RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA: Disentangling the Discourses (Reclaiming Sanskrit Series Book 3), by Manjushree Hegde.

................................................................................................

RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA:

Disentangling the Discourses

(Reclaiming Sanskrit Series Book 3)

by Manjushree Hegde (Author)

................................................................................................

This foundation, this series, this work was as needed on intellectual pane and in cultural realm as defense of India on physical plane.

As one reads even the volume editorial, one becomes aware of just how much Vidwattaa and Paanditya these authors must have, even over and above all the studies one becomes aware of as one sees the names referred, to be in this good fight.

A tiny wish - that the quotations from Sanskrit were given in Devanaagarie, at least along with the Roman transcripts! Latter are painful to see, much as the effort is made to get them up to the required level to render Sanskrit without doubts regarding pronunciations.

................................................................................................

"“... an integral theme of Sanskrit epic literature is kingship ... the acquisition ... the legitimacy of succession, the predicament of transferring hereditary power within a royal dynasty...”

"Pollock (2007a:10)"

"So, according to him, the Mahābhārata is essentially a struggle between Yudhiṣṭhira and Duryodhana for the succession to the Kuru throne; the Harivaṁśa is a story of Kṛṣṇa slaying Kaṁsa in order to reinstate the latter’s father on the throne; the Nalopākhyāna treats of the struggle between King Nala and his brother, Puṣkara, for the throne of Niṣadha; stories of Yayāti, Śakuntalā, and Devavrata are quoted by him as further examples of his stand."

Unbelievable, farfetched nonsense, using twisted logic and butchered original legends by a twisted mind of a butcher, just to suit his assault of a thesis against culture of India so as to wipe it off, helping missionaries to harvest an unconquered living ancient culture.

Perhaps it's just that a Western mind, when unopened and uncultured, looks only at what it can comprehend, as a puppy only sees a toy or a bone; so Pollock sees only a struggle for throne, and not how it was not fought over by the brothers, in fact.

So he doesn't see a woman saved or avenged, at all, but only a WWI replayed in India! He's incapable of travel, of leaving his own ancestral background behind, and probably sees a political story in Red Riding Hood as well.

"It is at once clear that Pollock makes this conclusion by discarding the “unnecessary” “appropriation(s) by brahmanical orthodoxy” (Pollock 2007a:9) — in other words, by an employment of “higher criticism”. In his own words,

"“In the course of their transmission, in oral and afterwards in written form, and as a result of their appropriation by brahmanical orthodoxy, a congeries of topics — mythological, philosophical, religious, and so on — was incorporated into them. But at the root, in the very heart of many of these epic narratives, can be found a political problem...”

"Pollock (2007a:9)"

Wonder where he inserts those when he interprets Hans Christian Anderson.

Goethe wrote (in his communication to Schiller dt. 16 May 1798),

"“I am more than ever convinced of the unity and indivisibility of the Iliad, and there is no man living or ever will live who can change this conviction. I prefer to think of the Iliad as a whole, to feel it joyfully as a whole. There is too much subjective in this whole business. It is interesting to doubt, but it is not edifying. These gentlemen are laying waste the most fruitful garden of the earthly kingdom. They have taken away from us all veneration... The Iliad is so round and complete, they may say what they will, that nothing can be added to it, or taken from it.”

"Calvert (1846:153)"

Indeed, and Pollock never read Goethe, much less of his writing to Schiller about Iliad - or he knew about this, but thought he could get away with butchering another, colonial subjugated culture! Evident thereby some of the risks that accompany being friendly and trusting as India does, rather than adopting the belligerent hostility of China.

"Of the Nibelungenlied and Beowulf, too, R. W. Chambers and others pointed out that the quality of the compositions do not allow for the mere sticking of lays together. Chambers famously remarked, “Half a dozen motorbikes cannot be combined to make a Rolls-Royce” (Everts 1908:553). Of the Mahābhārata, too, Charles Drekmeier commented:

"“Hopkins many years ago concluded that the original narrative core of the epic is impossible to isolate from the later mythical and moralistic accretions, and few present-day students of the Mahabharata would question his judgment.”

"Drekmeier (1962:132)"

"Much research — literary, historical and archeological — has now led to a generally accepted consensus that the pursuit of the “epic core” is, at best, a dubious and unreliable inquiry. If one continues on its path for a stretch of time, one would have to conclude, like E. Washburn Hopkins, that “there was no text there at all”!4

................................................................................................

"On the vast canvas of the Harivaṁśa — containing 16,374 śloka-s — the episode of Kaṁsa’s defeat occurs within a mere 93 śloka-s. In a sum total of 318 sarga-s, Kaṁsa’s name occurs in ten. It is amply clear that the Kaṁsa-episode, albeit important, is hardly the “kernel” of the story of Harivaṁśa — so contrary to the claims of Pollock."

One could truthfully say that his importance pales, in comparison to that of Cousin Willie, amongst various Hanovers and descendents thereof that precede, in the genealogy of the royal clan of Princess Charlotte, the granddaughter of Late Diana, Princess of Wales.

................................................................................................

"In order to arrive at some plausible answers, Pollock tries to reconstruct the historical setting of the Rāmāyaṇa: According to him,

"“major urban cities of Aryan India came into existence” in approx. 700 B.C.E; so, the three-four hundred years following the middle Vedic age (approx. 800 B.C.E, according to him) were, Pollock writes, a crucial period in the Indian society — it was at this juncture that some “fundamental and lasting transitions occurred in the Indian way of life”. One such “transition” was, he claims, the “extraordinary expansion of the role of the king”

"(Pollock 2007a:11)."

Of course, one major tool of adherents of Macaulay policy is to deny everything indigenous, call it a lie and establish western dicta - such as timeliness given in indigenous accounts are fantastic and imaginary, the charamdntioned are unreal and everything must fit the diktat of church and the biblical timeliness imposed; if West Asia wasn't civilised at a particular time and Europe was primitive, India couldn't have been an advanced civilisation, else it wouldn't have lost to barbaric invaders, is the logic.

That India was for more civilised, for several millennia, before Europe and Mediterranean neighbourhood, is unthinkable for West. As is the civilisation of continent across Atlantic, but for the monuments discovered. Those of India are ignored if they were not yet destroyed by twentieth century by invaders and colonial regimes.

But the indigenous timeliness stretch back to before the vanishing of the ocean between India and Asia, and India’s witnessing of rising of Himaalayan ranges out of the ocean.

And RĀMĀYAṆA is of era not too long after, as the king who strived and brought fiwn Gangaa to India from heavens was a few generations (60?) before him, not several millennia. India was far more forest than urban in RĀMĀYAṆA, unlike in MAHĀBHĀRATA, and the latter occurred in another Yuga, the second; of the four, we are in the last.

So the timeline Pollock gives are ridiculous at best, but likely racist and driven by an agenda of ultimately converting India, by first wiping out her culture, is a safer bet.

"It is improbable, says Pollock, that exclusive royal dynasties (associated with monarchy) existed in the Vedic period — there are no accounts of struggles for succession to the throne within families, there is not a word that carries the connotation of “royal dynasties”. So, he says, it must be a later development. But by the time the Rāmāyaṇa was composed, he writes, a type of monarchy had come about that was unlike anything before — the welfare of the State had come to depend exclusively on the king, and political power had become entirely concentrated in the hands of royalty. For the first time, he says, it became a practice to transfer royal power through heredity (Pollock 2007a:13). Consequently, many complications arose in its transference, and so the epic poets found it useful, he says, to occupy themselves with its concerns."

First and foremost, Vedas are NOT about worldly concerns. Second, they've been horribly misinterpreted by Europeans who decided that they had to be about animal husbandry by nomads who invaded and massacred an urban people, with nit a shred of evidence about any of it except having excavated remains of an urban settlement. The decision that the settlement couldn't be related to civilisation that claims Veda-s, was arbitrary at best, mischievous very likely, and in any was in favour of all invaders of past millennium, hence suspect.

Finally, Pollock IS not only misinterpreting but seeking to butcher Rāmāyaṇa, and his agenda is political, not about era of Rāmāyaṇa but of the day - of conversion. Where does he get off pretending hereditary inheritance was invented in India, unless he is from a tribe in Africa that doesn't impose monogamy on women? Or is he going on a fast unto death protesting security of career for C&C?

................................................................................................

"Max Muller first dated the Ṛgveda, on apparently linguistic grounds, to approx 1200 B.C.E What he did was classify ancient literature sequentially into four distinct periods — period of the chandas, mantra, brāhmaṇa, and the sūtra. First of all, the most important names of the Sūtra period were identified as Śaunaka and Kātyāyana. Next, Kātyāyana was claimed (not on absolute grounds) as identical with Vararuci. Afterwards, according to a detail furnished by Somadeva’s Kathā-sarit-sāgara that Vararuci was a minister to the Nanda-s of Pāṭalīputra, Max Muller pinned Vararuci/Kātyāyana’s date to 325 B.C.E. Calculating on these lines, Muller concluded that the sūtra period extended from approx. 600 B.C.E to 200 B.C.E. Moving backwards, the Brāhmaṇa period extended from 800 B.C.E to 600 B.C.E, the Mantra period from 1000 B.C.E to 800 B.C.E and finally the Chandas from 1200 B.C.E to 1000 B.C.E. Based on these calculations, Max Muller concluded that the Ṛgveda belonged to 1200 B.C.E."

All this humongous mistake, due to a person in Mauryan court sharing a name with one from Veda-s? This, from a culture that names children after parents, repeatedly?

"Muller’s theory, it is obvious, is purely ad hoc. Firstly, the theory stands entirely on the identity of Kātyāyana with Vararuci which is hardly beyond question; it is, in fact, pure speculation. Secondly, assigning 200 years for a literary period is extremely arbitrary and without grounds. Winternitz remarks, “Now it is clear that the presumption of 200 years for each of the literary epochs in the birth of the Veda is purely arbitrary... it was strangely forgotten on how weak a footing the prevailing view actually stood...” (Ketkar 1987:272) Eventually, Max Muller withdrew his own claim. He said,

"“If now we ask as to how to fix the dates of these periods, it is quite clear that we cannot hope to fix a terminum a qua. Whether the Vedic hymns were composed in 1000 or 2000 or 3000 B.C. no power on earth will ever determine”

"Muller (1979:138)"

He never thought of the simplest, looking into India's, Aryan literature and the indigenous measures of time?

"Unfortunately, in spite of such a clear-cut retreat by the clergy himself, his earlier hypothesis holds solid ground; many — if not most — Western scholars and their Indian followers continue to swear by 1200 B.C.E as the date of the Ṛgveda.

"On the other hand, two important scholars, Jacobi and Balagangadhara Tilak, worked to date the Veda from a different angle — that of astronomy. In 1899, they worked simultaneously, yet separately — one in Bonn, and the other in Bombay — to come to almost identical conclusions. Accordingly, they noticed that in the Brāhmaṇa-s, the Kṛttikā constellation coincided with the Meṣarāśi; but in the Saṁhitā-s, the Meṣa coincided with the Mṛgaśirā. A change of Meṣa from Kṛttikā to Mṛga would take at least 2000 years. Calculating on these lines, the two scholars dated the Ṛgveda to beyond 5000 B.C.E. When these results were published, “a hue and cry was raised by the scholars against such a heretic step...” (Ketkar 1987:273), ... "

It's only slightly unclear in the astronomical details, but yes, that timeline is closer to reality.

The real clue is that of the story itself, where a primate species not only helps Rāma build a bridge to Lanka, a bridge still visible to satellites and determined by researchers to be an ancient construction, but also, they conversed, on Dharma and more, with him, and had a civilisation that included palaces. This whole epic then is of an era of a primitive people developing from primate to human, but having urban development and palaces and other accouterments of human civilisation before losing primate characteristics.

" ... and today, it is barely recognized as valid in the academic circles. Be that as it may, recent advancement in archeological and geological survey has demonstrated — with ample proof— that the Ṛgveda must be of an earlier date. Peter Clift and others show, for example, that the Sarasvatī river in its full-fledged flow (as described in the Ṛgveda) can be dated to before 47,000 B.C.E:

"“Our provenance studies now allow some important constraints to be placed on reconstruction of the river systems since the mid-Holocene. Our data show that the Yamuna likely flowed west, not east as it does now, at least prior to 49 ka [ka = kilo-annum, thousand years]. Such a change in drainage pattern is possible because the Yamuna reaches the Himalayan foreland close to the crest of the drainage divide. Why the switch from Indus to Ganges occurred is unknown but could reflect a number of processes diverting the river east, such as an avulsion event driven by autocyclic processes, as seen for example by the 120 km shift of the Kosi River in 2008. The Beas River was delivering material directly to Tilwalla prior to 10 ka, which in turn would require the Sutlej to have flowed into the Ghaggar-Hakra east of Marot. This means the northern Thar region must have been an area with several major confluences and a large river with a combined flow arguably sufficient to reach as far as the Arabian Sea … While drainage from the Yamuna may have been lost from the Ghaggar-Hakra well before development of the Harappan Civilization, flow from the Beas and Sutlej may have been more recent in Cholistan, if still prior to 10 ka. Loss of these rivers might be expected to have had a catastrophic effect on sustaining settlement in this region, but our evidence argues against this. Water in the small Ghaggar-Hakra (or Sarasvati) River would have been further reduced by monsoon weakening from 4.2 ka (Enzel et al., 1999; Staubwasser et al., 2003; Wünnemann et al., 2010), but evidence for dramatic changes in water sources was much earlier. While drainage capture is dramatic in the eastern Indus Basin in the late Quaternary, it appears to have occurred prior to human settlement and not to have directly caused the Harappan collapse.”

"Clift et al (2012:213)"

"At the very least, ample proof has been given for the “Harappan” civilization’s identity with the Vedic civilization6. Equipped with the new data, then, one can confidently say that the “major cities of India came into existence”, not in 700 B.C.E, but, at the very least, 2600 B.C.E. For at least four millennia before, writes Michel Danino, many regions on the Indo-Gangetic belt had already harbored settled village communities — settled, but slowly evolving new practices of agriculture, technology (metallurgy in particular), and crafts. In his words,

"“... Extensive, planned cities, rising almost at the same time hundreds of kilometers apart, fully functional by 2600 B.C. and interacting with each other through a tight network....”

"Danino (2010:83)"

"If the chronology is corrected, Pollock’s theories, it can be shown, do not hold water at all."

On the contrary, Pollock can only be wrong - the chronology above can only be incorrect in the unexpected direction as far as west goes. 47,000 BCE sounds closer to reality if timeline of Veda-s but in reality they voted be far far older, since - as we know - indua witnessed an ocean vanishing between India and Asia, and Himaalayan ranges rising out of ocean.

................................................................................................

"Mostly, it is for his function that a king is made divine — he is put in a position where he must bear the responsibility of the welfare of his people, and this position makes him “pure” as it were, and trustworthy. In the Vasiṣṭha Dharma Sūtra (19.48), for example, it is said that kings remain untainted with impurity for they hold Indra’s place (aindraṁ sthānam āsīnaḥ). Yet, despite the formal declaration of a king as god, he is not treated as such in everyday affairs. When he removes his official crown and joins other men — at festivals, sports, wars — no one recognizes him as a god."

This is taken much more seriously in first two abrahmic creeds and in Europe, where royal blood is considered to carry divinity; hence the hype about merovingians, platagenets etc., who are reported to carry DNA heritage of king of Jews via his daughter Sarah born in southwest France, according to local tradition, and hence too the hunting down of Knights Templar by church, as well as of the merovinguans and plantagenets. If there were descendents of the worshipped god in Europe, jews and Christians would unite in support, znd church loses nit only power but value as sole conduit to him, goes the logic.

India is indeed different. Kings are anointed, but are not ever taken as gods; that's entirely a different ballgame. Rāma was Avatāra because he was, because of his protection to the righteous and weak, from evil. His very name signifies why - it means literally one whom people could relax in protection of, and live well due to security.

But even when someone is an Avatāra, his DNA or blood in sense of descendents isn't ever automatically considered divine. His or her parents and ancestors, children and descendents are seen matter-of-factly, for what they are worth, and remain human fir most part. A small benefit is the kick of persecution, one may say, but such persecution of divine is not a characteristic of India, that persecution of divine belongs to Chaldean legends and history of Rome.

................................................................................................

"Pollock’s article, “Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India” (1993)1, commences with Advani’s ratha-yātrā. In what follows, Pollock attempts to show how the Rāmāyaṇa, “a heroic tale of love, loss, and recovery from the classical past should be invoked to empower and give substance to the politics of the present” (Pollock 1993:262). From historic sources — archeological, epigraphical, and literary — he tries to demonstrate that the “Rāmāyaṇa imaginary” (an image of Rāma as a “destroyer” of rākṣasa-s) came to occupy “a public political space” from the twelfth century onwards — when India faced a cultural and political confrontation by the Muslims/Turks. At this convenient juncture, he says, the Hindu rulers used the Rāmāyaṇa to consolidate their power — they cast themselves in the role of Rāma and the foreign invaders as rākṣasa-s; and this trend, Pollock says, continues to this day. ... "

Problem is he, not unlike opposition of since 2014, take people of India for fools. This is despite the surprise of a slap delivered by the same people in 1977 to a regime that had assumed that a combination of terror and propaganda can fool India's poor, illiterate people. The surprise and slap delivered then by the very patient population that gave chance after chance for promises never carried out was a lesson not understood by those that pride themselves rooted in ideologies borrowed from abroad anywhere other than India.

Pollock makes the same mistake.

First and foremost, divinity of Avatāra was not a later invention but was already well established before Rāmāyaṇa, as evidenced by the two Avatāra-s meeting.

If Rāmāyaṇa hadn't been deeply rooted, invoking it in twelfth century would have no impact.

And, more than anything, Islamic barbarism in India, of every horrendous kind, was real, whether Pollock likes it or not. If Pollock thinks otherwise, he could have gone on a fast unto death protesting US policy regarding Iraq. Whatever performances encouraged and funded by Hindu kings, they wouldn't have painted a benefic Muslim ruler into a Rāvaṇa without the said Muslim rulers, invaders and generally the foreigners to India, cooperating to begin with - and they did, for well over a millennium.

Alauddin Khilji horrified all of India when he demanded that the king of Chittor surrender his beautiful wife, Queen Padmini, for asking. When refused, he went to war, and men of Chittor died to the last man on battlefield while women entered a pyre on the last morning of the battle after saying farewell to men, rather than face abduction and gang rapes that Islamic invaders were infamous for.

Hindu kings doing propaganda would be of no use if Islamic invaders hadn't behaved far worse than Rāvana, Duryodhana and every other villain known to India, all combined exponentially. India and her people aren't fooled that easily.

And Pollock is malintentioned in implying so.

" ... Furthermore, Pollock claims that Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa itself carries certain elements/instruments in its narrative that allows for an “easy deployment” of itself for “dangerous” political purposes: it is for this reason that it was employed in the twelfth century, and it is for this reason that it continues to be employed for perpetrating “political outrages” today. ... "

Why, does Pollock intend being another Rāvana or an Alauddin Khilji? Why does he find danger in a story of an abducter of a wife punished, unless he intends to impose a creed that teaches women are of no worth, are not human on par, and do on?

" ... In his words,

"“I suggest in what follows that the Rāmāyaṇa came alive in the realm of public political discourse in western and central India in the eleventh to fourteenth centuries in a dramatic and unparalleled way. I believe the text offers unique imaginative instruments - in fact, two linked instruments - whereby, on the one hand, a divine political order can be conceptualized, narrated, and historically grounded, and, on the other, a fully demonized Other can be categorized, counterposed, and condemned. The makers of elite culture in medieval South Asia chose these instruments for the work of divinization and demonization at this historical moment because of the emergence of two enabling conditions. One was the peculiar salience that a far older political theology now seems to have achieved in the service of the legitimation or enhancement or perhaps just self-understanding of kingship. The other was the appearance of Others who - whether, in fact, they presented an unprecedented unassimilability or could opportunistically be represented as such - were especially vulnerable to the demonizing formulation the Rāmāyaṇa made available.”

"Pollock (1993:264)"

What does he mean, "western and central India"? As if the rest weren't as much followers of Indian indigenous treasures! And, as said before, if someone says Pollock is a fool or a Shakuni or a Rāvana, does it force him to oblige? If not, millions of people being accused of beliesuch a propaganda about good tulers can only be fools, and this is what Pollock accuses Indian people of - falsely! Why?

Answer isn't in India, it's in church and its antisemitic propaganda on weekly basis resulting in holocaust that's staring Pollock and West in general in face. But twisting it to suit jihadists of today or their ancestors the invaders devastating India by massacres isn't helping holocaust victims, survivors, or those guilty of keeping blinkers on. It can only help war criminals when likes of Pollock lie about Hindus as they lied about Jews for millennia.

................................................................................................

"Series Editorial"

"It is a tragedy that many among even the conscientious Hindu scholars of Sanskrit and Hinduism still harp on Macaulay, and ignore others while accounting for the ills of the current Indian education system, and the consequent erosion of Hindu values in the Indian psyche. Of course, the machinating Macaulay brazenly declared that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India, and sought accordingly to create “a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals and in intellect” by means of his education system – which the system did achieve.

"An important example of what is being ignored by most Indian scholars is the current American Orientalism. They have failed to counter it on any significant scale.

"It was Edward Said (1935-2003) an American professor at Columbia University who called the bluff of “the European interest in studying Eastern culture and civilization” (in his book Orientalism (1978)) by showing it to be an inherently political interest; he laid bare the subtile, hence virulent, Eurocentric prejudice aimed at twin ends – one, justifying the European colonial aspirations and two, insidiously endeavouring to distort and delude the intellectual objectivity of even those who could be deemed to be culturally considerate towards other civilisations. Much earlier, Dr. Ananda Coomaraswamy (1877–1947) had shown the resounding hollowness of the leitmotif of the “White Man’s Burden.”

"But it was given to Rajiv Malhotra, a leading public intellectual in America, to expose the Western conspiracy on an unprecedented scale, unearthing the modus operandi behind the unrelenting and unhindered program for nearly two centuries now of the sabotage of our ancient civilisation yet with hardly any note of compunction. One has only to look into Malhotra’s seminal writings – Breaking India (2011), Being Different (2011), Indra’s Net (2014), The Battle for Sanskrit (2016), and The Academic Hinduphobia (2016) – for fuller details.

"This pentad – preceded by Invading the Sacred (2007) behind which, too, he was the main driving force – goes to show the intellectual penetration of the West, into even the remotest corners (spatial/temporal/ thematic) of our hoary heritage. ... "

Why this word "hoary" for India's beautiful, rich treasures of heritage?

" ... There is a mixed motive in the latest Occidental enterprise, ostensibly being carried out with pure academic concerns. For the American Orientalist doing his “South Asian Studies” (his new term for “Indology Studies”), Sanskrit is inherently oppressive – especially of Dalits, Muslims and women; and as an antidote, therefore, the goal of Sanskrit studies henceforth should be, according to him, to “exhume and exorcise the barbarism” of social hierarchies and oppression of women happening ever since the inception of Sanskrit – which language itself came, rather, from outside India. ... "

All of which is, of course, complete and utter nonsense propagated in West against India and everything good about her, as per Macaulay policy explicitly stated and employed by British regime.

" ... Another important agenda is to infuse/intensify animosities between/among votaries of Sanskrit and votaries of vernacular languages in india. A significant instrument towards this end is to influence mainstream media so that the populace is constantly fed ideas inimical to the Hindu heritage. The tools being deployed for this are the trained army of “intellectuals” – of leftist leanings and “secular” credentials."

And those willing to sell their souls and fracture their nation are not only always an easy prey, but available to join in this under a variety of self-stuck fraudulent labels - secular, progressive, liberal - and willing just as fraudulently to accuse India lovers under accusations and abusive labels just as falsely hurled at them.

"Infinity Foundation (IF), the brainchild of Rajiv Malhotra, started 25 years ago in the US, spearheaded the movement of unmasking the “catholicity” (- and what a euphemistic word it is!) of Western academia. The profound insights provided by the ideas of “Digestion” and the “U-Turn Theory” propounded by him remain unparalleled."

If one is familiar with history of attempted assassination of Queen Elizabeth I with multiple assassins sent by Vatican, and has gone through "Holy Blood, Holy Grail", that word "catholicity" associated chiefly with - or appropriated fraudulently as label by and for - church of Rome, acquires a very different connotation, just as the word "secular" has, after the anti-Hindu, anti-India brigade selfl-labelled themselves secular, continuing their obeisance to creeds assets erstwhile foreign colonial regimes and obedience to various foreign agencies with anti-India agenda, whether the latter be left or West, church or underworld.

"It goes without saying that it is ultimately the Hindus in India who ought to be the real caretakers of their own heritage; and with this end in view, Infinity Foundation India (IFI) was started in India in 2016. IFI has been holding a series of Swadeshi Indology Conferences.

