Racist Side Of Ramayana

Opinion | Now now before you Hindu extremists start getting all offensive in the comments, just hear me out. Ramayana might be the earliest piece of racism ever recorded and I have all the logical evidence to support my theory. I by no means intend to undermine the epic but if I did so in the process, well I just couldn’t help it. 

To those who don’t know, Ramayana is one of the two great ancient Indian epics and the establishment of Hinduism as a religion was believed to have took place after the events following it. To many Ramayana is the symbolism of way of life, and a reason to riot for others (topic for another day).  

The short story of Ramayana goes like this. There’s a king in Ayodhya believed to be situated in the present-day state of Utter Pradesh in north India. One of his sons was Lord Rama. Rama basically won Princess Sita and married her. Rama was all set to be crowned the next king but was sent away on a Vanvas (a vacation intended as punishment in olden times) for 14 years. Sita alongside a brother of Rama Laxmana decided to come along. Now the three were in a forest when Sita was abducted by the antagonist that is King Ravana. There’s an interesting episode of how Ravana managed to do that but it is not that canon so let’s just skip that part. Rama and Laxmana furious about these happenings for obvious reasons, decided to rescue Sita from Ravana whose kingdom was in Lanka (present day Shri Lanka). Along the quest they met a being who had some prominent features of a human and also of a monkey he was called Hanuman. Hanuman also knew people with similar features in the region and one of them was a King who promised to give Rama an army to fight Ravana. Now this wasn’t an ordinary army, but the soldiers in this army were actually well-trained monkeys who understood instructions and were ready to fight for a human. They were known as Vanarsena and we’ll come back to that later. Rama all set along with brother Laxmana and strongman Hanuman lead the army to Lanka defeated King Ravana and rescued the abducted Sita. They all returned happily back to India later Ayodhya which till date the event is marked as the festival of light, Deepawali. 

Now this joyful story which sends the message of prevailing of good over evil has a dark side to it. There’s no written proof of the theory and none of the scriptures imply to it, but if you use a bit of logic and understanding this will make a lot of sense to you as well. The epic of Ramayana how it is told today has a share of supernatural stuff. From the supernatural strength of Hanuman to ten heads of Ravana, but these can be easily explained by years of adulteration and spicing up. But if we believe that the events of Ramayana without the supernatural stuff were true (which I do believe were true) then one of the most prominent part of the Ramayana the army of super smart and organized monkeys the Vanarsena goes unexplained. They couldn’t have been spiced up as there wasn’t one such monkey, but they had an army and a kingdom as well. So, who were these monkeys and why did they disappear?  Why cannot we raise an army of such monkeys today? The thing is we can and this so called Vanar are living with us.  

If we divide India in terms of races, the north India consists of people belonging to Indo-aryan race which are generally fair and speak dialects of Hindi then Sanskrit. The southern India is inhabited by Dravadians who were true natives to the Indian subcontinent and have features like dark skin, curly hairs and a totally different language from that of the Aryans. Lord Rama being from Ayodhya was an arayan. He started his journey from north India and met Hanuman in the the middle of his journey to the south. Hanuman remember was half human-half monkey and could communicate with the Vanersena as well as Lord Rama and there were more like Hanuman. And finally, the Vanersena the organized army of monkeys who followed every instructions of the humans and built a literal bridge in the sea between India and lanka. I just can’t help but wonder was this army truly of monkeys. 

To me and in my opinion they were not. They were humans and to be particular they were Dravidians from southern India. They were described as monkeys by the writers of Ramayana because of their features and the fact that they spoke different languages. Hanuman and other similar characters were from middle India, possibly Maharashtra. The reason they are represented the way they are, is because they spoke both languages and might be originally from south but were living among the aryans and have learnt to speak their language.  

All this may sound really offensive and most of you will differ from my opinion. But if you just think logically and geographically it all adds up. Racism in India could be traced long back in time and even exists till date. So, it may very well be the case with the epic of Ramayana as well. If the super smart monkeys with their own kingdoms did actually exist then where are they now? Where are the beings like hanuman? There might be other spiritual and religious explanations but logically I can’t think of any better explanation.

In my opinion Ramayana, one of the most important scriptures in Hinduism has a racist side which is being celebrated for centuries.