Karpatriji’s Ramayan Mimansa was a book on my to-read list for quite some time now. Karpatriji is a popular Hindu sanyasi from 20th century India. He was hailed as a Dharma Samrat for his erudition. He was the founder of Ram Rajya Parishad which was a traditionalist Hindu party that contested elections in 1950s. He means many things to many people depending on their political leanings and worldviews. Some revere him. Some abuse. Some ignore. I have a lot of respect for his life and work and I write this review as a tribute to the sheer genius and scholarship of Swami Karpatriji.

I am not a Ramayana or a sanskrit expert. My understanding of Ramayana comes from what i have read/seen/heard in Telugu/English/Hindi over time in India. Neither am I a Hinduism/Sanatana dharma expert. My understanding of Hinduism has been refined over time by my own reading and understanding of the works of Kanchi Mahaperiyava Swami Chandrasekharendra Saraswati, Kavisamrat Viswanatha Satyanarayana, Ananda Coomaraswamy, Swami Karpatriji and many more such stalwarts. Not to forget or discount the influence of the lived reality of the religion in a country where the majority continues to practice it in some form or the other.

This personal introduction is important as what one makes out of this book primarily depends on where one is in their own journey of understanding Hindu Dharma in modern times. Years ago, when the issue of the ban on A. K. Ramanujan’s Three hundred Ramayanas was “hot”, I remember having a conversation with an acquaintance. He lamented - “Which Ramayana can I follow myself or teach to my kids if there are so many of them”. Another good friend of mine once said - “How do you know if Ramayana was not the Harry potter or Da Vinci Code or LOTR of its time i.e., a widely popular work of ‘fiction’ that became so popular that the future generations started assuming it was for real “(We are still good friends although I remember we had a bit of fight back then on this topic).

These are quintessential conversations that define our times. A reading of this book will help in resolving a lot of such confusions and also helps one understand what makes someone think in such a way to prompt such questions in the first place. This review is to mention what stood out in this book for me as an individual. The book itself is 900+ pages long and by no means is it a light read. So, this review cannot be considered as a summary of its entire contents. I hope it will pique the interest of a few more people in the body of literature that Swami Karpatri left behind.

One of the primary goals of this book is to refute a lot of conclusions propagated by the Belgian missionary Father Camille Bulcke in his works on Ramayana. In the process, Karpatriji also makes a case for interpreting or understanding Ramayana from a Dharmic lens. I haven’t read Bulcke’s work on Ramayana. However, looking at whatever Karpatriji calls out in this book, it is clear that a lot of Bulcke’s views are still alive in a lot of Ramayana literature that floats around to this day by an assorted group of authors - Indologists, Marxists, Historians, Creative fiction writers etc. So, this book has a lot of contemporary relevance. Infact, it is perhaps more relevant now than before.

Karpatriji opens his dissection of Bulcke’s work by discussing Bulcke’s claims that the story of Rama and Sita has questionable vedic roots. This is an assertion I have heard all along - the idea of a certain specific vedic age, the idea of nature worship being the only primary worship “back then”, the idea that today’s “Gods” like Krishna, Rama were a later day inventions/addition etc. Karpatriji gives a strong rebuttal to this with a fascinating discourse on understanding the Vedic worldview. He asserts the concepts of Anaadi (beginningless), Anantha (endless), Apaurusheya (No human creator), Swatah Pramana (Self-authentic).

In another segment titled “the disease of the westerners”, Karpatriji refers to Bulcke’s claims on the timeline or dating of Ramayana. Karpatriji makes a remark that a lot of westerners (of his time) have trouble accepting the idea of a civilized society that pre-dates the birth of Christ. Elsewhere, Karpatriji also deals with Bulcke’s assertion that the Baalkaand and Uttarakaand of Ramayana were later day additions. Karpatriji also refers to the works of Hermann Jacobi here. To this day if you go to the Wikipedia page on Ramayana, you would find some of Bulcke’s assertions out in the open including references to Jacobi as another authority for the same. The biases of these platforms are known. However, the right way to do this is to perhaps represent multiple perspectives including that of Swami Karpatri as a traditionalist perspective and let the discerning reader pick and choose. Perhaps this is too much to expect considering the narrative politics at play.

Karpatriji also says that a lot of western scholars and some of their Indian followers attempt to timebox Vedas to a few thousand years before Christ under the influence of a Christian worldview. Per him this is quite unlike traditional scholars who advocate the idea of Anaadi Ananta i.e. no beginning no end. These were contested ideas back then. They continue to be contested ideas even to this day except that the agency of traditionalists like Swami Karpatri has weakened by quite a bit now so there isn’t so much of a “contest” on this now. A lot of our mainstream intellectuals have “moved on” from this traditionalist discourse.

