik, T.B. (1993). Rama-katha among the Tribes of India. In Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India. PP.31-48. Eds. K.S. Singh &BirendranathDatta. Anthropological Survey of India, Segull Books. Calcutta.
* Rao, A.K. (2015). Re-figuring the Ramayana as theology.Routledge: Oxon.
* Singh, K.S. (1993). Introduction, pp.1-9. Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India. Eds. K.S. Singh &BirendranathDatta. Anthropological Survey of India, Segull Books. Calcutta.
* Singh, K.S. (1993). Tribal versions of Rama-katha:An Anthropological Perspective In Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India. PP.31-48. Eds. K.S. Singh &BirendranathDatta. Anthropological Survey of India, Segull Books. Calcutta.
* Thapar, R. (2014). The Ramayana Syndrome. Helter Skelter Magazine. https://helterskelter.in/2014/04/the-ramayana-syndrome/ (Accessed on 05/05/2025.
* Vyas, N.N. (1993). The tribal view of the Ramayana; An exercise in the anthropology of knowledge. In Rama-Katha in Tribal and Folk Traditions of India. PP.10-14. Eds. K.S. Singh &BirendranathDatta. Anthropological Survey of India, Segull Books. Calcutta.

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Vol 57, No. 52, June 22 - 28, 2025