FT256

Back in September 2007, the unthinkable happ­ened for devout Hindus: the government in India filed an affidavit in their Supreme Court declaring that the events in Ramayana – one of the holiest of Hindu books relating the life of the god Rama – “should not be read as historical truth” or as evidence that Rama ever existed.

As more than 80 per cent of India’s over one billion populat­ion are Hindu and elections were looming, this was not the smartest move. The hardline Hindu Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) mounted angry opposit­ion, accusing the government of blasphemy in denying the existence of the widely worshipped Lord Rama and of “deliberately destroying the most ancient relic of Hindu history”. The government was forced into an undignified retraction of the affidavit the following day, but this was too late to prevent nationwide demonstrations, which included a number of deaths.

Two senior officials were sacked and Ambika Soni – the outspoken federal cultural minister of the National Congress Party that made up the government – was forced to offer her resignation (although this was never acted upon). She used the occasion to say she would “no longer take responsibility” for the affidavit, which had been filed on behalf of the Archæological Survey of India. The offending document, it turned out, was intended to be evidence in a vital appeal to build a canal.

This was no ordinary canal. Ever since the advent of large vessels, all shipping on India’s east coast was forced to make a detour around the island of Sri Lanka because the passage between the northern part of the island and the Indian mainland is blocked by a shallow chain of limestone shoals, beaches, coral reefs and rocky outcrops about 19–30 miles (30–48km) long (depending on where you measure from) and just 1m (3ft 3in) deep in places. When this was revealed in photographic glory by NASA satellite photographs in 2002, it was immediately seized upon by devout Hindus as tangible proof of one of the key stories in the Ramayana, which tells of a stone bridge – 10 leagues wide and a hundred long – across the sea. It was built by the sage Nala aided by the god Hanuman and his army of monkeys to aid Rama in the rescue of his wife Sita, who had been kidnapped by the demon Ravana and taken to his kingdom in Lanka.

Realising the chief argument of the opposition would be the sacrilege of destroying tracts of a site associated with a much-loved god, the government tried to get their retaliation in first by undermining the historical and geophysical reality of Rama and his bridge. The government was engaged in a huge and historical project to create a navigable sea route around the Indian peninsula that would save time and reduce shipping costs. The Sethusamudram Ship Canal – a project valued at £250 million – would be dredged across the Ram Sethu (Rama’s bridge, also known as Sethu Bandhana, Hanuman Sethu and Nala Sethu) to link the Palk Strait in the north with the Gulf of Mannar in the south. Given the high stakes and continuous pressure from leaders in industry and commerce as well as the Indian Navy, it was not surprising to see officials, such as the chief minister of Tamil Nadu, the state on the mainland side of the Ram Bridge, openly questioning the historical existence of Rama and thereby his bridge. “Who is this Ram? From which engineering college did he graduate?” he joked. (His sarcasm backfired, however, as protesters attacked his family home and a bounty of “his weight in gold to whoever beheaded him” was offered by the head of the World Hindu Council – in jest, he later said.)

The forces behind the clash were already well established. In March 2007, months before the government gaffe, around 10 Hindu organisations worldwide had mobilised for an Internet campaign – ramsethu.org – to have the submerged land link declared a world heritage site. The ‘bridge’ was first surveyed by the British in 1804 and named by them Adam’s Bridge (after an Islamic legend). By 1922, there had been at least nine proposals to cut a canal across it. Others suggestions followed until, in 1997, the National Environ­mental Engineering Research Instit­ute (NEERI) drew up a plan for excavations near Pamban Island. With some changes, this was formally accepted by the government in 2005 as the Sethusamudram Project. It contained much on minimising the impact on biota and environment alongside details about dredging 48 million cubic metres (1,695 million cu ft) of silt, but nothing at all about the cultural consequences.

Expert views are equally divided on this matter – poss­ibly reflecting the deep hold the Rama myth has on the Indian psyche – and the whole issue remains confused. A former head of the country’s Geo­logical Survey, S Badrinarayanan, said he believed the formation was “not natural” and recent government surveys were “not thorough”. At least one court of law (the Madras High Court) in Tamil Nadu, and the intriguingly-titled National Remote Sensing Agency (part of the Indian Space Research Organisation), both refer to the “bridge” as possibly “man-made”. The latter said it was about 3,500 years old after carbon-dating corals from its beaches.

On the other hand, in 2007, Prof. N Ramanujam of the Geology and Research Centre, Chidambaram College, astrophysicist J Narlikar and a group of professors from Madurai Kamaraj University, all declared it a natural form­ation some 17 million years old. During the last period of glaciat­ion, about 18,000 years ago, the sea-level would have been more than 100m (328ft) lower, and the ‘bridge’ would have formed a natural land-bridge between India and Sri Lanka. Another study found that some 4–5,000 years ago the sea-level at Pamban rose 2m (6.5ft) higher than the present level. On both sides of the ‘bridge’ there is corresponding evidence of human habitation as early as 8–9,000 years ago, and on Sri Lanka itself human occupation extends to the late Pleistocene (about 13,000 BP). It was on this archæological evidence of antiquity that some scientists requested the Indian government to have UNESCO declare it a World Heritage site.

Unfortunately for the tradit­ionalists, some venerable Indian scholars spoke publicly about what they had long debated in academia. “The Ramayana is not that old,” the historian RS Sharma told the Times of India. “Nor did the area have human habitation 1.75 million years ago.” The oldest textural evidence of the Ramayana seems to date from around 400 BC, he said, and the stories in it are traditionally placed in the Treta Yuga (one of the four eons of Hindu chronology) some 880,000 years earlier. Stories about the principal characters are certainly older than the text. The book itself is completely vague about the actual location of the mythical bridge and, as other scholars have pointed out, according to the scripture, Rama himself destroyed the bridge after his rescue mission succeeded.

The row forced a government rethink, since when a new scheme was developed by the Sethusamudram Corporation, which will cut through the northern part of the landbridge 3km (1.8 miles) within and parallel to India’s maritime border with Sri Lanka. We have not been able to find any more recent status reports of this “Suez of the East” than April 2008. As reported on the company website, dredging to the north and south of the landbridge was going well. The landbridge itself is still intact and probably will remain so as long as the opposition has the upper hand.

SOURCES
Times of India 19 Oct 2002; Times, Guardian, BBC News 14 Sept 2007; BBC News 15, 19 Sept 2007; Int. Herald Tribune, 27 Sept; BBC News, 7 Dec 2007. Sethusamudram Project: sethusamudram.gov.in/
See also FT167:24.