Rama

Rama is worshipped under a title that is not a claim to power: maryada purushottama, the supreme man within bounds. Where Krishna breaks rules and is loved for it, Rama keeps them at costs the epic does not conceal, and that is the whole of his religious character.

The Ramayana sets the pattern immediately. On the eve of his consecration, his father Dasharatha is held to a promise made long before to Kaikeyi, who asks for her own son on the throne and Rama in the forest for fourteen years. Rama does not argue. He goes, and his father dies of the grief of it, and his brother Bharata places Rama's sandals on the throne and rules as a regent rather than a king. The story is not primarily about a hero winning; it is about what obligations cost when they are honoured.

Ramrajya, the reign of Rama, becomes the standing Indian term for good government: a kingdom where the rains come, no one is poor, and no parent buries a child. Gandhi used the word constantly to describe what independence should produce, and meant by it a moral order rather than a Hindu state. The term has since been used in senses he did not intend, and the contest over it is live.

Dating the epic is a matter of ranges. Robert Goldman proposed oral composition between 750 and 500 BC and held that the archetype can hardly be earlier than the beginning of the seventh century BC. Others put the core between the eighth and the fourth centuries. Books two to six are the oldest; Hermann Jacobi argued that the first book, the Balakanda, and the seventh, the Uttarakanda, are later additions, on grounds of style and of narrative contradictions, and John Brockington extends the later compositional stages to around the third century of the common era.

This matters for Sita, because the material that troubles readers most is largely in the seventh book.

Rama's birthplace at Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh has been the site of the most consequential religious dispute in modern India, and the atlas states the sequence rather than the merits.

The Babri Masjid stood on the site, and an inscription attributed its construction to Mir Baqi, a commander of the Mughal emperor Babur, in the sixteenth century. The claim on the other side is that the mosque was built over a temple marking Rama's birthplace. Litigation over the site is documented from the nineteenth century. In 1949 images of Rama appeared inside the mosque overnight; the building was locked and the dispute became a title suit that ran for decades.

The Vishva Hindu Parishad and allied organisations made the site a national campaign through the 1980s. On 6 December 1992 a crowd assembled at Ayodhya demolished the mosque. Riots followed across India, with deaths generally estimated around two thousand, and bombings in Bombay in March 1993 killed over two hundred more. The Liberhan Commission, appointed days after the demolition, reported in 2009.

The Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment on 9 November 2019. It held that the demolition was an egregious violation of the rule of law, that the evidence did not establish that the mosque was built by demolishing a temple, and that the Archaeological Survey of India had found an underlying non-Islamic structure without establishing what it was. It awarded the disputed site to the Hindu parties for a temple and directed that five acres elsewhere in Ayodhya be allotted for a mosque. A temple was consecrated on the site in January 2024, with the Prime Minister present.

Roughly a hundred and seventy-five million Muslims live in India, and Rama is worshipped by very large numbers of Hindus who took no part in any of this. Both facts belong in the account.