flowed through India with undiminished volume. They are read daily in every village, in every house,—as welcome in the grocer's shop as in the royal palace. Blessed are the two poets whose (true) names have been lost in the vast wilderness of Time, but whose words still flow, carrying a copious steam of strength and peace to the doors of millions of men and women, and fertilising the heart of modern India with the rich loam incessantly brought down from hundreds of past centuries.
Therefore, it will not be correct to call the Ramayan and the Mahabharat epics only; they are histories, too;—not the history of incidents, which concerns a particular age only, but the eternal history of India. Other histories change with the passage of time, but this history has suffered no change. The history of what has been the object of India's devoted endeavour, India's adoration, and India's resolve, is seated on the throne of eternity in the palace of these two vast epics.
Hence the criticism of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat must follow a different standard from that employed in appraising other poems. It is not enough to judge whether Ram’s character was noble or base, whether Lakshman's conduct charms the critic or not. The critic must pause in reverence and judge how the entire land of India through many thousand years has regarded these works.
In the present case we must humbly find out the message that India speaks in the Ramayan, the ideal that India recognises as great in this epic. It is a popular notion that only a heroic poem can be an epic. The reason is that in every country and age where martial greatness has been honoured most, the national epic has naturally been predominantly heroic. True, there is plenty of fighting in the Ramayan; true, Ram is a hero of extraordinary strength; but the heroic is not the predominant spirit in this epic. The Ramayan does not proclaim the glory of physical prowess,—its main theme is not the description of battles.
Nor is it true that it is an epic only descriptive of the exploits of a certain incarnation of the Deity. Scholars will show that Ram was not an avatar but a human personality to Valmiki. Here I may briefly say this that if the poet had described a god instead of a man in the Ramayan, it would have lessened the greatness of his work, it would have taken away from its merits as a poem. Ram's character is glorious only because it is human.
The Ramayan is the story of that combination of all noble qualities which Valmiki sought for in the hero worthy of his epic, and which Narad discovered in the person of Ram, the perfect MAN, after failing to find it in the gods. (Balkanda, Canto 1). In the Ramayan no god has dwarfed himself into an incarnation; only a man has raised himself to the Godhead by his inner greatness. The poet of India wrote his epic to set up the supreme ideal for men. And from his day Indian readers have been eagerly reading this description of the ideal human character.
The chief peculiarity of the Ramayan is that it has shown the story of a household in a superlative form. The tie of moral law (dharma), the bond of affection, between father and son, brother and brother, wife and husband,—has been raised to such a transcendental height in the Ramayan, as to make it easily a fit theme for an epic. We often see that what gives life and movement to other epics is conquest of kingdoms, destruction of foemen, the fierce clash between two strong and antagonistic parties. But the greatness of the Ramayan does not depend on the war between Ram and Ravan; that war is only a device for setting off the splendour of the conjugal love between Ram and Sita. The Ramayan only shows the extreme point which a son's loyalty to his father, a brother's sacrifice for another brother, a wife's faith to her husband, and a king's duty to his subjects, can reach. In the epic of no other land have such predominantly domestic relations of individuals been deemed a fit subject of treatment.
This fact tells us of the character not of the poet only but of India too. From this we can realise how great the home and domestic duties are to India. This epic clearly proves the high estimation in which the householder's life (garhasthya ashram) was held in our land. The householder's life was not meant for our own happiness or comfort; it held the whole fabric of society together and developed the true manhood of the people. The household was the foundation of the Aryan society of India; and the
