Rama - The story of a history
A man or an avatar?
 Many have been the Western as well as Indian scholars who have gone into the question of whether Valmiki saw his Rama as an avatar or as a human being, the best of all that mankind had seen until that time. Brockington is one of the many eminent scholars who have analysed the Ramayana of Valmiki threadbare, analysed the structure, gone into the grammatical and linguistic aspects, studied the pattern of the verbal system, construction of sentences, et al, which go into the mould that a poet adopts for himself, that goes to bear the stamp of his own particular style and have come to several important conclusions. How far and to what extent the conclusions can be accepted, per se, is another question. But the conclusions are nonetheless important, though we may have to rework on certain points, question the logical validity, test the theory propounded by him with contradicting external - but at the same time undeniable – evidence and see the result for ourselves. They form a very sound and plausible basis for us in our quest for what might be closer to the truth.
According to Brockington, Valmiki could not have composed the Bala and Uttara Kandas, which were enriched by oral tradition down the generations of bards who recited and interpreted the ‘core book’ that consisted only of five cantos, namely, Ayodhya, Aranya, Kishkindha, Sundara and Yuddha
Kandas.
 “The original story,” he states at the very beginning of his book ‘The Righteous Rama’ and continues, “began no doubt with some version of the court intrigues which open the Ayodhya Kanda, now the second book of the epic. Here we are introduced to the aging king of Ayodhya, Dasaratha, his wives Kausalya, Bharata, son of Kaikeyi, and Lakshmana and Satrughna, sons of Sumitra…” and at the end he concludes that the story, which Valmiki could have composed somewhere between the 3rd and the 5th centuries BC, was spread by bards reciting it to the masses, adding a few more details every time. “And that’s how,” he concludes, “what started as a story of a king slowly transformed into a religious text, narrating the descending of the Lord on earth, assuming human form, depicting Rama the king as an avatar of Vishnu.”
“This concept of an avatar was not there,” argues Brockington, “when Valmiki composed his grand epic. “Roughly put, the essence of his arguments would boil down to this. Then, after the composition of the epic, as it has to happen, bards got the epic by heart, recited it to the masses and moved about the country from the northernmost corner of this vast continent to the southernmost tip, adding a few scenes in each geographical junction where they stayed for a while, to tell the people that ‘Rama was in their place, close to them,’ so that a sense of belonging is created and the story can be appreciated and can become more absorbing. With the passage of time, generations and crossing of geographical boundaries, the epic grew up, evolved and took shape.” Brockington breaks this entire evolution into five stages, the first one being the ‘creation of the core book’.
“It is during the second stage,” he argues, “the complex inter-relationship of mutual borrowing with the Mahabharata begins.” He points to the existence of the story of Rama in the Mahabharata, which itself is an acknowledgement of the exceeding popularity of Ramayana. “During the second stage also the divergence into Northern and Southern recensions was taking place, and was largely complete before the fixing of the Uttara Kanda in the later part of the third stage. It had already progressed significantly by the time of the Mahabharata borrowings from the Ramayana…” he continues.
 In essence, what he argues is this, at this point. ‘The story of Rama, which is narrated to Yudhishthira by Markandeya in the Vana Parva in order to strengthen his flailing spirit, contains the core events of Ramayana. Since these two epics were not distanced in time by the passage of comparatively long number of years, the version in Mahabharata, namely, Ramopakyana, would be much closer in details to its original. He then points out the number of differences by way of events narrated, between Valmiki Ramayana and the
Ramopakyana.
There, of course, are many differences between these two, the chief among them being the absence of Agni Pravesa in the Ramopakyana. But then, there are differences in the events described in the synopsis that appears in the Bala Kanda (which is supposed to be an interpolation, according to Brockington and many others) and the main course of events, one of which is the absence of the second repudiation of Sita!
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