# The Modern Review/Volume 11/Number 3/India's Epic

THE MODERN REVIEW
INDIA'S EPIC
From the Bengali of Ravindranath Tagore.
GENERALLY speaking poetry may be divided into two classes: some of them are the individual utterances of their authors, others breathe the voice of a large community.
By 'the individual utterance of a poet' we do not mean that the work is not intelligible to other men, for then it would be mere raving. The phrase means that the peculiar genius of the poet expresses the eternal sentiments and heart's secrets of universal Humanity through the medium of his personal joys and sorrows, his fancies, and his life's experiences.
Another class of poets reveal through their compositions the feelings and experiences of an entire country or age, and make them the eternal property of Man. These are the master-poets (mahá-kavi.) The Muse of a whole country or race speaks through them. Such a master poet's work does not look like the composition of any particular individual. It springs like the tallest forest tree out of the deep bowels of the country and spreads its sheltering shade over the land of its origin. In Kalidas's Sakuntala and Kumar-sambhav we see their author's peculiar skill of hand. But the Ramayan and the Mahabharat seem to be India's, like the Ganges and the Himalayas; their authors, Vyas and Valmiki, seem to have been set up for show only.
In truth Vyas and Valmiki were not the names of any real men; they are names given at a guess. These two vast works, these two epics which embrace all India,—have lost the names of their authors; the poet has been completely hidden by his own poem!
What the Ramayan and the Mahabharat are to us, the Iliad was to Ancient Greece. It was born and seated in the heart of the entire Greek world. The poet Homer merely gave voice to his country and age. Like a fountain his speech gushed out of the deep secret heart of his country and flooded it for ever.
No modern poem has this universality. Milton's Paradise Lost has no doubt much sublimity of style, glory of metre, and depth of sentiment; but it is not the property of his whole country; it is only a treasure for the library.
Hence we must regard the few ancient epics as a class apart. They were large-limbed like the gods and Titans of old; their breed is now extinct.
The ancient Aryan civilisation flowed in two streams,—into Europe and India. In each of these lands two great epics have preserved the message and music of that civilisation.
As a foreigner, I cannot say for certain whether Greece has succeeded in expressing her entire genius in her two epics. But I am sure that India has left no part of herself unembodied in the Ramayan and the Mahabharat.
Hence it is, that centuries have rolled on, but the Ramayan and the Mahabharat have ​flowed through India with undiminished volume. They are read daily in every village, in every house,—as welcome in the grocer's shop as in the royal palace. Blessed are the two poets whose (true) names have been lost in the vast wilderness of Time, but whose words still flow, carrying a copious steam of strength and peace to the doors of millions of men and women, and fertilising the heart of modern India with the rich loam incessantly brought down from hundreds of past centuries.
Therefore, it will not be correct to call the Ramayan and the Mahabharat epics only; they are histories, too;—not the history of incidents, which concerns a particular age only, but the eternal history of India. Other histories change with the passage of time, but this history has suffered no change. The history of what has been the object of India's devoted endeavour, India's adoration, and India's resolve, is seated on the throne of eternity in the palace of these two vast epics.
Hence the criticism of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat must follow a different standard from that employed in appraising other poems. It is not enough to judge whether Ram’s character was noble or base, whether Lakshman's conduct charms the critic or not. The critic must pause in reverence and judge how the entire land of India through many thousand years has regarded these works.
In the present case we must humbly find out the message that India speaks in the Ramayan, the ideal that India recognises as great in this epic. It is a popular notion that only a heroic poem can be an epic. The reason is that in every country and age where martial greatness has been honoured most, the national epic has naturally been predominantly heroic. True, there is plenty of fighting in the Ramayan; true, Ram is a hero of extraordinary strength; but the heroic is not the predominant spirit in this epic. The Ramayan does not proclaim the glory of physical prowess,—its main theme is not the description of battles.
Nor is it true that it is an epic only descriptive of the exploits of a certain incarnation of the Deity. Scholars will show that Ram was not an avatar but a human personality to Valmiki. Here I may briefly say this that if the poet had described a god instead of a man in the Ramayan, it would have lessened the greatness of his work, it would have taken away from its merits as a poem. Ram's character is glorious only because it is human.
The Ramayan is the story of that combination of all noble qualities which Valmiki sought for in the hero worthy of his epic, and which Narad discovered in the person of Ram, the perfect MAN, after failing to find it in the gods. (Balkanda, Canto 1). In the Ramayan no god has dwarfed himself into an incarnation; only a man has raised himself to the Godhead by his inner greatness. The poet of India wrote his epic to set up the supreme ideal for men. And from his day Indian readers have been eagerly reading this description of the ideal human character.
