A friend called last night and asked me after my last post — why Ramayan specifically? Are you trying to make this about religion?

Fair question. Here is my answer.

Do you know who wrote the dialogues for B.R. Chopra’s Mahabharat on Doordarshan? The one that stopped the country every Sunday. The one that 100 million people watched without fail.

It was Dr. Rahi Masoom Raza. A Muslim scholar from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. A Urdu poet with a doctorate from Aligarh Muslim University.

When people objected and asked why a Muslim was writing a Hindu epic, Dr. Raza’s response was simple and final. “I am the son of the Ganga. Who knows the civilisation and culture of India better than I do?”

And the actor who played Arjun in that same series? Firoz Khan. Born into a Pashtun Muslim family with roots in Peshawar, where I have never been to but have known the name growing up in the town of Sher Shah Suri and crossing GT Road almost on daily basis. Firoz became so completely one with his character that he eventually changed his legal name to Arjun. His own mother started calling him Arjun.

This is the point I am making when I talk about EduCulture.

The Ramayan and the Mahabharat are more of civilisational inheritance tham only some religious property. There is a difference. Religion is about belief. Civilisation is about the shared values, aspirations and imagination that holds a people together, the stories they dream in, the values they reach for when they need language for something important.

Bali is a Hindu island in a Muslim nation and it has built a thriving cultural economy around the Ramayan. Indonesia does not seem to be seeing a contradiction there, we may be creating a fuss out of it on our own. Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam, Trinidad, Fiji, all of them treated this inheritance as a living thing worth tending, worth performing, worth building institutions around.

The gap in India is an hashtag#EduCulture gap. We stopped asking what our stories are actually for. We reduced them to ritual on one side and controversy on the other, and lost the vast middle ground where Rahi Masoom Raza lived, where Firoz Khan lived, where the Kecak dancers of Bali live every single evening.

An hashtag#EduCultured person does not need to be Hindu to understand the Ramayan. They need to be Indian. Or, as the rest of the world has amply demonstrated, they do not even need to be that.

The story belongs to anyone willing to live by what it teaches.

That is all I am saying.