Revamping Lucknow

 

The Kingdom We Imagine, The World We Inherit: Why Ramrajya, Why Not Krishna Rajya?

Before I uncap my pen, I would like to credit my supervisor for the prompt that set this little train of thought in motion. Too flighty for a writer, I hesitate to use the term to describe myself, but if there is anything I have learnt along the way, it is that even an ordinary conversation can sometimes float a sentence on which muggers like me can happily thrive for days.

Almost instinctively, when asked to imagine an ideal state, we reach for Ramrajya, as though it were the only natural choice, an idea so familiar that it is difficult to disentangle from our very imagination of good governance. Ironically, I grew up in a household where Krishna’s worship was far more prevalent than Rama’s, and yet the idea of Krishna Rajya never occurred to me. The nuance remained an arm’s length away, close enough to be visible, yet somehow too distant to grasp, until one fine day, when the ball was kicked a little closer to my side of the table.

To linger over what Ramrajya stands for would be a rather tedious detour, so I will, perhaps shamefully, take its meaning for granted: that somewhere along the centuries, Rama’s kingdom grew beyond the boundaries of Ayodhya and came to stand not for the rule of Rama, but for righteous governance itself. To trace how a kingdom became an ideal, and a king a measure of righteous rule, we must, of course, return to the primary text:

सर्वं मुदितमेवासीत् सर्वे धर्मपरोऽभवन् ।

राममेवानुपश्यन्तो नाभ्यहिंसन् परस्परम् ॥

Drawn from the Yuddha Kaṇḍa, Sarga 128, verse 101, the shloka offers a glimpse of the peaceful and harmonious society imagined under Lord Rama’s reign. The kingdom here is not merely prosperous; it is ordered around dharma, where the conduct of the ruler seems to ripple outward into the conduct of the ruled. Perhaps this is where a kingdom first slips beyond its geography, ceasing to be merely a place and becoming an ideal.

But an ideal kingdom, one imagines, cannot exist on its own; it needs an ideal king to hold the reins. And this is where Rama becomes rather interesting. His significance lies not merely in the fact that he rules, but in the curious fact that he first allows himself to be ruled by dharma. His exile is perhaps the finest illustration of this irony: the prince who is quite literally within touching distance of the throne chooses to walk into the forest instead. Rama's sovereignty, then, carries a delightful paradox: his claim to kingship becomes all the more powerful because he is willing to give kingship up. The king earns the right to rule, in a sense, by knowing when he has no right to place himself above the order he is meant to uphold.

Perhaps this is also why Rama travelled so well beyond the pages of the Ramayana. A kingdom may be imagined once, but an ideal has a rather more stubborn life of its own. Rama’s Ayodhya could be retold, translated, sung and reimagined across centuries, each retelling adding another layer to what his rule was expected to signify. The historical Rama and the political idea of Ramrajya, therefore, are not quite the same thing; somewhere along the way, the former became the vessel for the latter. By the time Ramrajya entered modern political vocabulary, it had already accumulated a long memory; one that made the phrase feel less like an invocation of a particular kingdom and more like a familiar shorthand for the kind of order a kingdom ought to embody.

(To speak of Ramrajya in modern political vocabulary and leave Gandhi entirely out of the picture would be nothing short of a betrayal. But I shall, perhaps wisely, resist the temptation to take that well-trodden road; Gandhi’s Ramrajya deserves an essay of its own, and this one has another question to chase.)

And yet, having followed Rama from the throne of Ayodhya into the much larger realm of political imagination, I find myself returning to a question that is rather difficult to unsee. Why does our imagination of the ideal polity so readily begin and, more curiously, end with Rama? It is here that another figure enters the frame, one who has occupied an altogether different but no less consequential place in the Indian imagination. Krishna.

To bring Krishna into this conversation is not, I think, to set up a contest between two gods, two kings, or two competing models of virtue. That would be both too easy and, frankly, too reductive. Krishna arrives carrying a rather different political world with him, one that we must first allow to speak on its own terms before asking what it might have to say about the state.

