by Sunita, HfHR cofounder

Sita’s Kitchen is a slim book by one of Mahatma Gandhi’s grandsons, the late brother of our own Advisory Board member Rajmohan Gandhi. Giri and I were visiting with Rajmohan and Usha Gandhi in Panchgani a few days ago when I mentioned this book, written in 1992. Rajmohan ji gave us permission to excerpt his brother’s book, saying “Ramu would want nothing more than people reading Sita’s Kitchen at this time.”

The acknowledgements page is dated March 1992, whereas the Babari Masjid was destroyed by Hindu extremists on December 6th, 1992. Ramchandra Gandhi’s heart would have been shattered by the demolition of the mosque, but since he passed away in 2007, he was spared the further heartbreak of the recent Supreme Court decision to allow the construction not of a “grove of generativity in the heart of Ayodhya” but a temple to Lord Rama on the very site of the demolished mosque.

Ramchandra Gandhi was troubled by the increasing tensions as extremist Hindus were threatening to demolish the mosque in 1990-91, and decided to go to Ayodhya himself. As he walked around the mosque, he noticed a sign which read, “Janmasthan Sita-ki-Rasoi,” which means “Birthplace Sita’s Kitchen.”

Mr. Gandhi was a practicing Hindu, and a follower of both Sri Rama and Sri Ramana Maharshi. This little book is his reflection and meditation upon Sita’s Kitchen, an adivasi shrine to the Devi which is believed to have existed in the very place that the Babari Masjid stood.

I found it haunting, heart-breaking and also healing to read this book which is almost like a new Upanishad, a prayer for an end to violence. This excerpt is from the Prologue:

Religious exclusivism had converted a medieval building into a terrorist time-bomb which was likely to explode at any moment in the face of secular morality and spiritual catholicity, grievously injuring India’s distinctive identity in the modern world as a civilization which sought to cherish both secularism and spirituality. The child and the adult turned in desperation to Sri Ramana. 

Help was at hand. I opened my eyes. My attention was drawn to what I had noticed the first time around, a signboard of quite contemporary design which said in Hindi “Janmasthan Sita-ki-Rasoi,” i.e. “Birthplace Sita’s Kitchen.” The voluminous mosque-baiting propaganda of a Hindu indignation was also devoid of any reference to Sita’s Kitchen.

Bitterness sought in a male supremacist way to commemorate Rama and banish Sita from memory; even as the male supremacist citizenry of Ayodhya in the Ramayana had crowned Rama and caused the banishment of Sita. A script of tragedy deeply encoded in consciousness was demanding to be replayed. 

The Hindi phrase “Sita-ki-Rasoi” has a resonance which the English translation does not have for me: an ambiance of domesticity and divinity which happily includes the pious notion of an actual kitchen where Godhead-incarnate Sita cooked delicious and nutritious food for the Raghava household, but stretches all the way beyond that architectural idea  to the archetypal notion of the earth as the Divine Mother’s laboratory of manifestation and field of nourishment for all self-images of self.

The sacred words “Birthplace Sita’s Kitchen” posted above the main arch of the mosque held the time-bomb in self-realizing self-restraint, and formed a banner headline without whose guidance it would be impossible to read that stone-story as revealing anything but shame. I took those words as Guru Ramana’s gift of a saving mantra to embattled Indian civilization in ironically an “un-battle-able” Ayodhya. It is more than a year since my eyes were opened to that magic inscription in crude paint, and my mind and heart will continue to meditate on the meaning of that inscription long after the Ayodhya dispute is resolved, as I hope, by the grace of Rama and Sita and Ramana, it will be.

The element “Sita’s Kitchen” in the compound phrase “Birthplace Sita’s Kitchen” can be read as an answer written against the item “Birthplace” in a column of questions regarding Rama or any manifest form, avataric or ordinary. And the Sita whose kitchen is also the birthplace of Rama is only in manifestation his consort; in reality she is Mahalakshmi, Godhead, Self; And Sita’s Kitchen is the entire field of her self-imaging Shakti, powerfully represented by the earth.

It is on earth, in the embrace of the Divine Mother, that all are born, all creatures great and small; all forms manifest, noble or evil; and all are nourished. I have no doubt at all that at least the northern portion of the Ramkot mound in Ayodhya must have been in antiquity a scared fertility grove, an aboriginal shrine of the Divine Mother which acquired the name, “Sita’s Kitchen” during the Ramayana age without the slightest loss of significance.

The Ramkot zone sheltering the Babri mosque is as a whole Sita’s Kitchen, and also every part and portion of it. Any number of kitchen shrines can be established there. One such is a platform outside the mosque’s northern wall, whose deities are a rolling board and a rolling pin; powerful symbols of generativeness and humble apparatus of bread-making decidedly of aboriginal authenticity in conception.

Likewise, the zone as a whole is Rama’s birthplace; and every part and portion on its surface. Any number of birthplace shrines can be established there. One such is a platform—the Ram Chabootra—near the mosque’s main entrance. 

