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"In for it!" thought I, as I put forth all the excuses I could think of, but my mother would have none of them. She sent for my brother Dwijendra, and, as soon as he arrived, greeted him, with: "Just hear Rabi read Valmiki's Ramayan, how splendidly he does it." It had to be done! But Madhusudan relented and let me off with just a taste of his pride-reducing power.
On the Medical Substances of India, and the Indian Art of Medicine. On the Philosophy of the Ancient Indians. A Translation of the Veda. On Ancient Indian Geometry, Astronomy, and Algebra. A Translation of the Puranas. Translation of the Mahabharat, and Ramayan. On the Indian Theatre, &c. &c. On the Indian Constellations, with their Mythology, from the Puranas.
Scenes from the Ramayan and Mahabharata adorn the great blocks of the boundary wall, sculptured in high relief. The Vedic Powers of Nature, with Indra as the god of storm and hurricane, manifest the recognition of that earlier belief which became submerged in the vast system of Pantheistic mythology.
If during the last fifty years we had been educated through the vernaculars, our elders and our servants and our neighbours would have partaken of our knowledge; the discoveries of a Bose or a Ray would have been household treasures as are the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. As it is, so far as the masses are concerned, those great discoveries might as well have been made by foreigners.
Turning back to the hoary past, in which many Indians, even of education, imagine there was a golden Indian empire, we can trace underneath the ancient epic, the Ramayan, a conquering progress southward to Ceylon itself of a great Aryan hero, Ram. But of any Indian empire founded by him, we know nothing.
The sacred trees and lions carved here on the walls of the temple quadrangle, give place in the galleries to scenes from the great Hindu epic of the Ramayan.
Then, uniting further the mutually exclusive castes, many are the common heritages, actual or adopted, of traditions and sacred books, and the common national epics of the Ramayan and the Mahabharat. The cause of the solidarity is not a common creed, as we shall see when we reach the consideration of new religious ideas, ideas.
The island of Bali, and the slopes of the Tengger range, retain a modification of Hinduism, and Bali treasures a Kawi version of the Ramayan and Mahabharata epics. Many inspiring thoughts and noble sentiments, expressed in story and song, have become well-known maxims identified with Javanese life.
"One who has carefully studied the Ramayan will be impressed with the idea that the Aryan conquest had spread over parts of Northern India only, at the time of the great events which form its subjects."
If, at some spot where bathers are not inconvenienced, the boat be moored, and the visitor ascends the steps, he may find on certain days, in two or three places, pundits reading and explaining the Ramayan, or the Mahabharut, the great Hindu Epic Poems, to a crowd of people, mainly composed of women.
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