Skip to main content

Ram and Rahim

The Malayalam poem which inspired this post


A poem that I read in a Malayalam journal yesterday continues to haunt me up to this moment. A very short poem, just 16 short lines, it is titled Rahim and Ram. Unable to catch sleep, Ram is wriggling convulsively in his new temple. From beneath the temple’s sanctum sanctorum rises the adhan in the fractured voice of a mosque’s debris. Rahim apologises to Ram and says, ‘This is the Kali Yug. Its humans don’t know that we are merely characters created by poets.’

This afternoon a young friend sent me a query on WhatsApp. “Is objective truth the same as objective reality?” My response: The Ram Temple in Ayodhya is objective reality. But is it objective truth?

The first prime minister of India asserted vehemently that India did not need more gods and temples. He said dams were modern India’s temples and went on to construct the Nagarjuna Sagar, the Hirakud, the Damodar Valley dams, etc. When some malicious person infiltrated the Babri Masjid soon after Independence and placed an idol of Ram Lalla inside to stake a claim to the mosque, Nehru asked the police to throw the idol into the Sarayu and be done with it.

Three quarters of a century later, Nehru’s successor, who had installed himself as the Maharaja of Bharat by ceremoniously carrying a sceptre to the new palatial parliament building, spent a royal sum of Rs1800 crore on a temple for Lord Ram who had abandoned his own palace to live in exile in wildernesses for the sake of keeping his stepmother happy. This Maharaja-PM defied the rubrics of the consecration ceremony for various reasons all of which ultimately boil down to his megalomania and self-aggrandizement.

Is Lord Ram wriggling in this palatial temple consecrated by a royal thespian? Is he there inside that temple at all?

I am reminded of a parable.

A man known for his many transgressions was excommunicated from the church. He took his woes to God. “They won’t let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner,” he said to his God. “What are you complaining about?” God asked. “They won’t let me in either.”

“Open your eyes and see your God is not before you!” Rabindranath Tagore tells the worshipper in the temple. All your chanting and singing and telling the beads are useless. Your God is not sitting in this lonely dark corner of your temple. God is out there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground, where the path-maker is breaking stones…

How far back have we been taken from Tagore and Nehru by the Maharaja-PM. Tagore and Nehru were visionaries, Nehru’s current successor is a reactionary who changes costumes too often.

Comments

  1. Replies
    1. A lot of people are concerned about tha temple politics. See this, for instance: https://m.thewire.in/article/rights/ex-civil-servants-express-deep-disquiet-over-states-involvement-in-ram-temple-consecration/amp

      Delete
  2. Hari OM
    Eloquent hiss and spit! Again I fold my hands and sing pranaams for your insight. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  3. What is truth? What is reality? I don't think I can get my head around this on a Friday. It's too much for me.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Will change the constitution too not only costumes!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Taliban and India

Illustration by Copilot Designer Two things happened on 14 Oct 2025. One: India rolled out the red carpet for an Afghan delegation led by the Taliban Administration’s Foreign Minister. Two: a young man was forced to wash the feet of a Brahmin and drink that water. This happened in Madhya Pradesh, not too far from where the Taliban leaders were being given regal reception in tune with India’s philosophy of Atithi Devo Bhava (Guest is God). Afghanistan’s Taliban and India’s RSS (which shaped Modi’s thinking) have much in common. The former seeks to build a state based on its interpretation of Islamic law aiming for a society governed by strict religious codes. The RSS promotes Hindutva, the idea of India as primarily a Hindu nation, where Hindu values form the cultural and political foundation. Both fuse religious identity with national identity, marginalising those who don’t fit their vision of the nation. The man who was made to wash a Brahmin’s feet and drink that water in Madh...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Helpless Gods

Illustration by Gemini Six decades ago, Kerala’s beloved poet Vayalar Ramavarma sang about gods that don’t open their eyes, don’t know joy or sorrow, but are mere clay idols. The movie that carried the song was a hit in Kerala in the late 1960s. I was only seven when the movie was released. The impact of the song, like many others composed by the same poet, sank into me a little later as I grew up. Our gods are quite useless; they are little more than narcissists who demand fresh and fragrant flowers only to fling them when they wither. Six decades after Kerala’s poet questioned the potency of gods, the Chief Justice of India had a shoe flung at him by a lawyer for the same thing: questioning the worth of gods. The lawyer was demanding the replacement of a damaged idol of god Vishnu and the Chief Justice wondered why gods couldn’t take care of themselves since they are omnipotent. The lawyer flung his shoe at the Chief Justice to prove his devotion to a god. From Vayalar of 196...

Insecurity and Exclusivism

“ Hindu khatare mein hai.” This was one of the first slogans that accompanied the emergence of Narendra Modi on the national scene. It means Hindus are in Danger . It reveals a deep-rooted feeling of insecurity. Hindus constitute an overwhelming majority in India – 80%. All the high positions in governance, judiciary, academics, any significant place, are occupied by Hindus. Yet the slogan was born. Strange? It will be facile to argue that Modi used this slogan and its concomitant hatred of Muslims and Christians as a political weapon for winning votes. True, he was successful in that; he rose to the highest political post in the country using minority-bashing. But the hatred did not end with that achievement; rather it spread outward and became more exclusive. Muslim and European rulers of India were booted out from the country’s history books and wherever else possible like the names of roads and institutions. With vengeance. Now there is a concerted effort going on to place In...