Sriramajeyam

Sriraramajeyam

I had a string of aunts and cousins who had their little notebooks with unruled blank pages.  As a kid I would watch them sit quietly, focused on their writing.  It would read in Tamil, possibly in No. 4 font, Sriramajeyam.  More than half a dozen columns, about fifty lines to a page, filled with Sriramajeyam.  It would take them half an hour or more.  They would look at me and smile and say it is good for you.  The exercise resulted in the cleansing of the mind; an affirmation of the sense of discipline and obedience that Rama must have surely shown when he was banished from his palatial home with Sita and Lakshman.  An affirmation of the fact that he had strength and power, but that could be used only for extenuating reasons, ensuring that punishment is meted out only to those directly responsible for the crimes.  Sriramajeyam became a metaphor for both devotion and restraint.

Over the last three decades, Sriramajeyam in the south has been replaced by a more truculent Jai Shree Ram – a bullying war cry that has emanated from the north, finding the occasional echoes in the South.  While we cringe at these sounds, and long for the solace that Sriramajeyam brings the question that needs to be addressed is how did we get here.  How did what was essentially a tussle for street and muscle power between two communities assume gargantuan proportions of a theologically driven hate campaign, something that could not find any sanction in the scriptures.   Was it just the Parivar prodding the masses or were there deeper undercurrents at play.

The answers probably lie in how we read the past, in the South and the North.  The hinterlands of Tamil Nadu which are a huge draw for domestic tourism are replete with temples for every God; most of them are centuries old, magnificently conceived and constructed, cherishing a lore which is unique to that temple.  While the devotees come in clearly stratified by birth and wealth, those differences seem dwarfed by the power the temple holds – so much so that even the poorest of the poor come out feeling special and blessed.  The South sees the past as a heritage that continues to thrive to this very day.   Our freedom was special not because we attained it, but more so because of the methods of ahimsa that was used.

However in the north, freedom got mixed up with partition, a scar that one would have hoped would have disappeared with the passing generations but refuses to do so.  Even liberals have it.  I still remember a casual post on social media about the Birla Mandir in Delhi, constructed barely 100 years ago, as the oldest Hindu temple in Delhi.  Is that true?  May be not grammatically, but much of the heritage that existed is gone thanks to centuries of conquest and plunder which inevitably followed.  One could ask similar questions about the grand Angkor Wat temple in Borubudur.  Did something else exist undernneath?  Was a culture put to the sword to build the grandest of the grand shrines?  Can we go beyond the wounds that our ancestors suffered that we never did, and hold out a hand in peace and say enough is enough.  May be build a museum for conflicts and erase the past.  In the culture that we grew up in this could be called Sriramajeyam.