Karpatriji also talks at length about various Jain Ramayanas, Buddhist Ramayanas and many other such variants. However, he cautions the reader by saying that just because there is a multiplicity of renditions it doesn’t mean that they are all equally true. If one agrees that Lord Rama is indeed not a fictional character then one should also agree that there must indeed be a “pramaanik roop” i.e., an authentic form of him. He suggests that one needs to rely on Valmiki Ramayana as a key source of pramaana for this. While saying this he also acknowledges that there is no dearth of people who say that Rama and Krishna never existed or those who dish out all sorts of Ramayanas as they believe he was a fictional character anyway. This section of the book is worth a re-read! It is very much applicable to our era of creative fiction where “anything goes” in the name of creative liberty. The nuance in Karpatriji’s argument is very intriguing. He doesn’t advocate that Ramayana be ossified into a single printed book of a particular version of Valmiki Ramayana. Far from it. In fact, all through this book he quotes from multiple versions of Ramayana like Ananda Ramayana, Adbhut Ramayana, Adhyatma Ramayana, Dwipada Ramayana, Ram Charit Manas and countless others. However, he repeatedly cautions against various forms of distortions as well.

Another assertion of Bulcke, that the Vanaras were in “reality” tribals of the Vindhya region is also dealt with at length by Karpatriji in a chapter in this book. Another theory that Karpatriji refutes in detail is something we hear a lot - that Rama was originally a normal human being, a good king and in later renditions of the text he became a God, he became an avatar of Lord Vishnu etc. Karpatriji clearly asserts that questions like - “Who is Vishnu? Who is Prajapati? What were their various avatars and when did they happen?” cannot be answered by relying on Pratyaksha pramana and Anumana pramana alone and that modern historians are not qualified to answer these questions themselves as they don’t look beyond these pramanas. Karpatariji states that the idea of Avatarvaad (i.e., a sequence of avatars) is not mere fiction and it is as true or real as the sun and the moon. He also states that the pramana or source of proof for such lies in the Vedas and other vedic sources like Puranas, Upapuranas, Itihasas, Shastras etc

After an elaborate discussion spanning hundreds of pages starting from Balakaand and ending with Uttarakaand, Karpatriji summarizes a lot of his key arguments in a chapter titled - Ramcharit Simhaavalokan - (An overview of Ramayana). In this chapter he makes a very key point on Avatarvaad. He categorically states that several western scholars specifically those belonging to Jewish, Christian and Islamist faiths have great trouble accepting the idea of recurring avatars as it doesn’t fit in well with the idea of a single lifetime and a judgement day so on. Karpatriji also talks about the influence of vikaasvaadis or evolutionists in attacking the foundational tenets of Vedas, Ramayana, Mahabharata, Puranas etc. Karpatriji states that it is a combination of all these ideologies which are less than a few hundred years old that have now come to define the foundations of world history. He clearly states that it is under the influence of these ideas that several scholars reject the idea that Vedas are Anaadi (beginningless) and try to force fit them to sometime before 3000BC -4000BC and also propagate other such ideas like - Rigveda is ancient, Yajurveda and Samaveda are of a more recent origin, Atharva veda is an ‘inferior’ veda, Brahmanas are not vedas, Upanishads are later day additions and a product of Kshatriya intellect etc. I am not qualified to pass a judgement on any of these. However, my grouse is only that the traditionalist discourse like this barely gets any space in various forums today.

Elsewhere, Karpatriji also talks about the multiplicity of Ramayanas due to Kalpa Bheda i.e., crores and crores of recurring Rama avatars across various Kalpas. However, the nuance in Karpatriji’s argument is that this multiplicity is within the bounds of various avicchinna sampradayas or paramparas i.e., unbroken traditions and it cannot be taken to mean that “anything goes” in the name of Ramayana.

In another part of the book Karpatriji thoroughly refuted the allegations that the Bhakti aspect of Ramayana was a later day addition based on the influence of Krishna Bhakti or rather the popularity of Krishna as a Deity/God. Karpatriji also talks about the arguments of Bulcke and other such scholars that the Baalkaand of Ramayana describing Rama’s childhood was a later day addition based on the influence of the literature on Krishna’s childhood. In the process, he makes a remarkable point stating that even if one goes by this theory that a particular version of Ramayana had the influence of Krishna, it isn’t necessarily a bad thing. He states that as per the Sanatana principles there is a Krishna before every Rama and a Rama before every Krishna as everything is Anaadi i.e., beginningless. This is a fascinating view point of traditionalists that gets lost in the politicking that goes around today in historicising our past in the name of seizing control of narratives.

In one of the concluding chapters of the book Karpatriji moves out of Bulcke’s thesis and gets on to a detailed discussion of another book on Ramayana written by Ganesh Chandra Joshi. There are also several other chapters to follow this one specifically dealing with the dating/timeline of Ramayana and Mahabharata. It is beyond the scope of a book review to comprehensively cover all these aspects that Karpatriji discusses in this book.

For me personally, this is a book to cherish for a lifetime. Am quite sure I will refer to this book every now and then for years to come. This is a small attempt in spreading the good word on this book for what it is worth. The hardcopy may be difficult to procure. I purchased it on flipkart. Exoticindiaart also has some copies. The PDF softcopy is available on archive.org. I hope this review helps in reinvigorating interest in the works of Swami Karpatriji. Karpatriji himself had no qualms in reading Christian missionary renditions of Ramayana, Western philosophies, Marxist literature etc. As “modern” Hindus perhaps we need to also spend some time reading our own traditionalist scholars to build a well-balanced perspective on our past, present and future.

Image provided by the author.