"Held twice a year on an average, these conferences focus on select themes and even select Indologists of the West (sometimes of even the East), and seek to offer refutations of mischievous and misleading misreportages/misinterpretations bounteously brought out by these Indologists – by way of either raising red flags at, or giving intellectual responses to, malfeasances inspired in fine by them. To employ Sanskrit terminology, the typical secessionist misrepresentations presented by the West are treated here as pūrva-pakṣa, and our own responses/rebuttals/rectifications as uttara-pakṣa or siddhānta.

"Vijayadaśamī

"Hemalamba Saṁvatsara

"Date 30-09-2017

"Dr. K S Kannan

"Academic Director

"and

"General Editor of the Series"

................................................................................................

................................................

February 19, 2022 - February 19, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Volume Editorial"

................................................................................................

"Epic v/s Itihāsa"

"It is typical of Western scholars to treat Indian Itihāsa-s and Purāṇa-s on par with their own epics – viz. the poems of Homer (dated around 8th c. BCE). But Dr. V. Raghavan, one of the finest Sanskrit scholars of the last century, had already cautioned: “To place the two Indian epics on a par with Homer or Virgil is to ignore how the Indian poems have been adored and how they have moulded the character and faith of the people”. Brockington is not unaware of the prejudices that alien labels such as “epics” may inject into readers’ minds.

"Already by the time of Plato (4th c. BCE), the Homeric poems had come to be looked down upon. In vivid contrast, there was/is no Hindu – through the length and breadth of this vast country and through the millennia of history - who does not revere the Itihāsa-s of the Hindu heritage viz. the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. (That is not to deny, of course, the new breed of Hindus with their thoroughly colonised minds, who look upon the West with admiration if not awe, or are sold to leftist and “secular” ideologies)."

................................................................................................

"Tapas and Yoga"

"To the typical Western Indologist the Rāmāyaṇa is a “chaotically structured” text. The very opening word of the Rāmāyaṇa is anathema to him: the Rāmāyaṇa starts with tapas - which is a mere mortification of the body (if he professes Christianity), and little else than superstition (if he swears by “secularism”/science). Yet there is no Sanskrit work which does not revere tapas and yoga. The Gītā calls itself a Yoga-śāstra. Vyāsa wrote the Mahābhārata with the power of tapas and brahma-carya, says the opening chapter of the epic (tapasā brahmacaryeṇa - Mahābhārata 1.1.54). “Stationed in yoga” it was, that Vālmīki “beheld” all of the Rāmāyaṇa. “tataḥ paśyati dharmātmā tat sarvaṁ yogam āsthitaḥ” (Rāmāyaṇa 1.3.6), and saw everything in its verity and veracity (tat sarvaṁ tattvato dṛṣṭvā 1.3.7) - noted, right again, in the opening chapters."

................................................................................................

"Exhume and Censor"

"A typical Westerner would love instead some ballad, “a heroic tale of love, loss and recovery”, which he therefore would suppose to form the “nucleus of the epic”; even the wise sayings of the epics are but extraneous inanities to him, howsoever integral they are to the story.

"His mind runs to “settle” the text, arrive at a “definitive” edition, rid the epic mass of all dross of “accretions”, given as he is to suspecting and discovering “interpolations” at every step by deploying “Higher Criticism”.

"As time progresses, the newer breed of Indologists would like to do something smarter: discover something newer, something “deeper”, that is nonsensical with the epics — discover some evils of patriarchy, or like Pollock, exhume and unpack, and expose the hegemonic and oppressive tactics enshrined in them. And for this, Pollock develops many theoretical frameworks, his 3D-philology positing three meanings – the authorial, the traditional and the presentist – “all equally true”. As the last one, mine, is as true as the original author’s, I can foist upon a text any interpretation as I choose to. Legitimising nonsense thus can unleash a volley of interpretations and interpretive strategies, which can run easily amuck.

"For Pollock or the critics of his ilk, whatever is religious/mythological and philosophical/didactic in Sanskrit literature (would smack of “Brahmanism”, and so,) must be purged from the text. The critic has the fullest freedom to be on the look out for censuring, and so censoring, whatever sounds superfluous to him, or laborious or incongruous to him - from the epic, branding them as unoriginal. As Manjushree’s excursus shows, this Higher Criticism was tried on literature from the Bible to Shakespeare, and was rather repudiated by the scholarly elite of indisputable eminence such as Humboldt and Goethe. Vandalising other cultures is the prerogative, nay duty, of the White Man, after all."

................................................................................................

"Fratricide/Patricide"

"Manjushree has very well shown the hollowness of Pollock’s foisting somehow a “fratricidal war” as the recurrent theme in the epics: so he can stoop to the level of showing Kaṁsa as the brother of Kṛṣṇa!

"Pollock seeks to show that dynastic succession marked a major change in the structure of political power in Indian history, only towards the beginning of the epic period. To the contrary, there are around 50 references in the Ṛgveda alone that speak of various dynasties. If not fratricide, should not patricide be posited somehow as the next step by default as elsewhere (as for example the standard practice that it was with regard to many, if not most, Muslim rulers)? Yes, vānaprasthāśrama for the king and yauvarājya for the prince appear to Pollock as an “institutionalized ritual exile of the king”! Manjushree cites P V Kane to show how vānaprastha was no new invention in the Rāmāyaṇa, but one dealt with already in Aitareya Brāhmaṇa."

................................................................................................

"Sowing Seeds Of Suspicion"

"Struggle for power, dynastic conflict, and armed combat are for Pollock, the “normal” processes of succession! He seeks to show the commonalities between Ayodhyākāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa and Sabhāparvan of the Mahābhārata — with an aim to characterise these second sections of the two epics as the true commencement of the stories therein. He sees similarities in the behaviour of Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira, and even suggests collapsing the two texts into a single time-frame! Though depictions of fraternal unity incomparably outnumber fratricidal wars in ancient Indian literature, Pollock thinks that Daśaratha, Kausalyā, Guha, Bharadvāja and even Lakṣmaṇa – all of them suspect that Bharata would mount a struggle for power! The subtle mistranslations by Pollock of the original Rāmāyaṇa passages in these contexts are very well laid bare by the author of this monograph. In certain places, Pollock’s own translation betrays his misreading and misinterpretation. Pollock makes much of the (sole) statement in the work on rājya-śulka, and our author shows how it has no corroboration in the words or deeds of any character in the long epic. For the wearer of the political spectacles, the most adventitious can loom as the inexorably quintessential. Where was the need to read politics into Bharata’s staying at his uncle’s house? He was sent there by Kaikeyī herself, after all (2.8.28, Mantharā’s words to Kaikeyī). Further, kṛta-śobhi (2.4.27) in this context can simply be rendered as [the mind (cittam) which is] full of glow and glee (-śobhi) by a [good] deed performed or executed (kṛta-) (rather than merely contemplated). Kṛta, in the sense of sukṛta, “well-done” (of a positive, rather than neutral, value) shows itself as the first member of at least a dozen compound words in Sanskrit. If Kaikeyī herself rejoiced, as she did, apropos Rāma’s coronation in prospect, would not Bharata have, in retrospect?

"If there is a dictum that one must act like Rāma (which is to say act dharmically), it appears to Pollock as an expedient to “submission to hierarchy” so contrived as to make way for absolute heteronomy! Filial piety is for him a political tool of subjugation! Our author points out how the same virtue was praised in Chinese and Roman cultures too. Contrast this with the natural ejaculation of Monier Williams (1863): “Nothing can be more beautiful and touching than the pictures of domestic and social happiness in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata... In England, where national life is strongest, children are ... less respectful to their parents. In this, the Hindus might teach us a good lesson.” And this, in spite of the Fifth Commandment of the Bible - viz. Honor thy parents, thy father and thy mother! Or, will Pollock see the same conspiracy already in the Bible? Or, does he hold this idea has travelled from the East to “vitiate” the West?

"Pollock has had (read plainly pretends to have had) no knowledge of the celebrated Upaniṣadic dicta viz. mātṛdevo bhava and pitṛdevo bhava. Surely an editor of the classics of India ought to know this! Or is this another attempt at divide et impera?

"The issue of social hierarchy takes our author into the scheme of the varṇāśrama system which she analyses in the light of the approach of Coomaraswamy (who in turn brings in the corrobrative analysis of Plato too). The concepts of yajña, karman, dharma and vocation are clearly set forth by her in their inter-relationship."

................................................................................................

"Spiritual Authority and Temporal Power"

"Pollock speaks of the relationship between “the king and the brahmin”, which is to say kṣātra and brāhma, as an uneasy one. Yet for over three millennia, the system was followed without even a faint hint of cataclysm. The brahmin’s monopoly of the source of authority bars, asserts Pollock, kingship from developing its full potential; quite to the contrary, Manu as well as the Mahābhārata bring out the harmony and mutual complementarity and supplementarity of the two very well (Manusmṛti 9.322). Manjushree refutes Pollock’s claim that Rāma had any contempt for kṣātra-dharma, citing half a dozen verses from the Rāmāyaṇa, all wilfully ignored by Pollock.

"There can be nothing more mischievous than the equation of the Indian king with personal autocracy. The Hindu king, on the other hand, was never considered above law, but always under the Principle of Dharma, than which there is no Higher. There is perfect accord regarding this issue amongst the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, the Manusmṛti and Arthaśāstra. The crowning quote from Coomaraswamy bears out how the healthy development of kingship to its full potential was achieved nowhere else perhaps as in India – exactly contrary to the contention of Pollock.

"Araṇyakāṇda of the Rāmāyaṇa is very problematic for Pollock, as very many events there are “marvellous and fantastic”. Professing to study the epic from a traditional standpoint, Pollock switches over glibly midway to Northrop Frye’s idea of a myth. “The monstrous subhuman creatures and beings of superhuman spirituality” are items that Pollock cannot digest. Pollock thinks that kingship is the unifying element in the Rāmāyaṇa, forgetting or ignoring the fact that Rāma acts as but a kṣatriya, not as a king himself, in the episodes of Araṇyakāṇḍa. The sages seek Rāma’s help in the Rāmāyaṇa, much as the brahmins beseech Yudhiṣṭhira’s help in the Mahābhārata when he is in exile. The six-fold classification of dharma that our author draws our attention to is quite inclusive, and well explains the role of Rāma in the forest."

................................................................................................

"Divinity: Functional or Ontologocal"

"Another issue where Pollock expends much of his ingenuity is in the discussion of the question of the divinity of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa. There is a great deal of difference in referring — to kings in general as embodiments of divinity, and to Rāma as an incarnation of Viṣṇu. Calling Rāma a god-man, rather dubiously, Pollock attempts to conflate the concepts and confuse the readers, but Manjushree lays bare the subterfuge of Pollock.

"Pollock has several jibes at Rāma in the wake of the kidnap of Sītā when Rāma is full of grief. Pollock says that Rāma wanders like a madman but Manjushree shows how the poet develops vipralambha-śṛṅgāra-rasa in the poetical work that the Rāmāyaṇa is. She is careful enough to notice how even while taking into account though partially, the traditional interpretation, Pollock also subtly disparages them. The clear difference between Rāma as God, and perceiving every king as god, is carefully befuddled by Pollock. Manjushree looks into the examples of Nala versus the divinities in the Mahābhārata, as also the episode of Pṛthu Vainya therein, and Rāma’s own claim in the Rāmāyaṇa that he is human. She brings in relevant statements from Āpastamba Dharma Sūtra, Gautama Dharma Sūtra and Vasiṣṭha Dharma Sūtra (all ancient texts of the pre-Christian era) in handling this subtle issue. She does not miss the key mistranslation well-wrought by Pollock of a verse in the Rāmāyaṇa in this context. She very well establishes the clear cut difference between an ontological divinity and a functional divinity about which even a layman in India may be sensitive, but which even some scholars of our times can be made to get confounded about; and this, Pollock exploits very well."

................................................................................................

"Misr(l)ead"

"The misinterpretations of Pollock are not limited to literary texts. That he has stakes in the contemporary political developments of India is liable to be missed by many cabined in and confined to literary/academic circles. In his 1993 article he aired his ire against the Rath Yātrā of L K Advani — when the call to rebuild the destroyed Ram Mandir at Ayodhya was given. In his zest for playing upto Islamophiles, a la the obsequious leftists, Pollock grieves that the epic poem is “invoked to empower and give substance to the politics of the present”.

................................................................................................

"Archeology and Epigraphy: Tools to Delude"

"Foraying into archaeological and epigraphical “evidence’ too, Pollock tries to demonstrate that Rāma came to occupy a public political space from the 12th Century onwards. He does not accuse politicians of abusing the Rāmāyaṇa for political purposes, or that some elements in the Rāmāyaṇa have been exploited for that purpose. He lays the blame squarely on the Rāmāyaṇa itself as carrying elements and instruments that allow for an easy deployment for dangerous political purposes: “the Other can be fully demonized, categorised, counterposed and condemned”! The message that Pollock gives – not subtly, but openly, is that 12th century onwards, it is the Rāmāyaṇa that has been used for othering Muslims who were demonized, and Hindu kings divinised; and hence the Rāmāyaṇa is having a dangerous role in Hindu-Muslim politics. It is only after the 12th century, Pollock argues, that India saw the rise of Rāma temples subsequent, and hence consequent, to the arrival of Muslims."

A new twist to demonising Hinduism in favour of conversionist abrahmic creeds that seek to destroy every rich culture with a tapestry of full palette of hues to boil all non-white, non-pink down to a brown stew.

"Our author shows how the archeological and inscriptional evidences furnished by Pollock are either very partial and selective, or are quite inconclusive, and in any case over-interpreted. Pollock quotes from Bakker, but Talbot and Chattopadhyaya show the hollowness of the claims of either. Typical of Pollock’s academic temerity are words such as these in the context (but used passim): “...my findings have to be regarded as provisional, but again I would be surprised if further work would require fundamental revision of my conclusion”. So our author examines in detail the Dabhoi inscription (13th c. C.E.) and Hansi inscription (12th c. C.E.) which Pollock himself offers as supporting his stand; and she shows how the political mytheme of Rāma v/s Rāvaṇa does not figure in them in fact, despite Pollock’s claims to the contrary. Kings are glorified (in the context of their vanquishing the barbarian turuṣka-s) as not merely Rāma, but as too, Indra, Viṣṇu, Śiva, Yudhiṣṭhira and many others – quite contrary to the political imagination of Pollock. Our author offers the evidence of five inscriptions of the 12th and 13th centuries – all consistently contradicting the stand taken by Pollock."

................................................................................................

"Literary Evidence - Nil"

"And when it comes to historiographical or literary evidence that Pollock seeks to exploit, our author provides both anvaya and vyatireka evidence in abundance that repulse the tall claims of the “Rāmāyaṇa mytheme” given as some revelation by Pollock. If Pollock points to two kāvya-s as supporting his idea, she provides evidence from more to show that there is nothing that even approximates to the “mythopolitical equivalence” that he conjures, even in the kāvya-s that he cites himself.

"Cherry-picking only convenient facts (or rather factoids, or more exactly merely somewhat suggestive data), concealing their settings, and stripping them of larger/fuller contexts, and brazenly building grand theories out of them – all this, and the grandiloquent language, befits or bespeaks of merely overambitious apprentices; not by any means, of mature scholars. Perfidy, let there be no illusion, is not compensated by ostentation. It is a tragedy of another order that Pollock considers dharma as a mere socio-political issue, whereas in Hindu India, even poetry (or for that matter any art) was considered a yoga of a different format, which is to say, one of universal and transcendent dimensions, though not without social/political reflections."

................................................................................................

"Vedic Roots"

"The Hindu tradition always looked upon the epics – the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata – as elaborations (upabṛṁhaṇa) of the Veda-s : the mitra-sammita thus expounded the ideas and ideals of the prabhu-sammita; nor did the kāntā-sammita (poetry/literature in general) lag behind (The Rāmāyaṇa could very well be viewed as both mitra-sammita and kāntā-sammita). The greatest text book on poetics (viz. Kāvya-prakāśa) said that kāvya sends out its message viz. be like Rāma (rāmādivad vartitavyaṁ, na rāvaṇādivat) very subtly; and the greatest vāda-grantha on poetics (viz. Dhvanyāloka) showed (at 4.5+) how mokṣa (the Summum Bonum of life), and śānta-rasa (the Flavour of Tranquillity), constitute the quintessence of the Mahābhārata, the twin epic of the Rāmāyaṇa."

................................................................................................

"Iconoclasts in Academic Cloak"

"The “academic” attack suffused with casuistry, upon the spiritual kāvya of a yogic poet (by resorting to the ruse of labelling it as but a political poem) is a crime more heinous than the iconoclasm of the Muslim marauders. It is time, then, to wrest Indology from the hands of the haters of the Hindu heritage, and reinstate the insiders’ approach. Naturally secular that Hindus are, they have tolerated for too long the “academic” Westerners’ intrusion into their cultural and intellectual space. It is time they took custody of their own hoary and hallowed tradition."

................................................................................................

"From Disdain to Disruption"

"The words of Matthew Arnold, carrying a ring of truth, and cited with approval by Coomaraswamy, may not suffice today:

"“The brooding East with awe beheld

"Her impious younger world.

"The Roman tempest swell’d and swell’d, "And on her head was hurl’d.

"The East bow’d low before the blast

"In patient, deep disdain;

"She let the legions thunder past,

"And plunged in thought again.”

"The dictum of Vedānta Deśika (14th c. C.E.) - that goblins need to be responded to in their own language (lest they understand nothing, nor refrain from their diabolical diatribes) — piśācānāṁ piśāca-bhaṣayaiva uttaraṁ deyam — is more apposite today than during his own times when the invading hoardes dealt untold destruction upon our opulent temples and innocent populace. What Veṅkaṭādhvarin (17th c. C.E.) grieved, of the horrendous brutalities and warrantless animosity of the alien tribes, the turuṣka-s and yavana-s, is not less true of the contemporary “academic elite”:

""niṣkāruṇyatamais turuṣka-yavanair niṣkāraṇa-dveṣibhiḥ |"

"It is scholars like Manjushree that can rise to the occasion to remedy the grim situation. (With due apologies to Mallinātha commencing his commentary on Raghuvaṁśa/Kumārasambhava, we may say:)

"bhāraty Ādikaveḥ Pollāg(Pollock)-

"durvyākhyā-viṣa-mūrcchitā |

"Mañjuśrī-mañjulā-vāṇī

"tām adyojjīvayiṣyati ||"

"Makara-Saṅkrānti

"Hemalamba Saṁvatsara

"15th January 2018

"Dr. K S Kannan

"Academic Director

"Swadeshi Indology Conference Series"

................................................................................................

................................................

March 03, 2022 - March 03, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Author's Words"

................................................................................................

" ... For Indians, the Rāmāyaṇa is their sacred itihāsa, the fabric of their whole life, “as much a piece of unfinished business as it was for the learned commentators on the poem of the thirteenth through the eighteenth centuries… as vital a work as it had been for its original audiences who preceded them by millennia” (Goldman 2005:83). Indians still celebrate the birth of Rāma (the pan-Indian Rāmanavami festival) with fasts, prayers and recitations of the Rāma-kathā; Dīpāvali is still celebrated to commemorate Rāma’s return from exile to Ayodhyā; the nine nights of Navarātri see a re-enactment of the Rāmāyaṇa — and on the tenth night (Duśśera), an effigy of Rāvaṇa is burnt symbolically to remember Rāma’s victory. It is also the practice of many to do the Rāmāyaṇa-pārāyaṇa those ten days. Furthermore, in Coomaraswamy’s words, “to be such a man as Rāma, such a wife as Sītā, rather than to express ‘oneself’, is the aim [of every Indian]” (Coomaraswamy 1918:87).

"In his ‘The Myth of the Eternal Return’, Mircea Eliade demonstrated that in archaic societies, ‘reality’ was an “unending recurrence of archetypal paradigms played out in the cosmos”, and that “archaic ontology” “tolerates ‘history’ with difficulty and attempts to periodically abolish it” through a “reduction of events to categories and of individuals to archetypes” (Eliade 1959: 36). Much of India still retains of this archetypal-mythical world-view, and in Eliade’s words,

"“It is not our part to decide whether such motives were puerile or not, or whether such a refusal of history always proved efficacious. In our opinion, only one fact counts: by virtue of this view, tens of millions of men were able, for century after century, to endure great historical pressures without despairing, without… falling into that spiritual aridity that always brings with it a relativistic or nihilistic view of history.”

"Eliade (1959:152)"

................................................................................................

"Acknowledgements"

"To Sri Rajiv Malhotra I owe an immense debt of gratitude. It was he who first drew my attention — through his books — to the existence of the Western-academia-challenge that looms before us. It was at his conference that I learnt of the severity of the problem — and the urgency of a rebuttal. It was he who first suggested that I write this monograph — and graciously made place in his institution for me. It was he who channeled the financial support to complete it — without him, and his institution — Infinity Foundation India — this monograph would truly be inconceivable."

"Manjushree Hegde"

................................................................................................

................................................

March 03, 2022 - March 03, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Introduction"

................................................................................................

"“The worst readers are those who go about it like marauding troops: they remove what they can make use of, befoul and derange the rest, and blaspheme the whole.”"

"Nietzsche"

................................................................................................

"The Rāmāyaṇa has commanded attention from Western Indologists ever since their introduction to the “epic” at the turn of the nineteenth century. Even now, at the turn of the twenty-first century, that attention has little turned elsewhere.

"Early European scholarship was often harshly critical of the epic : they displayed, almost invariably, a characteristic uneasiness when faced with the “chaotically–structured” text filled with “ogres, magicians and talking beasts” (Goldman 1984:27). Consequently, they sought to identify an “epic nucleus” — some one great and complex action — embedded, though transformed, within the ample tapestry of the Rāmāyaṇa. Most of their researches, therefore, were attempts to cut away what was to them fantastic figments, the winding disquisitions, and the complex didactic material — all in order to restore the “original” story — perhaps a sombre “heroic tale of love, loss and recovery” (Pollock 1993:262). V.S. Sukthankar sarcastically commented,

" “Modern criticism begins with the assumption that... the “nucleus”... was unfortunately used — or rather misused — by wily priests, tedious moralists and dogmatizing lawyers as a convenient peg on which to hang their didactic discourses and sacerdotal legends ... it is a great pity that a fine heroic poem, which may even be found to contain precious germs of ancient Indian history, should have thus been ruined by its careless custodians. But it is not quite beyond redemption. A skillful surgical operation — technically called “Higher Criticism”— could still disentangle the submerged “epic core” from the adventitious matter...”

"Sukthankar (1957:10)"

"So, the chief European critics of the Rāmāyaṇa — Lassen, Weber, Jacobi, Schlegel, Gorresio etc — subscribed to this “higher criticism”1.

................................................................................................

"Twenty-first century studies of the Rāmāyaṇa, on the other hand, are mostly focused on the topic of “folk and vernacular versions of the Rāma story in which the hegemonic discourses of patriarchy and social hierarchy that lie close to the heart of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa are contested or resisted in a variety of subaltern and/or regional retellings” (Goldman 2004:19). In other words, modern critics of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa fixate on identifying elements of “hegemonic and comprehensive regimes of patriarchal dominance” (Goldman 2004: 20) in the text, and address only issues of gender, power, hierarchy and authority in it.

"Contrarily, Professor Sheldon Pollock, the Arvind Raghunathan Professor of South Asian Studies, Columbia University, (henceforth Pollock) is in a league of his own. Pollock recognized early on that Indologists were either concerned with a text’s existence in its “moment of genesis” (Pollock 2014:399), or in its relevance to present-day scenario. Both methods — independently considered — were, he mused, wholly flawed. In his extensive works on philology, Pollock carefully examined the two methods, and held them up to the light to show the cracks — the barest chiaroscuro of light — in them.

"Accordingly, if an Indologist subscribes to the first method (i.e., treatment of a text in its “moment of genesis”), he is implicitly committed to the belief that the text is a purely historical object, and has zero meaning to him in his present. Consequently, his goal is to “erase any living critical appropriation of the past text” (Pollock 2014:401) to unearth the “mind of its author”. Its pitfall, according to Pollock, lies in its exclusivity. It (a) neglects the tradition’s reading of the text (b) ignores the presence of past texts in contemporary times, and (c) presupposes, rather arrogantly, that “our own historical being can be erased in grasping that past historical meaning” (Pollock 2014:401).

"An Indologist committed to a “present-reading” of the text, on the other hand, attempts only to problematize the participants’ narrative and decode meanings that are “disguised” in the text and beyond it; consequently, the texts’ meaning to a different (or rather, original) participant/audience is wholly ignored. In Pollock’s words,

"“This type of deeply antihistoricist approach typical of our students is the most powerful impression many take away from the experience of teaching the text, but it is an approach that carries its own kind of truth, measuring (positively) the distance in consciousness between now and then but also (negatively) the failure of students to register that distance and enter into other planes of reading.”

