The importance of the hero-god Rama in the politics of independent India cannot be overstated—especially in January 2024, as a state-sponsored Ram Mandir is set to be inaugurated in Ayodhya, Uttar Pradesh. Contemporary politics may be beyond the scope of a history column, but Rama’s historical evolution is not.
Over the centuries, across an enormous swathe of Asia, litterateurs, artists, and politicians have found the story of the hero-god, with its emotional stakes and grand ideas, infinitely adaptable and useful. Sanskrit and Tamil, Khmer and Javanese, Buddhist and Muslim: many voices have told Rama’s story, for many goals. Here are some of them.
Rama the God, Ramapala the King
In an earlier edition of Thinking Medieval, we explored a remarkable uprising in 12th century CE Bengal: the Kaivarta rebellion. It was primarily a backlash of the landed aristocracy against centralising efforts by the Pala state—a backlash that eventually spread to the agrarian poor. It was crushed by a coalition of lords supporting king Ramapala, a member of the ruling dynasty.
Unlike other agrarian uprisings, the Kaivarta rebellion was recorded by a court poet, because it could be used to eulogise Ramapala. This poet’s name was Sandhyakaranandin, and he described himself as “the Valmiki of the Kali Age” (kali kāla Vālmīki). The title was not coincidental: his sole surviving work, the Ramacharitam, is both an epic tale of Ramapala and, in parts, a deliberate parallel between the king and the god Rama. This is achieved through complex, often puzzling Sanskrit double entendres. These were studied by historian Kumkum Roy in her chapter, “The Artful Biographer: Sandhyakaranandin’s Ramacharitam”.
Here’s Sandhyakaranandin at work, in an example provided by Professor Roy. Unlike Rama, Ramapala was not his father’s eldest son. And far from the fraternal amity of the Ramayana, Ramapala had actually been imprisoned by his elder brother before seizing the throne himself. Nevertheless, the poet equates the two by using the Sanskrit term jyeṣṭha, meaning both “eldest” (in the case of Rama) and “best” (in the case of Ramapala). In another obvious parallel, Ramapala’s feudatories are compared to Hanuman and other vanara monkey-men. Other comparisons are not so obvious: Ramapala’s capital city is praised as the equal of Lanka; the Pala home territory, Varendri, is compared to Sita. And the Ramacharitam, rather than compare Ramapala’s rival Bhima Kaivarta to Ravana, actually praises him for his generosity and virtue.
What are we to make of all this? Professor Roy suggests that Sandhyakaranandin was rather craftily hedging his bets, using Rama—with the god’s felicitous similarity to Ramapala’s name. The Kaivarta rebellion was over, but the Pala kingdom was still unstable in the 12th century, on the verge of collapse. Hence the comparison of the land of Varendri—rather than a specific queen—to Sita, for the ruler of the land might change, in which case the poet could simply reuse the verses in another composition. Clearly, then, Sandhyakaranandin’s approach to the Rama legend was not one of devotee to his supreme god. The Rama legend, instead, offered a canvas, a palette of ideas; using them with skill, the poet could find patronage and success in an unstable political environment.
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Rama and the Cholas
Sandhyakaranandin was indicative of a broader change in medieval India. From the 10th to the 12th centuries CE, rulers and court poets perfected the craft of appropriating myths for their own circumstances. Such appropriations are often thought of as resulting purely from devotion, or from cynical politics. The reality is somewhere in between. Medieval kings and poets, like Sandhyakaranandin, certainly understood the political value of rewriting myth. At the same time, what we call “myth” was, to them, a distant, semi-real history of earlier Ages, which they saw being re-enacted by themselves in the Kali Age.
For example, the 11th century Eastern Chalukya king Rajaraja Narendra (r. 1019–61) was caught in the brutal inter-dynastic strife of the Chola-Chalukya Wars, many of whose protagonists claimed descent from the sun and moon; Rajaraja’s personal circumstances certainly inspired his need for a political and literary text. When commissioning a Telugu retelling of the Mahabharata, he is recorded to have said: “My lineage begins with the moon, and then proceeds through Puru, Bharata, Kuru, and King Pandu. The stories of Pandu’s famous sons [the Pandavas], virtuous and beyond blame, are ever close to my heart… My mind inclines day and night to those stories.” (Translation by Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman in Classical Telugu Poetry: An Anthology.)
Rajaraja’s brother-in-law, the Chola emperor Virarajendra (r. 1063–69), was also aware of the political potential of myth. By the time he came to the throne, the empire was caught in ever-escalating warfare with its neighbours, and a public argument had to be made to support the emperor’s wars. As philologist Whitney Cox writes in Politics, Kingship and Poetry in Medieval South India, Sanskrit eulogies published by Virarajendra’s court did so by mining the Rama legend. In one case, they claimed that a king called “Chola” had been born into the solar dynasty of Rama; while on a hunt, he chased a demon in the form of a deer, followed by his army, and finally reached the Kaveri river, where he settled Brahmins. Virarajendra, like this putative ancestor, had also made major land-grants to Brahmins. The Rama legend was also used to argue that rulers had to do difficult things. Here’s a quote from one of Virarajendra’s inscriptions, composed in the 11th century by the poet Chandrabhushanabhatta and translated by Cox:
“[Rama] didn’t kill the lord of the rākṣasas out of anger, nor out of desire did he bring back his beloved: he fulfilled the duties of a king, completely and fully. If you think that he did not, why did he strike down the Śudra who was practising tapas on Mount Malaya with his sword?” (For the relevant inscription see Epigraphia Indica XXV, page 25). Of course, what a medieval court thought were the “duties of a king” vary quite drastically from ours. The point is that, just like Sandhyakaranandin, the Chola poet found that the Rama legend could be used to support the political situation of his patrons.
There’s much more to say about Rama and the peoples who have sought to tell his story: in the next edition of Thinking Medieval, we will cross the Bay of Bengal to see some of them.
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 Ratan Priya)