The Curious Case of the “Kidipede Ramayana”

*** CAUTION: Long Post ***

About a month ago, I came across a “History” site meant for kids which had this “Ramayana Project for Kids“. Under “Some points for discussion”, it mentioned:

The Ramayana is …an Aryan story, and they show the people of southern India as bad monkeys – not even human.

How should we feel about this? Should we not perform the play? Should we try to show that Hanuman and the monkeys are people too?

In response, I wrote the following letter to Dr Carr who was managing this project and the site:

Dear Dr Carr,
 
I was recently pointed in the direction of your website by one of my acquaintances.
 
Teaching History to kids is difficult in the best of times (I should know as a father) so efforts like yours are very welcome indeed.
 
Unfortunately I noticed some errors in a particular section that deals with Ancient Indian History. Specifically, this link mentions that “The Ramayana is partly about the Aryans trying to invade the people of southern India.  It’s an Aryan story, and they show the people of southern India as bad monkeys – not even human.”
 
You would probably know that the Aryan Invasion Theory (IAT) is now thoroughly discredited and no longer accepted as a true interpretation of events that unfolded in India several centuried ago.
 
Besides, I am not sure which interpretation of Ramayana you relied upon but the people of South India are not mentioned as “Monkeys” in Ramayana!
 
Perhaps you have not had the chance to update the section or perhaps you inadvertently overlooked this in the middle of your other commitments. I do hope though that you will consider revising this in the light of recent research.
 
I look forward to hearing from you,
 
Sincerely,
Shantanu

What follows are excerpts/reproductions from a series of emails on this subject. I’m posting them here as a matter of record and because it is important to refute such claims and false assertions – and necessary to record the statements as well as the rebuttals . The first one, is the response I got from Dr Carr following my email. Dr Carr wrote:

Dear Mr. Shantanu,

Thanks for writing, and thanks for visiting Kidipede! Most Indian and Western historians and archaeologists do agree that there were at least some Indo-European people who arrived in India around 1500 BC; the linguistic evidence of Sanskrit shows it, and recent genetic evidence from DNA analysis confirms it. You will find scholars saying so here, for example: Indo-Aryan Controversy: Evidence and Inference in Indian History, by Edwin Bryant (2005). A scholar’s discussion for other scholars of all the evidence concerning Indo-European nomads coming to India (for and against), but written for adults rather than kids.

or here: The Aryan Debate, by Thomas Trautman (2005). Not a kids’ book, but a collection of past writings about this question, designed to show why it is so political and what the problems are with the evidence.

I do not know of any professional historians with relevant doctorates, Indian or Western, who would disagree; if you do, I would be happy to read what they have to say, though on a children’s site we cannot always describe all minority views.

Regarding the analysis of the Ramayana, I didn’t mean that the people of South India were monkeys! I am sorry you got that impression. I’ve changed the wording on that page to make it clear that this is a metaphorical representation. I hope that helps. Thanks for pointing it out.

When I had emailed Dr Carr, I had copied the email to, amongst others, Sh Krishen Kak (Retd. IAS and a doctorate in anthropology from Princeton) who added this bit:

Dr Carr, may I invite your attention to http://www.vedanet.com/ - this is the website of Dr Frawley’s institute in New Mexico – and especially to the first few titles on http://www.vedanet.com/index.php?option=com_weblinks&catid=14&Itemid=12 a propos the so-called Aryan invasion.  You may find educative too  Dr Frawley’s book on Hinduism.

In response to Sh Kak, Dr Carr wrote:

Thanks for writing, and thanks for visiting Kidipede. We’d prefer sources written by scholars with doctorates and peer-reviewed academic publications in the relevant subjects, please. If you send those along, we’ll be happy to consider them. Dr. Frawley does not have this kind of credentials, though he has many admirable qualities.

This prompted a flurry of further emails – some of which I am reproducing below. 

First one, from Dr Karr:

…I have looked, because you’re far from being the first person to write to me on this subject, and I have not found any reputable scholar who denies that there were Indo-European incursions into India. As you say, I am not an expert in early Indian history myself, and I don’t feel qualified to evaluate the evidence on my own. I must therefore rely on these published opinions from academic presses. As you are not an expert on the subject either, I think we ought to both rely on the experts.

See for example,
Am J Hum Genet. 1996 October; 59(4): 927–934.
Pre-Caucasoid and Caucasoid genetic features of the Indian population, revealed by mtDNA polymorphisms.
G. Passarino, O. Semino, L. F. Bernini, and A. S. Santachiara-Benerecetti
Dipartimento di Biologia Cellulare, Università della Calabria, Rende (CS), Italy.