And the Babari mosque could also be regarded as a birthplace shrine; it could have always been so regarded, even before the images of Rama and Sita were stealthily installed inside it, and without the necessity of the act of trespass and appropriation. Because the mosque falls within the sacred birthplace and kitchen area, and every structure within that area is simultaneously a shrine of Rama and a kitchen shrine of Sita; with or without the benefit of the installation and consecration and worship of sacred images inside the structure. 

The insistence that the sanctum sanctorum of the mosque is the precise and exclusive place of Rama’s birth is blasphemy, not faith; and of course it is not theology or archeology or history. It is not blasphemous to hold a zone , a finite surface, to be the birthplace area, every part and portion of it; because such a zone, so understood, would be lucid image of omnipresence; Rama’s, Godhead’s, Self’s omnipresence.  What is blasphemous is the denial of omnipresence by imposing the task of imaging it exclusively on any one spot of the zone area. This is what Hindu narrow-mindedness is doing Hinduism-denyingly by accusing the Babari mosque of standing on the supposedly singular spot marking Rama’s birth (sic).

The spiritual motifs carved on the pillars and stones of the Babri mosque are common to Hinduism, Buddhsm and Jainism, and the location of the mosque in the sacred kitchen zone of Ramkot draws pointed attention to the kinship of these traditions with aboriginal spirituality. In thus drawing attention to the coherent spiritual universe of aboriginally (sic), Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism, the mosque makes a stupendous contribution to Indian self-knowledge. Ought such a teacher be allowed to be banished by ungrateful pupils?

The apparent intractable otherness of the mosque as a reminder of historical humiliation is overcome in the intimacy of kinship-establishing self-knowledge to which that sentinel of Ramkot awakens the grieving pride of Hinduism.

Not only that. The Babari mosque’s medieval trespass into the kitchen area dramatizes the entry of Sufism into the corpus of Indian mysticism. Indeed,  the cognateness of Abrahamic mysticism in general, and not only Sufism, with Hindu, aboriginal, and Buddhist mysticism, is powerfully suggested by the continuity of the mosque’s inner space of objectlessness with the void of the kitchen zone, which is continuous with the sphericality of the earth and the surrounding emptiness. And this continuity, deeply evocative of ahimsa or non-violence, the virtue emphasized centrally by Jainism and savingly by Gandhi in our annihilationist age.

Indian spiritual self-knowledge cannot become self-realization without an encounter with non-Indian spiritual tradition, and without sharing space and time with them. Held in topographical and historical embrace by the birthplace and kitchen zone of Ayodhya, the Babri mosque is evidence not of Hindu humiliation but of its venturesome sadhana of self-realization.

The apparent insurmountable otherness of the mosque as a representative of exclusivism is softened by the realization which he interloper in Ramkot forces upon nativist Indian spirituality, namely, that its universe has been widened by Islam’s presence in india. 

But what of the interloping images in the mosque?

The later nawabs of Awadh were avid patrons of Hindu temples in the entire provincial region of which Ayodhya is a part; and especially Rama and Krishna Bhakti flourished under their rule. It should be possible for Muslims, and not only Muslims, to see the images implanted in the Babari mosque as representing the hospitableness of Islamic rule in Avadh to Hindu spirituality; and as reflecting the lodgment of Rama and Sita, Krishna and Radha, in many a Sufi heart; and of their names in the singing voice of great Muslim masters of classical Hindustani music.

————

The Babari edifice is a testifying tree which bears the flowers of nearly five hundred years of Islamic piety, and of nearly fifty years of Hindu bhakti.  It could have grown only in the sacred soil of Sita’s Kitchen, and cannot be transplanted anywhere else. Certainly the tree bears thorns too, thorns of medieval and modern vandalism. But it can give shade to pilgrims weary of hatred in the name of the sacred for at least another half a millennium. Cutting it down would be ominous for life and civilization on earth. 

Hindus and Muslims must forgive each other’s trespasses in Ayodhya, if they wish their trespasses against each other all over India to be forgiven.

That Christian thought takes my mind to [Note from Sunita: a mural of Mahatma Gandhi with two upraised arms that Ramchandra Gandhi saw once on a visit to Oxford] Oxford and St. Mary’s Church and the Gandhi mural’s double-voting upraised arms. With one raised arm Gandhi votes for the status quo to be preserved in relation to the Babari mosque in Ayodhya; and with the other he works for a sacred grove to be established in front of the mosque by the adivasis and harijans of India as a kitchen shrine of Sita, within which could be accommodated a separate birthplace shrine of Rama.

Or could it be that Gandhi’s upraised arms in the mural are a despairing gesture, an anticipation of annihilation? 

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Annihilations (the readiness to destroy all life and civilization on earth) is the highest stage of development of dualism, if one male be permitted thus to interpret  Lenin’s epigram regarding imperialism and capitalism. Dualism is the conviction that self and not-self are everywhere pitted against one another. Individual human beings against one another and against human collectivities. Human collectivities against one another and against individual human beings, living species against one another. The human species against all other living species. All life against matter, all existence against nothingness. So why not advance the hour of annihilation? This is the temptation of annihilation, dualism’s despairing destructiveness now unfurling in all societies on an unprecedented scale.

