Ram wasn’t always top god in India. Political chaos, conflict with Turks elevated him

For centuries, Ram was considered a semi-divine hero and ideal king, not a supreme god. It’s only from the 1200s that major Ram temples were built.

Ramayana Panels at Hampi's Hazara Rama Temple (L) and an 18th -century painting depicting Ram and Lakshman wearing crowns | Graphics: Manisha Yadav | ThePrint

Today, it’s difficult to imagine a time when Ram was not one of Hinduism’s most important gods, or the deity most frequently evoked by politicians. But 1,000 years ago, South Asian rulers were far more interested in Shiva and Vishnu as paramount deities. The rise of Ram took centuries: taking him from Sanskrit literature, to temple reliefs, to the divine analogue of living kings, enshrined as one of the great gods of Vijayanagara, one of the largest cities on earth at one point.

 

Ram the hero

The Ram legend is one of India’s oldest, but it’s not clear when it moved from a bardic tale into the Sanskrit mainstream—a process that brought it to courts across South Asia and beyond.

In her paper ‘Historical Evolution of the Ram Legend’, historian Suvira Jaiswal pointed out that the Sanskrit version of the Ram legend, which decisively identified him as an avatar of Vishnu, emerged relatively late—perhaps as late as the 2^nd century CE. Around this time, Vishnu became a major royal deity and also assimilated Krishna, the ancient hero of the Mathura region. Before this point, as suggested by inscriptions and coinage, Vasudeva Krishna was a popular, relatively independent god, and the evidence for Ram worship is hazy.

The Gupta dynasty, which dominated the Gangetic Plain from the 4^th–6^th centuries, made little mention of Ram in their inscriptions and coinage, though they closely identified themselves with Vishnu. In ‘Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India’, Sanskritist Sheldon Pollock points out that it was in literature that the Ram legend really took off in the first millennium CE, inspiring the poet Kalidasa, the Vakataka king Pravarasena, and many others. Soon after, new kingdoms in the Deccan occasionally used Ram in their self-presentations, as pointed out by art historian Parul Pandya Dhar in her chapter, ‘The Rāmāyaṇa Retold by Sculptors and Scribes in pre-Vijayanagara Karnataka’. But up to the 8^th century, these were mostly passing references in inscriptions, or minor reliefs in temples. Ram appeared alongside other heroes and minor divinities, like Yudhisthira and Brihaspati.

Ram became a larger part of the iconographic programme in the 8^th century, when the Chalukya, Pallava, and Rashtrakuta dynasties struggled for primacy in the Deccan. As Dhar shows, in the Virupaksha and Papanatha temples at Pattadakal, large sculptures of Ramayana legends cast the king as Ram and his enemies as Ravana—but these appeared in temples primarily dedicated to Shiva. Further south, notes Pollock, 10^th-century Chola kings, attempting to conquer the island of Lanka, occasionally compared themselves or their vassals to Ram. Bronze sculptures of Ram were present in some Chola temples, but as archaeometallurgist Sharada Srinivasan writes in her chapter, ‘Ramayana Bronzes and Sculptures from the Chola to Vijayanagara Times’, their dimensions suggest Ram was considered a divine hero rather than a paramount god. So, what changed?

Contact with the ‘Other’?

From the 10^th century, as we saw in an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, Central Asia and Northern India re-entered each other’s geopolitical orbits for the first time since the Hunnic wars, which ended in the 7^th century CE. Turkic peoples began to move—aggressively—into both Iran and Punjab.

As before, the Central Asians brought with them confident, assertive new political cultures. The last major movement of Central Asians into the subcontinent had lasted for nearly 700 years—from the first century BCE to the 7th century CE—and for the beginning of this period they were condemned by the Brahminical writers of the Puranas, even as they were enthusiastically embraced by Buddhism. In the 10^th century, though, South Asia’s political culture had become substantially Puranic, and was far less willing to accommodate Central Asian ways of kingship. And Central Asian kings, now seeking legitimacy in the wider Islamic world, were also intransigent.

