Font size: 
As bulldozers roll over ... "Stop!" you say at this point. "Let not your imagination run this wild. No civilized government, Jordanian or Israeli, would do such a thing as to destroy a unique natural formation associated with the mythologies of major world religions." And you are right too. No civilized government would do it.
Welcome to India, where the government is more "secular" than civilized. But it is not just the government that ought to be blamed.
Today people are furious that the Archeological Survey of India has claimed there is no historical basis for the characters of the Ramayana, the important Hindu epic. People want to pass responsibility for this claim and heads are likely to roll in the Cabinet and in the ranks of bureaucrats. But who are the actual culprits?
When some websites started claiming that NASA had discovered the bridge built by Sri Rama some 1,750,000 years ago -- and thus fraudulently sought certification from NASA for the historicity of the Ramayana -- the crime, or rather the sin, started. When some Hindu nationalist leaders claimed in front of the media that through radiocarbon dating NASA had ascertained that the bridge was millions of years old and that archaeologists had certified to the man-made nature of the bridge, they were definitely not helping the Hindu cause.
Their claims undermined a glorious Hindu tradition, which for millennia has held that mythologies are internalized realities and not external historical events. It even allows that core historical events can be mythologized when they fall in harmony with what mythologist Joseph Campbell calls the "mono myth," or the cycle of the mythological hero.
Let me explain. The mythological event of Siva destroying three demonic flying space-based townships with a single arrow comes down from the Vedic period to this day in variant mythological forms. Today we know this as probably the mythological recording of an actual astronomical event -- perhaps even an unusual event.
But an ancient Tamil mystic who lived no less than 1,500 years ago, Thiru Moolar, says that "one who understands the mythology of Siva destroying the three celestial townships as a literal truth is a fool." He further states that the three townships burnt by Siva are inside you -- your inner pollutants, namely ego, egoistic action that binds and the web of illusions in which you are caught. None attacked him for ridiculing the fundamentalist reading of mythology.
Cut to 2007. Some Eric von Daniken-type Western Vaishnavite devotees who sought NASA certification for the fundamentalist understanding of Hindu epics and mythologies, and a group of Hindu nationalists who happily swallowed this bamboozlement, repeating it and fitting themselves with glee into the stereotype that their ideological opponents offered them -- they all, albeit unwittingly, paved the way for the "insult" that Sri Rama and the Hindus face today. But that is only part of the story.
On the other side there is the sacred geography, reinforced by thousands of years of telling and retelling of the mythological narratives, that unites India as a nation more organically and spiritually than the railway lines and telegraph wires. Mahatma Gandhi spoke of it in his Hind Swaraj. In fact explicitly mentioning the Sethu, Mahatma says:
"What do you think could have been the intention of those farseeing ancestors of ours who established Setubandha (Rameshwar) in the South, Jagannath in the East and Hardwar in the North as places of pilgrimage? You will admit they were no fools. They knew that worship of God could have been performed just as well at home. They taught us that those whose hearts were aglow with righteousness had the Ganges in their own homes. But they saw that India was one undivided land so made by nature." (Hind Swaraj, Chapter 9)
Even Nehru, who was high on the Marxist opiate for the intellectually romantic, recognized this as the silk thread that binds the nation. The balkanization of India, for which many forces work overtime, could not take place. This is not because of the non-existent wisdom of our politicians, who have a genius for dividing people for votes, but despite them. It is because of the sacred geography of the nation, sanctified by the feet of billions of Indians over countless generations who undertook pilgrimages to these places, where they felt the presence of Rama, Krishna Balarama and other Divines.
Even if the Rama Sethu bridge is natural -- as it most probably is -- it is definitely sacred and is part of the sacred memory of generations of Indians. Only an incredible combination of cultural illiteracy combined with insensitivity could be thick-skinned enough to destroy such a natural formation, hallowed by thousands of years of tradition, which acted as a niche for marine biodiversity for many thousands of years long before the human veneration of the structure began.
And the government was arrogant enough to take potshots at the Ramayan. Not just arrogant but ignorantly arrogant. It should be remembered that archeology, and even multi-disciplinary studies taken up by historians, have failed to vindicate the historicity of such personalities as Jesus or events like the Exodus, which form the core of Biblical narratives.
Yet if one takes a look at the history textbooks issued by the secular government of India we find that these Biblical personalities and events are treated as proven figures and events of history and not mythological in nature. Yet the same textbooks treat the Ramayan as more a mythological fiction than as an epic with a historical core.
No wonder the non-archeologist bureaucratic heads of the Archeological Survey of India, to please the ruling Reich, acted a bit over enthusiastically. Yet there is one person who can really throw light on this unnecessary controversy churned up by non-professionals. This person, whom even the leftwing Romila Thapar concedes is "the finest archeologist in India," is the one who conducted actual archeological studies in areas associated with the Ramayana.
He is Dr. B. B. Lal, the former director of the Archeological Survey of India and director of the project for the archeological study of sites related to the Ramayana. As early as 1988 the Indian Council of Historical Research organized an international seminar in New Delhi at which he presented a 60-page paper entitled "Historicity of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana: What has archaeology to say in the matter?" Finding its contents counter to their views, the authorities of the ICHR withheld publication of the paper. Later he published the findings pertaining to the Ramayan under the title "Archaeology of the Ramayana Sites Project: Its Genesis and a Summary of the Results" in the year 1990. Let me quote from this paper of B.B.Lal:
"To sum up, the archaeological evidence from the five sites excavated so far does indicate that the Ramayana is not a figment of somebody's imagination, but may have had a kernel of truth at its base."
Neither the pseudo-secularists nor those Hindus who childishly claim a 1,750,000 timeline and NASA certification for Rama's existence do good for the cause of free thinking. And definitely the Union Shipping Minister who insists on destroying the Rama Sethu formation has a level of intelligence and wavelength of action matching the Taliban. His party government has the notoriety of issuing social science textbooks in 1996, reprinted in 2001, in which Piltdown man -- exposed as a hoax in 1953 -- was listed as a humanoid stage in evolution and issuing textbooks praising Mussolini prepared by a Catholic nun in 2006. Is there any wonder the minister's behavioral pattern reflects the intelligence and mindset of the Taliban?
In such an environment the onus of saving this structure -- natural most probably and sacred definitely -- is now on the Hindu nationalist movement, which should tread its path carefully without falling into the pitfalls of fundamentalist fantasies. The leaders of the Hindu nationalist movement will do well to read Dr. B. B. Lal's paper on the archeology of Ramayana sites (Manthan, October 1990) which shall provide them the scientific spirit of the middle path they need to take.
--
(S. Aravindan Neelakandan is a social scientist working with an ecological NGO called Vivekananda Kendra -- Natural Resources Development Project in Nagercoil, India. He is also a freelance writer and author of the Tamil-language "God and 40 Hz.")
