My other writings
Cricket 24 x 7
Jaagruthi
Yahoo! 360
Mayajaal
My Bloglines
My 43 things
My LinkedIn
On Orkut
Badri's Tamil thoughts
Ganesh's Happily Haphazard
Nitin's Acorn
Prabhu's Pethals
Raghu the reluctant Delhiite
Samanth's blahg
Sankhya the busy idler
Srini the movie critic
Rabble Rousing Random Ramblings by S Jagadish is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 Unported License.
A little more than a month ago, I wondered about why the Ramayana and Mahabharata had dark skinned heroes. Sandeep wrote a lovely follow-up post where he said colour was not important in ancient Indian thought.
I read an interesting news item today in 'The Hindu' where a historian, Suvira Jaiswal, was quoted as saying that Rama seemed to be a Dravidian creation and over a period of time, the concept/persona travelled up towards northern India and became well established there.
This is very interesting, because one of my conjectures was that it was possible that the authors of the two epics based their characters on some super archers in south India.
Labels: epics, hindu, mahabharatha, mythology, ramayana
Did you like the post? [ Subscribe to the blog feed - |
I have no idea why this thought suddenly came to mind today.
In the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha, the heroes, the ace archers, are invariably dark skinned: Rama, Arjuna and Krishna in particular. Karna can be seen as an exception. In any case, he wasn't one of the protagonists. I found this to be too much of a coincidence.
I'm making one assumption here - that the Aryan invasion theory is right, and that the Dravidians were a bunch of dark-skinned folks unlike the fair-skinned Aryans who came from Caucasia, and the Aryans pushed the Dravidians further down south.
I believe that the Ramayana and the Mahabharatha were nothing more than fantastic stories, the Mahabharatha in particular being a superbly complex story. They aren't for real. If someone (Valmiki or Vyasa, to give them names) did write these stories, why'd he/she pick dark skinned characters as the heroes? During their wanderings, did they come across supreme bowmen from parts of southern India and they just had to incorporate them as heroes in the stories that they were weaving?
Let's take a counter-view. Assuming that the two epics were in fact actual events which were chronicled by Valmiki and Vyasa, the whopping majority of the characters involved in the epics were Kshatriyas and the events predominantly occured north of the Vindhyas (peninsular India makes very few appearances in the Mahabharatha and would perhaps not even have featured in the Ramayana had Ravana's base been in modern-day Bangladesh).
This makes it even tougher to explain how dark-skinned chaps became heroes in the epics since most folks in northern/western India were fair skinned. The likes of Krishna, Arjuna and Rama are exceptions. Then again, maybe their skin was just a shade darker than the others and poetic license was liberally used to make them blue/blue-black in colour! But, if they were exceptions, isn't it still too much of a coincidence that all three major protagonists were dark coloured?
Your thoughts?
Labels: epics, hindu, mahabharatha, mythology, ramayana
Did you like the post? [ Subscribe to the blog feed - |
Some of the links may now be broken/not take you to the expected report since the original content providers may have archived/removed the contents.
All opinions expressed are mine alone. My employers (past, present or future) are in no way connected to the opinions expressed here.
All pictures, photographs used are copyrights of the original owners. I do not intend to infringe on any copyright.
Pictures and photographs are used here to merely accentuate and enhance the content value to the readers.
