A day after the unveiling of the Ram mandir in Ayodhya, at a time when the constitutional lakshman rekha separating the proverbial State and Church — or should that now read Temple? — appears to be ominously fuzzy, it would be instructive to cast our eyes towards another shrine. This one, too, stands proud Ram ke naam pe. One would not have to take an expensive flight — a Calcutta-Ayodhya air ticket on IndiGo was recently priced at Rs 12,469 for January 22 on a popular travel app — to reach this humble edifice. All one needs is to take a taxi, cross the second Hooghly bridge, alight at the Batore Crossing and, then, take a toto — a battery-run contraption — to reach this Ramrajya located in Howrah’s Ramcharan Seth Road. And there, in an unostentatious temple overlooking narrow, congested streets teeming with merchandise shops the size of pigeon holes, abutting a buzzing bazaar, stands the moustachioed, 28-foot-tall sovereign of Ramrajatala.
On a visit to the shrine sometime back, I was told that like all sovereigns, he can be temperamental: woe betide the darshanarthi who attempts to awaken him from his afternoon siesta. But his lordship’s moodiness is compensated for by his democratic, pluralist credentials. He stands surrounded by figurines representative of Shaivite, Vaishnavite, even Tantric traditions; his attire is symbolic of the confluence of Hinduism’s versatile sects; he — the words of the elderly temple priest still ring in my ears — is the protector of all, irrespective of caste or creed; even the faithless are not shunned — members of the temple committee, there were whispers, have included atheists and communists; the sovereign even pays his municipal taxes on time.
But most poignantly, and importantly, this figure of inclusivity appears human and sympathetic on account of his fragility. His ‘soldiers’, a feisty group of elderly men, the patrons of the shrine, had remained unequivocal in their commitment to insulate their lord from the broader political, polarising currents that have afflicted the republic’s body politic in the time of Hindutva’s the spectacular electoral dominance. The management and devotees of Ramrajatala’s shrine are not outliers in their espousal of a sentiment that echoes the constitutional notion of delinking faith from politics: the minders of another notable Ram temple, this one is located on Central Avenue in neighbouring Calcutta, also decided to stay aloof from explicit political functions on January 22 that witnessed frenzied outreach programmes on the part of the Hindutva ecosystem that is coached to obfuscate the bloody backstory that blights its hour of its triumph.
Obscure shrines that respect and encourage private communion between devotees and deities are not rare in India’s neighbourhoods. Neither are Indians who are willing to view divinity — deities — as gentler, fallible, all-too-human entities, occasionally in need of protection themselves. This sensibility is, in fact, consistent with a fecund liberal cosmology that has, over centuries, crystallised in the public consciousness on account of formidable social, religious and intellectual ferment. The Bhakti movement in medieval Bengal and, later, the Bengal Renaissance of the eighteenth century — characterised by the fire of Rammohan’s reformism, not to mention the radicalism of young, luminescent Derozians, the Brahmo Samaj, and many other pioneers — are but some of the nourishing roots of this tradition.
In Bengal, literary creativity that was the result of this churn has also played a formative role in the reimagination of the divine and the resistance to dogma. Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Meghnad Badh Kavya (1861) may have ruffled feathers — puritan and tolerant — by blurring the lines between heroes and villains but none could question its mastery in offering the reader a new lens, that of empathy, to dissect the foibles and failings of heroes. This demythologising — humanising — of the divine acquired the contours of a perfect absurd-comedy over 60 years later, in 1924, in Sukumar Ray’s play, Lakhman er Shaktishel, peopled with delightfully gluttonous, wailing, witty divinities. The secular and the divine intermingled equally brilliantly in Abanindranath Tagore’s Khuddur Jatra — it features, among other wondrous creations, a Surpanakha in high heels — a post-modernist retelling of the Ramayana fusing an ancient text with contemporary visual imagery. These literary canons were not merely fusillades in the then emerging liberal-political project of weakening the shackles of orthodoxy and dogma; they would, in the near future, give the fledgling, mint-new republic the courage to resist the temptation to dress in theocratic finery besides fostering a sense of individual ownership of deities transcending the rigours of differentiation. It must be mentioned that the ‘ownership’ of the divine is not a one-way — unilateral — enterprise. It is democratic, secular in spirit. While the literature transferred the gods to the mortal terrain, transforming them into relatable, human kin in the process, the devotee, liberated by the emancipatory touch of fiction and progressive social ideas, could forge a kinship unobstructed by the pesky mediation of either the State or charismatic, elected interlopers.
This personalised, autonomous compact between the divine and the mortal may appear to be anachronistic to present-day India. Indeed, this columnist’s recent visit to a city a little under three hours away from Ayodhya revealed innumerable signs of the triumph of faith as a political project: among these, the image of a lone Tricolour, surrounded — besieged? — by saffron buntings in a roadside kiosk was perhaps the most portentous.
But reflections on the eclipse of the mellower, mundane, yet accessible Ram by his pugnacious avatar should not be a cause for either nostalgia or inertia. In fact, an intelligent — political — reading of Ramrajatala’s sovereign’s communion with his subjects could offer clues to the revival of a counter-narrative to Hindutva. For such a resurrection to be meaningful, it must involve honest appraisals of crucial enquiries: how has Hindutva triumphed in projecting India’s unique model of constitutional secularism — in which the State, while assuring the rights and freedoms of all religious communities, is supposed to be non-partisan in its conduct — as a form of perverted laïcité that panders to minoritarianism in exchange for electoral dividends? Is it because India’s secular moorings remained confined to islands of privilege? Did Nehruvian socialism and its subsequent torchbearers truly embrace a cultural consciousness that is undoubtedly yoked to explicit religious sensibilities? Is secularism even feasible as a workable doctrine in a polity that has failed to stem inequality, the eternal flame that feeds the fire of majoritarianism?
Unfortunately, one cannot look up to the divine, be it Ramrajatala’s Ram or others, for the answers. The answers will be the outcome of a moral contest that will pit a conscientious citizenry against its current political minders. The future of the republic and, indeed, of the sovereign of that ideal, as opposed to a conjured, Ramrajya may well depend on the result of this contestation.
uddalak.mukherjee@abp.in