"Pollock (2014:408)"

"According to Pollock, then, a “tension” exists between the two modes of philology for they are viewed as mutually exclusive to each other — only one is often construed to be true. Moreover, a striking feature of philological studies is, he writes, the complete neglect of the readings offered by the tradition itself:

"“Most scholars simply ignore these, as my classics teachers always did, for whom no traditional interpretation, whether of Hellenistic scholiast, Roman commentator or medieval scribe, could make any claim to truth. Even those who do not ignore them, like my Indian teachers or Sanskrit colleagues, rarely offer an account of why we should take the meanings, or the truths, of tradition seriously.”

"Pollock (2014:402)"

"First of all, then, Pollock wishes to draw attention to the “traditionist-plane of reading” of a text: a text’s receptive history, he says, is just as important as its genitive history. Of the reason of its importance — one that his Indian teachers and Sanskrit colleagues failed to muster — he proposes that every interpretation of a text is enabled because of the presence of certain elements in the text that allows for it — one would not be possible without the other. It is, therefore, the task of a philologist to search for and retrieve these elements of the text — to what end is not clear, though.

"Secondly, Pollock wishes to find a delicate way to weave together the three apparently separate strands of philological modes — reading of a text in “its moment of genesis, its reception over time, and its presence to personal subjectivity” (Pollock 2014:399). Accordingly, there are three, “potentially radically different, dimensions of meanings” to a text — “the original author’s, the tradition’s and my own” (Pollock 2014:401). Each of these meanings, writes Pollock, are true: none more or less than the others. Each contributes towards a subtler/deeper understanding of a text, and must be taken into serious account. Philology thus “resides in the sum total of the varied senses generated on these three planes, their lively copresence to our mind.” (Pollock 2014:400)

"In this manner, Pollock crafts for himself an exquisitely delicate tool — a pluralistic and inclusive mode of philology that allows him to analyze the Rāmāyaṇa on three different, yet accommodating, “planes of truths”, “feeling no compulsion to rank or even to reconcile them” (Pollock 2014:400). A close reading of his Rāmāyaṇa, then, lays bare the effortless ease with which he alternates between the “planes of truth”— choosing this one or the other in conformity to, as this monograph aims to show, his own implicit design.

................................................................................................

"In this monograph I will explore these readings of Pollock: in the first chapter, his “Plane 1” reading of the Rāmāyaṇa; in the second, his “Plane 2” reading, and in the third, his “Plane 3” reading of the text. I will employ three angles to analyze and critique his different readings:

"Philological — analysis of the method employed to “make sense” of the text;

"Semantic — analysis of factuality of certain data, translations, interpretations, etc; and

"Linguistic — analysis of language employed for sophisticated hypothesizing.

................................................................................................

"The Rāmāyaṇa edition that I have referred to is the Gita Press (Gorakhpur) edition."

................................................................................................

................................................

March 03, 2022 - March 04, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 1"

"The Mind of Vālmīki”

................................................................................................

"1.1 The Problematic"

"Pollock’s introductory essays to his translation of the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa (Clay Sanskrit Library, 1986) are his own deconstructions of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa upon “Plane 1 Philology”1. “Plane 1 philology” is essentially an effort “to understand the text at first as well as, and then even better than, its author” (Schleiermacher 1997:112). It is an effort to theorize about the “original nucleus” of a text — to distinguish between the “old” and the “new”, the “original” and the “spurious” sections of a text, to reconstruct — psychologically and historically — the original author’s mind. In order to realize this goal, Pollock locates Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa in its (1) literary and (2) historical climate/context. In his own words,

"“The meaning and significance of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa will come into focus more readily if we view the story against the background of other ancient Indian epic narratives and locate those narratives in their historical context... Just as, according to the first rule of interpretation we determine the signification of a word in reference to the words surrounding it, so the literary text can be viewed as a semantic entity that acquires specific meaning in reference to the “texts” in which it is embedded: the literary genre, for example, and its historical situation.”

"Pollock (2007a:9)"

"Pollock’s Rāmāyaṇa, therefore, finds itself betwixt

"a. “other ancient Indian epic narratives” and

"b. at the tail-end of “a dynamic period of transition”— the middle Vedic age. Let us, then, examine each in its turn.

................................................................................................

"1.1.1 Literary Climate"

"Most if not every ancient Indian epic, reflects Pollock, is at its core, a confrontation of a “struggle among “brothers” for succession to the hereditary throne” (Pollock 2007a:10). In his words,

"“... an integral theme of Sanskrit epic literature is kingship ... the acquisition ... the legitimacy of succession, the predicament of transferring hereditary power within a royal dynasty...”

"Pollock (2007a:10)"

"Pollock (2007a:9)"

"Scholars who employ “higher criticism” must illustrate their methods for whatever it is worth. Ludwig, for example, specified thus:

"“... special attention must be given to the way in which the various episodes have been joined together— whether they have been welded into a harmonious whole or whether they have been pieced together clumsily. The critic must be on the look-out for ‘misconceived-links’, ‘striking laboriousness’, ‘absolute superfluity’, ‘repetition of the theme’, ‘unnatural and farfetched motivation’, ‘incongruity between explanation and matter to be explained’, and so on and so forth. These are all indications of unoriginality and interpolation...”

"Cited in Sukthankar (1958:7)"

Wonder where he inserts those when he interprets Hans Christian Anderson.

"Unfortunately, Pollock neither illustrates nor justifies the criteria he uses to “cut away” “extraneous” portions so as to determine the “core” of these texts. Based, instead, on this alleged primary concern of kingship in the afore-quoted stories, he deduces that the Rāmāyaṇa is also, at its core, a determinate treatment of kingship and its politics. It may be useful to trace here in brief a history of the method that Pollock subscribes to — its application and its pitfalls."

................................................................................................

"1.1.1.1 Excursus: A Brief History of Higher Criticism"

"Friedrich August Wolf (1754-1824) is generally considered to be the first to tread in a definitive direction towards higher criticism. Wolf was deeply skeptical of ancient literary works. In 1795, he published a work, Prolegomena ad Homerum, where he challenged the notion that Homer wrote the Iliad or the Odyssey2; these epics, according to Wolf, were gradually built/accumulated in course of time by storytellers and wandering Greek minstrels, and could not be ascribed to any one author. Following the lead of Wolf, Karl Lachmann (1793-1851) dissected the German epic, Nibelungenlied, into twenty short “lays”, and the Iliad into eighteen “lays”. These lays, he claimed, were variously augmented in course of time to finally attain epic proportions3. In William Wallace Everts’ scathing words,

"“Lachmann adopted Wolf’s theory that epics are lays reduced to order, and applied it first to the Nibelungenlied. ... He found the glory of the Iliad not in the whole epic with its symmetry and unity, but in the separate lays. The parts he accounted greater than the whole, for the lays were spoiled when they were squeezed into the mold of the epic. ... This tour de force had its admirers, the crowd that counts more than it weighs, that worships a great name and wants to be considered in line with the advanced thought of the hour. The followers of Lachmann carried their master’s method to further extremes, making breaks where they could not find joints, and subdividing his divisions, until by their complications they made his theory ridiculous...”

"Everts (1908:540)"

"Indeed, after the publication of these works, most literary and religious works were scanned for the “original” and the “interpolations” — the Old Testament, Greek New Testament, Aeneid, Beowulf, works of Chaucer, Shakespeare, etc. Yet, only a few decades later, this method fell into great disrepute. Men like Humboldt, Goethe, and Boeckh, who had first endorsed the idea, rejected it upon further reflection, (Everts 1908:535). Goethe wrote (in his communication to Schiller dt. 16 May 1798),

"Calvert (1846:153)"

"Drekmeier (1962:132)"

"nirantara-rasodgāra-garbha-sandarbha-nirbharāḥ |

"giraḥ kavīnāṁ jīvanti na kathā-mātram āśritāḥ ||

"(Vakrokti-jīvita 4.4, antara-śloka 13)

"“Those words of poets which describe episodes delineating poetic relish remain [in the hearts of men] — not [merely] plot-driven stories” [Trans. ours]."

"V. S. Sukthankar beautifully writes,

"“Notwithstanding the high-sounding phrases in which it is couched, it is easy to see that this critique cannot give absolutely certain and dependable results, it being merely the exploitation of individual opinion, which selects what it pleases and rejects, on insufficient evidence, what is incompatible with a preconceived subjective scheme... the residue no more represents the “original” heroic poem than a mangled cadaver, lacking the vital elements, would represent the organism in its origin or infancy.”

"Sukthankar (1957:7,5)"

................................................................................................

"1.1.1.2 Pollock & Higher Criticism"

"Yet, it does not deter Pollock from scrounging for the “original” in the Rāmāyaṇa and other Indian epics to form, what can, at best, be called vague and incorrect impressions.

"Not by the furthest stretch of imagination can the Mahābhārata be considered only a “struggle among “brothers” for succession to the hereditary throne”. Pollock’s hypothesis throws up a few questions: Why then did each of Arjuna, Bhīma, Nakula, and Sahadeva — Yudhiṣṭhira’s brothers — not contest his right to the throne? Why, again, did each of Duryodhana’s ninety-nine brothers not fight him for it?

"Furthermore, this is a text that has painted the Indian tradition with intense colors: the temples and art-traditions, the literature and poetry, the festivals and daily-life of India — are deeply informed by the Mahābhārata. In Stanley Rice’s words,

"“[the Indian epics] are living and throbbing in the lives of the people of India, even of those illiterate masses that toil in the fields or maintain a drab existence in the ghettos of the towns. To such as these the famous old stories are the music and color of life. They are the perennial fount from which the oft-repeated draughts never quench an insatiable thirst. In the king’s palaces and in the peasant’s huts you may still hear the grand legends of the Great War and the pathetic sufferings of Rāma...”

"Rice (1924:9)"

"If the Mahābhārata was a mere story of jealousy and internecine family strife, how could it fascinate, for more than two millennia, the minds of generations of men? What explains its vitality, its universality, its immortality? No, the Mahābhārata is not simply a story of a futile war of annihilation; it is, at the very least, a struggle between justice and injustice, between dharma and adharma, between Self and not-Self. In Sukthankar’s words,

"“What gives [the Mahābhārata] real depth and significance is the projection of the story on to a cosmic background, by its own interpretation of the Bharata War as a mere incident in the ever recurring struggle between the Devas and the Asuras; in other words, as a mere phase in cosmic evolution... (the war) is the expression of a state of tension between two ideal order of beings, a moral type ... and an immoral — or rather an unmoral — type which it is the object of the former to destroy. This war is an eternal recurrence, a phenomenon assuming in the time-space continuum the most diverse forms and aspects...”

"Sukthankar (1957:66)"

"Capturing perfectly the true essence of the Mahābhārata in his magnum opus, Dhvanyāloka, Ānandavardhana wrote,

"mahābhārate’pi śāstra-rūpa-kāvya-cchāyā’nvayini vṛṣṇi-pāṇḍava-virasā’vasāna-vaimanasya-dāyinīṁ samāptim upanibadhnatā mahā-muninā vairāgya-janana-tātparya-prādhānyena sva-prabandhasya darśayatā mokṣa-lakṣaṇaḥ puruṣārthaḥ śānto rasaś ca mukhyatayā vivakṣā-viṣayatvena sūcitaḥ |

"(Dhvanyāloka 4.5, Vṛtti thereon)"

"“Again, in the Mahābhārata, which has the form of a didactic work although it contains poetic beauty, the great sage who was its author, by his furnishing a conclusion that dismays our hearts by the miserable end of the Vṛṣṇis and Pāṇḍavas, shows that the primary aim of his work has been to produce a disenchantment with the world and that he has intended his primary subject to be liberation (mokṣa) from worldly life and the rasa of peace.”

"[Trans. Ingalls et al] [italics ours]

"If, then, there is a “core” to the Mahābhārata, it is verily this.

"Coming now to Harivaṁśa, similarly, it is hardly a story of fratricide — it is, in three parts (Harivaṁśa-parvan, Viṣṇu-parvan, Bhaviṣyat-parvan), a rather winding account of Kṛṣṇa’s life. It resumes the Mahābhārata’s framing dialogue between Śaunaka and Ugraśravas: Śaunaka asks to hear more about the Vṛṣṇi-s, and Ugraśravas relates what Vaiśampāyana told King Janamejaya in response to the same question. The Harivaṁśa-parvan follows — and it contains the details of the creation of the cosmos, of Pṛthu Vainya (the first king), particulars of the scheme of successive Manu-s, of the tradition of ancestor worship, and of the Solar and Lunar dynasties etc. Janamejaya then asks about Viṣṇu Nārāyaṇa’s appearances in the world, and especially about his appearance as Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva. Vaiśampāyana then describes the battle between gods and demons, explains why Viṣṇu took form as Kṛṣṇa, and narrates Kṛṣṇa’s life in detail. The Viṣṇu-parvan consists largely of that narration presenting Kṛṣṇa in his own family context (rather than that of his Pāṇḍava cousins) and narrating his birth, his and his brother Balarāma’s childhood exploits among the cowherds, his defeat of King Kaṁsa, his role within the Vṛṣṇi clan, and his role in his sons’ and grandsons’ affairs. The Bhaviṣyat-parvan reverts to the Śaunaka-Ugraśravas dialogue: Ugraśravas gives details of Janamejaya’s descendants, and of his Aśvamedha sacrifice, and so ends the tale.

................................................................................................

"1.1.2 Historical Climate"

"Working now from an a priori that kingship is indeed a central concern of Indian epic poetry, Pollock wonders why it was that Indian poets were interested in this particular subject:

"“We are naturally led to wonder why this question should assume such importance for the Indian epic. We are not dealing here, as in other epic traditions, with just the heroic deeds of warrior kings, but with the nature and function of kingship as such; and these questions are not tangentially significant but central to the structure of the epic...”

"Pollock (2007a:10)"

"In order to arrive at some plausible answers, Pollock tries to reconstruct the historical setting of the Rāmāyaṇa: According to him,

"(Pollock 2007a:11)."

But the indigenous timeliness stretch back to before the vanishing of the ocean between India and Asia, and India’s witnessing of rising of Himaalayan ranges out of the ocean.

So the timeline Pollock gives are ridiculous at best, but likely racist and driven by an agenda of ultimately converting India, by first wiping out her culture, is a safer bet.

"Now, Pollock’s conclusion rests primarily on three chronological details that, in turn, rest on the disreputed Aryan Invasion Theory (AIT) / Aryan Migration Theory (AMT): that

"a. the Vedic period extends from 1500 B.C.E — 500 B.C.E;

"b. major cities of “Aryan India” can be dated to approx 700 B.C.E.; and

"c. the Rāmāyaṇa was composed in the “last centuries B.C.E”.

"Let us examine these closely."

................................................................................................

"1.1.2.1 Dating of Veda-s & Cities of India"

" A brief summary of the AIT is in order. David Frawley writes,

"“According to this account [AIT] ... India was invaded and conquered by nomadic light-skinned Indo-European tribes (Aryans) from Central Asia around 1500-1000 BC. They overran an earlier and more advanced dark-skinned Dravidian civilization from which they took most of what later became Indian civilization. In the process they never gave the indigenous people whom they took their civilization from, the proper credit but eradicated all evidence of their conquest. All the Aryans really added of their own was their language (Sanskrit, of an Indo-European type) and their priestly cult of caste that was to become the bane of later Indic society. The so-called Aryans, the original people behind the Vedas, the oldest scriptures of Hinduism, were reinterpreted by this modern theory [i.e. AIT] not as sages and seers - the rishis and yogis of Hindu historical tradition - but as primitive plunderers. Naturally this cast a shadow on the Hindu religion and culture as a whole. The so-called pre-Aryan or Dravidian civilization is said to be indicated by the large urban ruins of what has been called the “Indus Valley culture” (as most of its initial sites were on the Indus river), or “Harappa and Mohenjodaro”, after its two initially largest sites. In this article we will call this civilization the “Harappan” as its sites extend far beyond the Indus river. It is now dated from 3100-1900 BC. By the invasion theory Indic civilization is proposed to have been the invention of a pre-Vedic civilization and the Vedas, however massive their literature, are merely the products of a dark age following its destruction. Only the resurgence of the pre-Vedic culture in post-Vedic times is given credit for the redevelopment of urban civilization in India...”

"Frawley (1997:3)"

"In the centuries following the establishment of AIT theory, the Veda-s were dated based either on linguistic considerations or on astronomical calculations, and admittedly, “the opinions of best researchers in the matter of the age of the Ṛgveda differed not by a few centuries but by a few thousands of years” (Ketkar 1987:270). A review of their conclusions, therefore, is in order.

All this humongous mistake, due to a person in Mauryan court sharing a name with one from Veda-s? This, from a culture that names children after parents, repeatedly?

"Muller (1979:138)"

He never thought of the simplest, looking into India's, Aryan literature and the indigenous measures of time?

It's only slightly unclear in the astronomical details, but yes, that timeline is closer to reality.

"Clift et al (2012:213)"

"“... Extensive, planned cities, rising almost at the same time hundreds of kilometers apart, fully functional by 2600 B.C. and interacting with each other through a tight network....”

"Danino (2010:83)"

"If the chronology is corrected, Pollock’s theories, it can be shown, do not hold water at all."

................................................................................................

"1.1.2.2. Royal Dynasties & the Veda-s"

"For Pollock, “there had actually (never) been any clear conception of an exclusive royal dynasty in the Vedic period”, and therefore,

"“...we have good reason to suppose that the special prominence dynasties and dynastic succession acquire in the epic texts is at least partly the result of major changes in the structure of political power in late vedic times.”

"Pollock (2007a:13)"

He's wrong on two counts, of course, of timelines alone - Vedic time being long before RĀMĀYAṆA for one, and both being long before he could possibly imagine, for another.

Besides, in RĀMĀYAṆA alone there are several kingdoms and kings mentioned since before the birth of the four brothers, beginning with the genealogy of the family which goes back several generations. Kings were neither new nor were kingdoms.

"This is the primary reason he cites for Vālmīki’s purported exclusive treatment of kingship in the Rāmāyaṇa. Contrarily, references to dynastic kings and hereditary monarchy abound in the Veda-s. Many passages of the Ṛgveda are proof of this — we see, for example, that the throne is passed on from father to son for at least four generations among the Tritus (Sharma 1988:114)7. The Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa refers to a kingdom of ten generations, daśa-puruṣam rājyam (Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa 12.9.3.1-3), and we hear of the dynastic rulers, Pārikṣita-s and the rulers of the Janaka’s line. In the Aitareya-brāhmaṇa is a reference to the birth of an heir to the throne (Aitareya-brāhmaṇa 8.9) and we see also that hereditary monarchy did not preclude the principle of election or popular selection8— the tale of Devāpi and Śantanu is an illustration of the fact that choice was often limited to the royal-family members (Nirukta 2.10). We also see that in the Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa, Duṣṭarītu Pauṁsāyana is banished from his kingdom that had come to him through ten generations (Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa 13.9.3.1; cf. Aitareya-brāhmaṇa 8.10). A short list of the references to monarchs of a prominent dynasty of Ṛgveda, the Bharata dynasty, is as follows (Talageri 2000:142):

"1 Bharata: 6.16.4;

"2 Devavāta: 3.23.2,3; 4.15.4; 6.27.7; 7.18.22;

"3 Sṛñjaya: 4.15.4; 6.27.7; 6.47.25;

"4 Vadhryaśva: 6.61.1; 10.69.1,2,4,5,9–12;

"5 Divodāsa: 1.112.14; 1.116.18; 1.119.4; 1.130.7,10; 2.19.6; 4.26.3; 4.30.20; 6.16.5,19; 6.26.5; 6.31.4; 6.43.1; 6.47.22,23; 6.61.1; 7.18.25; 8.103.2; 9.61.2;

"6 Pratardana: 6.26.8; 7.33.14;

"7 Pijavana: 7.18.22,23,25;

"8 Devaśravas: 3.23.2,3;

"9 Sudās: 1.47.6; 1.63.7; 1.112.19; 3.53.9,11; 5.53.2; 7.18.5,9,15,17,22,23,25; 7.19.3,6; 7.20.2; 7.25.3; 7.32.10; 7.33.3; 7.53.3; 7.60.8,9; 7.64.3; 7.83.1,4,6-8;

"10 Sahadeva: 1.100.17; 4.15.7-10;

"11 Somaka: 4.15.9;

"Talageri shows that while these kings are descendents of Bharata, they are also called Pūru-s: according to the Purāṇa-s, the Bharata-s are a branch of the Pūru-s; this is further confirmed in the Ṛgveda where both Divodāsa (Ṛgveda 1.130.7) and Sudās (1.63.7) are called Pūru-s, and Parucchepa Daivodāsi repeatedly speaks as a Pūru (Ṛgveda 1.129.5; 131.4). The other prominent dynasty in the Ṛgveda is the Tṛkṣi dynasty of Māndhātā, identifiable as a branch of the Ikṣvāku-s. An extensive analysis of the dynasties is made in Talageri (2000). From the Purāṇa-s, a more exhaustive list can be compiled— although the value of historical material from the Purāṇa-s is sometimes contested in Western academia.

"All of the afore-quoted data goes to show that the “historical climate” in which Pollock wishes to situate the Rāmāyaṇa is absolutely baseless. No substantial proof exists at all to show that kingship and its “attendant problems” were “new and, in their very nature, urgent” in the purported epic period. It is, at best, a speculative theory that may have been worked backwards to fit the idea of kingship as the “core” of Indian epics."

Hegde gives him benefit of doubt out of civility. In reality, he's either ignorant or lies deliberately, expecting to get away with it in a world where white supremacy and disdain for India have been routine for over two centuries.

................................................................................................

""1.2. The Problematic: An Analysis"

"After establishing heredity monarchy as a matter of utmost concern of Indian epic poets, Pollock discusses three of its major “problems” at length:

"1.2.1 Yauvarājya (crown-prince-hood):

"Yauvarājya, defines Pollock, is a situation where a still-reigning king must appoint his successor. Quoting Jack Goody, he draws attention to the “difficulties” of this type of “premortem succession”:

"“... For the sharp contrast that exists between king and ex-king... makes it well-nigh impossible for a man easily to cast off the authority he has held by right of birth... this aura that attaches to the ex-king creates problems... which can often be resolved only by the banishment or the killing of the king.”

"(cited in Pollock 2007a:12)"

"Quoting Tod, he continues,

"“It is a rule (for an ex-king) never to enter the capital after abandoning the government; he is virtually defunct; he cannot be a subject, and he is no longer a king.”

"(cited in Pollock 2007a:12)"

What utter nonsense the fellow goes on spouting! This, in context of RĀMĀYAṆA????!!!!!

"It must be noted here at once that the collection of essays that Pollock refers to — Succession to High Office (1979) edited by Jack Goody — deals specifically with the difficulties of transfer of power in Basutoland, Buganda, Northern Unyamwezi, and Gonja. In the context of ancient India — where patricide was virtually absent — it is simply irrelevant. Ajātaśatru and Aśoka — of a later age — are the only two kings associated with patricide; otherwise, very rarely are such accounts to be found in ancient India. We see that Daśaratha, for example, looks anxiously forward to the day he would see his son crowned as prince-regal9 (Rāmāyaṇa 2.1.36):

"eṣā hyasya parā prītir

"hṛdi saṁparivartate |

"kadā nāma sutaṁ drakṣyāmy

"abhiṣiktam ahaṁ priyam ||

“In his heart he cherished this single joyous thought: When shall I see my dear son consecrated?”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"With utter contempt for facts, Pollock writes, “the Ikṣvāku dynasty confronted this [virtually nonexistent] problem [of yauvarājya] by the institutionalized ritual exile of the king” (Pollock 2007a:12) (words in [] supplied by us)— by his entering of the vānaprasthāśrama. He implies vānaprasthāśrama was a stratagem that (only) the Ikṣvāku-s adopted to allow a “dignified” exit to the ex-king." ... "

What nonsense! He pretends that vānaprasthāśrama was invented for kings! What next, he'd say poor and middle class had no home life with marriages and children because there were no kingdoms to bestow? Perhaps in Europe that was true, what with droit de seigneur! Not in India.

Vānaprasthāśrama was normal stage of life when duties towards parents and children were done, and still is - forests may be rare, but concept very well deep in India's psyche, and this is the time used for pilgrimages to the extent possible within each person's, couple's capabilities.

