The general problem of historicity in Hindu religious narrative can be seen in the differences of opinion that arise between etic (outsider) scholarship on a given narrative versus emic (insider) scholarship. The insider perspective, for example, of the Rāmāyaṇa, is that Rāma is an historical figure, while the outsider perspective tends to treat Rāma as a mythical character. How one judges this matter impacts the reception of scholarship in general in the context of a Hindu audience, though Hindus are not a monolith, and themselves express diverse opinions on the matter, from literal to figurative readings. Nevertheless, it is worth keeping in mind that much of the emic studies on traditional Hindu narratives turn on a recounting of emic/etic divides, so that an emic study is all too often framed as a defense of culture in the face of foreign interloping by crackpot scholars who dismiss concrete evidences pointing to the historical existence of such figures. The common defense of Rāma’s historicity claims that outsiders fail to recognize the concrete historical evidences and literary nuances which bolster this position.
While I find myself in more recent work on the side of the etic thinking on this and many other HIndu tropes, I initially took the emic position up and defended it as a hermeneutic exercise, a practice Hindu philosophers and rhetoricians call ‘pūrva-pakṣa’. The idea of pūrva-pakṣa is that one cannot be expected to defeat a position if one is incapable of first articulating that position faithfully. Of course, Western academies already utilize such a method on occasion; a method referred to as “generous reading”.
I myself exercised extreme generosity in my early readings of Hindu literature, to the point that I found myself attempting to defend the indefensible by mental gymnastics which would make even a seasoned yogin blush. I attempted, for example, to defend, in a graduate level essay, the extreme antiquity attributed to the narrative of Rāma’s life by emic scholars, a period of over a million years prior to the present.
My advisors were obviously perplexed at how to reign in my more ambitious and less wieldy enterprises, and on reflection, I think it did little to recommend my academic disposition to the weighty position afforded by a doctorate from a world-class university. Yet the sting of failure in my repeated attempts to enforce an emic vision of Hindu history nevertheless did far too little to correct the underlying problem, as I only later discovered.
A methodological constant in my decades long studies of Hindu thought and history has centered on this concern over etic and emic divides. How does one explain the Hindu perspective of history to both practitioner and non-practitioner, while doing justice to both sides of the debate? Moreover, how does one unite the two communities in understanding, given the chasm of difference concerning their methodologies of reading history? Doubtless, emic scholarship frequently strives to dismiss any attempt which does not demonstrate a thorough familiarity with the traditional narratives. And the etic scholar will not countenance any rendering of history which falls far afield of the standard academic account, as the emic account often does, without a concomitant quantity and quality of concrete data to underscore its historicity.
Another concern which has guided my studies may hold the key to this problem. One has to keep in mind the simple question of authorial intent. We would not fast accuse J. K. Rowling of intending the position that there is a literal historical school of Hogwarts where a young wizard named Harry Potter learned magic in such and such an historical period, and that she were doing the serious work of historical preservation. And nor would we accuse any other author of popular fiction of doing history when they were just trying to tell a compelling story. And of course, “doing history” can be reduced to a literary style, and it often is used in that way, even when its author chooses other ends as its aim, as exemplified in the classical novel, Don Quixote, by Miguel de Vasquez.
I say, “other ends” here, because as scholars concerned with a critical reading of history, we have to read a work that purports to be historical (whether in fact or as a literary device), as not always giving such an end away on the face. The historical use of lemmata, uncited references to prior works is common enough to warn us against any rash judgments on ancient authorial intentions. One has to appreciate the varieties of concerns that form the impulse to writing and composition if one is to make a substantive literary critique of any single work, what to speak of a whole body of texts.
Anyone sufficiently familiar with the ancient Vedic Saṁhitās has heard of the Vedāṅgas, the so-called Vedic limbs, which include Jyotīṣa, the study of the positions of stars and heavenly bodies in the heavens. This literary branch is a core feature of ancient civilizations, both East and West, and one that even the most “protestant” of Hindu thinkers would do well to familiarize themselves with, even if astrological thinking is itself justifiably held in scorn for its fantastical ways of reasoning. The imagery of astronomy and astrology figure centrally in the thinking of Hindu metaphysics, even for readers who are unable to recognize more than a couple constellations in the night sky. The vision of the heavens given in both the Vedic and Purāṇic literature can be quite elaborate, and this extreme detail offers us a bounty of historical references. As such, it is of central importance to the emic thinker who aims to provide concrete data on the question of historicity. But just as important, it provides an etic explanation for a secular student of Hinduism who wishes to render the often chimerical visions of gods and demons intelligible within a Postmodern world. Regarded in this light, astrology and astronomy should not be regarded as Hindu sideshows resulting from a lack of rational structure. They are the rational structure that illuminates the meaning of very many classical texts, and with that, an evidently important feature of the ancient authors’ hermeneutical intentions.
We simply have to take a circumspect path of initiation into familiarity with the Vedic and post-Vedic works. We can do this by drawing attention to a simple historical fact, that the Vedic ritual mind had a deep and abiding concern with producing accurate calendars. Horology, the craft of time-telling, is frequently referenced in the Vedic and Purāṇic works, and is found in places even where one might not expect it. Sometimes this material appears abruptly, as a non sequitur within an ongoing discussion (cf., the 5th canto of the Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam). At other times, it forms an indispensible background condition, a kind of general lemmata, or narrative foundation. Recognizing how and why horology provides this foundation has the rather powerful impact of clearing up historical questions in ways that one might not have anticipated.
