Ram: How do we want our Gods? More human than human

Did Ram sport a beard? And if he did, or did not, how are we to know? If an awesome variety of individuals consider that he was clean-shaven, is not that sufficient for us to contemplate the matter settled then – that the deity-king was as clean on chin as Lord Salman is on chest?

The ‘beard’ subject has been festering in my head for fairly a while now. The heady partnership of mob and media might not have picked up on it but. However a latest dialog about ‘How on Earth did we repair the best way our gods look?’ – together with the outstanding transformation of the West Asian, brown-skinned, dark-haired Jesus right into a blond Haight Ashbury hippie dude – made my salt’n’pepper ideas on the matter bristle once more.

One factor’s for positive – as a lot as one will be positive about issues like these: it is definitely unlikely that (wo)man created god in her/his personal picture. You solely should see your neighbours. Until, that’s, your neighbours’ ancestors could not stand the thought of normal-looking devis aur devas, so had them ‘made’ super-real/surreal, desi Barbie-style good?

All customary depictions of an grownup Ram present him and not using a hint of facial hair. It was within the late Nineteenth-early twentieth century that the ‘trendy’ depiction of Ram – not podgy, not lanky, however with the appropriate set of abs and air of benevolence that many IIM toppers have – ‘solidified’ with the mass market manufacturing of reasonably priced prints rolling out of Ravi Varma Tremendous Artwork Lithographic Press from 1894. For the primary time, because of grasp of (Western classical figures-inspired) mytho-art Raja Ravi Varma, anybody and everybody might afford god in his or her dwelling.

This clean-shaven grownup Ram, ubiquitous in thousands and thousands of households by the early-mid twentieth century, grew to become the favored selection for Indian Idol. However Ram was not all the time the chikna we all know him as so nicely at the moment.

Historic and medieval equivalents of at the moment’s producers of TV mythologicals definitely most well-liked the ‘clear Ram’ look when it got here to depictions in stone and different three-d supplies. (Not everybody preferred the additional arduous work like Michelangelo, who depicted Moses in his sculpture with detailed heavy ivy-league, octopoid face-tresses.) However the painter, coming in later, did not have such restrictions to Gillette issues away.

The artists commissioned by Rana Jagat Singh of Mewar within the mid-Seventeenth century to create an illustrated Ramayan definitely did not thoughts placing a thick twirl on the higher lip of a blue-skinned Ram. To trendy eyes, this ‘model’ of Ram appears extra like Indrajit (Ravan’s fine-looking and splendidly named, however left unsurnamed son) than Ravi Varma’s upstanding Citizen No. 1.

However the Mewar Ramayan is not the one one to explain Ram with facial hair. Pothi (sacred textual content) traditions in Kannada of the Seventeenth century, to provide one instance, describe a bearded Ram. Bounce a couple of centuries, and in her 2008 historical past of the comedian e-book collection, Amar Chitra Katha, The Traditional Fashionable, Nandini Chandra writes about how Ram Waeerkar, one of many major illustrators within the ACK group, had first drawn Ram with a beard primarily based on Pothi texts. ‘He was requested to redraw his Ram based on the Ravi Varma type,’ writes Chandra, who goes on to cite artwork historian Christopher Pinney on how Varma remodeled ‘the Indian imaginary from a realm of fantasy to a historicised realist chronotope (learn: grounded in time and placement)… and ‘gave’ India its gods in an actual type.’ De jure mythology grew to become de facto historical past.

Curiously, due to Waeerkar’s private fondness for Tarzan comics – particularly art work of the Sixties-70s by Russ Manning – Ram with the top-knot that we see within the 1970 printed ACK comedian e-book version, Rama (Vol. 504), later picked up by these going for a extra virile, bow-wielding, sinewy-muscled chap, grew to become the template for North India’s favorite deity at the moment. These with extra pacifist leanings have the choice of the closer-to-Ravi Varma model transmitted by Ramanand Sagar, in his 1986 78-episode TV serial with Arun Govil as a podgier, softer-at-the-edges Ram. Muscular Ram, in TV exhibits or posters, is, after all, at the moment’s most well-liked avatar.

As for the difficulty of the beard, let me shave it for an additional day. For, it does not actually matter in any respect. Because it’s us who resolve how we wish our gods to look- extra human than human.