In India’s inner life,  however, dualism has been deeply rebutted in a variety of ways by aboriginal spirituality, Hinduism, Buddhism and Jaina traditions is well known. And if my faith in the aboriginality—and therefore, timeless antiquity—of Sita’s Kitchen is not delusion, dualism’s annihilistic darkness cannot prevail against Ayodhya’s comprehensive arsenal of light.

Hindus and Muslims must not allow this light to be dimmed by failing to resolve the Babari crisis non-dualistically, i.e. without either side experiencing a sense of humiliation at the hands of the “other.” 

———————

My faith in the aboriginality of Sita’s Kitchen in Ayodhya is not only supported by the undeniable connotations of generatively (sic) carried in the name of the place. It is strengthened by the Ramayana itself.

In a profoundly revelatory episode, adivasi—aboriginal—king Guha and Rama embrace each other in a gesture of perfect equality, letting us into the secret that the truth of Guha and the truth of Rama are one.

What is the truth of Guha, or aboriginality? The truth of Guha is the truth of the earth as the Divine Mother’s kitchen, the truth of her nourishing care of all her creatures who are forms of manifestation of  herself, or primal energy. At least this.

And what is the truth of Rama? Invoking the authority of the Adhyatama Ramayana and the Yogi Vasistha, and the authority of Sri Ramana Maharshi, and in the light of my own reading of the epic, I submit that the truth of Rama is the truth of advaita, non-duality; the truth of singular self-consciousness and its cinematic field of self-imaging Shakti which is samsara. At least this. 

The truth of aboriginality and the truth of advaita are one. To banish all doubts in regard to this sacred identity, let us remind ourselves that it is Guha who instructs a fellow-aboriginal to row Rama, Sita and Lakshmana across the waters of a river front shore to another: a function in which its deepest meaning is attributable only to divinity. The episode, no doubt, also encodes aboriginality’s dateless trusteeship and transportation of the Ramayana story across the river of time.

Rama and Sita being one in selfhood, the identity of the truth of aboriginality and advaita could not in antiquity have been more pointedly expressed than by the establishment of a grove of generativity bearing the name, “Sita’s Kitchen.” I maintain in faith that the mound of controversy in contemporary Ayodhya was this grove of hope, and still can be. 

It is the firm conviction of the Sri Ramanuja tradition of Vaishnava Bhakti, into which my mother and her ancestors were born, that the episode of Sita’s banishment is an undevout kaliyuga interpolation in the Ramayana; that the original story ended with the coronation of Rama and Sita in Ayodhya after their victorious return from Lanka. I remember trying to defend the authenticity of the banishment episode in an argument with my mother. “I am impressed by your bhakti, Rama, not your arguments,” is what she said by way of demanding deeper thought from me on the matter, and not dismissively, I am sure. I think I can defend my position better now; not unaided by bhakti, though, nor without restorative presumptuousness. The following readings of Ramayana episodes are dedicated to my mother and her pauranika father Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.

The Ramayana begins with a narration of ecological violation. One of a pair of kraunca birds in love-play on the branch of a tree is felled by a hunter’s arrow, in clear violation of the code of ecologically honorable hunting. The horrified observer of this scene is the author of the Ramayana himself, Sage Valmiki.  He curses the hunter angrily, harshly condemning him to a life of ceaseless, restless, wandering. The sage, however, is soon filled with remorse for his un-sage-like act of cursing, and for the harshness of his curse; but is equally fascinated by the metrical music of his cursing words. Creator Brahma himself materializes to allay the Sage’s anxiety, and asks him to set the Ramayana story to verse in the haunting meter of his curse.

I suggest that this opening episode of the epic legislates that ecological violation cannot be too harshly condemned, and is a narrative determinant which drives the epic on remorselessly to the eventual separation of Rama and Sita as the price which even the divine couple have to pay for the ecological violation implicit in the killing of the demon March by Rama at Sita’s instigation. It was necessary to kill Maricha, but not for food or clothing, as Rama, Sita and Lakshmana were not in need of these things at the time Maricha appeared in their hermitage. But such need is the only justification for hunting! Although unavoidable, the killing of Maricha is unavoidably unecological. Maricha is separated from a possible deer mate at the level of manifestation. And so, again at the level of manifestation, Rama and Sita have to separate soon after reuniting, like the kraunca birds.

In its passage through time, the aboriginal trusteeship of the Ramayana seems to have passed into the hands of chauvinists and courtiers of exploitative city states. The ecologically educative separation of Rama and Sita by mutual consent became distorted into the sexist banishment of Sita by Rama for suspected infidelity in Lanka. This ancient distortion encourages today’s chauvinist and ecologically insensitive politicians of little faith to see in the Babari Masjid the violation of Sita and to seek its banishment from Ayodhya, and the construction in its place of a dualistically divided temple dedicated to Rama without Sita.

I hold fast to my belief in faith that after Sita’s recourse to the forests across the Sarayu, Rama and Guha established an aboriginal grove of generativity in the heart of Ayodhya, which was undoubtedly the birthplace of Rama and a kitchen shrine of Sita: the indivisibility sanctified  by the deity forms of a rolling board and a rolling pin.