Rāmānuyātram: The Modern Ratha Yatra In Classical Sanskrit

Rāmānuyātram: Rallying Behind Rama. Dr Shankar Rajaraman. Praharsha Publications. Pages: 100. Price: Rs 125. You can order a copy here.

Open Rāmānuyātram and you feel something unusual for a modern book: the language stands in its full classical register without descending into modern looseness.

आस्थाय राम इति नाम शुभञ्च रूप-

मुच्चैर्विडम्बयदिवोपनिषद्वचांसि।

यत्रोदियाय पतगान्वयभागधेयं

प्राग्ब्रह्म सा विजयते भुवि पूरयोध्या॥

(1)

The city of Ayodhyā stands tall upon earth. This is

where the Supreme Being, as if uproariously mocking

the Upaniṣadic lore, manifested long ago as the Solar

dynasty's fortune-incarnate, assuming the blessed name

of Rāma, and a propitious form to accompany it.

Dr Shankar Rajaraman writes in classical Sanskrit, but he points the lens at recent history, the 1990 Rāma Ratha Yātrā, and the effect is startling.

The poem does not “report” events. It reorchestrates them in the grammar of epic poetry, so that roads become rivers of rasa, and reportage melts into kāvya, and a chariot becomes a moving camera obscura that renders India in light and shadow.

This is not nostalgia. It is a craft.

The poem’s big wager

Shankar’s central risk is simple to state and hard to pull off: can a classical aesthetic carry modern content without sounding strained? He answers with prosody. The poem rides almost entirely on Vasantatilakā, a 14 syllable metre with a stately gait; it is the proper horse for a long road.

For the last verse, he switches to Māndākrāntā, the metre of departure and ache. So the ending does not just say “arrival”; it sounds like arrival settling into the afterlight. Even if you do not scan metres, you feel the tempo change the way you feel a film’s score drop a key in the final scene.

A map drawn on a body

The poem’s signature device is its body imagery India. As the chariot moves, the land coheres into a figure: Karnataka flashes like a vermilion parting; the Narmadā foams into a white girdle; deserts rasp like skin in the wind.

These are not pretty ornaments. They do narrative work. By letting Bhāratabhūmi arrive as a person, the poem lifts the journey out of street level reportage and makes the reader feel a single organism wake up, region by region.

The technique is old; Kālidāsa loved it, but here it gains a new urgency: the map is not just seen; it is felt.

Puns that double as thought

Where the poem really glints is in its śleṣa (puns) that are not jokes but engines of thought. A devotee stricken by a gulikā (bullet) survives spiritually because the Name of Rāma is also a gulikā (pill).

The line does not merely console; it inverts causality: the thing that should end a life becomes the word that completes it. Elsewhere, clouds and Rāma share verbs; what rain does to heat, Rāma does to evil, so meteorology and ethics fold into one grammar. You turn a page for the story; you reread a verse for the after image it leaves in the mind.

Sound mirrors meaning throughout. A quiet yamaka (syllabic echo) lands at a hinge of the poem, repeating a phrase to bind “rising” and “setting.” It is the kind of music you notice only when you slow down, but once heard, it explains the book’s mood: this is a chronicle written not in slogans but in counterpoint.

Itihāsa as calibration, not camouflage

The poem’s aitihāsika analogies, Hanumān’s shadow seized mid ocean, Triśiras mapped onto three domes, could have turned bombastic in lesser hands. Here they function as calibrations.

Itihāsa is not pasted over the present; it sizes the present. When the leader is arrested, the Simhikā image does not thunder; it measures the event’s moral strangeness, a shadow, not a body, is caught. When a karsevaka climbs, the Trikūṭa echo does not ask for applause; it aligns effort with archetype (Hanumān). The poem trusts readers to supply debate; it supplies scale.

Where feeling is argued, not asserted

Shankar’s handling of martyrdom is the book’s most delicate achievement. The verses that narrate deaths do not linger on gore or whip up pathos.

मा मेति वारिविहगध्वनिना सरय्वा-

मुद्द्वीचिबाहु बहुशो विनिवारयन्त्याम्।

म्लेच्छाधिराडकृत जातु स बर्बराख्य-

स्तत्र स्थितस्य बत रामकुलस्य भङ्गम्॥

(2)

Alas! Once upon a time, the Mleccha king known as

Barbara (Babur) desecrated Ayodhya's Rāma temple,

even as (river) Sarayū dissuaded him over and over again

exclaiming, "No, please don't", through waterbirds' wails

and her swaying wave arms.

They arrange correspondences; earth to earth, light to light, breath to wind, until the body dissolves in the five elements and rests in a presence named Rāma.

The mood is vīra (heroic) braided with karuṇa (compassion), and the braid is tight. You come away with an emotion that feels earned, not willed.

The Poetic Mind Behind the Work

Shankar is, unusually, also a psychiatrist. His research links self conscious emotions with Sanskrit aesthetics, and he currently serves as Director of the Centre for Ancient History and Culture at JAIN (Deemed to be University).

A recipient of the Badarayan Vyas Samman from the President of India, he is known in Sanskrit circles not only for scholarship but for extraordinary creativity with constrained poetic forms. His earlier works include:

• Citranaiṣadham a citrakāvya retelling of Nala and Damayantī

• Nipunaprāghunaka a modern one act play (Bhāṇa)

• Devīdānvīyam a citrakāvya retelling of Mahiṣāsuramardini

• Multiple Sanskrit translations of classical and regional works

The Invisible Labour Behind the Poem

Shankar soon realised that no single source contained the sensory detail needed to write poetry about the yātrā. English books focused on consequences, Hindi chronicles were scattered, and documentation was patchy.

So the poet became a historian:

• digging through old magazines,

• watching grainy footage,

• interviewing witnesses,

• mining Google Books for fragments.

The published book, therefore, contains 15 pages of notes, a rare marriage of kāvya and archive, poetry and documentation.

Why Sanskrit matters (even if you read it in translation)

You can read this book in English and still taste its architecture. But the Sanskrit does something translations can only approximate.

It allows compression without crudity. A single compound can hold a panorama, a decision and a judgement. A single metre can carry both march and prayer. And because the diction stays classical, the poem never sounds like it is chasing the present; rather, it receives the present into a vessel tested for centuries.

How to read it (and enjoy it)

• Do not binge. A handful of verses at a time lets the inner music catch up with you.

• Track the chariot. Notice how the landscape metaphors change the moral temperature of scenes.

• Listen for returns. Repeated sounds and images quietly stitch episodes into an argument.

• Pause at the end. That one verse switch to Māndākrāntā is the book’s last craft gesture; let it land.

The quiet claim the book makes

Rāmānuyātram does not beg to be “relevant.” It does not editorialise. Its quiet claim is braver: Sanskrit can still think in the present tense. Not by diluting itself, but by trusting its own tools, metre, metaphor, rasa, to make meaning where headlines can only make noise.

For readers, that means you do not pick this book up to agree or disagree. You pick it up to see what happens when history is asked to sing, and what changes in us when it does.