D. K. Hari - Historical Rama

B harath Gyan has been collating specific, scientific knowledge of India, using ancient knowledge sources and modern scientific tools and methods, from a present day perspective and relevance.

The knowledge of the Indian civilization is available scattered in various forms such as books, manuscripts, oral tradition amongst scholars, various art forms, customs and traditions of the land.

The current generation is facing a barrier in reaching out to this knowledge due to the limited availability and access to such resources, the ancient languages and the style of expression used, the approach to the subjects etc., all of which are in contrast to the present day system of expression or understanding.

In Bharath Gyan, as part of our quest for the specific scientific knowledge and practices of the civilization, we have come across many stories, ideas, views, theories, factual events and statements.

With the help of traditional scholars with a modern bent of mind and modern scientists open to traditional knowledge systems, we have endeavoured to carefully sift through all this data, with an inquisitive, rational, logical and scientific mind to understand the knowledge from a fresh interdisciplinary perspective. The outcome of this analysis is the compilation of Bharath Gyan.

Over 10 years, spanning across 108 subjects, the independent facts and data collated, self validate and corroborate each other beautifully in this compilation, as pieces of a jigsaw.

Bharath Gyan, a research organization, is in the process of bringing this knowledge out through far reaching and engaging mediums so that it can be easily understood and enjoyed by all across the world.

The objective is to bring out this knowledge and wisdom, in relevance to current day topics of interest, trials and tribulations faced by Indians as well as the world.

Besides filling the readers with wonder at the not-so-commonly known scientific facets of our ancient civilization, it is hoped that this knowledge and approach of the ancients will kindle or aid future research for the benefit of science and mankind.

Can we make the past converge with the present for the future?

Ours is perhaps not the first effort in this direction, neither should it be the last

As one of the initiatives, Bharath Gyan, encouraged by His Holiness
Sri Sri Ravishankar, has entered into an alliance with the Art of Living, to jointly repurpose the compiled knowledge into various knowledge products for dissemination to the community at large.

Our website www.bharathgyan.com provides more insights into our activities.

I t is a privilege to be invited to inscribe a Foreword to the monumental work of Sri. D.K. Hari and Smt. D.K. Hema Hari of Bharath Gyan on Historical Rama. Ramayana is a beautiful and majestic story of great values and noble deeds. It is a representative chronicle of mans ageless and supreme struggle to preserve all that is beautiful and precious in human life. The story of Rama has been told again and again ever since the great chronicler Valmiki recorded his own contemporary eye witness account.

Jawahar Lal Nehru in his Autobiography said that in the great festive days of Dussehra and Ramlila when tableaus and processions re-enacted the old story of Ramchandra and his conquest of Lanka, crowds were attracted to Bharadwajas Ashram where there was once a primitive University. Nehru re-calls that on those days endless stream of visitors went to their house from dawn to dusk. The Bhardwajas ashram was close to the Nehru home.

Again in his Discovery of India, he says that in Ramayana, facts and fiction are so interwoven together as to be inseparable and this amalgam becomes an imagined history. Nehru quotes Goethe who condemned those who said that the old Roman stories of heroism,
of Lucretia and others were spurious and false. Anything that was essentially spurious could only be observed and untruthful and never beautiful and inspiring and that if the Romans were great enough to invent things like that, we at least should be great enough to believe them.

Nehru also refers to Michelet, the French Historian who with special reference to Ramayana said:

Whoever has done or willed too much let him drink from this deep cup a long drought of life, of youth..Everything is narrow in the West - Greece is small and I stifle; Judea is dry and I pant. Let me look towards lofty Asia, and the profound East for a little while. There lies my great poem, as vast as the Indian ocean, blessed, gilded with the sun, the book of divine harmony wherein there is no dissonance. A serene peace reigns there and in the midst of conflict an infinite sweetness, a boundless fraternity, which spreads over all living things as ocean (without bottom or bound) of love, of pity of clemency.

What is splendorous beyond mans imaginative capacity cannot be fictional.

Story of Rama is the splendid example. In his celebrated Lectures on the Ramayana V.S.Srinivasa Sastry observes;

it is no act of impiety to study the Ramayana as an epic poem concerning human beings. It is an act, on the other hand, which gives to Valmiki his own due, establishes him as a man who held in his mind assuming that he was the one that wrote the story a clear, fully-formed, full-blooded conception of men and women of superior ability and superior value,
of superior moral stature. I would exhort you all to read the poem from this point of view.

You must read the story as a human story, lived among human beings by a human being, and, then, Oh, what rich treasures there are of wisdom in it.

Of course, sentimentalists felt a sense of hurt when their God was treated as a mere mortal. But then, it needed only a mortal to vanquish Ravana as he had the divine boon of protection from Gods and Demons and all others, except mere mortals. The Lord descending to a earth to extinguish a great evil, had, had to ironically act as and really believe himself to be, only an ordinary mortal, like every one else.