The atom bomb is as nothing compared with it. The utterance of the name of Rama was “an infallible remedy” and “a cure for all disease”, wrote Gandhi in his journal Harijan on 24 March 1946, a point reinforced in rather more striking language on October 13 th of the same year: “I have said that to take Ramanama from the heart means deriving help from an incomparable power. In his youth, on Gandhi’s own testimony, he was urged by his nurse Rambha to take the name of Rama when in distress, and he held this counsel close to his heart throughout his life. Indeed, “true understanding”, when “the little self perishes and God becomes all in all”, required one to disavow all the common associations conjured by the name of Rama: “Rama, then, is not the son of Dasharatha, the husband of Sita, the brother of Bharata and Lakshmana and yet is God, the unborn and eternal” ( Harijan, 22 September 1946). Gandhi gave it as his opinion, in an article published in Young India on 22 January 1925, that “Rama, Allah and God are to me convertible terms”, and on subsequent occasions he came to affirm the idea that the Rama of which he spoke had no correspondence to “the historical Rama”, the ruler of Ayodhya and the son of King Dasharatha ( Harijan, 28 April 1946). Gandhi himself came to venerate the text, even if he was critical of some of its passages, but it is equally certain that his idea of Rama, often described in textbooks as an incarnation of Vishnu but held up by his devotees as the supreme God, an ideal ruler, and a perfectly realized being, was not derived only from the Ramcaritmanas. Much of north India is also Ramcaritmanas country, where the 15 th century poet-saint Tulsidas’s majestic retelling of the Rama katha (story) holds sway. In the Gangetic Plains, the terrain that Gandhi made his own as he came to assume the leadership of the movement for Indian independence, villagers have for centuries commonly greeted each other and strangers with the words, ‘Ram-Ram’ and ‘Jai Siya Ram’.
Diaspora Purana: The Indic Presence in World Culture.Gulf Indians and the Hierarchies of NRIs.
From Masjid to Mandir: Across the Corentyne, Into Suriname.Contemporary Electoral Politics in Trinidad.
0 kommentar(er)
