SCRIPTURES

Ramayana - Its Roots
                    by Kalaprapurna Dr.G.Atchutharamaraju


The eternal epic Ramayana is earnestly believed by eminent historians and scholars as one based on the traditional history of the “Surya Vamsa” kings of Ayodhya and Valmiki must have taken this story of Rama from Vedic stories, It is opined so as the names of Ikshwaku, Dasaratha and Rama occur in the Rig Veda. It was not his contemporary history that Valmiki wrote. The lyric of Rama must have come down to him from several ages that preceded his times. It must have been sung and related for centuries before Valmiki, though not in the prosody he preferred. He must have embellished the shape and structure of the theme, its narration and style, which act has glorified him and crowned him as the Adi Kavi deservedly, though in fact there had been myriads of Vedic Poets who composed ‘Riks’ and hymns of perpetual delight, which are a perennial source of human knowledge in its multitudinous splendour and grandeur.
It will be interesting to note that the etymology of the word, "Veda" has been capable of generating and has in fact given scope for similar and cognate meanings - ‘Veda’ in Sanskrit means the earliest and the first knowledge and ‘Vid’ means ‘to know’. The Italian word, "vedere " means ‘to see’ to ‘perceive’. It is ardently believed by one and all that the ‘Rishis’ of Vedic times are “Seers”. They saw the knowledge that came down upon them.

It is common knowledge that in the history of human activity there are many missing links. Though the main stream of knowledge of Vedas is supposed to continue unceasingly through Aranyakas, Upanishads, Puranaas, Epics etc., it has to be conceded that there should have been some missing links between the period of the Vedas and that of the epics. There is the allegorical story of a demon rolling up the earth and depositing it under an ocean so that Lord Vishnu in his ‘Varaha Avatar’ retrieved the earth along with the Vedas. This connotes an age when ‘the Vedas’ went underground.

Even Veda Vyasa’s efforts to classify and codify the Vedas were not totally accomplished as could be seen from the disjunctive nature of the ‘Khila Sookthas’ in Rig Veda. The order of the Riks as set out cannot also spell out a discernible chronology of events - many thousands of Riks might have been lost - some might have been interpolated, some repeated.

In spite of the Herculean efforts of erudite scholars to fix the period of Vedas, the range of those times varying from 6000 BC to 60,000 BC makes it inconceivable that so many millennia should have passed off without any countable contribution of learning and knowledge. Either Vedic knowledge should have been eclipsed by a knowledge of non-Vedic precepts of nonbelievers, or it must have gone underground, thrown into abysmal dark regions by some demonic forces. The naming of Valmiki as Adikavi must have been, therefore, on account of his being a trend setter, or an epoch maker of a Renaissance or resurgent period of Aryan literature.