If you want to read it on the Web, you’ll find it here:
http://www.scribd.com/doc/520921/aryan-invasion-of-India-occurred-Revealed-by-mtDNA-analysis 

Your point about the Ramayana is a good one, and, as I wrote to your friend earlier, I have modified that page to show that the relationship between monkeys and south Indians is a metaphorical representation, not something the Ramayana actually says. Thanks for pointing that out! You’ll find other people with this idea here:
http://www.haryana-online.com/Culture/sanskrit_literature.htm
http://www.ibiblio.org/gautam/hind0002.htm
or in this academic article:
• Πανδαιη and Sītā: On the Historical Background of the
Sanskrit Epics
• Asko Parpola
• Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 122, No. 2, Indic and Iranian Studies in Honor of Stanley Insler on His Sixty-Fifth Birthday (Apr. – Jun., 2002), pp. 361-373

In response, Sh Kak wrote:

You ask about “international conspiracy”.  Please take the time to  check out “Invading The Sacred: An Analysis of Hinduism Studies in America”, edited by Krishnan Ramaswamy, Antonio de Nicolas and Aditi Banerjee – it is a very scholarly examination, replete with  citations of experts, of attitudes such as yours.  Dr NS Rajaram has  already forwarded to you and your university a paper to appear in a  scholarly journal – I am attaching it again for your convenience…

Dr N S Rajaram wrote:

I have held senior faculty and administrative positions at major universities, not a glorified community college like Portland State. I have learnt that less secure people are the more they fall back on credentials.
when NASA or IBM invited me for a seminar nobody asked me about my credentials (I lectured on neural networks), but were only interested in what I had to say.

we should not lower ourselves by arguing with people who want to be big frogs in a little pond. So let us not waste our time with these people.

Prejudice is all they have left.

This was then picked up Dr Kalyanaraman who emailed several others to get their views on this. Dr Kalayanaraman-ji also included in his email this excerpt from Jules Michelet (1798-1874), the French historian about the Ramayana:

The year 1863 will remain cherished and blessed. It was the first time I could read India’s great sacred poem, the divine Ramayana…. This great stream of poetry carries away the bitter leaven left behind by time and purifies us. Whoever has his heart dried up, let him drench it in the Ramayana. Whoever has lost and wept, let him find in it a soothing softness and Nature’s compassion. Whoever has done too much, willed too much, let him drink a long draught of life and youth from this deep chalice…. Everything is narrow in the Occident. Greece is small — I stifle. Judea is dry — I pant. Let me look a little towards lofty Asia, towards the deep Orient. There I find my immense poem, vast as India’s seas, blessed and made golden by the sun, a book of divine harmony in which nothing jars. There reigns a lovable peace, and even in the midst of battle, an infinite softness, an unbounded fraternity extending to all that lives, a bottomless and shoreless ocean of love, piety, clemency. I have found what I was looking for : the bible of kindness. Great poem, receive me !… Let me plunge into it ! It is the sea of milk.

From Michelet, La Bible de l’humanité, volume 5 of Å’uvres (Paris : Bibliothèque Larousse, 1930), p. 109-110.

Subsequently, Dr Geeta Athreya sent this email to Dr Carr:

Dear  Ms. Carr,
 
I wonder why Universities in America would teach kids racism and animosity where there was and is none. I am a South Indian — Tamilian to be very precise. Wonder how much you know what it is to be Tamilan born in Madras in Tamilnadu. I have never heard through out my life — I am pretty old — your Aryan invasion into the South story and depicting the South Indians as Bad Monkeys story!!!!!   Bad Monkeys?!!! Bad Monkeys?!!! In fact the Monkeys are so good and revered — that recently — there was a story by Discovery Channel how much Monkeys are revered in India and therefore how difficult it is to curtail them in urban areas. 
 
So even if the south Indians were monkeys — in fact all of us were monkeys if you remember Darwin  —- A Monkey is a Big Time God in India and quite rightly so !!! Hanuman the Great Monkey God is the one of most powerful concepts ever conceived and you have to be either Indian or imbibed being Indian like Dr. Frawley or Francois Gautier to know, understand  and feel all these things. 
 
In the first episode of the Story of India by the BBC South India is almost referred to as the Mother of the World because in the beginning there was probably only the South– and we are referring to times when the Indian peninsular broke away from the Africa landmass.
 
