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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
Before I come to the tradition of
epics in Indic civilisation, while
not restricting myself to the
Ramayana, let me start with an
apparent digression that has to do
with the unique role that epics or
puranas continue to play in Southand
Southeast-Asian cultures. That
role cannot be fully captured by the
English term ‘epic’.
It is customary to trace the beginning
of the Indic civilisation in canonical
texts like the Vedas and Upanishads
and see them as the unifying threads
of the civilisation. That is what the
nineteenth-century reform movements
affirmed and that is what modern
India and modern Hinduism, born in
the first half of the nineteenth century,
uncritically swallowed. Strangely, of
the few persons who openly dissented
from this way of looking at India, one
is our national poet—an antinationalist
national poet, but a
national poet all the same. (This part
of the world seems to specialise in
such inner contradictions.)
Rabindranath Tagore not only wrote
and scored the Indian national anthem
but also scored India’s second national
anthem written by Bankimchandra
Chattopadhyay, Bande Mataram. He
also wrote and scored the national
anthem of Bangladesh, which has not
always been on the best of terms with
India, and scored the national anthem
of Sri Lanka, which is at the moment
experiencing a paroxysm of
nationalism. This is a record
unparalleled in the known history of
nation-states and unlikely to be
matched in the future. It is interesting
that although Bangladesh has
experienced some fundamentalist
stirrings and Sri Lanka has had
problems with India, there has been
no movement in either country to
change its national anthem. This is
worth remembering on the 150 th
anniversary of Tagore this year.
Now, Tagore came to believe that the
clues to India’s civilisational unity lay
not in the Vedas and the Upanishads
but in the medieval sants and mystics
and in the Bhakti and Sufi
movements. It must not have been
easy for him to arrive at this position.
It negated the fundamentals of the
reformist Brahmo sect to which he
and his family belonged. The
Brahmos, like the other major reform
movements born in colonial times,
believed that Hinduism, with its
myriad local variations and highly
diverse popular cultures, had to be
radically reformed on the basis of the
Vedas and the Upanishads and
cleansed of its myriad superstitions,