Krishna's story, rather amusingly, begins about as far away from a throne as one can imagine; in a prison in Mathura, born to Devaki and Vasudeva under Kamsa's rather unforgiving watch. From there, the story takes a turn towards Gokul and Vrindavan, where the future statesman is, for a while, busy being a cowherd, a mischief-maker and the perennial headache of those around him. But Vrindavan was never meant to keep him. The same Krishna who could, with a mere turn of his flute, have one set of people abandoning their chores and another abandoning all restraint, would eventually leave its pastures for the rather less forgiving company of kings. Mathura came, then Dwarka; and somewhere along the way, the flute remained, but the audience changed.

The audience changed, but perhaps not the trickster. The playful child of Vrindavan grew into a figure who could be tender and ruthless, charming and calculating, disarmingly playful one moment and devastatingly serious the next. He could win hearts with a flute, but he could also win a war without ever lifting a weapon. There was, in Krishna, always something slightly difficult to pin down; he could be the friend one moment, the strategist the next, and, when the occasion demanded it, the man who knew precisely which thread to pull to make an entire political tapestry shift.

Perhaps the most revealing glimpse of Krishna comes not from the battlefield, but from the moment before it, the pause in which war is still a possibility rather than a certainty. Standing at that precarious threshold, Krishna asks:

संयुगे वै महाराज दृश्यते सुमहान्क्षयः ।
क्षये चोभयतो राजन्कं धर्ममनुपश्यसि ॥

Taken from the Udyog Parva of Mahabharat( chapter 93, verse 28),
 the question is deceptively simple, but Krishna is not merely making an appeal for peace. He is asking something far more uncomfortable: when a political victory leaves both sides bleeding, what exactly is it that we have won and where, amidst all that destruction, does dharma find its place? Here is a Krishna who seems less interested in the purity of a principle than in what happens when that principle enters the rather untidy world of human action. Dharma, in his hands, is not always a straight road; sometimes it is a question asked at the fork in the road, when neither path comes without a cost.

And yet, this is where Krishna becomes harder to hold in a single frame. The man who had walked into Hastinapura carrying the possibility of peace would, when that possibility slipped away, find himself standing beside Arjuna on the battlefield. Perhaps there is something quietly tragic in that journey, from asking men to lay down their weapons to preparing one of them to fight. Krishna's story does not spare us the discomfort of such contradictions. It reminds us that sometimes the world does not leave goodness untouched, but asks it to survive in circumstances it never chose.

This, perhaps, is where Rama and Krishna begin to pull us in two rather different directions. Rama gives us a king who knows when to hold the reins, even when the reins are his own desires; Krishna gives us a figure who must decide what to do when the road ahead refuses to stay within the painted lines. Rama’s dharma seems to lie in knowing where the boundary falls and having the restraint to stop at its edge. Krishna’s lies in what happens when the boundary itself begins to blur beneath one’s feet. One offers the comfort of a compass; the other the unease of navigating without a map. One gives us the clarity of the ideal; the other the burden of the real.

Yet perhaps even this distinction needs to be handled with some care. Rama and Krishna did not walk through the same world, nor were they handed the same set of questions to answer. Rama's Ayodhya and Krishna's fractured political landscape belong to different moral and historical terrains, and to place them too neatly on either side of a line would be to make their stories far simpler than they ever were. Perhaps Rama could afford to become the compass because his story gives us a world in which the line, however difficult to follow, can still be seen. Krishna arrives when the map itself has begun to tear.

Perhaps the trouble with Ramrajya is not that we imagined too much, but that we may have imagined too little. What if the ideal kingdom is not the one where the road is always straight, but the one where someone knows what to do when it suddenly bends?What if the greater test of a ruler is not how long he can keep his hands clean, but how wisely he knows when they must be dirtied? What if dharma is easiest to admire when it is uncomplicated, and most precious when it asks something painful of us?

Would we still choose Rama if the kingdom were already burning? Would we still ask for a perfect king if the world handed him imperfect choices? And if Krishna, with all his questions, contradictions, compromises and impossible choices, were to knock at the door of our imagined kingdom, would we let him in?

Perhaps Ramrajya tells us the world we would like to inherit. Perhaps Krishna Rajya asks whether we are wise enough to govern the world we actually have.