Though violence was not new to Northern India, such a direct confrontation of Central Asian and Northern Indian political systems certainly was. Two centuries of raids and battles, from the 10^th to the 12^th centuries, transformed how both sides presented themselves in their court literature. Central Asian kings claimed to be agents of jihad, North Indian kings claimed to be protectors of Brahmins and temples against foreign barbarians. For North Indians at this time, as Pollock points out, the Ramayana provided an ideal political canvas and mytho-historical frame.

Unlike the Mahabharata, the Ramayana supports divine kingship and is not morally ambiguous: its central struggle is quite literally between a god-king and demon-king. As such, many kings in Northwest India, including the Vaghelas, Chahamanas (Chauhans), and Chaulukyas (Solankis) claimed a direct equivalence with Ram and compared their Turk rivals to demons. The Gahadavala kings, who ruled Varanasi, built a temple to Ram in the 12^th century.

In practice, of course, Hindu rulers still made land-grants to Muslims, and Muslim rulers claimed titles such as “Srimad”. The archaeological and literary picture indicates that the establishment of Sultanates in North India, while certainly a departure, was not a devastating or jarring “Dark Age” as right-wing influencers claim. Medieval peoples could certainly be xenophobic and fanatical, but we should take their rhetoric with a pinch of salt—and verify it with other evidence.

All this aside, the contact with Turkic polities certainly invigorated how Indian kings saw Ram, and he finally came into his own as a major political figure, the king’s divine analogue. Across India from the 12^th century, both Vaishnavite and Shaivite kings compared themselves to him, and their rivals—irrespective of religion—to Ravana.

 

The king as Ram

The most ambitious attempt to link kings to Ram unfolded in Vijayanagara (present-day Hampi), from the 14^th–17^th centuries. At the very heart of Vijayanagara’s Royal Centre—an expansive zone of palaces, markets, and temples—was the Ramachandra Temple, known today as the Hazara Rama. In The Ramachandra Temple at Vijayanagara, archaeologist John M. Fritz writes that the shrine was the focus of the city, positioned at the nexus of its major roads. Walking around the Royal Centre inevitably meant circumambulating the temple. It linked the royal palaces to the more public spaces, and Ram’s idol may have moved in procession along the same routes used by the king.

Archaeologist Anila Verghese, in her paper ‘Deities, Cults and Kings at Vijayanagara’, points out there’s little evidence for Ram worship in the area before the city was founded in the 14^th century. But during the city’s 15th-century heyday, its rulers systematically linked the site with Kishkinda, the legendary kingdom of the Vanara monkey-men believed to have aided Ram. They did so by identifying hills there with the sites of Ramayana events, and building temples there—positioned such that they would be visible from the Ramachandra temple, where many state rituals were performed.

The shrine attracted endowments from Vijayanagara vassals, who, by publicly associating themselves with the god, also signalled their allegiance to the king. The 16^th-century emperor Krishna Raya, the most powerful of Vijayanagara rulers, donated six villages to Ramachandra for 44 religious services. Krishna Raya’s primary rivals at the time were not the Deccan Sultans, but the Gajapatis of Odisha. Ramachandra, we must assume, was intended to support Krishna Raya’s wars against all his enemies, not just a single religious group. Vijayanagara was certainly interested in conquering other Hindus—even to the point of oppression.

There’s much more that should be said about the historical evolution of Ram, his devotees of many faiths, his appropriators from many polities, ancient and modern. But let’s leave his story here for now.

Author’s note: In many of the regions and periods discussed, Ram was historically referred to as Rama. It has been changed to Ram here for the reader’s convenience.

Anirudh Kanisetti is a public historian. He is the author of Lords of the Deccan, a new history of medieval South India, and hosts the Echoes of India and Yuddha podcasts. He tweets @AKanisetti. Views are personal.

This article is a part of the ‘Thinking Medieval‘ series that takes a deep dive into India’s medieval culture, politics, and history.

(Edited by Asavari Singh)