The Ramayan is a fabulous text. It is in several languages and is a much revered text. You would do well to teach your kids that in India today it is a well loved story and text. It is also quite complicated– so do not try to interpret and read into it knowing little. For example it is erroneously concluded that Ravan the King of Lanka was a so called Dravidian and therefore was against Aryans. It is nothing of that sort. Ravan’s father was a Brahmin and therefore for all practical purposes Ravan was the Brahmin !!!! ( and if you know what that means) and Rama was the Kshatriya, helped by the monkeys. But you ignorant of the World– Ramayana has not only the monkeys, it has eagles, bears, squirrels, other birds all helping Rama. All Indian mythology is always like this. A composite environment– with water, wind, sun, earth, animals, birds people all coexisting, performing their roles and living according to their DHARMA. Ms. Carr go research on the word DHARMA– there is no equivalent to it in the world.  
 
Believe me I have no animosity towards you or your university. I only say ” Forgive them they know not what they say”. I am always amazed how Universities — particularly– in the West research on people and conditions round the world and sometimes when I come across these texts or books– I feel like saying — Why on earth would you waste your time writing about something which you study for a short period of time and then write your thesis?  It makes no difference to us who actually live these things — I have come across books written about my community or caste — and I can only laugh. Well if you consider us so important go ahead and write books about us — in the end they will all get destroyed anyway when the Great “Pralaya” ( flood) comes . Only spoken words remain– that is why the Vedas have survived. Now don’t ask me what the Vedas are  !
 
Jai Hanuman,
 
Yours sincerely,

Yamuna Harshvardhan then added her voice to this:

To
The President, Portland State University
 
My name is Yamuna Harshavardhana. I am a Hindu and Indian with a fair amount of knowledge of our ancient literature. In fact, I too am a writer for children on the same subject as Dr. Carr with my writings including stories from The Holy Bible. However, I should own that I have no qualification in this field but that of having read the scriptures and re-told them in the best light possible by me.
 
With this introduction, I request you to take time to look into what is happening to the image of your University’s history department.
 
You could see a series of messages between Dr. Karen Carr and several scholars and practising Hindus about the way Ramayana is presented on her website Kidipede here: http://sites.google.com/site/hindunow/motivated-distortions
 
There are several fallouts of such writings:

For Hindus:

1. False propaganda of our history and image. VERY FALSE in the light of recent scientific knowledge where the Aryan invasion has been proven utterly false. In fact, the very term ‘Aryan’ has no racial mention anywhere in the ancient Indian literature.
2. Promotion of hatred between peoples. VERY BAD as history is meant to be a subject to learn about the negatives of the past and avoid them in the present for a better future. However, Dr. Carr is only continuing and perpetuating colonial ideas and attitudes.

For you:
 
1. A projection showing how ignorant your Institute can be. Remember there are people who have assimilated the epics of India like no academic can:  they breathe these epics in everyday activities and it is not merely a matter of study alone. Dr. Carr, by her own admission, is not a scholar on the Ramayana. So, she has to follow standards. The Wikipedia, for example. Better not to allow for imaginative interpretation where there is none present previously. Safe for her and for you.
2. That you are have a Christian Proselytist agenda. Certainly, there is a lot of ground to show that you are as the presentation of Jesus is VERY VERY DIFFERENT from the way Rama is presented.
3. That you are racist. That you still see ‘other’ people in different light. Her sympathies with ‘bad monkeys’ show that she is unable to see people as people but only as those with different external — and purely cosmetic — appearances.

For the others:
 
1. A poor exposure to the  rich and ancient epic of India, the oldest in the world and held in high esteem by the Hindus.
2. A later dawning of the truth would again debase your University.
It is, therefore, clear that you stand to gain by learning quickly from what is presently happening.

You can erase out all that by doing the following:
 
1. Replace the pages with such objectionable content gleaned from not so well accepted sources with the accepted versions. It is seen that the earlier page has been replaced by another one — better but not totally correct, not yet.
2. Get the ideas of what the practising Hindus have to say about their heritage and history before throwing in your views about an alien and completely different culture and people.
3. Apologise openly and honestly for the mistakes done. That would matter a lot to a billion people on the globe and they would all applaud your honesty and be more than willing to suport your site/University in future.

Thanks. May truth prevail. May peace prevail. May we work toward a beautiful world.
 
Sincerely,
Yamuna

*** End of Emails ***

It is now almost one month after my initial email…and in spite of everything mentioned in the emails above, the contents of the page have not been significantly altered…and so a few kids in USA continue to learn that “Aryans” did not even consider “South Indians” as humans but “bad monkeys”.

Sad.

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