The chief peculiarity of the Ramayan is that it has shown the story of a household in a superlative form. The tie of moral law (dharma), the bond of affection, between father and son, brother and brother, wife and husband,—has been raised to such a transcendental height in the Ramayan, as to make it easily a fit theme for an epic. We often see that what gives life and movement to other epics is conquest of kingdoms, destruction of foemen, the fierce clash between two strong and antagonistic parties. But the greatness of the Ramayan does not depend on the war between Ram and Ravan; that war is only a device for setting off the splendour of the conjugal love between Ram and Sita. The Ramayan only shows the extreme point which a son's loyalty to his father, a brother's sacrifice for another brother, a wife's faith to her husband, and a king's duty to his subjects, can reach. In the epic of no other land have such predominantly domestic relations of individuals been deemed a fit subject of treatment.
This fact tells us of the character not of the poet only but of India too. From this we can realise how great the home and domestic duties are to India. This epic clearly proves the high estimation in which the householder's life (garhasthya ashram) was held in our land. The householder's life was not meant for our own happiness or comfort; it held the whole fabric of society together and developed the true manhood of the people. The household was the foundation of the Aryan society of India; and the ​Ramayan is the epic of that household. The Ramayan has thrown this domestic life into adversity and imparted a peculiar glory to it by placing it amidst the sufferings of exile in the forest. The rude shock of the Sita, Ram and Lakshman in the Panchavati Forest.conspiracy of Kaikeyi and Mantharā shatters the royal house of Ayodhydá, but still, in spite of it, the Ramayan proclaims the invincible firmness of domestic life. It is not physical prowess, it is not lust of conquest, it is not political greatness, but the peace-imbrued domestic life that the Ramayan has seated on the throne of heroic strength, after giving it the coronation-bath of tender tears.
A foreign critic has said that the characters described in the Ramayan are supernatural. My reply is, it is a question of temperament; what appears supernatural to the people of a certain character, appears as quite natural to a race of a different character. India has never detected any supernatural exaggeration in the Ramayan. A thousand years have proved that in no part has the story of the Ramayan ever appeared hyperbolical to India. This story has not only given instruction to all ages and all ranks of India, it has given them delight; they have not only placed it on their heads (in reverence), but have also enshrined it in their hearts; it is not merely a scripture to them, it is their romance.
It would never have been possible for Ram to be at once human and divine to us, it would never have been possible for the Ramayan to win our reverence and delight at the same time,—if the poetry of this epic had been to India a thing of a far-off realm of fancy, and not something included within the bounds of our society.
If a foreign critic, judging by the standard of the epics of his land, calls such a poem unnatural,—it only makes a peculiarity of India's genius the clearer by contrast with that of his country. In the Ramayan India has got what she craves for. In the Ramayan's simple anushtup rhythm the heart of India has been beating for thousands of years.
Reader, look not upon Valmiki's life of Ram as a mere poet's creation; know it as INDIA'S Ramayan; for then only will you be able to understand India truly through the Ramayan, and that epic truly through India. Remember that India wanted to hear not a historical tale of (national) achievement, but the ideal character of the full man, and this she has been hearing (in the epic) with ceaseless delight even to our day.
The slaying of the Magic Deer and the Ravishment of Sita.
Ramayan has conquered for ever the devoted heart of India.
The race that adores partial truth, that pursues material truth with tireless energy, that regards poetry as the mirror of Nature,—such a race is achieving many things in the world; it is peculiarly successful; the whole human kind is indebted to it. But, on the other hand, those who have said, "The Great (Bhumá) is the only happiness; the nature of the Great is the only proper object of inquiry,"—those who have directed their devotion to realise the beauty of all parts, the harmony of all conflicts, amidst the fulness of MATURITY;—their debt, too, the world can never repay. If their memory is lost, if their teaching is forgotten, then human civilisation, oppressed and withering in the close and polluted atmosphere of its dusty, smoky, densely crowded factory, will die inch by inch. The Ramayan is ever showing us a picture of those (ancients) who thirsted for the nectar of the FULL, the UNDIVIDED. If we can preserve our simple reverence and hearty homage for the brotherliness, love of truth, wifely devotion, servant's loyalty depicted in its pages, then the pure breeze of the Great Outer Ocean will make its way through the windows of our factory-home.
Jadunath Sarkar.