"This is, of course, a rather ludicrous claim. It would be useful to trace here the idea of vanaprasthāśrama to the Veda-s to illustrate that it was certainly not an uncommon practice — and certainly not unique to the Ikṣvāku-s. In the Vedic texts, the word “vaikhānasa” refers to “vānaprastha”. P. V. Kane notes,

"“There is nothing in the Vedic Literature expressly corresponding to the vānaprastha. It may however be stated that the Tāṇḍya Mahābrāhmaṇa (14. 4. 7) says that vaikhānasa sages were the favorites of Indra and that one Rahasya Devamalimluc killed them in a place called Munimaraṇa. Vaikhānasa means ‘vānaprastha’ in the sūtras and it is possible that this is the germ of the idea of vānaprastha. …”

"Kane (1941:418)"

"Kane cites another reference to vānaprasthāśrama in Aitareya-brāhmaṇa 33. 11:

"“What (use is there) of dirt, what use of antelope skin, what use of (growing) the beard, what is the use of tapas? O! brāhmaṇas! Desire a son, he is a world that is to be highly praised.” Here it is clear that ajina refers to brahmacarya, śmaśrūṇi to vānaprasthas (since according to Manu VI. 6 and Gaut III. 33, the vānaprasthas had to grow his hair, beard and nails). Therefore ‘malam’ and ‘tapas’ must be taken respectively as indicating the householder and the saṁnyāsin. A much clearer reference to three āśramas occurs in the Chāndogya Up. II. 23. 1 — “there are three branches of dharma, the first (is constituted by) sacrifice, study and charity (i. e. by the stage of householder), the second is (constituted by the performance of) tapas (i. e. the vānaprastha), the third is the brahmacārī staying in the house of his teacher and wearing himself out till death in the teacher’s house; all these attain to the worlds of the meritorious; but one who (has correctly understood brahman) and abides in it attains immortality.”

"Kane (1941:420)"

"So the institution of vānaprastha was a well-known one. Other kings who accepted vānaprastha include Bṛhadaśva, Trayyāruṇa, Viśvāmitra, Kapila, Bali, Manu, Saṁyāti, Yayāti, Devāpi, etc10. That it was amply respected even at a later age is deducible from the Greek traveller, Megasthenes’ account of it — he writes the vānaprasthas (hylobioi) who “live in woods where they subsist on leaves of trees and wild fruits, and wear garments made from the bark of tress” were the most respected of the society (McCrindle 2000:102). We see, again, that Pollock tries to locate the Rāmāyaṇa in an incorrect historical climate that is not substantiated with proof of any sort."

As usual.

................................................................................................

"1.2.2. Interstate Marriage"

"Another “problem”— or reason, rather— that partly led to the “later” hereditary transference of power was, cites Pollock, interstate marriage. Interstate marriage was basically a political alliance; it could occur “only if high office is transferred within a single dynasty.” Pollock writes further,

"“Closely related to this is the politically significant practice of rājyaśulka, the bride price consisting of the kingship (or kingdom)... It is clearly practicable only when kingship is proprietarily controlled.”

"Pollock (2007a:12)"

Again nonsense, because by that logic there ought to be four kingdoms, or at least three, bestowed on the three younger brothers by the common father-in-law of the four brothers, by Janaka, father of the four respective brides of the brothers. If there were any such compulsory bestowing, the names would be known to everyone of India, as everything about RĀMĀYAṆAis, but no such separation occurred until later, if then; most people assume the whole clan lived happily together, which amounts at least to no separate kingdoms bestowed st the wedding of the four couples.

................................................................................................

"1.2.3. Dynastic Struggle"

Pollock proceeds to more nonsense.

"The “final, and critical, intrinsic problem of kingship”, says Pollock, is the divisive and usually violent dynastic struggle that accompanies the hereditary transference of power. In the earlier tradition, Pollock says (referring to the Mahābhārata and the Harivaṁśa), there was only one method to resolve this difficulty of transference of hereditary power — that of armed combat. He writes,

"“The Mahābhārata is no doubt sensitive to the desperate dilemma of living made possible only through killing. But its interrogations are indecisive; it can conceive of no solution except the final one in heaven. Political violence is no less necessary for its impossibility. That the fratricidal doctrine is so often and positively enunciated and defended in the Mahābhārata suggests that for this and the other epic stories, as for the historical kings of ancient India, the acquisition and retention of political power ultimately if tragically superseded all other concerns...”

"Pollock (2007a:18)"

Pollock had a chance of being correct if he'd stuck to what he could comprehend, namely, Cousin Willie and his revenge against the first cousin, who spurned him and married another cousin.

Mahābhārata is beyond him, as is Sanskrit grammer, Rāmāyana and generally India.

"Vālmīki, on the other hand, he says, was dissatisfied with this, and suggested another solution to this problem: submission to hierarchy. Accordingly, the only way to obviate deadly antagonism (between family members) was by the doctrine of “unqualified submission” of the younger to the elder prince, the eldest to his father, and so on. So, by setting forth the example of Bharata who chose to bow before his brother and not contest the throne (when everyone expected otherwise), Vālmīki, according to Pollock, made the first literary attempt to “moralize” the exercise of political power. In his words,

"“For civilized society, the poet inculcates, by positive precept and negative example, and with a sometimes numbing insistence, a powerful new code of conduct: hierarchically ordered, unqualified submission.”

"Pollock (2007a:16)"

So were the numerous younger royals of Europe merely following Rāmāyana as their ideal in not contesting the throne? Or were there secret sword fights to settle the question? As far as known, the only person to lack grace of accepting his place, or giving appropriate place to others, was cousin Willie!

"For Vālmīki, then, he says, violence was literally the strategy of the inhuman, and this, Pollock demonstrates with examples of Sugrīva and Vālin and also of Vibhīṣaṇa and Rāvaṇa:"

Pollock is rejecting natural occurrence of good behaviour and good character amongst them; India does not, and Vālmīki did not. Good not only existed but proliferated there too. Pollock of course wouldn't see it!

"a. Sugrīva and Vālin: Sugrīva’s position, Pollock writes, was like that of Rāma — he was ousted from his kingdom by his brother, Vālin, and the throne was occupied by the latter. With Rāma’s aid, Sugrīva forcibly seized the throne of the monkeys; here, Rāma had no qualms in deploying arms, says Pollock, for he was dealing with an infringement of righteousness on the part of a monkey."

One, he could have at least used the word primate, since the species had kingdoms, palaces and could converse with Rāma on Dharma; two, Rāma was NOT ousted by his brother, Bharata - the latter came to forest to beg the elder to return, and it was promise to parents that Rāma gave as reason for not obliging a loving younger brother; three, Sugrīva had been banished due to a misunderstanding and wouldn't have been befriended by the elder who was a friend of Rāvana, hence the execution by Rāma.

"b. Vibhīṣaṇa and Rāvaṇa: Vibhīṣaṇa, in a similar plight, takes refuge under Rāma, (not, Pollock remarks, for altruistic reasons, but out of his “desire for the throne”.) ... "

Does Pollock not know the concept of right vs wrong, does he condone abduction of a woman as of no account? Or has he been having Vibhīṣaṇa confess to him, Pollock, in his, Pollock’s, dreams?

" ... When he expresses before Rāma his wish for the throne, the latter immediately crowns him as the king of Laṅkā. Here, Pollock wonders if Rāma does so “in order to gain Vibhīṣaṇa’s continued support”. ... "

Did Pollock make that bit up about "expresses before Rāma his wish for the throne"? India certainly dies not think it was due to such a low aim that Vibhīṣaṇa met Rāma or died with him.

" ... Rāma crowns him again after Rāvaṇa’s death. Here also, Rāvaṇa’s unscrupulous ways are cited as the reason for the use of the sword. ... "

So Pollock does ignore honour of woman as a concern of a man even about his own wife, and this would be more so when the man is a king as far as Pollock goes. Abrahmic disdain, or horror, of females at work there.

" ... As a side note, Pollock observes that there is no mention of Vaiśravaṇa who is “theoretically the rightful heir to the throne” and subtly implies that there is injustice at play here. In conclusion, he says that “submission to hierarchy” was Vālmīki’s way of resolving the complications that arose in the transference of hereditary power."

Vaiśravaṇa, a half-brother known better by his famous name Kubera, was not only king of a famed kingdom in Himaalayan region, but his capital Alakāpuri was reportedly all gold. The half brother, if given would likely not have changed his abode from beautiful Himaalayan city to one equatorial.

................................................................................................

"1.2.3.1 An(other) Incorrect “Literary” and “Historical” Climate"

"Pollock’s deductions are, again, drawn primarily by situating the Rāmāyaṇa in an incorrect literary and historical climate. Here, again, Pollock’s Rāmāyaṇa finds itself located in the general genre of epics:

"“... the genre itself and its primary social context restricted Vālmīki, like his predecessors and contemporaries to a set of themes. But when we compare the Rāmāyaṇa with other examples of epic literature, it seems evident that Vālmīki found the previous treatments deficient not only aesthetically but ethically as well”

"Pollock (2007a:15)"

He's imagining Vālmīki sitting around reading works of others, as Pollock himself no doubt does even if with scant comprehension, and thinks of getting published by a tiny improvement here and there, as Pollock has been used to! In India it never was this easy, whether sainthood or fame, much less the stature of Vālmīki and that of his subject. No institutions impose, or could, this acceptance on India. If it were that easy missionaries would have written the book long ago.

"But what, exactly, are “previous treatments”? It is widely accepted that Vālmīki is the first poet, the ādikavi. Bhoja, for example, reverentially refers to him as the foremost among eloquent poets:

"madhumaya-bhaṇitīnāṁ mārgadarśī maharṣiḥ

"(Campū-rāmāyaṇa 1.8)

"Gaṅgādevī writes of Vālmīki’s footsteps as the first in the realm of poetry-writing:

"pṛthivyāṁ padya-nirmāṇa-vidyāyāḥ prathamaṁ padam

"(Madhurā-vijaya 1.5)

"In Kṣemendra’s words, Vālmīki, like the foremost syllable ‘Om’, is the foremost poet:

"oṁkāra iva varṇānāṁ kavīnāṁ prathamaḥ kaviḥ

"(verse 2, Epilogue post Uttara-kāṇḍa, Rāmāyaṇa-mañjarī)"

So of course Pollock spouts nonsense.

"Pollock’s answer is: the Mahābhārata and the Harivaṁśa:

"“As the Mahābhārata and Harivaṁśa makes clear, the early epic tradition had acknowledged, if sometimes reluctantly, only one means for the resolution of political and dynastic conflict: armed combat.”

"Pollock (2007a:15)

"A considerable body of scholarly writing has been devoted to the question of precedence between the two texts, and it is now generally accepted that the Rāmāyaṇa is “somewhat older than the Mahābhārata” (Goldman 1984:38). Yet, in order to account for the “great synchrony” between the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa, Pollock decides that the oral traditions of the particular works were “co-extensive processes” that were continuously interactive and cross fertilizing —

"“[this and many other reasons] forces us to think of the two epic traditions as co-extensive processes that were underway throughout the second half of the first millennium B.C, until the monumental poet of the Rāmāyaṇa, and the redactors of the Mahābhārata authoritatively synthesized their respective materials and thereby in effect terminated the creative oral process.”

"Pollock (2007a:43)"

If there were any truth therein, not only the two epics would be seen as competing but one wouldn't see the greater work acknowledge the earlier, not only as previous epic but as definite history. And yet that is undoubtedly, which wouldn't be do if it hadn't been that they were individual creations carried through millennia via traditional renderings. Other poets have written their own Rāmāyaṇa and are, each, acknowledged and appreciated individually. Pollock is simply wrong, whether lying deliberately or carelessly assaulting another culture for sake of his advancement of career.

Pollock cites similarities of actions and behaviours by some characters to claim that the two were simultaneous; if anything, that should make him suspect one copied other. In reality he's pointing at, in some instances, of following of moral conduct by the righteous characters, of vile or misguided ones behaving in a manner easily guided by evil, and weak or old or promise-bound or attached ones behaving obviously not capable of mending the wrong going on.

"Surely, these “similarities” do not suffice to locate the two texts in a single time-frame? Most of the “similarities” — especially the behavior of different characters — are simply the characteristic features of the cultural context in which they are situated; in V. K. Gokak’s words, “the surprising uniformity in the matter of the choice and treatment of themes” (Gokak 1979:72) simply defines the “Indian” in “Indian literature”. Yet, Pollock writes of Vālmīki’s work as if it were simply one link in a chain of many.

"While this constitutes an incorrect “literary climate”, an incorrect “historical climate” is the “rampant” dynastic struggle that Pollock constantly refers to — in a Western context, “the Cain syndrome” is a foregone conclusion: many references can be found in the Genesis of the jealousy that Cain bore towards Abel, and finally, the murder of the latter by Cain. On the other hand, there are more instances of unity than fratricidal wars in ancient Indian literature; yet, Pollock chooses to project that syndrome on to the Rāmāyaṇa:

"“Everybody in the Ayodhyākāṇḍa expects Bharata to mount a struggle for power: Daśaratha (sarga 4), Kausalyā (69), Guha (78), Bharadvāja (84-85), and, of course, Lakṣmaṇa (90). This was the established pattern of behavior.”

"(Pollock 2007a:17) [italics ours]"

No, it wasn't. Lakshmana was known for shirt temper and was pacified by Rāma accordingly, because the elder one knew better (hence his being right first the position). Others might consider his, Bharata's, mother at fault and question if he didn't follow her, but he didn't. Established pattern of behaviour was in fact followed by everyone until a servant turned a stepmother against Rāma being king, because she had come with mother of Bharata as a servant with the bride, from faraway Gandhār, and wasn't integrated with the new place after decades, with no family of her in due to her handicap.

"He makes these conclusions based on certain misinterpretations and mistranslations. Let us, therefore, consider each of Pollock’s claims in their own context separately under four headings viz. (a) Daśaratha (b) Bharadvāja (c) Kausalyā (d) Vibhīṣaṇa. Please note that we proffer Pollock’s own translations of the Sanskrit texts to expose the shortcomings in his translations/interpretations.

"(a) Daśaratha: Pollock’s interpretation of Daśaratha’s expectation for Bharata to mount a struggle for the throne is primarily based on verse 2.4.25ff (cited infra). Let us examine the different events that unfold prior to this:

"In the said sarga, we see that Daśaratha first calls a counsel and tells them that he seeks respite from his kingly duties, and wishes to entrust his subject’s welfare to the care of his son — with, of course, the approval of the brahmins assembled in court (2.2.10). At this, the assembly applauds his decision, and rejoices “like peacocks at the rumble of a rain-laden cloud” (2.2.17). As it was the auspicious month of Caitra, Daśaratha decides to crown Rāma as his heir on the day of Puṣya of the same month11. He asks sage Vaśiṣṭha to make the required preparations (2.3.4), and later informs his son of his decision. Afterwards — after everybody empties the hall — the king holds further consultation with his councilors. It is then that he realizes that the auspicious day of Puṣya falls immediately the next day (Rāmāyaṇa 2.4.1-2):

"gateṣv atha nṛpo bhūyaḥ

"paureṣu saha mantribhiḥ |

"mantrayitvā tataś cakre

"niścaya-jñaḥ sa niścayam ||

"śva eva puṣyo bhavitā

"śvo’bhiṣecyas tu me sutaḥ |

"rāmo rājīva-tāmrākṣo

"yauvarājya iti prabhuḥ ||"

"“After the townsmen had gone, the king held further consultation with his counselors. When he learned what they had determined the lord declared with determination: Tommorrow is Puṣya, so tomorrow my son, Rāma, his eyes coppery as lotuses, shall be consecrated as the crown-regent”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"So, he sends again for Rāma to inform him of this new decision: that he will be crowned heir-prince immediately the next day. Further, Daśaratha tells Rāma that he has lately had inauspicious and ominous dreams — svapne paśyāmi dāruṇān (2.4.17). When astrologers were consulted, they informed Daśaratha that his birth star was obstructed by hostile planets which implied that he may die or meet with other such dreadful misfortune — rājā hi mṛtyum āpnoti ghoraṁ vāpadam ṛcchati (2.4.19). Daśaratha is afraid, and wishes to see his son take the reins before any calamity strikes him. Bharata’s absence, we see, had nothing to contribute to the urgency of the situation.

"But before concluding the conversation, the king says the following (Daśaratha to Rāma) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.4.25-27),

"viproṣitaś ca bharato

"yāvad eva purād itaḥ |

"tāvad evābhiṣekas te

"prāpta-kālo mato mama || 25 ||

"kāmaṁ khalu satāṁ vṛtte

"bhrātā te bharataḥ sthitaḥ |

"jyeṣṭhānuvartī dharmātmā

"sānukrośo jitendriyaḥ || 26 ||

"kintu cittaṁ manuṣyāṇām

"anityam iti me matiḥ |

"satāṁ ca dharma-nityānāṁ

"kṛta-śobhi ca rāghava || 27 ||"

"Pollock interprets it in order as follows:

"“I believe the best time for your consecration is precisely while Bharata is away.”

"[italics ours]

"“Granted your brother keeps to the ways of the good, defers to his elder brother, and is righteous, compassionate, and self-disciplined.”

"“Still, Rāghava, it is my firm belief that the mind of man is inconstant, even the mind of a good man constant in righteousness. Even such a man is best presented with an accomplished fact.”"

Pollock deliberately mistranslates.

"Pollock repeatedly alludes to this situation to draw attention to an “inner strife” between the members of the family: for example, in his summary of the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa, he writes, “... in a private meeting with his father [Rāma] learns that the ceremony is to take place the following day lest Bharata have time to return and contest the succession.”

"(Pollock 2007a:6)"

"First of all, the word prāpta-kāla must be interpreted as destiny, not “best time”; so 2.4.25 reads, “I think it is destiny that your consecration should take place when Bharata is away.” It is in a tone of regret that Daśaratha says these words, not craftily. Secondly, Pollock translates the work kṛta-śobhi (2.4.27) as “accomplished act”. In doing so, he blatantly ignores the epithet “śobhi”. The word literally refers to the splendid nature/praiseworthiness of an act. Hence a more (contextually) appropriate translation would be as follows: “O Rāma! It is my opinion that minds of men are inconstant. But (kintu) a virtuous person (like Bharata - dharma-nityānām satām ca) will only praise a good that has been done (kṛta-śobhi), [i.e. the consecration ceremony]”12.

"Literally, there is no evidence to support Pollock’s stand that Daśāratha expected Bharata to contest the throne.

"(b) Bharadvāja: Pollock relies on a few statements of Bharadvāja’s in order to conclude that he expected Bharata to mount a “struggle for kingship”. Let us consider those verses: Bharadvāja says these words to Bharata (Bharadvāja to Bharata) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.90.10-13):

"kim ihāgamane kāryam

"tava rājyaṁ praśāsataḥ |

"etad ācakṣva me sarvam

"na hi me śuddhyate manaḥ || 10 ||

"suṣuve yam amitraghnam

"kausalyānanda-vardhanam |

"bhrātrā saha sabhāryo yaś

"ciram pravrājito vanam || 11 ||

"(niyuktaḥ strī-niyuktena

"pitrā yo’sau mahā-yaśāḥ |

"vana-vāsī bhavetīha

"samāḥ kila caturdaśa)13 || 12 ||

"kaccin na tasyāpāpasya

"pāpaṁ kartum ihecchasi |

"akaṇṭakam bhoktumanā

"rājyaṁ tasyānujasya ca || 13 ||"

"Pollock translates the verses in order thus:

"“What is your business in coming here when you should be ruling the kingdom? Explain this to me fully, for my mind is unclear on it.”

"“The son Kausalyā bore, a slayer of enemies and the one source of delight, has been banished for a long time to the forest with his wife and brother.”

"“I trust you have no intention of harming this innocent man and his younger brother, thinking thereby to enjoy unchallenged kingship.”

"If one stops here, as Pollock surely does, one may garner the wrong picture of the situation. Let us look, therefore, at the ensuing verses. When Bharadvāja thus addresses Bharata, the latter is reduced to tears (Rāmāyaṇa 2.90.14):

"evam ukto bharadvājam

"bharataḥ pratyuvāca ha |

"paryaśru-nayano duḥkhād

"vācā saṁsajjamānayā ||

"“So Bharadvāja spoke, and with tears in his eyes Bharata replied to him in a voice breaking with sorrow”.

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"Bharata defends himself and his intensions in the verses 14—18 to which Bharadvāja replies (Rāmāyaṇa 2.90.21):

"jāne caitan manaḥsthaṁ te

"dṛḍhīkaraṇam astv iti |

"apṛccham tvāṁ tavātyartham

"kīrtiṁ samabhivardhayan ||"

"“I knew what was in your heart and only questioned you to hear it openly confirmed and to see your fame magnified to the highest degree.”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"So, the sage did not at all expect a “dynastic struggle”; nor was this the “established custom”. He simply wanted “to hear it openly confirmed and to see your fame magnified to the highest degree”. It is with this same intention that Guha poses the same question to Bharata, and finally praises him thus (Guha to Bharata) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.85.13):

"śāśvatī khalu te kīrtir

"lokān anucariṣyati |

"yas tvam kṛcchra-gataṁ rāmaṁ

"pratyānayitum icchasi ||

"“You are prepared to bring back Rāma when he is in such a plight, and for this you shall win everlasting fame throughout the worlds”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"(c) Kausalyā: When Bharata and Śatrughna return from visiting their maternal uncle and hear of the misfortunes that elapsed in their presence, they rush to meet Kausalyā. Upon seeing them, Kausalyā vents out (Kausalyā to Bharata) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.75.11):

"idaṁ te rājya-kāmasya

"rājyaṁ prāptam akaṇṭakam |

"samprāptaṁ bata kaikeyyā

"śīghraṁ krūreṇa karmaṇā ||"

"Pollock translates it thus:

"“Then, in deep sorrow, Kausalyā spoke to Bharata. “You lusted for the kingship and here you have it unchallenged— and how quickly Kaikeyī secured it for you by her savage deed.”

"From this, Pollock concludes Bharata’s purported hostility. It must be noted here that Kausalyā was in the clutches of extreme grief when she spoke these words — she was hardly in possession of her mind. Vālmīki repeatedly draws attention to her miserable condition by the use of words such as “vicetanā”, “malina-ambarā”, “naṣṭa-cetanām”, etc — in Pollock’s own translation “insensible”, “dropped down unconscious in the anguish of her sorrow”, etc (Rāmāyaṇa 2.75.7-10).

"evam uktvā sumitrāṁ sā

"vivarṇā malināmbarā |

"pratasthe bharato yatra

"vepamānā vicetanā ||

"(sa tu rāmānujaś cāpi

"śatrughna-sahitas tadā |

"pratasthe bharato yatra

"kausalyāyā niveśanam ||

"tataḥ śatrughna-bharatau

"kausalyāṁ prekṣya duḥkhitau |)

"paryaṣvajetāṁ duḥkhārtāṁ

"patitāṁ naṣṭa-cetanām |

"rudantau rudatīṁ duḥkhāt

"sametyāryāṁ manasvinīm ||

"bharataṁ pratyuvācedam

"kausalyā bhṛśa-duḥkhitā ||"

"Pollock’s translates it thus: “With this, she set out to Bharata, her face drained of color and her garment filthy, trembling and almost insensible.”

"“But at that same moment Rāma’s younger brother was setting out to Kausalyā’s residence, accompanied by Śatrughna.”

"“And when Śatrughna and Bharata saw Kausalyā, they were overcome with sorrow. She dropped down, unconsciousness in the anguish of her sorrow, and they took her in their embrace.”

"When this context is kept in focus, it is reasonable to assume that Kausalyā bore no ill will towards Bharata, nor did she suspect him of trying to usurp the throne; these were harsh words spoken in extraordinary grief, and ought not to be taken literally. The interpretations of Pollock are far from dignified.

"(d) Vibhīṣaṇa: Pollock writes, “In Laṅkā once more, the struggle for political power among brothers is settled by the sword”. This is simply a ridiculous claim— the war at Laṅkā was hardly a “struggle for political power”. It must be noted here that Kumbhakarṇa, Rāvaṇa’s brother, fought for him until the end — sacrificed his life, too — despite the fact that he had utter scorn for Rāvaṇa’s misdeeds (6.63.1-21). Vibhīṣaṇa, too, took refuge under Rāma only after Rāvaṇa sneeringly rejected his advice and declared (in assembly) that a death penalty ought to be meted out to him (6.16.26).

"Further, Pollock takes the statement, “There is no brotherly love among heroes” (7.11.12 as per Pollock), to make a strong case for himself — but this statement was made by the rākṣasa, Prahasta, chief of Rāvaṇa’s army in the Uttara-kāṇḍa, and so by no means can it stand for the “established pattern” of the times.

"Also, this statement is taken out of its context to be misinterpreted by Pollock. Here, the situation is: Rāvaṇa’s maternal grandfather urges Rāvaṇa to seize the throne of Laṅkā — by force, if necessary (for Rāvaṇa’s brother, Kubera, ruled Laṅkā then). Rāvaṇa rejects the idea because “Kubera is my elder brother!”, and to this, Prahasta, echoing Rāvaṇa’s maternal grandfather’s views, says, “there is no brotherly love among heroes” (7.11.9-12 as per Pollock).

"How this statement of the rākṣasa chief can come to be the “established pattern”, only Pollock can tell."

................................................................................................

"1.2.3.2. A Problem of Narrative"

" ... Out of gratitude, Daśaratha bestowed on her two boons which now Mantharā urges she use to install Bharata on the throne. This story, Pollock says, has an unusually contrived appearance:

"a. The presence of a queen at a battle is, he says, extraordinary, and virtually unparalleled in Sanskrit literature."

Not true. At least one other such human incident is Satyabhāmā killing Narakāsura, her fighting alongside her husband, Krishna. This is of course much later, in another Yuga, but nevertheless, it indicates such things did happen.

