Ramayan Beyond Religion: An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

Ramayan Beyond Religion An EduCulture Perspective on Civilisational Heritage

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.

From Ritual to Living Tradition: The EduCulture Lessons of Ramayan Across the World

From Ritual to Living Tradition The EduCulture Lessons of Ramayan Across the World

Let me ask you a simple question. Rank the following by the quality and scale of their living Ramayan tradition:

1. A city of your choice in India
2. Bali, Indonesia
3. Phnom Penh, Cambodia
4. Vientiane, Laos
5. Trinidad & Tobago
6. Fiji

Most Indians put their city first and then they immediately realize that its not the correct answer.

Bali is covered corner to corner with statues of Shri Ram, Hanumanji, Mata Sita and Jatayu. The Kecak dance retells the Ramayan every single evening as a living cultural act, under open skies, to paying audiences from around the world. Indonesia’s Prambanan Ramayan Ballet is a UNESCO Masterpiece of Intangible Heritage. This is happening in the world’s largest Muslim-majority nation. In Trinidad, in a village carved out of old sugarcane land at the edge of the Caribbean Sea, Ramlila has been performed continuously for over a hundred years. In Fiji, every settlement has its own Ramayan Mandali, a tradition going back 130 years.

Now back to your city or village in India, surely we have a Ramlila Maidan where we burn Ravan every October. And then we fold it up and go home.

Where is the event management ecosystem built around this tradition? The design hubs, the hospitality circuits, the curriculum that draws on the Ramayan for leadership and ethics the way Bali built an entire tourism economy around the Kecak? The country where Maharshi Valmiki first gifted this epic, is treating it as a seasonal ritual while the rest of the world turns it into a living civilisational asset.

BTW, this is not a religious question I am asking here, it is an hashtag#EduCulture question.

Also, I am not just pointing at the gap. There is a Ramlila that has been performed without interruption for 65 years, from India, at the world stage occasionally. I want to bring that story back into the conversation it deserves.

If you are building where culture meets economy, where heritage meets education, where hashtag#EduCulture is understood to be right solution for future of our kids, then please connect or point me to someone who cares.