Horology, as the art of time-telling, has to do with concrete, empirical references: the mathematical movements of heavenly bodies. But the heavenly bodies, whether those of satellites, planets, or stars, do not always present themselves in a straightforward fashion within narrative. For example, Rāma is referred to as an avatāra, which is often rendered as “incarnation of God”. Some scholars have further commented that the term simply means to “cross down” (tara being treated as a verb). But from a grammatical perspective, if we treat tara as a noun, the term could simply mean “descended-star”. Both interpretations fall within Sanskrit grammatical rules, so there is a kind of nascent polysemy. Nascent polysemy which affords horological readings is not uncommon to Hindu literature. Rūpa Goswāmin’s Bhakti-rasāmṛta-sindhu, for example, uses such horological polysemy in his opening remarks. This practice is apparent in many of the places where the emic scholar of history claims the historicity of Hindu deities.
I accidentally discovered this practice some years ago. I was left with the impression that I had been little prepared by my prior studies to see it for what it was, and so it took me several years afterward to sufficiently familiarize myself with constellations and the movements of heavenly bodies. I practiced this art in simple observations I made of the phases of the moon, in contemplating the form of the year with its waxing and waning days and nights, in the passage of the Sun and the Moon through the 12 signs of the Zodiac. I also utilized newly discovered digital tools that enabled me to visualize constellations from different sites on the Earth, that enabled me to look back in Time to see the stars in the former positions as the ancients saw them. This enabled me to better visualize the precession of the Earth’s axis and equinoxes. Such tools further enabled me to quickly compare the constellations of different horological traditions, belonging to different ancient civilizations (specifically, Indo-European civilizations).
This last feature proved to lead to my most important epiphany: That ancient navigators in traveling, far-reaching caravans of traders, explorers, and adventurers shared a common thread of understanding with the astrologers who predicted the fates of patron-kings, and who utilized the esoteric knowledge of the heavens to exercise enormous power over the various states in which they found themselves. The belief in the power of the heavenly bodies to influence the fate of mankind was bounded together with the power of the annual calendar to decide the cadence of the daily, weekly, monthly, seasonal, and annual events of the Indo-European civilizations, and these in turn, were interwoven by narrative processes that enriched the forms and structures of heuristic practices, teaching astrologers, astronomers, and ritual priests how to recognize the stars in the sky, how to render the cacophony of lights and shadows into a well-ordered orchestra of cause and effect.
But in all this, a new player emerged, a monolithic deity which absorbed and coordinated the lesser, panentheistic, henotheistic deities: The all-encompassing Year, and its principle abstract background, Time. By developing the abstraction of Time through the complex interplay of horological deities, mythic placeholders, and moving heavenly bodies, history was founded on divine, or heavenly terms. Theism has many of its roots in this early play of Time and Fate, of human destiny and the destiny of the state, of the individual and the collective, all arranged and coordinated by the structure of Time, the calendar, the perennial flow of progress and decline.
The Concept of Time is thus, in its earliest stages, closely akin to (and at places, perhaps indistinguishable from) the concept of God. And this can be, if not proven beyond all doubt, still indicated in a way that compels investigation: That the unreality of Time and the unreality of God are, as metaphysical questions, almost indistinguishable. The one behaves much like the other, though they have their peculiarities. Neither God nor Time are strictly empirical phenomena. Both of them assert primacy as a background condition for the possibility of existence.
But to return these comments to the question of Rāma’s historicity, I must make a further assertion, that there are even now constellations in an annually visible segment of the night sky which coordinate variously (whether strictly or in ways that suggest gradual decalibrations of the calendar) with the Hindu festivals that commemorate his various life events.
The annual Hindu festival of Diwali passed just recently, and as such, it behooves us to examine the stellar sky for signs of heavenly causation in association with the narrative. Diwali or Dipāvali, is the festival of lights, associated narratively with the return of Rāma to his kingdom of Ayodhya, after living as a hermit for 14 years in exile. Just a cursory examination of the constellations and heavenly bodies associated with illumination demonstrates a easy connection. The heavenly constellation Hercules comes into full view just as the sun is rising in the east. This association of the visibility of the Hercules constellation and the return of light offers us a fair and simple argument for the meaning of the Diwali festival. Of course, I had not made any previous mention of Hercules in this essay, though I have already written of numerous associations between Rāma and Hercules in other essays recorded elsewhere (see links below). Of course, rigorous scholars, whether etic or emic, are unlikely to find it necessary to accept this association on the mere instance I provide here, but I beg their patience and attention to those other references I have made elsewhere.
Concluding Remarks
While this brief essay does not close the question of Rāma’s historicity, it does provide us an opening to reflect on a potential authorial intention which we might not have guessed, had we not taken this unusual approach. Did the authors of Rāma’s return intend to express an esoteric relationship between the return of the Hercules constellation and the return of the sun? Did the authors see themselves as horologists, ritualizing Time when they composed this narrative? Does not this ritual itself express a longing for the return of the day, embodied in countless oil lamps, in the face of an encroaching winter solstice and the expanding domain of the night? Or is it designed to remind us of the cool season that arises in coordination with this cosmic conjunction of our star with those stars? Perhaps all of the above?
And if so, if the author intended to act as a horologist in composing this cosmic poetry, does the historicity of Rāma recede? Or does it return its rightful, ancient place in the heavens? In the body of a constellation whose figure can only be drawn by a contemplative mind?
For further readings on the various associations between Rāma-līla and Astronomical horology, I refer the reader to my online blog: visnuswheeloftime.blogspot.com
The below links can be read in no particular order, though the piece on Jagannatha perhaps the most immediately useful.