And that's only on the human level. Victory against demons for Gods is achieved by Durgā, Kālī and other forms of Mother Goddess, Shakti, literally "Power" or "Energy" or Strength/Capability, or any synonyms thereof. When it's not her, it's either her specifically born-for-the-purpose son Kārtikeya, or, in one special instance, Vishnu in female form of Mohini (closely translated, "Enchantress").

"b. Kaikeyī, he says, oddly does not remember the incident at all, and even when she is reminded of it, she simply does not claim the boons as her due.

"c. Mantharā tells her, “use the power of your beauty”: And this is what Kaikeyī does — she “ensnares” him with just this power. She makes Daśaratha promise before the Gods that he will fulfill any wish of hers, and when he does this, “with quite a casual indifference to the narrative”, Pollock points out, Kaikeyī says “I will now claim the two boons you had once granted me”.

"Now, according to Pollock, there is another “knot” in this matter:

"We find at the end of the story that Daśaratha had, in order to gain the hand of the beautiful princess, agreed to pay the highest bride-price, rājya-śulka — a promise to the woman’s male kin that her son shall succeed the throne. If this was true, Pollock says, Kaikeyī only demanded what was rightfully hers, and must be exculpated of all blame/taint. This, he insists, must have been the original version of the story. So, according to Pollock, Vālmīki, in all likelihood, revised the story by introducing the incident of the two boons, and tried to minimize, if not eliminate altogether, the incident of the rājya-śulka."

"Problems abound in Pollock’s interpretations— all his speculations stand on one and only one verse said by Rāma to Bharata (Rāma to Bharata) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.107.3):

"purā bhrātaḥ pitā naḥ sa

"mātaraṁ te samudvahan |

"mātāmahe samāśrauṣīd

"rājya-śulkam anuttamam ||

"“Long ago, dear brother, when our father was about to marry your mother, he made a brideprice pledge to your grandfather— the ultimate price, the kingship”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"There is nothing in the Rāmāyaṇa other than these words of Rāma (2.107.3) that even remotely suggests that Daśaratha made such a promise of rājya-śulka. Let us review the connected scenes under these headings:

"(e) Mantharā and Kaikeyī

"(f) Daśaratha and Kaikeyī and

"(g) Rāma and Bharata.

Author doubts too about Kaikeyī having accompanied her husband in war and she should know better, from all the legends of remote and not so remote past. It indeed wasn't every queen who fought in a battle, but some certainly did.

"(f) Daśaratha and Kaikeyī: If Daśaratha, indeed, had schemed to snatch the throne that was rightfully Bharata’s, he would not have “gladly entered the inner chamber to tell his beloved wife the good news.” (Daśaratha to Kaikeyī) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.10.10):

"adya rāmābhiṣeko vai

"prasiddha iti jajñivān |

"priyārhaṁ priyam ākhyātuṁ

"viveśāntaḥpuraṁ vaśī ||

"“Now, when the great king had given orders for Rāghava’s consecration, he gladly entered the inner chmber to tell his beloved wife the good news”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

"Rush, he did, to tell his good wife of his decision; when, instead, he learnt that Kaikeyī was in a fit of grief, lying on the ground in a posture so ill-befitting her, he was consumed with sorrow, and offered to do what she wished; he, in fact, swore by Rāma to fulfill her wishes (Daśaratha to Kaikeyī) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.11.5-6):

"avalipte na jānāsi

"tvattaḥ priyataro mama |

"manujo manuja-vyāghrād

"rāmād anyo na vidyate ||

"tenājayyena mukhyena

"rāghaveṇa mahātmanā |

"śape te jīvanārheṇa

"brūhi yan manasecchasi ||

"“Oh proud woman! Don’t you know that there is nobody on this earth dearer to me than you — except Rāma, the best among men”.

"[Trans. ours]"

"“I swear in the name of the scion of the Raghu dynasty, the invincible, broad-minded Rāma, the best among men worthy of long life. Tell me what you have in mind.”

"[Trans. IIT website]"

"It is then that Kaikeyī demands the fulfillment of her wishes. But nowhere is a mention of rājya-śulka made. It is hard to conceive of any legitimate reason for the conspicuous absence of its mention.

"(g) Rāma and Bharata: Why, then, did Rāma tell Bharata of a rājya-śulka? Let us examine the relevant verses (Rāma to Bharata) (Rāmāyaṇa 2.107.3):

"purā bhrātaḥ pitā naḥ sa

"mātaraṁ te samudvahan |

"mātāmahe samāśrauṣīd

"rājya-śulkam anuttamam ||

"“Long ago, dear brother, when our father was about to marry your mother, he made a bride price pledge to your grandfather — the ultimate price, the kingship.”

"[Trans. Pollock]

"We may furnish an explanation for the above: in order to console Bharata, Rāma told him an untruth. Consider the situation:

"When Bharata met Rāma in Citrakūṭa, he [Bharata] was railing against Daśaratha and Kaikeyī, accusing them both of unrighteousness (2.106.8-14). He felt great anger against his parents, and also a profound guilt for what had transpired; Rāma tried to console him by reassuring him that he was not at fault — and that his parents, too, were not unrighteous (2.105.32-37). Bharata was not to be pacified — he continued to lament piteously (2.106.8ff), while Rāma tried to calm him in every way possible.

"Finally, with utmost compassion, Rāma told Bharata of the alleged rājya-śulka, concluding his sentence with “mā viṣādam”— “do not despair” (2.107.19). This utterance, therefore, need not be taken literally; it was solely to console Bharata that Rāma said them; note that in 2.107.19, in a similar situation with respect to Daśaratha, Rāma tells Sumantra, “You can tell the king you did not hear [Daśaratha’s command to stop the chariot]... [for] to prolong sorrow is the worst thing of all.” Rāma has employed such words more than once:

"ciraṁ duḥkhasya pāpiṣṭham (2.40.47)

"ciraṁ duḥkhasya pāpīyaḥ (2.50.5).

"Pollock’s allegations of an imminent dynastic struggle, we see, are absolutely without any grounds."

................................................................................................

"1.3 Vālmīki’s “Solution”"

"In order to address the above-stated “problems”, Vālmīki allegedly proposed a “solution” as per Pollock: to obey elders without deliberation. According to Pollock, this instruction of “submission to hierarchy” was not limited to the kṣatriya class alone — it was addressed to the society at large. By modeling a protagonist whose status was that of “absolute heteronomy”, Vālmīki, Pollock says, glorified its value and instructed the society to follow suit. He writes,

"“The state of junior members of the Indian household was, historically, not dissimilar to that of slaves (as was also the case in ancient Rome), both with respect to the father, and again, hierarchically among themselves… More generally, like the slave, Rāma is ‘not his own master, he is subordinate to others and cannot go where he wishes’ as an early Buddhist text defines the condition of slavery.”

"Pollock (2007a:20)"

One may safely bet that he wouldn't classify European royalty under those terms, or pronounce them obeying Vālmīki’s instructions. Yet their behaviour differed little in this regard.

"So, when one was told to “behave like Rāma”, it meant “submit to hierarchy”. It was a formula that, Pollock says, was inculcated into the public memory by innumerous public recitations and performances of the poem, and he refers to the large endowments made by Pallavas, Coḷas and Pānḍyas for this purpose in support of his argument."

What's his explanation for lack of success of colonial regimes in their attempts to convert India, or surprise delivered to regime that imposed emergency with jailing all dissenters? India isn't to be imposed on, not then, not in 77 and not in recent past by liars. If India revered Rāmāyana it was not because it was performed or told.

"By Pollock’s verdict, one would have to conclude that Vālmīki conjured the idea of filial piety as a “political tool of subjugation”. Without doubt, this accusation borders on the ludicrous. Filial piety is/was a ubiquitous value: in Chinese culture, for example, filial piety is considered the first virtue; historian Hugh D.R. Baker treads so far as to say that familial-respect is the only element common with the different traditions in China (Baker 1979:102). ... "

"Similarly, pietas erga parentes (piety towards parents) was one of the strongest instincts in the Roman people:

"“This relationship is the natural home of the Roman pietas. To be pious meant to be “son”, and lovingly to fulfill the duties of the filial relationship. Love fulfilling duties, or rather the loving fulfillment of duties, this is the meaning of pietas.”

"(Haecker 1934:62)"

Author goes on to give more from various cultures, including Greek and so on.

" ... If this idea was but of one man — Vālmīki — how can we account for its universality?"

So why does Pollock seek to demean it for India? Answer lies in the answer to the question, who benefits when Indian young fo not respect parents? There are several questions, similar, with one answer - church. When all Hindu festivals are stopped celebration of, when young do not respect parents, when temples aren't respected, church can step into the void. When Indian marriage arrangements are ridiculed, it's Western machinery with dating sites and confessionals, marketing of various US objects and fests and more that benefits.

"Pollock further extrapolates the “submit to hierarchy” formula to the Indian social-life at large, and writes that post-Vālmīki, this “inflexible hierarchy based on birth” became the “norm”. He quotes from the Rāmāyaṇa to substantiate his claim: “the kṣatriya-s accepted the brahmins as their superiors, and the vaiśya-s were subservient to the kṣatriya-s. The śūdra-s, devoted to their proper duty, served the other three classes (1.6.19)” (Pollock 2007a:11). In the light of Pollock’s statements, it becomes imperative to understand the idea behind “submit to hierarchy”— whether filial, social or otherwise."

Says a person brought up on church and inquisition, heretics burnt at stake and paedophile priests protected while victims and their parents threatened by church, ...

................................................................................................

"1.3.1. Social Hierarchy in India"

"According to the Hindus, the purpose of life is defined in a fourfold way. On the one hand, the purposes of life are the satisfaction of desire (kāma), the pursuit of the means thereof (artha), and the fulfillment of function (dharma, in the sense of duty); on the other hand, the final purpose of life is to attain liberation (mokṣa) from all wanting, valuation and responsibilities. These immediate and final ends are not independent of, or fundamentally opposed to, one another, and provision is made in the society for both the active life of the householder (pravṛtti), and for the contemplative life (nivṛtti) of the saṁnyāsin.

"For a person leading an active life, spiritual progress is to be attained by the study of Scriptures, and the fulfillment of one’s own proper functions (sva-karman) in the āśrama that one may be living in at the time. In Kṛṣṇa’s words, sve sve karmaṇy abhirataḥ saṁsiddhiṁ labhate naraḥ (Bhagavad-gītā, 18.45) — Man reaches perfection by his loving devotion to his own work (sva-karma) [Trans. Coomaraswamy (1946:28)]. Sva-karman may be understood as performance of an activity in conformity with one’s own nature. In Rene Guenon’s words,

"“... everyone must normally fulfill the function for which he is destined by his very nature, and he cannot fulfill any other function without a resulting grave disorder, which will have its repercussion on the whole social organization to which he belongs. Even more than this, if such a disorder becomes general, it will have its effects on the cosmic realm itself, all things being linked together according to strict correspondences”

"(Fohr et al 2001:58)"

"According to tradition, dharma16 and sva-karman are interwoven concepts: the one is the Universal and Eternal law; “the other is that share of this Law for which every man is made responsible by his physical and mental constitution” (Coomaraswamy 1940:41). In other words, through the performance of his sva-karman, an individual participates in the Universal dharma, and so it is that sva-karman is translatable as sva-dharma. Coomaraswamy writes,

"“Nothing will be more ruinous to the state than for the cobbler to attempt to do the carpenter’s work, or for an artisan or money maker led on by wealth or by command of votes or by his own strength to take upon himself the soldier’s form, or for a soldier to take upon himself that of a counselor or warden, for which he is not fitted, or for one man to be a jack-of-all-trades; and he [Plato] says that wherever such perversions occur, there is injustice. He points out that our several natures are not all alike, but different, and maintains that everyone is bound to perform for the state one social service, that for which his nature is best adapted. And in this way more will be produced, and of a better sort, and more easily, when each one does one work, according to his own nature, at the right time and being at leisure from other tasks. In other words, the operation of Justice provides automatically for the satisfaction of all the real needs of a society.”

"Coomaraswamy (1977:23)"

" ... Indeed, the primary reference of karman is to the performance of sacrificial rites, and it must be understood that while we render karman by “action,” it is actually impossible to make any essential distinction of the meaning “sacrificial operation” for that of simply “operation”.

"Accordingly, all trades of a traditional society are considered sacred, and as a sort of liturgy. Kṛṣṇa says, “inasmuch as by his own work, he [a man] is praising Him”. It is precisely this idea that finds such vivid expression in the well-known Indian philosophy of action, the karma-mārga of the Bhagavad-gītā. Kṛṣṇa says yajñārthāt karmaṇo’nyatra loko’yaṁ karma-bandhanaḥ (Bhagavad-gītā 3.9) — the world is enchained by whatever is done, unless it be made a yajña. So, then, we are to do whatever Nature bids us do, whatever ought to be done; but without anxiety about the consequences over which we have no control. We are to surrender all activities to Him, that they may be His and not ours; they will no more affect Him than a drop of water sticks to the shiny lotus leaf. There is no liberation by merit, but only by working without ever thinking that “I”, that which I call “myself”, is the actor. In other words, everyman’s Way to become what he is — what he has it in him to become — is one of perfectionism in that station of life to which his own nature imperiously summons him. The pursuit of perfection is everyman’s “equality of opportunity”; and the goal is the same for all, for the miner and the professor alike, because there are no degrees of perfection.

"This metaphysic of action underlies the whole Indian vocational system, and it is from this point of view that in India, every profession is a “priesthood”. In the more unified life of India it is not only in special rites that the meaning of life has been focused; this life itself has been treated as a significant ritual, and so sanctified. This sacrificial interpretation of life can be best explained by quoting the doctrine itself as expounded by Ghora Āṅgirasa to Kṛṣṇa:

"“When one hungers and thirsts and has no pleasure, that is his initiation.

"When one eats and drinks and takes one’s pleasure, that is his participation in the sacrificial-sessions.

"When one laughs and feasts and goes with a woman, that is his participation in the liturgy.

"When one is fervent, or generous, or does right, or does no hurt, or speaks the truth, these are his fees to the priests.

"Wherefore they say: He will beget, he has begotten - and that is his being born again.

"Death is the final ablution.”

"(Chāndogyopaniṣad III. 17.1-5) [Trans. Coomaraswamy 1946:18]"

"So, the caste-system is not like the class-system; rather, to quote A. M. Hocart, “a four-fold vertical division of humanity” (Hocart 1950:163). Kṛṣṇa says, cāturvarṇyaṁ mayā sṛṣṭaṁ guṇa-karma-vibhāgaśaḥ (Bhagavad-gītā 4.13) — “I emanated the Four varṇa-s, distributing qualities and operations” [Trans. Coomaraswamy 1946:6]. Accordingly, the individual natures which are the most spiritually evolved, the ones closest to the ultimate goal of mokṣa — the Brahmins — occupy the first rung of the ladder. Such natures are qualified thus:

"śamo damas tapaḥ śaucaṁ

"kṣāntir ārjavam eva ca |

"jñānaṁ vijñānam āstikyaṁ

"brahma-karma svabhāvajam ||

"(Bhagavad-gītā 18.42)"

"“Control of internal and external sense-organs, austerity, purity, forbearance, straightforwardness, knowledge, wisdom, and faith are the duties of brahmins, born of their inherent nature.”

"[Trans. ours]"

"It must be noted here that any individual who bears these qualities may be perceived as a brahmin. We see, for example, Satyakāma Jābāla of Chāndogyopaniṣad, goes to a brahmin teacher and asks to be his disciple. When asked to what lineage he belongs, Satyakāma can only answer that he is the son of his mother, and knows not who his father may have been: the teacher accepts him on the ground that such candor is tantamount to a brahmin lineage.

"On the next rung of the ladder, then, are the kṣatriya-s:

"śauryaṁ tejo dhṛtir dākṣyaṁ

"yuddhe cāpy apalāyanam |

"dānam īśvara-bhāvaś ca

"kṣātraṁ karma svabhāvajam ||

"(Bhagavad-gītā 18.43)"

"“Valour, invincibility, steadiness, adroitness and not retreating in battle, generosity and lordliness are the duties of kṣatriya-s born of their inherent nature.”

"[Trans. ours]"

"Vaiśya-s occupy the third, and the śūdra-s, the last rung of the ladder:

"kṛṣi-gaurakṣya-vāṇijyaṁ

"vaiśya-karma svabhāvajam | "paricaryātmakaṁ karma

"śūdrasyāpi svabhāvajam ||

"(Bhagavad-gītā 18.44)"

"“Agriculture, cattle-tending and trade are the duties of the vaiśya, born of his inherent nature. And the duty of a śūdra is one of service, born of his inherent nature.”

"[Trans. ours]"

"In a vocational society uncorrupted by ideas of social ambition, it is taken for granted that “everyone is very proud of his hereditary science” (kula-vidyā) (Mālavikāgnimitra 1.4).19

"In a vocationally integrated society, a proportionate equality is practiced.20 Accordingly, the liberty of choice is more and more restricted the higher one’s status: noblesse oblige. (Coomaraswamy 1940:40)

"It must be noted here that varṇa is not, in Hindu law, a legal disability; men of any varṇa may act as witnesses in suits (Manusmṛti 8.61-63). Furthermore, according to this proportionate law, a king is to be fined a thousand times as much as a śūdra for the same offence (for the consequences or repercussions of a King’s offence is far-reaching in effect than that of a common man.) Similarly, a brahmin’s punishment is also very much heavier than a śūdra’s for the same offence, and many things are allowed to the śūdra that a brahmin or the wife of a brahmin may not do, like remarriage (Coomaraswamy 1946:16).

"It must also be noted that caste discrimination is strict only in terms of rules against intermarriage and inter-dining. For example, not even the king can aspire to marry his own brahmin cook’s daughter. As for inter-dining, a Hindu does not inter-dine even with his own wife, or his own caste, and that this has nothing whatever to do with social prejudice of any kind, but reflects a functional differentiation.21 The varṇa system has been painted in such dark colors only because it is incompatible with the existing industrial system; it ought not to be judged by concepts of success that govern life in a society organized for overproduction and profit at any price, and where it is everyone’s ambition to rise on the social ladder, rather than to realize his own perfection. Indeed, this scheme is the nearest and only approach to a workable socialism that has been tried in our race, and that succeeded for hundreds of years. Sir George Birdwood’s words:

"“In that [Hindu] life all are but co-ordinate parts of one undivided and indivisible whole, wherein the provision and respect due to every individual are enforced, under the highest religious sanctions, and every office and calling perpetuated from father to son by those cardinal obligations of caste on which the whole hierarchy of Hinduism hinges... We trace there the bright outlines of a self-contained, self-dependent, symmetrical and perfectly harmonious industrial economy, deeply rooted in the popular conviction of its divine character, and protected, through every political and commercial vicissitude, by the absolute power and marvelous wisdom and tact of the brāhminical priesthood. Such an ideal order we should have held impossible of realization, but that it continues to exist and to afford us, in the yet living results of its daily operation in India, a proof of the superiority, in so many unsuspected ways, of the hierarchic civilization of antiquity over the secular, joyless, inane, and self-destructive, modern civilization of the West”.

"Birdwood (1915:76, 83-84)"

................................................................................................

"1.4 The “Crux” of the Problematic"

"An(other) important “achievement” of the Rāmāyaṇa was, Pollock says, the establishment of paternalistic formulation of the political society. Here, the king is portrayed as the father of the state, and the people as his children. It is an “alluring image” that establishes, Pollock says, a kinship bond between the two, and works towards the “institutionalization of dependency and loyalty… for the centralization of power” (Pollock 2007a:21). Here, too, Pollock seems to imply that Vālmīki perhaps conjured this idea for attaining “political domination”."

Is he seriously claiming that Europe had equality between any two castes, much less between a chamber-maid and a king? In fact royalty, especially a monarch, was not only seen as personalized hid but royal blood was supposed to carry that to next generation. India on the other hand dies not view royalty in that light. Ordinary royalty aren't above ordinary Kshatriya. Attaining Godhood via actions, or being recognised as Avatāra, is another matter.

Pollock portrays in a twisted and false narrative a conflict between kings and Brahmins, and claims Rāma instructed his brother to disdain Kshatriya Dharma.

"First of all, to show Rāma as contemptuous of kṣātra-dharma is groundless and ridiculous in equal measure. In the very beginning of Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa, Rāma is described thus (Rāmāyaṇa 2.1.16):

"kulocita-matiḥ kṣātraṁ

"dharmaṁ svaṁ bahu manyate |

"manyate parayā kīrtyā

"mahat svarga-phalaṁ tataḥ ||

"“[Rama] entertained thoughts befitting his (great) dynasty and honoured the code of conduct of a kshatriya; he believed one could attain heavenly abode through his great achievements.”

"[Trans. IIT website] [diacritics not used in the original]"

"Rāma is first, before anything else, a kṣatriya— immortalized in his image of Kodaṇḍa Rāma. Rāma’s prowess comes to light in most of the kāṇḍa-s — but we realize his indomitable prowess in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa in particular: Mārīca, we see, did not forget the taste of Rāma’s wrath till the end — his description of Rāma must be recounted verbatim (Mārīca to Rāvaṇa) (Rāmāyaṇa 3.37.16 and 3.39.14 respectively):

"dhanur vyādita-dīptāsyam

"śarārciṣam amarṣaṇam |

"cāpa-bāṇa-dharam tīkṣṇam

"śatru-sainya-prahāriṇam ||

"“His bow is like on open burning mouth, and his flaming arrows are like fire. He is all anger. He is the wielder of bow and arrows. He can strike the enemy army (alone)”."

"[Trans. IIT website] [diacritics not used in the original]

"vṛkṣe vṛkṣe ca paśyāmi

"cīra-kṛṣṇājināmbaram |

"gṛhīta-dhanuṣam rāmam

"pāśa-hastam ivāntakam ||

"“In every tree, I see Rāma clad in bark and deerskin, wielding the bow, holding a noose in hand like the god of death.”

"[Trans. IIT website] [diacritics not used in the original]

"Rāvaṇa does not understand Mārīca’s fears till he himself comes face to face with Rāma in battle (Rāmāyaṇa 6.99.12):

"sa dadarśa tato rāmam

"tiṣṭhantam aparājitam |

"lakṣmaṇena saha bhṛātrā

"viṣṇunā vāsavam yathā ||

"“[Rāvaṇa] saw Rāma with Lakṣmaṇa like Viṣṇu with Indra (with his Kodaṇḍa in hand, touching the sky”.

"[Trans. ours]

"An incident that illustrates well Rāma’s prowess is that of Khara and the 14,000 rākṣasa-s who are decimated by Rāma’s arrows. Recounting the incident, Śūrpaṇakhā tells Rāvaṇa (Śūrpaṇakhā to Rāvaṇa) (Rāmāyaṇa 3.34.7-10):

"nādadānaṁ śarān ghorān

"na muñcantaṁ śilīmukhān |

"na kārmukaṁ vikarṣantaṁ

"rāmaṁ paśyāmi saṁyuge ||

"hanyamānaṁ tu tat sainyaṁ

"paśyāmi śara-vṛṣṭibhiḥ |

"indreṇevottamaṁ sasyaṁ

"āhataṁ tv aśma-vṛṣṭibhiḥ ||

"rakṣasāṁ bhīma-rūpāṇāṁ

"sahasrāṇi caturdaśa |

"nihatāni śarais tīkṣṇaiḥ

"tenaikena padātinā ||

"ardhādhika-muhūrtena

"kharaś ca saha-dūṣaṇaḥ ||

"(Summary [ours]):

"None saw how Rāma took the arrows, how he directed them, or how he bent the bow. The rākṣasa-s felt the scorching arrows killing them. Rāma alone put an end to the life of Khara and Dūṣaṇa.)"

"It is not for nothing that Kṛṣṇa salutes Rāma’s invincibility with the words (Bhagavadgītā 10.31),

“[pavanaḥ pavatām asmi]

"rāmaḥ śastra-bhṛtām aham”

"— “[Of the purifying elements, I am the wind.]; among the wielders of weapons, I am Rāma”."

"Secondly, Pollock wrongly associates “truth and righteousness” only with brahmins, and violence only with kṣatriya-s — if he is taken literally, we must conclude that kṣātra has not an iota of truth or righteousness in it. This is, (un)fortunately, ridiculous. Contrary to his wilful misrepresentations, brāhma and kṣātra are both grounded in “truth and righteousness”, and differ, primarily, only in function (and also, a predominance of one of the sattva/rajas guṇa-s). Brāhma’s essential function is to safegaurd the fundamental principles on which stands a tradition or a society — so its “true function” is knowledge and teaching. Kṣātra, on the other hand, is “government” and it is two-fold in nature: administrative/judicial on the one hand, and military on the other — and these two elements are represented in various traditions as “the scales and the sword”. The Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad asserts that kṣatra is the life-breath (prāṇa) that protects (trāyate) one from being hurt (kṣaṇitoḥ). (Bṛhadāraṇyakopaniṣad 5.13.4)23. A well-established kṣatra ensures a well-nourished community24. A difference only of function between the brahma and kṣatra can be seen in the Puruṣa-sūkta of Ṛgveda (10.190): here, brahmins are shown as corresponding to the mouth of the Puruṣa representing teaching whereas the kṣatriya-s correspond to his arms because their functions relate essentialy to action.

