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.