"On reading it one feels that the real heroic age of India had passed. We miss the rude and sturdy manners and incidents which mark the Mâhâbhârata. The heroes of the Râmâyana are somewhat tame and commonplace personages, very respectful to priests, very anxious to conform to all the rules of decorum and duty, doing a vast amount of fighting work mechanically, but without the determination, the persistence of real fighters. A change has come over the spirit of the nation. It is more polished, more law-abiding, less sturdy, less heroic. In brief, the two epics give us the change which Hindu life and society underwent from the commencement to the close of the Epic age."
Griffiths, in the introduction to his metrical version of the Râmâyana, remarks that one of its most salient features is the complete absence of any mention of "that mystical devotion which absorbs all the faculties," to which we have constant reference in the Mâhâbhârata. The remark is full of critical acumen, and at once differentiates the varying planes on which the two dramas move.
That of Râma and his long-suffering wife Sîta, is, doubtless, the more human of the two; but there is a grandeur about the story of Bhishma before which the former crumbles to commonplace. Still, as R. C. Dutt asserts:--
"There is not a Hindu woman in the length and breadth of India to whom the story of Sîta is not known, and to whom her character is not a model to strive after and to emulate. Râma, also, though scarcely equal to Sîta in the worth of character, has been a model to man for his truth, his obedience, his piety. Thus the epic has been for the millions of India a means of moral education, the value of which can hardly be over-estimated."
Historically, there is little to be gleaned from it beyond the conquest of Southern India and Ceylon. Socially, it shows the accretion of custom, the consolidation of dogma, and the passing of power from the soldier to the priestly caste. Yet even here it is but a very modified Brahmanism of which we catch glimpses, and even caste itself is not as yet crystallised into hard and fast form.
So, with the Râmâyana and some few Purânas which, however, will be better considered in the next chapter, the Epic period closes.
Some few points in it may lay claims to distinct historical basis. The existence of Janaka, King of Kosâla, the father of Sîta, the befriender of wisdom, is so far attested by later writings and by legend, that his personality gains reality; but it is in the crashing, confused welter of the Mâhâbhârata that we must look for a just estimate of what India was like a thousand years before Christ.
[THE MARVELLOUS MILLENNIUM]
B.C. 1000 to A.D. 1
A millennium indeed! A thousand years of Time which (despite many purely historical events in its latter half, to which return will be made in the next chapter) must be treated, as a whole, as perhaps the most wonderful period in the history of the world. For, just as in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries humanity appears to have set its mind on art, and such names as Shakspeare, Dante, Rafael, Leonardo da Vinci, Palestrina, Cervantes, and a hundred others are to be found jostling each other in history, so, during these thousand years, the mind of man throughout the whole world appears to have been set on solving the great secret of Life and Death.