"Indian kingship, therefore, implied anything but a personal autocracy. Kings required the vocal consent of the people who “made him the guardian of their comfort” (Ṛgveda 1.100.7) — and participation in government meant the representation of at least three, if not all the four varṇa-s making up the multitude of the viś — the people. The sabhā25 and the samiti26 were the forums of vox populi, which served as checks on the authority of the king. The popular basis of royal selection finds expression in the Atharva-veda (6.87-88):

"“... viśas tvā sarvā vāñchantu

"mā tvad rāṣṭram adhi bhraśat.

"dhruvo’cyutaḥ pramiṇīhi

"śatrūñ chatrūyato’dharān pādayasva /

"sarvā diśaḥ sammanasaḥ

"sadhrīcīr-dhruvāya te samitiḥ kalpatām iha...”

"“Gladly you come among us; remain firmly without faltering; may all the people want you; may you not fall off the state... Vanquish you firmly, without falling, the enemies, and those behaving like enemies crush you under your feet. All the quarters unanimously honor you and for firmness the assembly here creates you.”

"[Trans. Jayaswal]"

"A king was called rāṣṭrabhṛt — literally, “one who bears, supports, and maintains the kingdom”. The primacy of the king’s protective power is as old as the Ṛgveda as is inherent in such epithets as gopā janasya (Ṛgveda 3.43.5) and janasya gopatiḥ (Ṛgveda 9.35.5). The king’s obligation to his subjects comes forcefully to the fore in the oath he takes before the consecrating priest in the aindra-mahābhiṣeka ceremony. “From the night of my birth, the royal birth”, says he, “to that of my death, for the space between these two, my sacrifice and my gifts, my place, my good deeds, my life and my offspring, mayest thou take if I play thee false”. (Aitareya-brāhmaṇa 8.15) [Trans. Jayaswal]

"A king is dharmasya goptā, the “protector of dharma”, and dhṛta-vrata27 the “upholder of the sacred law”. Elsewhere, he is called satya-sava, “of true sacrifice”, satya-dharma, “of true conduct”, satyānṛte, an “authority in truth and falsehood” like Varuṇa, and a satya-rājan, a “true king” (Taittirīya-brāhmaṇa 1.7.10.1-6). The emphasis therefore is clearly on truth and duty. King Aśvapati proudly declares: “Within my realm there is no thief, no miser, nor a drinking man, none altar-less, none ignorant, no man unchaste, no wife unchaste”. (Chāndogyopaniṣad 5.11.5)

"An interesting and important ceremony in the Rājasūya consists in the priests silently striking the king with sticks on the back. The rite is construed as the height of priestly authority by Weber; but the rod or daṇḍa touching the king is understood as the “symbolic Scepter of Justice” by Jayaswal, “conveying by the action the view of the sacred common law that the king was not above but under the law” (Jayaswal 2006:208-209).

"So, the last thing expected of the Indian king was to “do as he liked”— he had to always do what was “correct”. A large section of Artha-śāstra, for example, deals with the characteristics of a just monarch, and the methods to train him to be one. In the opening pages of this text, Kauṭilya says, “In the happiness of his population, rests the ruler’s own happiness; in their welfare lies his welfare; he shall not consider as good whatever pleases him, but he shall consider as good whatever pleases his population.”28 In another place, Kauṭilya says (Artha-śāstra 10.3) that the king functions as a public servant— “he is on the same footing as his soldiers, both receiving their different wages and both being entitled to share the assets of the nation.” The king was regarded as a trustee; he was particularly enjoined to note that the treasury was not his private or personal property— it was a public trust to be utilized for public purposes (Mahābhārata 4.2.3-5).29

"No Indian texts on polity endorsed the subjects to tolerate tyranny — if the king did not adhere to dharma, the subjects were, at first, recommended to threaten the tyrant that they would migrate from the country if he did not mend his ways (Śukra-nīti-sāra 1.277-78). If this did not produce any effect, the subjects were to dethrone the king, and replace him with a person of their choice (Śukra-nīti-sāra 1.351-53). The Mahābhārata, too, explicitly recognizes the subject’s right to tyrannicide (albeit as a last resort) (Mahābhārata 13.86.35-6). So, the distinctions between monarchy and tyranny were sharply drawn — the king was certainly no despot riding roughshod over the susceptibilities of his people. If he did, he came to grief. We hear of many kings deposed by their people; and of their efforts to resume their reign30. The Śatapatha-brāhmaṇa refers to Duṣṭarītu Pauṁsāyana being banished from his kingdom, though it had come to him through ten generations."

"“...the absolute monarchies of the Orient are not comparable to that of France immediately before the revolution. The normal Oriental monarchy is really a theocracy, in which the king’s position is that of an executive who may do only what ought to be done and is a servant of justice (dharma) of which he is not himself the author. The whole prosperity of the state depends upon the king’s virtue — just as for Aristotle, the monarch who rules in his own interest is not a king but a tyrant, and may be removed like a mad dog.” Coomaraswamy (1977:48)""

................................................................................................

................................................

March 04, 2022 - March 04, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 2"

"Of Kings and Mortals"

................................................................................................

"In his “Introduction” to the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa, Pollock reconstructs the literary and historical situation of the “original” Rāmāyaṇa to demonstrate kingship as a “new and, in their very nature, urgent” problem of the time — and therefore a dominant — if the only — concern of the text. In his introductory essays to the Araṇya-kāṇḍa, on the other hand, he focuses on the “receptive history” of the text and its “mythical nature” to make more forceful his argument."

Presumably the silly title of the chapter is due to something Pollock says, such as kings were not mortal?

................................................................................................

"2.1. Pollock’s "Traditionist-Philology"

"According to Pollock, philology is primarily of two types. In an essay titled “The Return to Philology”, Edward Said (in Humanism and Democratic Criticism, 2004) drew the distinction between the two by utilizing two intriguing figures: one, Dr. Casaubon from George Eliot’s Middlemarch — a curmudgeonly self-absorbed scholar who symbolized the “sterile, ineffectual, and hopelessly irrelevant to life” (Said 2004:57) variety of philology; the other, Nietzsche, who stood as the “poster boy for fertile, effective, and relevant philology” (Mallette 2010:6). In Anthony Grafton’s words,

"“One set of humanists seeks to make the ancient world live again, assuming its undimmed relevance and unproblematic accessibility; another set seeks to put the ancient texts back into their own time, admitting that reconstruction of the past is difficult and that success may reveal the irrelevance of ancient experience and precept to modern problems.”

"Grafton (1985:620)"

That clarifies the stupid orientation of Pollock, in classifying work solely by its tumeline, instead of actual worth, and taking sides within old vs new, as if there is truth precisely only on one side.

"Pollock labeled the first type — the Casaubon type — of philology as “historicist” or “Plane 1” philology, and the latter — the Nietzsche type — as “presentist” or “Plane 3” philology. To this list, he added a Plane- 2 philology — the “traditionist philology”.

"Generally, the phrase “traditionist” philology may conjure to mind a deconstruction/reconstruction of the experience of a poetry by a traditional/original audience. Richard Martin writes,

"“The more we learn about actual oral poetries, from Central Asian to Arabic and African to South American Indian, the more obvious it becomes that the traditional audience of an oral performance, the “native speakers”, as it were, of the poetry, have, all of them, the mental equivalent of a CD-ROM player full of phrases and scenes… I would go further and say that the full “meaning”, and the full enjoyment of traditional poetry, come only when one has heard it all before a hundred times, in a hundred different versions…”

"Martin (1993:227-28)"

Martin makes sense.

"But Pollock’s attempt is neither towards a re-construction of “a mental-equivalent of a CD-ROM” of Indian tradition, nor towards a “full meaning/enjoyment of traditional poetry”. Instead, his effort is towards identifying the cause of this or that traditional interpretation. According to him, every interpretation is made possible by something, by some property of the text that allows for it. “Every reading of the text is”, therefore, “evidence of human consciousness activated by the text in its search to make sense of it” (Pollock 2014:406) [italics ours]. A philologist, therefore, ought to focus on the text and try to identify what in it allowed for a particular interpretation1."

Hence thise schoolgirls on Shelfari questioning equipment of Jane Austen's Mr Collins as an explanation for his being intellectually deficient.

"He writes,

"“Since all interpretations are embodiments of human consciousness, which have been called into being by certain properties in the text, such forms of consciousness cannot be correct or incorrect in their historical existence. What we philologists aim to capture when we read along the plane of tradition — which, remember, is only one of three — are those forms themselves, what about the text itself summoned those forms of consciousness into existence…”

"Pollock (2014:406) (italics not ours)"

He strings up words that leave mist in doubt if it all makes any sense at all, leaving a few to labour towards hard task of extracting sense if any, and being reluctant to admit it doesn't. His career is thus made, and theirs might be wrecked by admitting facts.

"“...Most scholars simply ignore these, as my classic teachers always did, for whom no traditional interpretation, whether of Hellenistic scholiast, Roman commentator or medieval scribe, could make any claim to truth. Even those who do not ignore them, like my Indian teachers or Sanskrit colleagues, rarely offer an account of why we should take the meanings, or the truths, of tradition seriously...”

"Pollock (2007b:402)"

"Unfortunately, Pollock’s specific version of “traditionist-philology”, and his employment of the word “tradition” is rather ambiguous. In the few references that he makes to tradition, it appears that he explicitly refers only to the medieval academic reception of the text ... "

"Medieval commentators of the Rāmāyaṇā cannot account entirely for its “receptive history”. First of all, the Rāmāyaṇa is primarily a composition-in-performance — performers neither memorize fixed texts nor improvise freely — they learn stylized diction, performance style, themes, and the outlines of the narratives and recombine them before audiences. So, the term “tradition” refers here, in Scodel’s words, “diachronically to the history and process of transmission… to the rules of the genre and to such conventions as the poetic dialect, the formulae, and the meter. It also frequently means the themes, and indeed, the actual narratives themselves” ... Writing of the Mahābhārata in India, V. S. Sukthankar remarks:

"“This dateless and deathless poem, which had evoked throughout Indian antiquity such wide interest and which forms the strongest link between India old and new— what is it, what is this miracle of a book? The learned philologist of the present day feels a deal of hesitation in answering this question, which to the unsophisticated Indian would present no difficulty whatsoever. If questioned, the latter will no doubt promptly and confidently answer that the Mahābhārata is a divine work recounting the war-like deeds of his ancestors, the god-like heroes of a past age, the unrighteous Kauravas on the one hand and the righteous Pāṇḍavas aided by Lord Śrī Kṛṣṇa on the other — of the Golden Age when gods use to mingle with men, when the people were much better off, much happier, than they are today. And the illiterate Indian is right, to a very large extent, far more often is than his “educated” brother.”

"Sukthankar (1957:53)"

"Unfortunately, Pollock’s “traditionist-philology” is historicist in its own way; his “tradition” is located in a historical context — in, arbitrarily, a medieval era — and thus carries with it a foundational element of historicism that is paradoxical and almost self-cancelling. It is this rationale that allows Pollock to say that the commentarial tradition is “the closest thing we have to an original audience” (Pollock 2007b:18) or that a “traditional-medieval interpretation” will lead to “trans-historical authentic attitudes” (Pollock 2007b:232). It is this rationale that allows him to differentiate between a “traditional-philology” and a “presentist-philology”. It is this rationale that pronounced Sanskrit dead — dead since at least the onset of the colonial era. By equating “tradition” with “medieval”, Pollock, in the end, only substitutes one “historic” lens for another."

Or it's simpler than that. Medieval is where Pollock finds support if he's agenda, his thesis about abusing Sanskrit and Hinduism and declaring both being dead. His being on side of invaders looting India should surprise no one. It's the side church takes.

................................................................................................

"2.1.1 “Mythical” Nature of the Rāmāyaṇa"

"For most — if not every — Western scholar, the Araṇya-kāṇḍa is, says Pollock, a problematic section of the Rāmāyaṇa. Whereas the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa treats of the “socio-political concerns” of a royal family, and therefore has a touch of reality to its narration, the remainder, to them, he says, is simply fantastic. To quote Jacobi,

"“... that [the saga of the Rāmāyaṇa] is composed of two utterly different and distinct parts. [In the Ayodhyā-kāṇḍa], everything is human, natural, totally free from fantasy… the case is quite otherwise in the second half of the saga [in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa] , where everything is marvelous and fantastic.”

"(As cited in Pollock 2007b:4)"

And that's how racists lose opportunities of discoveries staring them in face!

Why not ask, if it was all matter of fact? If it wasn't a story that did happen when primates were still evolving into humans, but were already civilised? As for ogres and demons, are we just ignoring discoveries in various regions from Northwest US and Canada to Central Asia and surrounding regions Siberia and Afghanistan, of humans encountering giants who are cannibals if their consuming humans - half their size - qualifies for the epithet?

It should, since one giant female was reportedly caught and kept in a Russian village in Siberia and bred at least one, possibly two, humans of normal size, normal in every other way to humanity.

But no, a racist and an abrahmic must brand everything superior of every other culture via a disdainful attitude in a derogatory manner so he can help his creed wipe out every alternative and establish a muddy brown stew uniformity replacing an alive, fantastic rich tapestry.

"Contrarily, the traditional/original audience of the Rāmāyaṇa has never felt, says Pollock, the said discontinuity between the different sections of the text. Not any of the “countless literary adaptations” or the “medieval commentator’s interpretations” show any doubts regarding the “organic unity” of the text. So, Pollock proposes to start his reading of the Rāmāyaṇa from a different point — from a “traditional” a priori that the Rāmāyaṇa is not made of two heterogeneous parts, but is, in fact, a unified whole:

"“Suppose we were to take seriously what generations of performers and audiences have felt, not to speak of the composer, that the monumental poem is not made up of two heterogeneous and uncombinable narratives, but forms a meaningful whole?”

"Pollock (2007b:5)"

"“the difference between the mythical and the fabulous is a difference in authority and social function, not in structure. If we were concerned only with structural features we should hardly be able to distinguish them at all… there are only so many effective ways of telling a story, and myths and folktales share them without dividing them. But as a distinctive tendency in the social development of literature, myths have two characteristics that folktales, at least in their earlier stages, do not show, or show much less clearly. First, myths stick together to form a mythology, a large interconnected body of narrative that covers all the religious and historical revelation that its society is concerned with, or concerned about. Second, as part of this sticking-together process, myths take root in a specific culture and it is one of their functions to tell that culture what it is and how it came to be, in their own mythical terms.”

"Pollock (2007b:12)"

Calling India's treasure myth, there's the racist's authenticated calling card.

"Accordingly, if the Rāmāyaṇa is considered as a myth that performs the “social function” of portraying the “nature of kingship”, Pollock says, the Araṇya-kāṇḍa can also be demonstrated to carry the same “social function”, and thus be taken as a myth that forms a “meaningful part” of the whole. So, first of all, he displays the similarities in structure between the Araṇya-kāṇḍa and the European romance (the only elements that Western scholars purportedly consider), and then demonstrates its “authority and social function” (of “portraying kingship”) to classify it as a “myth”— thus demonstrating its “unity” with the Rāmāyaṇa."

As if Europe had anything of a memory that goes that far back, or knew of evolution before Darwin forced it down their throats! India's history goes much farther back, to geological upheavals when an ocean between India and Asia vanished and Himaalayan ranges out of the ocean were seen by India, and much, much, much farther back before that.

"It must be noted at once that Pollock commits a fundamental mistake in his analysis: he commences to study the Rāmāyaṇa from a “traditional” perspective but midway, he exchanges it for a Western one. Indian tradition categorizes the Rāmāyaṇa as a kāvya or an itihāsa-purāṇa — naturally one would expect Pollock’s “Plane-2” philology to engage in a deeper/subtler understanding of the nature of a kāvya or Itihāsa/Purāṇa. On the contrary, it is Frye’s definition of a myth that entirely informs Pollock’s argument — his reading of the Rāmāyaṇa is only in its consideration as a myth, and a myth of the Frye variety at that. Surely, Frye’s “mythical” reading of the Rāmāyaṇa cannot be labeled as “Plane 2” or “traditionist” philology.

"Furthermore, the Rāmāyaṇa does not even fit properly into Frye’s definition of a myth. According to Frye, a myth is a story (mythos), usually about “the acts of gods”. They belong to a society and inform it — in this way, they primarily carry “a social function”. According to Frye, this “function” is to inform the society (of which it is a part) of their gods, their traditional history, the origins of their customs, structure, etc. There are myths of creation, of exodus and migration, of deluge, of apocalypse, and they discuss why we are here, where we are headed. Such myths outline, as broadly as words can do, a society’s vision of this universe, and its own place in it — its proclamation is not so much ‘this is true’ as ‘this is what you must know’. Myths are, therefore, regularly used in rituals — as a commentary, for dramatization, etc. Furthermore, a myth’s poet must be, according to Frye, a vehicle of God, not of memory. In Frye’s words,

"“On the mythical plane there is more legend than evidence, but it is clear that the poet who sings about gods is often considered to be singing as one, or as an instrument of one. His social function is that of an inspired oracle; he is frequently an ecstatic, and we hear strange stories of his powers. Orpheus could draw trees after him; the bards and Ollaves of the Celtic world could kill their enemies with their satire; the prophets of Israel foretold the future. The poet’s visionary function, his proper work as a poet, is on this plane to reveal the god for whom he speaks. This usually means that he reveals the god’s will in connection with a specific occasion, when he is consulted as an oracle in a state of “enthusiasm” or divine possession. But in time the god in him reveals his nature and history as well as his will, and so a larger pattern of myth and ritual is built up out of a series of oracular pronouncements. We can see this very clearly in the emergence of the Messiah myth from the oracles of the Hebrew prophets. The Koran is one clear historical instance at the beginning of the Western period of the mythical mode in action. Authentic examples of oracular poetry are so largely pre- and extra-literary that they are difficult to isolate. For more recent examples, such as the ecstatic oracles which are said to be an important aspect of the culture of the Plains Indians, we have to depend on anthropologists.”

"Frye (2006:52)"

"Pollock quotes Frye narrowly by saying that a “myth” must only carry “a social function” to be called one — implying that this social function may be of any sort. But Frye’s definition of a myth’s social function is rather rigid — not “any” social function can inform the “myth”. For Pollock, the Rāmāyaṇa is a “sustained and elaborate myth exploring the nature of a king, the character and quality of his powers and every domain in which these powers are manifested.” (2007b:14) [italics ours]. Frye, who classifies the Bible as a myth, would not admit Pollock’s “narrative of kingly discourse” to be called a social function.

"Pollock’s framework is faulty in Frye’s context. It is entirely out of place in a traditional-Indian one. So, it ultimately stands on a mish-mash of different theories that is shaky at best."

Hegde is being typically Indian in not calling a spade an age and a Pollock a dishonest fraud, out of a politeness still meted out to abrahmic conversionist racists - a remnant from gandhian needs of the then politics.

................................................................................................

"2.2 “Mythical Nature” of the Araṇya-kāṇḍa"

"In accordance with his framework, Pollock demonstrates that the Araṇya-kāṇḍa fits into Frye’s myth — he shows it is structurally similar to the “romance”, though functionally different. First of all, then, he draws attention to a multitude of “fantastic” elements in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa that lend it an appearance of a “romance”. In fact, a “vast inventory” may be found, he says, of the techniques and motifs in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa that are “representative of European romance” — the piety of the protagonist, an idealized love relationship between himself and the heroine, the loss of a beloved, the hero’s wanderings and the dimension of a quest and the gods’ role in the unfolding adventure, tokens of recognition, the hero’s triumph, etc."

Europe must have copied RĀMĀYAṆA copiously!

"Yet, the Araṇya-kāṇḍa is informed, says Pollock, with a “social function” which lends it its mythical nature — that of kingship. Accordingly, kingship is, he says, the key element that ties the Araṇya-kāṇḍa together with the Rāmāyaṇa.

................................................................................................

"2.2.1 “Authority and Social Function” in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa"

"As the title suggests, the Araṇya-kāṇḍa is set in the forest. Pollock, firstly, dwells on what this choice of locale implies for the story. In Western literature, Pollock remarks, wilderness is,

"“...the place where there is no community, just or injust, and no historical change for better or for worse... Therefore the individual (in the wilderness) is free from both the evils and the responsibilities of communal life...”

"Pollock (2007b:13)"

Wonder how he twists Red Riding Hood from a little girl eaten by a wolf into a seductress choosing to traverse a forest for an illicit rendezvous - after all, he couldn't afford to antagonise any names who might not take kindly to his assaults on a German culture! Hence the choice of India as a convenient target, butchering a milch city when she's threatened by a wolf, because the farmer isn't man enough to see her worth and defend her?

"In Sanskrit literature, too, he says, the forest is viewed in stark opposition to the town or city; it is a place “prior to, or at least exterior to” many of the claims and obligations of the social world. Life in the forest is not bound by the confines of family existence; on the contrary, it is precisely where “those escaping such confines come to find peace and transcendence — the renouncer, the ascetic, the seer— and indeed, those who are forced out of collective existence, exiles like Rāma himself”. In his words,

"“In this place outside the socialized and the humanized, all that a human is not can be found— monstrous subhuman creatures as well as beings of an almost superhuman spirituality; it is a place where demons, men, ṛṣis, demigods and gods all mingle.”

"Pollock (2007b:13)"

And what other reality does he expect, that of a present German forest that's merely a tended garden with a rare fix allowed to exist after millennia of all other creatures and humans too having been hunted out of existence? Doesn't Pollock recall camping in his youth, or was it on border of Central Park, not in forest?

For that matter, during WWII there were more than one colony of fugitives from naxos and their camps, in places as diverse as Netherlands and Belarusian regions. They included Jews not caught, and fugitives and escapees from camps, respectively. They certainly preferred dealing with wild beasts, if any, as and when encountered. So, probably, did the lost US soldiers in fog of France during Battle of Bulge, one may safely bet.

"From this a priori, Pollock finds it extremely odd that in the very first sarga of the Araṇya-kāṇḍa, the ascetics of the forest should approach Rāma and solicit his protection (as if he were still a king/protector in the forest) (Ascetics to Rāma) (Rāmāyaṇa 3.1.20-21):"

Really, what was his problem, Rāmashoukd have carried an official permit card with him allowing him to protect hapless victims instead of letting them be butchered? No, it's after all his not being authenticated, much less admitted Godhood of, by Pollock’s own church! Quite a German isn't he! (In Germany one may not practice a trade, craft or art, unless certified by the federal government as permitted to fo so, after an official course training; this includes anyone with a doctorate being allowed to call oneself Dr, we were informed, despite valid US degrees from US universities which German students travel to for studies!)

"te vayaṁ bhavatā rakṣyā

"bhavad-viṣaya-vāsinaḥ |

"nagara-stho vana-stho vā

"tvaṁ no rājā janeśvaraḥ ||

"rakṣaṇīyās tvayā śaśvad

"garbha-bhūtā tapo-dhanāḥ |

"“We are residents of your realm and need your protection. Wherever you may find yourself, in city or forest, you are our king, the lord of the people... You must always protect us ascetics for we are your children”

"[Trans. Pollock]"

King or not, he was a born Kshatriya at very basic level and brought up, trained, as such, with his primary duty at the core of his being having always been protection of those in need from assaults by those unlawfully so assaulting.

But Pollock’s refusal to comprehend and keeping his heart locked to natural beings of humanity, while keeping a lid on any possibility of a higher opening to his consciousness, is the problem after all.

"Apparently, it is not a one-off instance — rather it sets, says Pollock, the tone for the rest of the book. From the very beginning, there is a continuous “intrusion” of elements of “kingly duties” into the Araṇya-kāṇḍa, and these elements are “so resolutely anti-romantic in their fundamental significance, so heavily laden with “authority and social function” (Pollock 2007b:13). From here, Pollock proceeds to connect the dots to show “kingship” as the “social function” of the Rāmāyaṇa. It is impossible to work from a “traditionalist-plane” towards this end of “kingship” so we would do better to work like Pollock : backwards!"

That should have told him he was wrong in his interpretation.

