Who says the Ramayana and Mahabharat cannot be read as history?

In the last few weeks, there has been a lot of derisory laughter about a suggestion that some of India’s greatest myths, the Ramayana and the Mahabharat, could also be analysed as historical texts.

As soon as this suggestion was made — it was badly articulated, no doubt — there was an uproar of acidic commentary, especially from ‘Left commentators’ that implied, no, actually explicitly stated, that to suggest any historicity to mythology is illiterate and imbecilic.

But let us examine if this is true.

Let us take an example that no one with any reading of Indian history would hold to be invalid — the lectures delivered by D. R. Bhandarkar on ancient Indian history (specifically the period between 650 to 325 BC) at Calcutta University in February 1918. Now who was D. R. Bhandarkar and why should we listen to him? D. R. Bhandarkar was one of the finest Indian historians, and a writer and an essayist of sterling repute.

He was the Carmichael Professor of Calcutta University and taught Numismatics in the MA program for Ancient Indian History and Culture. The son of Sir R. G. Bhandarkar, the renowned Indologist, D. R. Bhandarkar’s work was lauded by no less than Sir Ashutosh Mukherjee as the ‘pathfinder in trackless regions of the boundless field of Indian antiquarian research’.

In his exploration of antiquity, Bhandarkar constantly points out how references in the Ramayana and Mahabharat, written as they were by men who attempted to capture the Zeitgeist of their moment, help confirm many historical facts. I shall mention only one or two as examples.

For instance, in one lecture, Bhandarkar talks about a Kshatriya tribe called Bhoja. He confirms this from multiple sources — from references in Kautilya’s Arthashastra, the Mahabharat and Harivamsa, one of the important appendices to the Mahabharat.

Then there is a reference to the Ikshvakus, a major ruling clan from the north of India. Bhandarkar confirms the presence of the Ishvakus from three sources, first, inscriptions that have been discovered by archaeologists from the Third Century which talk about the reign of the King Madhariputra Sri-Virapurushadatta of the Ikshvaku family. Then, from the Mahabharat, we know that Rama was part of the Ikshvaku race, and finally, Buddhist text tell us that so was the Buddha.

My final example from Bhandarkar’s teachings has to do with the Brahmin sage Agastya. Now Agastya is mentioned in the Ramayana as the first to have crossed the Vindhyas, and is admitted by all Tamil grammarians as the founder of the Tamil language, the great Tamirmuni, or sage of the Tamils. Also, points out Bhandarkar, if you read Caldwell’s Grammar of the Dravidian languages there is a mention of a hill where Agastya retired after his work is bringing forth the Tamil language, this hill, called Agastier (‘Agastya’s Hill’) by the British, is still to be found in the Tinnevelly district of Tamil Nadu.

Now what Bhandarkar says about these examples is of prime importance, ‘I am not unaware that these are legends. It is however a mistake to suppose that legends teach us nothing historical.’

This is exactly the point of revisiting ancient mythology from a historical point of view.

The purpose is not to prove that Rama was a historical figure, per se, but to show the connections between what we know as history and what we know as myth and how the two cross-pollinate to give us a sense of our national moorings. (This is exactly the point that Lord Meghnad Desai makes in his column about Bible scholars and The Illiad and The Odyssey http://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/out-of-my-mind-history-wars/). It is because long years of colonialism and then subsequent decades of sub-colonial rule denied Indians of any institutionalised sense of their past — apart from that evangelised by Marxist historians — that we have such a derogatory sense of self today. Next time you hear such sniggering, analyse the issue before you make up your mind.