Men in the Guise of Gods

Rama faces the greatest challenge of his legacy today and it is caused by humans who consider themselves gods, accountable to no one

- Sundar Sarukkai

COMING from south India, I have always been struck by the idols in temples in north India. They were so unlike the idols in the South. The temples themselves were a different experience: the architecture, the spatial distribution, rituals within the temple, as well as the cultural world surrounding a temple.

The idols were starkly different; most of them were white in contrast to the dark black stone idols in the South. They were smaller in general and their faces seemed to have a different visage. They even had different names in the North—Ram and Krishn instead of Rama and Krishna. Krishna—a male god in the South—was a name for a woman in the North. From South to North, even gender changes in a jiffy.

Temples for Krishna are ubiquitous across India. So also for Hanuman (and Ganesha, at least in the South). Temples for these gods pop up on stray corner streets, and sometimes even in the middle of a broad road. But not so for Rama. There are only a few big, grand temples for Rama in the South unlike many for the gods with other names.

Rama is not just another avatar. There is something fundamentally different about him. I have always seen him as a serious god, a family man, unlike Krishna, Hanuman and Ganesh—three popular gods in the South. Even his idols seemed to express the burden of being a married man.

Rama is a god in the guise of a man. Gods manifest as humans in order to teach us how to act. Gods come ‘down’ to the form of humans because that is the way we learn how to behave and act amongst ourselves. We constantly learn by watching how others act, what others do, and early lessons are learnt from these actions of gods in the many epics and puranas.