After a few similar uncomprehending quotes from him author says -

"It must be noted at once that Rāma is technically not a king — he is not an heir prince, even; he went into exile before his paṭṭābhiṣeka. He is but a kṣatriya— and it is as a kṣatriya that he promises, and provides, refuge to the ascetics. Grammatically, the word kṣatra is derived from the root kṣaṇu hiṁsāyām, and etymologically, it is kṣatāt nāśāt trāyata iti kṣatraṁ. The word itself refers, therefore, to “protection”. We know that instances of kṣatriya’s duty (of protection) abound in Indian literature. When, for example, in Kālidāsa’s Raghu-vaṁśa, Nandinī, sage Vaśiṣṭha’s cow, faces threat from Kumbhodara, the lion, Dilīpa offers to sacrifice his own self in order to protect Nandinī. And Dilīpa says (to Kumbhodara):

"kṣatāt kila trāyata ity udagraḥ

"kṣatrasya śabdo bhuvaneṣu rūḍhaḥ |

"rājyena kiṁ tad-viparīta-vṛtteḥ

"prāṇair upakrośa-malīmasair vā ||

"(Raghu-vaṁśa 2.53)"

"“The word ‘kṣatra’ is popularly used in the world for ‘one who protects from danger’. If a king i.e., myself, behaves in a manner contrary to such a definition, of what use is a kingdom to him, or even his own tainted life?”

"[Trans. ours]"

" ... in the Araṇya-kāṇḍa, the ascetics’ words tvam naḥ rāja does not make official Rāma’s kingship. It is a technical error on Pollock’s part, then, to say that “kingly” duties continue in the araṇya — it is a kṣatriya’s duties that continue into the araṇya.

"It appears that Pollock presumes that the duties of varṇāśrama do not apply “in the forest” (and that only the “kingly duties” continue in this realm) — an assumption which is completely groundless. In which dharma-śāstra is it stated that one may abandon one’s caste or station in life simply because he/she is “in the forest” ? Contrarily, we see that Sītā continues to perform her duties as a loyal wife to Rāma, Rāma performs his duties as a son (he performs the last rites of Daśaratha in the forest), he is still a husband, a brother, and, of course, a kṣatriya. Until one voluntarily and explicitly formally changes one’s station in life (i.e. into saṁnyāsa), one cannot simply adopt the ways of another."

"Indian dharma-śāstra-s, in fact, comprehensively classify dharma as six-fold (Kane 1941:3), viz.

"varṇa-dharma — injunctions based on varṇa alone, such as “a brahmin should never drink wine” or “a brahmin should not be killed”;

"āśrama-dharma — such rules as begging and carrying a staff enjoined on a brahmacārin;

"varṇāśrama-dharma — the rules of conduct enjoined on a man because he belongs to a particular class and is in a particular stage of life, such as ‘a brahmin brahmacārin should carry the staff of a palāśa tree;

"guṇa-dharma — such as protection of subjects in the case of a crowned king;

"naimittika-dharma — such as expiation on doing what is forbidden; and finally,

"sādharaṇa-dharma — what is common to all humanity viz, ahiṁsā and other virtues.

Regarding the abandonment/discontinuation of any of the above, P.V. Kane clarifies,

"“With reference to the four āśramas, there are three different points of view (pakṣas) viz. samuccaya (orderly co-ordination), vikalpa (option) and bādha (annulment or contradiction). Those who hold the first view (samuccaya) say that a person can resort to the four āśramas one after another in order and that he cannot drop any one or more and pass on to the next nor can he resort to the householder’s life after becoming a saṁnyāsin...

"The second view is that there is an option after brahmacarya i.e. one may become a parivrājaka immediately after he finishes his study or immediately after the householder’s way of life. ....

"The third view of bādha is held by the ancient dharmasūtras of Gautama and Baudhāyana. They hold that there is really one āśrama viz. that of the householder (brahmacarya being only preparatory to it) and that the other āśramas are inferior to that of the householder. ...The Mit. [Mitākṣarā] on Yaj. [Yājñavalkya-smṛti] III.56 refutes these three views and says that each is supported by Vedic texts and one may follow any one of the three. .... The word āśrama is derived from ‘śram’ to exert, to labor and etymologically means ‘a stage in which one exerts oneself’. Commentators like Sarvajña-Nārāyana ... endeavor to bring about reconciliation between the three views set out above as follows: the view that a man may pass on to saṁnyāsa immediately after the period of student-hood (without being a householder) applies only to those persons who are, owing to the impressions and effects of restrained conduct in past lives, entirely free from desires and whose tongue, sexual appetites, belly and words are thoroughly under control; the prescriptions of Manu enjoining on men not to resort to saṁnyāsa without paying off the three debts are concerned with those whose appetites have not yet thoroughly been brought under control and the words of Gautama that there is only one āśrama (that of the house-holder) relate only to those whose appetites for worldly pleasures and pursuits are quite keen”.

"Kane (1941:424)"

"It must be noted also that when those “escaping the confines” of their own station in life adopt a different mode of life “in the forests”, they don’t “escape” anything— they only exchange one set of duties for another. A person in vānaprasthāśrama is also bound by duties: he has to attend to those fires that he had attended to while he was a house-holder; he has, in addition, to sleep on the bare ground, keep twisted locks, wear deer-skin, perform ablution, worship gods, ancestors, and guests, and live upon food stuffs procurable in forests, etc. If one really wishes to “escape” the confines of the society, it is not enough to “enter the forest”— one must enter saṁnyāsa. Many kings entered vānaprasthāśrama after anointing an able heir to the throne — most of the kings of the Raghu-vamśa, the race of Raghu, for example: Bṛhadaśva, Trayyāruṇa, Viśvāmitra, Kapila, Bali, Manu, Saṁyāti, Yayāti, Devāpi, etc. But Rāma was not one of them."

"But Rāma was not one of them" applies to the present context of when the three in exile were living in great as per promise to the parents of Rāma, of course; eventually when Rāma handed kingdom over to heirs is a different matter.

"Kingship as a unifying element of the Rāmāyaṇa is nowhere corroborated in Indian tradition: it is Pollock’s idea entirely which picks its way through the text seeking confirmation of its existence. While he accepts the “traditional” view of unity (of the different kāṇḍa-s), its rationale/explanation is entirely his own — furthermore, it is thoroughly anti-traditional."

And, more than anything else, just plain wrong.

................................................................................................

"2.3. Divinity of Rāma and Other Kings"

"So, first of all, Pollock — with his “traditional lens”— examines the nature of Rāma. Accordingly, he first notices that the traditional audience of the Rāmāyaṇa has never had any doubt about the divinity of the hero and its integral role in the larger narrative. Western scholars have, contrarily, always questioned it. In order to understand this, Pollock proposes to study the “higher-order narrative features” in the logic of the story or within the context of the larger motifs and themes of the Indian tradition. In his words,

"“We may come closer to deciding the issue in question if we direct our attention to the poem’s “structured” message residing in certain higher order narratives”

"Pollock (2007b:20)"

Or, if they were honest, they could admit that church imposing a strict adherence to its viewport two millennia, at penalty of inquisition burning any dissenters at stake for several centuries, has had the intended effect of not only blinkered but completely blinding Westerners, till they won't see it if it hits them square up front. But then, they lack courage to admit it.

" ... boon of Rāvaṇa which is, he says, inextricably linked to the divinity of Rāma. In Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, Rāvaṇa had earned, by means of his ascetic mortifications, a boon that made him invulnerable to all divine and semi-divine beings. Pollock quotes Prahasta’s words: “Gods, dānavas, gandharvas, piśācas, divine birds, and serpents are utterly incapable of harming you in battle — what of monkeys?” (Rāmāyaṇa 6.8.2) ... Rāvaṇa did not bother to request invulnerability from men and other lower forms of life because to him, it was superfluous — they were harmless in his eyes, “nothing more than food”. So, a God could not slay Rāvaṇa — because of the boon. A mere man could not possibly kill him. ... Rāma is neither simply a man, nor simply a God, but “an intermediate being who partakes of both existential realms, combining the nature derived from each into a new, superordinated power ... "

Indeed, in quest of power, an ego driven entity would likely leave a chink in the armour asked for, rather than leave it to the Deity to bless according to need. This pattern was in prior cases too of demons slain, whether twins Sunda-Upasunda or Hiranyakashyapu (the father of Prahlad), Rāvaṇa or later Jarāsandha and Shishupāla or, much earlier, Raktabeejāsura.

"“Finally, what makes the adaptation of the ancient motif particularly suggestive, complex, and powerful in the Rāmāyaṇa is that this second-order being, this divine human or mortal god, is here coupled with a socio-political representation of everyday life in traditional India: such intermediate beings, gods who walk the earth in the form of men, are kings.”

"Pollock (2007b:43)"

But this is false, if only he'd pay attention! Even within Dashāvatāra, Rāma is the first king of this stature, and his kingdom comes far later, but his Divinity understood much earlier. Before him, the seventh Avatāra, there are six others, of which two human Avatāra at fifth and sixth are not kings, but poor Brahmins (who incidentally remain so despite capabilitiesto the contrary), and that's only about Avatāra of Vishnu.

First recognition of Divine in human form is of Shiva who is an ascetic never in worldly life until forced to - tricked by Gods into - marriage for sake of birth of someone who's born to defend Gods from adverse forces. And despite the marriage, Shiva remains ascetic, his consort accepting the stature and status, the life and the Divinity.

"For Pollock, Dhundhumāra and Rāma are equally a “second-order” of being — heroes who are men — but “more than ordinary men, not more than gods”. Furthermore, Pollock uses the stories of Sunda and Upasunda, Tāraka and Skanda, Bali and Vāmana, and Hiraṇyakaśipu and Narasiṁha to draw parallels and demonstrate that it is this adaptation of the “ancient motif” of “divine human, mortal god” that makes the Rāmāyaṇa a powerful “myth”."

Author discusses the mess Pollock makes by clearing up.

"In the Rāmāyaṇa, the Bāla-kāṇḍa narrates the story of the gods’ appeal to Lord Viṣṇu and his promise to come down as a human to vanquish Rāvaṇa.

"Gods addressing Viṣṇu: (Rāmāyaṇa 1.15.23-24).

"vadhārthaṁ vayam āyātās

"tasya vai munibhiḥ saha |

"siddha-gandharva-yakṣāś ca

"tatas tvām śaraṇaṁ gatāḥ ||

"“We siddha-s, gandharva-s and yakṣa-s, along with ascetics, have hence come here to devise ways of his [Rāvaṇa’s] death. We take refuge in you”.

"[Trans. IIT website]"

"tvaṁ gatiḥ paramā deva

"sarveṣāṁ naḥ parantapa |

"vadhāya deva śatrūṇāṁ

"nṛṇāṁ loke manaḥ kuru ||

"“O tormentor of enemies, O Viṣṇu, you are the supreme refuge for all of us. Resolve to be born in the world of men for the destruction of enemies of the gods (rākṣasa-s)”.

"[Trans. IIT website]"

"Lord Viṣṇu (to Gods): (Rāmāyaṇa 1.15.27-28)

"bhayaṁ tyajata bhadraṁ vo

"hitārthaṁ yudhi rāvaṇam |

"sa-putra-pautraṁ sāmātyaṁ

"sa-mitra-jñāti-bāndhavam ||

"hatvā krūraṁ durādharṣaṁ

"devarṣīṇāṁ bhayāvaham |

"daśa-varṣa-sahasrāṇi

"daśa-varṣa-śatāni ca ||

"vatsyāmi mānuṣe loke

"pālayan pṛthivīm imām ||

"“Abandon fear, blessings upon you; for your welfare, for gods and ṛṣi-s, I will dwell on this Earth — in the world of men — ruling for ten thousand ten hundred years, after killing the cruel and Rāvaṇa in battle along with his sons and grandsons, along with his ministers, along with his friends, relations and allies”

"Avataraṇa, literally a “crossing down”, refers to the “Descent” or “Incarnation” of a divine Person, who is therefore called an “avatāra”: it is interesting to note that the same word, avataraṇa, is used of the entry of an actor upon the stage, which is an appearance from behind a curtain and a “manifestation” analogous to that of the avatāra upon the world-stage. Such “Descents” are explained in the words of Kṛṣṇa spoken to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-gītā (4.6-7): “Whenever Order fails and Disorder arises, then do I bring forth myself: for guarding the doers-aright and for the destruction of evildoers, and to establish Order, I take birth aeon after aeon” [Trans. ours]. In Aurobindo’s words,

"“It is the descent of God on earth in human form through human birth ... In the West, this belief has never really stamped itself upon the mind because it has been presented through exoteric Christianity as a theological dogma without any roots in the reason and general consciousness and attitude towards life. But in India it has grown up and persisted as a logical outcome of the Vedantic view of life and taken firm root in the consciousness of race.”

"Aurobindo (1995:212-213)"

"Avatāra-s, in Indian tradition, are of different types: āveśa (inspired) (Narasiṁha, for example); aṁśa (partial) and pūrṇa (complete)2. They are all “Descents” in play — līlāvatāra. The Purāṇa-s enumerate 14 manvantarāvatāra-s, 25 kalpāvatāra-s, 4 yugāvatāra-s — of them, ten have attained greater popularity. A popular verse enumerates ten of them in a chronological order:

"matsyaḥ kūrmo varāhaś ca

"narasiṁho’tha vāmanaḥ |

"rāmo rāmaś ca rāmaś ca

"buddhaḥ kalkī ca te daśa ||

"Of the purpose of an avatāra, Aurobindo remarks,

"“There are two aspects of the divine births - one is a descent, the birth of God in humanity, the God-head manifesting itself in the human form and nature, the eternal Avatar; the other is an ascent, the birth of man into the God-head, man rising into the divine nature and consciousness (madbhāvam); it is the being born anew in a second birth of the soul. It is that new birth which Avatarhood and the upholding of the dharma are intended to serve... If there were not this rising of man into the God-head to be helped by the descent of God into humanity, Avatarhood for the sake of the dharma would be an Otiose phenomenon, since mere Right, mere justice or standards of virtue can always be upheld by the divine omnipotence through its ordinary means, by great men or great movements, by the life and work of sages and kings and religious teachers without any actual incarnation….”

"Aurobindo (1995:214)"

It is a paradox, this combination of two natures, one divine, one human3. Different questions it raises are: how can God, the divine unoriginate, be born? How can two complete natures (divine and human) be united in one being? How can God remain unchanged in himself and yet be subject to suffering and death? In order to answer these questions, one can only say that it is only by a leap of faith that it can be understood4. An avatāra is certainly fully God and fully man. In Shelley’s words, “Within this lies the mystery of the God-man”. So, Rāma is not “more than man, less than god”; he is fully man and fully god.

"Dhundhumāra’s story, on the other hand, is of a king — born a mere man — infused with the power of Lord Viṣṇu at the request of the sage Uttaṅka to fight Dhundhu, the rākṣasa. If Dhundhumāra was, simply on account of his being a king, as powerful or “divine” as Rāma, clearly there was no need for Uttaṅka’s intervention (or Viṣṇu’s, for that matter). Going further, was his father, Bṛhadaśva, also “divine”? What happened to his divinity when he chose to abandon “kingship” and enter into vānaprastha? Did it continue with him? Was it left behind in his office? Was it passed on to Kuvalāśva? Or was Kuvalāśva also born “divine”? Furthermore, according to Pollock’s logic, the other “kings” of the Rāmāyaṇa must also have been considered “divine” — but this is not the case. Not even Daśaratha — whose office Rāma must occupy — is understood as “divine”. Similarly, in the other stories, king Bali would have to be an avatāra himself, as too, Hiraṇyakaśipu."

"Pollock writes that the Indian tradition offers one prominent explanation of it: the reading offered by the Bhāgavata-purāṇa is viewed as authoritative by the majority of the medieval commentators. Accepting as an authentic feature of the poem Rāma’s status as an avatāra of Viṣṇu, the purāṇa explains,

"“God’s incarnation as a mortal in this world is not simply for slaying rākṣasa-s, but it is meant to instruct mortals. How else could it be that the Lord, the Self delighting in Himself, should have suffered so because of Sītā? The Blessed One, Vāsudeva, is the Self… without attachment to anything in the three worlds. He would not (except for the purpose of such instruction) have experienced that faintheartedness caused by (his attachment to) a woman”

"(Pollock 2007b:60)"

Pollock’s blinkers are very abrahmic here, blinding him to the mist obvious. He's looking through his biblical glasses where female us not even fully human, always less than male, suspect, blamed for downfall and sin.

This is the horrible worldview that has him say, disgustingly, "He would not (except for the purpose of such instruction) have experienced that faintheartedness caused by (his attachment to) a woman”. Pollock forgets that she, Sita, wasn't just anybody, any more than he, Rāma, was, but was as much his counterpart in human Avatāra as in his Divine form.

India, and her Divine Avatāra, regard female principle and women as as much divine at core as male, unlike the "male, fallen, female, more so" of abrahmic creeds. Rāma respects not only his mother's and wife but wives of enemies too, apart from other women he encounters.

But as a human, vanishing of his wife due to being kidnapped has him naturally driven crazy until there is news of what took place; as an Avatāra, he is deprived of the power that's her being, literally, dance a Divine couple is a Divine Principle and Divine Power thereof.

Pollock loses every opportunity of growth fir sake of imposing an ego and getting a name!

"It must at once be noted that the “traditional” interpretation that Pollock cites is not the only one offered. For example glossing on Rāmāyaṇa 3.60.10:

"yatnāt mṛgayamāṇas tu

"nāsasāda vane priyām |

"śoka-raktekṣaṇaḥ śrīmān

"unmatta iva lakṣyate ||

"the Rāmāyaṇa-śiromaṇi, a commentary on the Rāmāyaṇa by Śiva-sahāya, for example, says:

"śoka-raktekṣaṇaḥ saṁbhoga-śṛṅgāra-poṣaka-sarva-saṁpatti-viśiṣṭo rāmaḥ,

"yatnāt priyāṁ sītāṁ mṛgayamāṇa anvīkṣan api, nāsasāda prāpa,

"ata eva unmatta iva lakṣyate |

"Rāma’s lamentation is understood as Vālmīki’s exquisite portraiture of the tender sentiment of pathos. Rāma’s piteous ravings and lamentations consequent to the unbearable grief of separation from Sītā is vipralambha-śṛṅgāra that adds to distill the karuṇa rasa."

Author discusses Pollock’s comments further.

................................................................................................

"2.4 The King - An Ontological Divinity or Functional Divinity?"

"It is needless to say that the divinity of kings is different from an avatāra’s divinity. A king’s divinity is bestowed on him through a religious ritual — unless he is anointed and consecrated, he remains a mortal. A king’s divinity stands on a marriage of spiritual and temporal power — the king and the purohita together uphold the moral order, they take an oath of fidelity towards each other and it is then that the king lords the earth and becomes the guardian of dharma.

" ... we see that “human kings” are seen as antithetic to gods, and as mortal compared with immortals5. So it is that the divinity of Pṛthu Vainya is not established in spite of the feats he performs because of his virtuosity (when he wanted to walk over the seas, water solidified and let him walk on water: āpas tastambhire cāsya samudram abhiyāsyataḥ - Mahābhārata 12.59.123). On the other hand, it is said, “Viṣṇu entered his (Pṛthu’s) body, and so the world bows to this king as to a god among human gods” (Mahābhārata 12.59.130):

"tapasā bhagavān viṣṇur

"āviveśa ca bhūmipam |

"devavan naradevānāṁ

"namate yaṁ jagan nṛpam ||

"We also see in the Nalopākhyāna that Nala, a king, stands in the svayaṁvara in contrast to the Gods who have assumed his form. Further, most law-books make a distinction between king, gods, and brahmins: according to Gautama, witnesses must take an oath in the presence of deva-rāja-brāhmaṇa-saṁsad (Gautama Dharmasūtra 13.13); Āpastamba separates the verbal abuse of gods from that of the king puruṣaṁ devatānāṁ rājñaś ca (Āpastamba Dharmasūtra 1.31.5).

"In the Rāmāyaṇa is the suggestion that a king’s “supernatural goodness” makes him a god: “They say a king is human, rājānaṁ mānuṣaṁ prāhuḥ (but you), on account of your more than human conduct seem to me to be godlike (Rāmāyaṇa 2.101.4) (Rāma to Bharata). Pollock translates this verse thus:

"rājānaṁ mānuṣaṁ prāhur

"devatve sammato mama |

"yasya dharmārtha-sahitaṁ

"vṛttam āhur amānuṣam ||

"“Some say a king is but a mortal; I esteem him a god. His conduct in matters of righteousness and statecraft, it is rightly said, is beyond that of mere mortals.” Here, “yasya” ought to be translated as “whose”, not “his”. Dharmārtha-sahitam is not “in matters of dharma and artha”, but “according to dharma and artha”. Bharata’s words will then be: “A king whose conduct is according to dharmārtha, him deem they a god”.

"On the other hand, a king who neglects the affairs of the citizen will be roasted in airless hell (Rāmāyaṇa 7.53.6). Rāma, on the other hand, is divine as the incarnation of Viṣṇu, not as being otherwise a god (Rāmāyaṇa 6.35.36) rāmaṁ manyāmahe viṣṇuṁ mānuṣaṁ rūpam āsthitam (Mālyavān to Rāvaṇa). According to Pollock,

"“The king is functionally a god because like a god he saves and protects; he is existentially or ontologically a god because he incorporates the divine essence”

"Pollock (2007b:47)"

"A king cannot be a god ontologically; it is the Royal Consecration, a Soma sacrifice that is mythically connected with the consecration of Varuṇa, or with Indra, that confers the divinity on him. Pollock writes that it is irrelevant that, technically, Rāma is not yet a consecrated king; it cannot be, if he is arguing for Rāma’s divinity on account of his kingship. In the end, Pollock only fastens his own findings on to the “traditional” narrative to project it as the “traditional” reading of the text.

"If fabrication — the falsification / misrepresentation of data / information — in formal academic exercises is academic dishonesty, Pollock is, it is clear, guilty of several."

And often, too.

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

"[ 4 ] In the words of Cyril of Alexandria who used the Greek term kath’ hypostasin (hypostasis) to refer to the oneness of divine and human natures, “We must follow these words and teachings, keeping in mind what having been made flesh means; and that it makes clear that the Logos from God became man. We do not say that the nature of the Word was altered when he became flesh. Neither do we say that the Word was changed into a complete man of soul and body. We say rather that the Word by having united to himself hypostatically flesh animated by a rational soul, inexplicably and incomprehensibly became man.” McEnerney (1986:39)"

................................................................................................

................................................

March 05, 2022 - March 05, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Chapter 3"

"Rāmāyaṇa Casts its Ancient Spell?"

................................................................................................

"On Sept 25, 1990, L K Advani started on a Rām-ratha-yātrā from Somnath to Ayodhya to call for the rebuilding of the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya. The ratha — which resembled that of Arjuna’s in the tele-serial Mahābhārata — was welcomed enthusiastically — with zealous cries of “Jai Śrī Rām!” Its route was strewn with flowers, women carried coconuts, incense sticks and sandalwood paste to offer ārati to the ratha which was then smeared with tilak and the dust off its wheels was taken religiously. It did much to stir national unity — also, it allegedly catalyzed the destruction of the Babri Masjid two years later.

Pollock makes the same mistake.

First and foremost, divinity of Avatāra was not a later invention but was already well established before Rāmāyaṇa, as evidenced by the two Avatāra-s meeting.

If Rāmāyaṇa hadn't been deeply rooted, invoking it in twelfth century would have no impact.

And Pollock is malintentioned in implying so.

" ... In his words,

"Pollock (1993:264)"

"Pollock’s views may be summarized thus:

"a. Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa allows for the “divinization” of Hindu political order, and the “demonization” of the Other. Accordingly, then, the Rāmāyaṇa has — for a thousand years — served as a code in which “proto-communist relations could be activated and theocratic legitimation could be rendered” (Pollock 1993:288).

"b. From the twelfth century onwards — i.e., simultaneous with the “appearance of the Others” — it came to be employed in equations of politics and power: Hindu kings could be portrayed as the protector/“divine-king” Rāma, and the “outsiders” were rākṣasa-s.

"c. For this reason, it continues to be deployed today for “dangerous” Hindu-Muslim politics."

Again, if someone calls you a cannibal, must you oblige? It can only work the other way unless people are stupid, like west manipulated by church with lies. That isn't reason enough for Pollock to lie about India, about horrendous holocaust suffered by Hindus over more than twelve centuries to the tune if a hundred million, and much, much more. If he has the opinion that Islamic invaders were good guys, he might try living in, say, Iraq or Syria.

................................................................................................

"3.1 Archeological Evidence (Rise of Rāma Temple Cult)"

"Pollock’s first evidence is that of archeology — the “rise of Rāma temples” after the twelfth century. Rāma-worship and “Rāma-cult” commences, says Pollock, somewhere in the twelfth century, “assumes a prominent place within the context of a political theology”, and attains a “centrality” by the fourteenth century. Its growth can, he claims, be traced in virtual synchrony with “a set of particular historical events”— i.e. the “appearance of the Others”.

"In actuality, there is little work that traces the “rise of Rāma cult” in India — and it is perhaps Hans Bakker’s work that we must resort to. Bakker’s argument is similar to that of Pollock’s — he postulates the emergence of Rāma worship “in the latest period of independent Hindu rule in north India” and before the “firm establishment of Muslim power” (Bakker 1986:66). According to him, worship of the other avatāra-s of Viṣnu were based on “regional, popular, and not specifically Vaiṣnava traditions”— the Rāma cult had to wait for “favorable historical circumstances”. He writes,

"“This seems to have occurred when Hindus were driven into a defensive position by Muslim power, but this factor would never have led to a cult of such dimensions, impact and importance, had not a wave of emotional devotion (bhakti) a particular kind completely transformed the outlook and character of Hindu religion, in particular of Vaiṣnavism”.

