Let us, for the purpose of this post, first accept the popularly acknowledged period of Narsinh Mehta to be 1414 to 1480 and historically established period of Tulsidas’s to be between 1532 and 1623. There is a reason why I speak about these two extraordinary luminaries of the Bhakti movement in one breath. Born some 100 years apart both, according to their respective legends, were led to their faith and philosophy obsessions Krishna and Ram respectively by figure of absolute reverence in Hinduism—Shiv.
It is well-known among those who believe such things that it was Shiv who led Narsinh Mehta to a Krishna’s Raas-leela, a sort of cosmic dance spectacle, that eventually made him an absolute devotion to the deity. I did not know that even in the case of Tulsidas, by a wide consensus, among the greatest poet-philosophers of the world, was also brought to Ram by Shiv and Parvati in a dream. That bit I am just discovering in the book ‘The Greatest Ode to Lord Ram : Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas; Selection and Commentaries’ by Pavan K Varma, a career foreign service officer turned a politician but someone who was always very scholarly ever since I knew him as the spokesman of India’s foreign ministry in the 1990s. Pavan is easily among the five sharpest scholarly minds of all politicians in India.
To hear him speak of his scholarly preoccupations such as Mirza Ghalib or Adi Shankaracharya or now Tulsidas, is to hear him slurp with sheer intellectual relish. With some luck I will be able to feature him on my weekly radio interview show ‘Stars Aligned’ on Bharat FM. For now, I am reading some free excerpts from his latest work where I discovered Tulsidas’s dream.
Ramcharitmanas was also extensively read in my family, including by my grandmother Shobha on practically a daily basis. I have some muscle memory of the Sundar Kand, for instance, one of the seven Kands of this extraordinary work. A point that jumped out me about Tulsidas is also the same point that had jumped out at me about Narsinh Mehta. Tulsidas chose to write Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in order that ordinary people understood rather than Sanskrit which his fraternity, namely Brahmins, would have approved. Mehta, who was supposed to be unlettered, too wrote in colloquial Gujarati even though the concepts he deals with both Sagun (with attributes) and Agun (without attributes) as descriptions of the divine are profound.
It is a mere happenstance that I am reading Pavan’s excerpts in the countdown to the groundbreaking ceremony for a Ram temple in Ayodhya by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi tomorrow. That is not nearly as compelling for me as reading a book of this nature. Incidentally, I extensively reported Phase 1 of what is known as the Ram Janmbhoomi movement that first led to the systematic dismantling of the Babri Mosque on December 6, 1992 to make way for this temple nearly three decades hence. Those three decades have seen the emergence of the Bharatiya Janata Party from a ragtag band of ideologues and zealots into what it is a today—a nearly unchallenged political juggernaut. That is another story which I will not tell here to contaminate the remarkable spirit of Ramcharitmanas.
I had mentioned Aguna and Saguna. Pavan’s book has a remarkable stanza by Tulsidas about it. I have used the image below.
Varma translates it as “There are two aspects of God—the one unqualified and the other qualified. Both these aspects unspeakable, unfathomable, without beginning and without parallel. To my mind greater than both is the Name, that has established its rule over both by its might.
More than the faith aspect I am moved by the sheer astonishing philosophical aspect of both Tulsidas’s and Mehta’s constructs. And to think that they lived 100 years apart and very far from each other united by their shared philosophical incisiveness—one in service of Ram, the other Krishna, both reputedly led by Shiv.