"Bakker (1986:66)"

"Pollock finishes what Bakker started. His “evidence” is twelfth-century inscriptional references to

"a. two temples dedicated to Rāma in the kingdom of the Kalacuris of Ratanpur (in the Chhattisgarh area of Madhya Pradesh),

"b. the Rāma complex at Ramtek, and

"c. the Rāmacandra shrine at Hampi in the kingdom of Vijayanagara

"(Pollock 1993:266-9)."

"Pollock talks about the construction or reinvigoration of “several major cultic centers” devoted to Rāma after the twelfth-thirteenth centuries, but he does not cite them. He is not sure himself what the situation in the Gāhaḍavāla kingdom of Uttar Pradesh was like — he refers to Bakker’s work on Ayodhya to point out that the “Gāhaḍavāla dynasty begins to develop Ayodhya as a major Vaiṣṇava center by way of a substantial temple building program” (Pollock 1993:266). He does not cite any inscriptional evidence but nevertheless states with confirmation that a Rāma temple was constructed at Svargadvara ghat, probably by Jayacandra."

All this, on presumption without proof that temples didn't exist before, that people had forgotten about Rāmāyana until reminded by building of temples and then suddenly became great devotees, and so on. Pollock is abusing India calling her people fools, based solely on history of antisemitism in West fostered by church for two millennia.

"Pollock’s substantiation for his grand claims of significant growth of building Rāma temples all over India from the Gupta period onward is decidedly thin. On the other hand, the available documentation shows that temples of Śiva and Viṣṇu were built more than other deities in the period under examination. We see that although the Rāmacandra temple was located in the nucleus of the royal complex at Vijayanagara, the official epigraphic records of the Vijayanagara kings mention often their rāṣṭra-devatā viz., Virūpākṣa. Anila Verghese notes, “Pampā Virūpākṣa has undoubtedly been the principal deity at the site from before the founding of the empire onwards, and he was adopted as the guardian deity of the Vijayanagara state” (Verghese 1995:132). Another scholar, G. Michell, writes that the nucleus of Vijayanagara’s early sacred center at Hampi consisted of Śaivite shrines (Michell 1995:31-32). A sample of epigraphical record of the time is given below:

"“... Oh wonder! Though (like Kṛṣṇa) he (King Īśvara) was the son of the glorious Devakī, though (like Viṣṇu) he had lotus eyes, though he acquired tribute (bali) by his valor which was able to subdue the three worlds, (just as Viṣṇu in his Vāmanāvatāra acquired the three worlds from Bali by his three steps), and though he bore (the auspicious marks of) the conch and the discus in his hand— he became still more famous by the name of Īśvara, as he obtained prosperity (bhūti), universal worship, and the daughter of a king, (just as the god Īśvara wears ashes (bhūti) is universally worshipped and is the husband of the daughter of the mountain).

"Hultzsch (1892:367)"

"Compare this with the landscape of sacred centers in late thirteenth and the early fourteenth centuries Andhra. Keilhorn notes,

"“From the above abstract it will appear that most of the donations recorded here were made in the favor of the god Viṣṇu, under the names of Viṣṇu-bhaṭṭāraka, Nārāyaṇa-bhaṭṭāraka, Vāmanasvāmideva and Chakravāmideva. The same divinity I understand to be denoted by the name Tribhuvanasvāmideva. But besides him, we find among the donees also Umāmaheśvara, clearly a form of the god Śiva, and Bhailasvāmideva, a name in a fragmentary inscription from Bhilda, mentioned by Dr. Hall in the Journ. Beng. As. Soc, vol XXXI, p.112, is distinctly given as a designation of Ravi, the Sun’.”

"Hultzsch (1892:168)"

"Both these records were inscribed at the height of Turuṣka penetration into the Deccan. Yet, we see no reference to Rāma or such “political imagination” in them. A cursory glance at the list of “royal cults” of the period (epigraphy and actual sites) shows, in fact, that a very striking variety of deities were worshipped in different regions2: Bṛhadīśvara and Gaṅgaikoṇḍacolapuram were the royal “cult-centers” of Rājarāja Coḷa and Rājendra Coḷa of Tamil Nadu; the coins and epigraphs of the Kadambas consistently refer to Śrīsaptakoṭīśvara as their deity; the Śilāhāra-s always invoked Mahālakṣmī in their inscriptions; the Cālukya-s and Vāghela-s of Gujarat considered Somanātha as their most important deity. In Rajasthan, the site of Ekaliṅga emerged as a major centre of royal cult in the kingdom of the Guhila-s of Mewar; in Orissa, the Bhañja-s worshipped Śiva and Stambheśvarī, and Jagannātha.

"Of course these are but a few examples. Yet, it shows that the formation of royal or regional cults cannot be pinned down to a particular time-period nor can it be categorized as “reactionary”. What Bakker and Pollock do is choose certain insignificant incidents and piece them together to form a convenient narrative. C. Talbot also notes, “Inscriptions from Andhra provide little support for Pollock’s thesis, as far as the Rāmāyaṇa itself is concerned, for there are few direct references to the epic story.” (Talbot 1995:696)

"In Chattopadhyaya’s words, “the evidence adduced by Bakker and Pollock does not appear extraordinarily significant and can be explained in ways other than what have been advocated by them” (Chattopadhyaya 1998:106)."

What Pollock is doing is deliberately lying about Hindus, just as Rome in its cloak as church did for two millennia against Jews.

................................................................................................

"3.2 Textual Evidence (Epigraphical)"

Author quotes Pollock. Basically Pollock argues lack of evidence pro-Rāma, pro-Rāmāyana in form of inscriptions. He obviously either thinks India is as easily swayed as West was by church, in which case he might try explaining why India wasn't as easy as Europe or Egypt or Persia for abrahmic creeds to wipe out all traces of prior cultures, despite centuries of horrendous travails imposed on Hindus by barbaric invaders; or he's trying to impose guilt of West for holocaust on Hindus by transference which is silly since Muslims weren't victims in Indian history at any time.

As for inscriptions, what do people expect in a culture that fits not have tombs and tombstones but cremates dead, ashes flown down preferably Gangaa? Besides, Rāma was longer ago than European history in its most forgotten, foggiest past - West belittling industry knowledge is mere stupidity of racism. After all, India knew about ocean between India and Asia vanishing, Himaalayan ranges rising out of ocean, and more, which proved correct after West called it myth, and which is not the earliest record of Indian treasure of knowledge either.

So evidence of Rāma, of Rāmāyana, are in the fact that indua cherished it for more millennia than West can imagine.

Author discusses various inscriptions mentioned by Pollock and co.

"So the Dabhoi inscription refers to Gūrjara kingdom ruled over by Lavaṇaprasāda as “greater than Rāma-rājya” (verse 12). It also mentions the defeat of the turuṣka king by Lavaṇaprasāda who, the inscription asserts, could not be a mere mortal (verse 17). However, the “meaning-conjuncture” — an expression which Pollock uses to point to the identity of the king as victor over the turuṣka-s with Rāma, the slayer of Rāvaṇa — does not take place in this record.

"Interestingly, the record refers to Arṇorāja, founder of the Vāghela line, as imitating the feats of Kṛṣṇa, and his adversary Raṇasiṁha (not a turuṣka), slain on battlefield, is called Rāvaṇa (verse 10). Lavaṇaprasāda, victor over the turuṣka king, is mentioned to be more famous than Yudhiṣṭhira (verse 19). His son Vīradhavala, was “the image of Daśaratha and Kākutstha” (verse 25). We see that the composer of the record drew upon a repertoire of available motifs — and the “political mytheme” of Rāma v/s Rāvaṇa was not one of them.

"How this substantiates Pollock’s claim, only Pollock can explain."

Author discusses Hansi inscriptions, also mentioned by Pollock.

"We see that this praśasti draws an identification of the Cāhamāna king Pṛthvīrāja with Rāma, and of Kilhaṇa, Pṛthvīrāja’s maternal uncle, with Hanumān. However, if the record is located within the context of other contemporary inscriptions, it yields a different picture: Usually, in most Indian texts, heroes are identified with Viṣṇu, or Mahāvarāha (who lifts the earth submerged in the ocean of turuṣka rule), or as Agastya (who is the swallower of the ocean) (Chattopadyaya 1998:110). In the medieval epigraphs, therefore, “whether in the context of Yavana raids or outside them, the king— as a hero and a ruler— has many identities: Indra, Viṣṇu, Trivikrama, Mahāvarāha, Śiva, Pṛthu, Agastya, Kāma, Revanta, Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, Rāma, and so on” (Chattopadyaya 1998:110)."

She mentions and describes many more inscriptions.

"The few samples suffice to show that Pollock has arbitrarily isolated Rāma from the variegated world of a host of divinities and legendary kings, just to suit his theory/purpose and has wilfully and skillfully avoided any reference to others."

................................................................................................

"3.3 Textual Evidence (Literary)"

"Pollock’s last category of evidence is what he calls “historiographical” or literary evidence (Pollock 1993:273). Pollock takes just two literary examples to strengthen his argument:

"a. Hemacandra’s Dvyāśrayakāvya and

"b. Jayāṅka’s Pṛthvīrāja-vijaya."

"Admittedly, the two texts consider their respective kings, Jayasiṁha Siddharāja and Pṛthvīrāja III Cāhamāna as incarnations of Rāma, and the latter text, in particular, dwells at length on the depredations by the turuṣka-s in the region of Ajayameru, Rajasthan. Yet, to say that this lends incontestable support to Pollock’s conjecture of “mythopolitical equivalence” is a stretch of imagination. In the period under examination, there were innumerous forms of comparisons, and no one form dominated the other — for example, kāvya-s like Gaṅgādevī’s Madhurā-vijaya, Nayacandra’s Hammīra Mahākāvya, etc are literary works that talk of turuṣka invasions without reference to Rāma, and texts like Sandhyākaranandin’s Rāma-carita use the “Rāmāyaṇa-mytheme” in the context of a local warfare that is not turuṣka."

Author goes on to discuss the specific examples.

"Let us look at Gaṅgādevi’s Madhurā-vijaya to understand how other images (other than the “Rāmāyaṇa imaginary”) were used to depict the Muslims. Madhurā-vijaya is a mahā-kāvya written in the second half of the fourteenth century in celebration of Gaṅgādevī’s husband’s victory over the turuṣka-s of Madurai. Its eighth sarga reads thus:

"...............................................

"vyāghra-purīti sā yathārtham || 1 ||

"adhiraṅgam avāpta-yoganidraṁ

"harim udvejayatīti jāta-bhītiḥ |

"patitaṁ muhur iṣṭakā-nikāyaṁ

"phaṇa-cakreṇa nivārayaty ahīndraḥ || 2 ||

"….nughūrṇad ūrṇanābhaṁ

"vana-vetaṇḍa-vimardinīm avasthām |

"viratāny aparicchada-prapañco bhajate

"hanta ! gaja-pramāthi-nāthaḥ || 3 ||

"ghuṇa-jagdha-kavāṭa-sampuṭāni

"sphuṭa-dūrvāṅkura-sandhi-maṇḍapāni |

"ślatha-garbha-gṛhāṇi vīkṣya dūye

"bhṛśam anyāny api devatā-kulāni || 4 ||

"mukharāṇi purā mṛdaṅga-ghoṣair abhito

"deva-kulāni yāny abhūvan |

"tumulāni bhavanti pheravāṇāṁ

"ninadais tāni bhayaṅkarair idānīm || 5 ||

"satatādhvara-dhūma-saurabhaiḥ

"prāṅ-nigamodghoṣaṇavadbhir agrahāraiḥ |

"adhunājani visra-māṁsa-gandhair

"adhika-kṣība-tuluṣka-siṁha-nādaiḥ || 6 ||"

"The verses have been translated as,

"“O King! That city, which was called “Madhurāpurī” for its sweet beauty, has now become the city of wild animals, making true its older name “Vyāghra-purī”, the city of tigers, for humans dwell there no longer”. (1)

"“The famed temple of Śrī Raṅgapaṭṭaṇa has fallen to decay, and its structure being reduced to rubble. So much that Viṣṇu who famously slept there in his deep yoga-nidrā, has now literal protection only of the hood of Ādiśeṣa who has to be ever cautious from the falling bricks of the debris”. (2)

"“How do I describe the condition of the abode of the slayer of Gajāsura! In the bygone days, after slaying Gajāsura, Lord Śiva had taken its skin for his garment. And now being stripped he has gone back to being digambara. Wild elephants have now made the Śiva-liṅga their plaything, and all but spider-webs are the decorations of his abode.” (3)

"“[when such is the state of those famous temples] how would other devasthāna-s be any better! Moths have eaten away the once-beautiful wooden structures, the maṇḍapa-s have developed cracks in which now grass grows, and garbha-gṛha-s of many others are dilapidated and crumbling. My Lord, my heart is crying as I describe to you the situation of our beloved devatā-kula.” (4)

"“Those deva-mandira-s which used to resound with the joyous and pious beats of mṛdaṅga, today only the echo of fearful howls of jackals can be heard there.” (5)

"That Gaṅgā of South, mighty Kāverī, which used to earlier flow in proper channels curbed with dams created by our noble rulers of past – she now flows like a vagabond without discipline; like her new lords, these turuṣka-s, her dams being breached beyond repair. (6)…

"” Madhurā-vijaya (8.1-6) [Trans. S.K Tiwari]"

"So it continues, and further the situation is shown to escalate to cataclysmic proportions, and Gaṅgādevī’s husband takes the form of Mahā-varāha to restore peace.

"Nowhere, we can see, are motifs from the Rāmāyaṇa used in the descriptions here.

"On the other hand, let us take the example of Sandhyākaranandin’s Rāma-carita – this is a śleṣa kāvya (paronomastic) that produces two levels of meanings at the same time: on one level, the kāvya narrates Sītā’s deliverance after the slaying of Rāvaṇa by Rāma. On the second level, it narrates the account of the Pāla ruler (Sandhyākara’s patron), Rāmapāla, and his slaying of Bhīma, the Kaivarta king, (who usurped the territory of Varendrī for a short time). We can see an application of Pollock’s “Rāmāyaṇa mytheme”, if that, in a context that does not involve Muslims.

"Moreover, Pṛthvīrāja-vijaya’s “demonization” of the Ghurids cannot be interpreted as a reflection of a true Hindu “abhorrence” of Muslims. Jayāṅka was simply engaging in a mode of dehumanizing the Ghaznavid and Ghurid rivals of the Cāhamānas that was frequently employed to designate foes in literature — Muslim or otherwise."

Why does Pollock or anyone think there was a demonization needed for likes of ghori and gaznavi? Their own doing were enough to brand them as demoniacs.

" ... Pollock’s method of isolating references relating to Rāma from their larger contexts has the effect of exaggerating their importance. One must not settle for such neat narratives, and must, instead, work towards a more sophisticated theorizing."

................................................................................................

................................................

March 05, 2022 - March 05, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

"Conclusion"

................................................................................................

"Kāvye rasayitā sarvo na boddhā na niyogabhāk

"Bhaṭṭa Nāyaka"

"“Arms and the man I sing”— so run the opening lines of Virgil’s Aeneid. These few words reflect, wrote Paul Cantor, the whole essence of (ancient) epic poetry: warfare and politics. In his words,

"“...Homer and Virgil… they do single out the warrior’s life as the central theme of epic poetry. Even Shakespeare, with his wider range as a poet, focuses his serious plays, his histories and tragedies, on public figures and the central political issue of war and peace… The traditional concept of epic and tragedy as the supreme genres and the pinnacle of literary achievement effectively placed political life at the center of poetic concern.”

"(Cantor 2007:375)"

"Perhaps it is true of Western Epics. Perhaps it is not. What is certain is that it does not reflect the tenor of Sanskrit kāvya-s — and certainly not of the Rāmāyaṇa. For Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is, first & foremost, a kāvya1 — and kāvya — like the other arts — is/was considered a magnificent form of yoga in India.

"In his essay, The Theory of Art in Asia, Coomaraswamy demonstrated the formal steps in the yoga of “making of an artifact”:

"“...[the artist], having by various means proper to the practice of Yoga eliminated the distracting influences of fugitive emotions and creature images, self-willing and self-thinking, proceeds to visualize the form... The mind “produces” or “draws” (ākarṣati) this form to itself, as though from a great distance. Ultimately, that is, from Heaven, where the types of art exist in formal operation; immediately, from the “immanent space in the heart” (antar-hṛdaya-ākāśa), the common focus (saṁstāva, “concord”) of seer and seen, at which place the only possible experience of reality takes place. The true-knowledge-purity-aspect (jñāna-sattvarūpa) thus conceived and inwardly known (antar-jñeya) reveals itself against the ideal space (ākāṡa) like a reflection (pratibimbavat) or as if seen in a dream (svapnavat). The imager must realize a complete self-identification with it (ātmānam… dhyāyāt, bhāvayet), whatever its peculiarities, even in the case of the opposite sex or when the divinity is provided with terrible supernatural characteristics; the form thus known in an act of non-differentiation, being held in view as long as may be necessary (evam rūpam yāvad icchati tāvad bhāvayet), is the model from which he proceeds to execution in stone, pigment, or other material.”

"(Coomaraswamy 1934:5)"

"In an uncannily similar terminology, we are told in the first kāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa (Rāmāyaṇa 1.3.2-8):

"“Vālmīki, although he was already familiar with the story of Rāma, before composing his own Rāmāyaṇa sought to realize it more profoundly, and seating himself with his face towards the East and sipping water according to rule (i. e. ceremonial purification), he set himself to yoga-contemplation of his theme. By virtue of his yoga-power he clearly saw before him Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā, and Daśaratha, together with his wives, in his kingdom laughing, talking, acting and moving as if in real life ... by yoga-power that righteous one beheld all that had come to pass, and all that was to come to pass in the future, like a nelli fruit on the palm of his hand. And having truly seen all by virtue of his concentration, the generous sage began the setting forth of the history of Rāma”.

"(Coomarswamy 1918:23)"

"Indian theory of art is very clear that instruction is not the primary purpose of art. Abhinavagupta shows in the clearest terms that vyutpatti (didactic education) is — not consciously aimed at, but always is — a by-product of rasānubhava of a kāvya:

"na hi teṣāṁ vākyānām agniṣṭomādi-vākyavat satyārtha-pratipādana-dvāreṇa pravartakatvāya prāmāṇyam anviṣyate, prītimātra-paryavasāyitvāt /

"prītereva cālaukika-camatkāra-rūpāyā vyutpatty-aṅgatvāt

"(Locana, on Dhvanyāloka 3.33)"

"“... from the sentences of poetry we do not seek for the performance of certain acts on the basis of the tranmission by the sentence of a meaning that is true, as we do from such Vedic setences as “agniṣṭomam juhuyāt” (one must offer a fire sacrifice). This is because the end of poetry is pleasure, for it only by pleasure, in the form of an otherworldly delight, that it can serve to instruct us.”

"[Trans. Ingalls et al]"

"So, the “purpose” of a kavi is never self-expression/political-agenda/social-propaganda. It is unfortunate and ironical in equal measure that the “application” of Pollock’s “inclusive” and “pluralistic” philological tool leads him, not to three “radically different dimensions of truth(s)”, but to a singular truth on all three modes of philology: that the Rāmāyaṇa is a work that deals with power-dynamics.

Yet, it must be admitted that ‘interpretation’ is a landscape peppered with difficulties — it is the famous “hermeneutic circle” that perplexed Dilthey, et al. Perhaps it must also be admitted that it is impossible to ascribe a single meaning to a text. But in Matthew Kapstein’s words,

"“...if a limitless horizon of possible understandings begins to open before us, we balk nevertheless at the thought that any understanding is just as good as any other. Even if guided by a Kabbalistic conception of the plenitude revealed in each letter of scripture, we retreat before the prospect that all interpretive possibilities must be treated as equal. However, we find ourselves at a loss to specify sure principles that would permit us to delineate between an unlimited range of acceptable or fruitful understandings and an unending field of fantasies that we wish to rule out of court.” (cited in Ganeri 2017:15)

"Nevertheless, Kapstein offers a response to this “conundrum”: he calls the Indologists to play this game (of interpretation) by employing traditional Indian hermeneutics — “whether embodied in written commentaries or in the living expertise of traditionally educated scholars” — as a compass to “forge pathways through a conceptual topography” (Ganeri 2017:16). Going the Kapstein way, then, and locating the Rāmāyaṇa within the aims of Indian tradition, we can see that the text is not simply a social or political enterprise, but a magnificent work that is aligned to the ultimate purpose of life. Pollock, on the other hand, is clear:

"“These problems can be formulated through a large comparative generalization. If Homer, for example, addresses, a transcendent problem, showing us what makes life finally impossible— in the words of one writer, “the universality of human doom”— Vālmīki poses the more difficult question: What is it that makes life possible? This is more difficult because it is a social, not a cosmic question.”

"Pollock (2007a:4) [italics ours]"

"To Pollock, the question of dharma is social and political; to Vālmīki, it is universal and trans-mundane. From this position, both stand opposite to each other locked, as it were, in a zero-sum struggle for meaning — and the twain may never meet."

................................................................................................

"Footnotes"

"[ 1 ] In no uncertain terms, the Rāmāyaṇa characterizes itself as a kāvya. See Kane (1966), Hiltebeitel (2005), Pathak (2007). In his preface to “The Sanskrit Epics”, J. L. Brockington raises a question: “Is it... worth asking from the start whether the designation of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa as “epics” affects our understanding of them, generating expectations derived from ideas about the Iliad and Odyssey”."

................................................................................................

................................................

March 05, 2022 - March 05, 2022.

................................................

................................................................................................

................................................

March 03, 2022 - March 05, 2022.

Purchased December 25, 2021.

Kindle Edition

Published May 29th 2018

by INFINITY FOUNDATION INDIA

1st edition (29 May 2018)

ASIN:- B07DDM5H3L

................................................

................................................................................................

"Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies - 3"

"RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA"

"Disentangling the Discourses

"By Manjushree Hegde"

................................................

February 04, 2022 - February 19, 2022 -

March 03, 2022 - March 05, 2022.

Purchased December 25, 2021.

Kindle Edition

Published May 29th 2018

by INFINITY FOUNDATION INDIA

1st edition (29 May 2018)

ASIN:- B07DDM5H3L

................................................

Format: Kindle Edition

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07DDM5H3L

Language ‏ : ‎ English

Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies - 3 RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA

Disentangling the Discourses

By Manjushree Hegde

General Editor Dr. K.S. Kannan

Infinity Foundation India 2018

................................................................................................

Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies - 3 RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA :

Disentangling the Discourses

Author: Manjushree Hegde

Editor: Dr. K.S. Kannan,

Former Director,

Karnataka Samskrit University,

Bangalore.

email: ks.kannan.2000@gmail.com

Pages: 148

Year of Publication: 2018

ISBN: 978-81-934486-5-6

Price in India: 175/-

7 MGR Road,

Kalakshetra Colony,

Besant Nagar, Chennai - 600 090

email: swadeshindology@gmail.com

website: www.swadeshiindology.com

Typeset and Digital Edition created by: Sriranga Digital Software Technologies Private Limited, Srirangapatna 571 438.

Tel: (08236)-292432. www.srirangadigital.com

Printing: Anupam Art Printers

Plot number 3, Sector 7, IMT

Manesar, Gurugram

www.anupamartprinters.in

................................................................................................

RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA:

Disentangling the Discourses

(Reclaiming Sanskrit Series Book 3)

Kindle Edition

by Manjushree Hegde (Author)

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B07DDM5H3L

Reclaiming Sanskrit Studies - 3

RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA :

Disentangling the Discourses

Author: Manjushree Hegde

Editor: Dr. K.S. Kannan,

Former Director,

Karnataka Samskrit University,

Bangalore.

email: ks.kannan.2000@gmail.com

Pages: 148

Year of Publication: 2018

ISBN: 978-81-934486-5-6

Infinity Foundation India

7 MGR Road, Kalakshetra Colony,

Besant Nagar, Chennai - 600 090

email: swadeshindology@gmail.com

website: www.swadeshiindology.com Typeset and Digital Edition created by:

Sriranga Digital Software Technologies Private Limited, Srirangapatna 571 438.

Tel: (08236)-292432. www.srirangadigital.com

Printing: Anupam Art Printers

Plot number 3, Sector 7,

IMT Manesar, Gurugram

www.anupamartprinters.in

................................................................................................

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4589738823

................................................................................................

Reviews - Books I Read - DRJG

Saturday, March 5, 2022

RECLAIMING RĀMĀYAṆA: Disentangling the Discourses (Reclaiming Sanskrit Series Book 3), by Manjushree Hegde.

Light Explodes Across Heavens

Blog Archive

Serene, Reflecting

Contributors

Followers

My Shelfari Bookshelf