Posted on 18th March, 2026 (GMT 02:37 hrs)
Dedicated to Michael Madhusudan Dutt, Barrister-at-law
ABSTRACT
This short article explores a striking parallel between poetic creation and state-sanctioned reality-making in contemporary India. Drawing from Rabindranath Tagore’s poetic dialogue with Narada in the context of Valmiki’s Ramayana—where the poet’s imaginative mind-realm is declared Rama’s truer birthplace than historical Ayodhya—the discussion extends to two landmark institutional acts: the Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict (with Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s later confession of seeking divine guidance) and Section 32A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC), which retrospectively absolves corporate debtors of pre-insolvency offences upon plan approval, as vividly illustrated in the DHFL-Piramal takeover. Both instances represent exercises in retrospective ontological surgery: the poet erases or reconfigures the past through fiction for ecstatic delight (jouissance), while the judiciary and legislature do so through unsigned judgments infused with faith-based inspiration and statutory “clean-slate” mechanisms that shield economic continuity at the expense of accountability. The article argues that such sovereign rewritings—whether sacralising faith in a title suit or engineering corporate rebirth—breach the thick wall of separation between powers, subordinate evidence-based adjudication to revelation or expediency, and inflict profound injury on constitutional secularism. By collapsing the distinction between objective historical/legal truth and creatively decreed higher truth, these developments risk transforming the secular Republic into a palimpsest open to majoritarian or crony capture, where Article 51A(h)’s mandate of scientific temper yields to engineered absolution and divine endorsement. Ultimately, while the poet may harmlessly invent birthplaces, when the State borrows that crown, the stake is nothing less than the integrity of constitutional secularism itself.
1. Introduction
In the timeless interplay between imagination and reality, between fact and fiction — few ideas resonate as profoundly as the Bangla proverb “রাম না জন্মাতেই রামায়ণ” (“The Ramayana existed even before Rama was born”). This indigenous wisdom, elevated to philosophical heights by Rabindranath Tagore in his poem Bhasha O Chhanda (Language and Meter), captures the essence of creative sovereignty: the poet’s mind-realm becomes the “felt” birthplace of the hero, truer than any historical or geographical site. Tagore’s Narada declares to Valmiki, “Poet, know that your mind-realm is Rama’s birthplace—truer than Ayodhya itself.” Here, fiction precedes and defines existence, granting the epic its ecstatic freedom (jouissance, ahlada) unbound by chronology, correspondence, states of affairs or fact.
Yet what happens when this poetic prerogative migrates from the hermitage to the corridors of state power? When retrospective imagination—once the harmless delight of the kavi—becomes a tool wielded by judiciary and legislature to rewrite religious, legal, historical, or financial realities?
This short article traces that migration through three converging threads:
A. Valmiki’s meditative creation of Rama’s narrative;
B. the Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict, shadowed by Justice D.Y. Chandrachud’s 2024 confession of seeking divine guidance; and
C. Section 32A of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code, which engineers a “clean slate” for corporate debtors like DHFL in its Piramal takeover, absolving pre-insolvency “sins” through statutory fiat.
Each case performs a similar act of ontological surgery: declaring the past “not wholly truth” to birth a new, pristine entity—whether mythic hero, disputed land sanctified by faith, or rebranded corporation shielded from liability.
At the heart of this convergence lies a profound constitutional question: what becomes of secularism when the Republic borrows the poet’s crown to crown theocratic faith, expediency, or political alignment as higher truth? The following sections examine these parallels not as mere analogy, but as symptoms of a deeper erosion—the breach of walls meant to separate imagination from adjudication, revelation from evidence, and majoritarian desire from egalitarian reason—placing the very ethos of Constitutional Secularism at stake.
2. Truth-Claims, Imaginations and an Epic
“Who has received the most, and who has given even more than that?
Who has borne upon his own head, like a royal crown upon the king’s brow,
With humility and with glory, the greatest sorrow upon this earth?—
Tell me, O all-seeing divine sage, his blessed name.”
Narada replied gently, “Rama, lord of the Raghu line, of Ayodhya.”
“I know him, yes I know him—
I have heard the tales of his deeds,”
Said Valmiki. “Yet I do not know the whole account,
All the events of his life—how shall I compose his history?
Lest I stray from the truth—
This fear awakens in my mind.”
Narada said with a smile,
“That alone is truth which you shall create.
All that happens is not wholly truth.
Poet, know that your mind-realm
Is Rama’s birthplace—truer than Ayodhya itself.”
Having spoken thus, the divine messenger
Vanished like a celestial dream
Into the distant realm of the Seven Sages.
Valmiki sat in meditation;
The darkness fell silent,
And a stillness awoke in the hermitage forest.”
— “Language and Rhythm“, Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore’s lines do not merely echo the proverb “রাম না জন্মাতেই রামায়ণ” (Ramayana without Ram being born)— they crown it with a philosopher-poet’s dignity. The Bangla saying, in its wisdom-ful simplicity, already hints at a startling truth: the Ramayana feels older than Rama himself. The story seems to have pre-existed the prince of Ayodhya, as if poetry gave birth to the hero before history (or myth) could. Tagore takes that intuition and raises it to a metaphysical axiom:
“That alone is truth which you shall create. All that happens is not wholly truth. Poet, know that your mind-realm Is Rama’s birthplace—truer than Ayodhya itself.”
Here the proverb is no longer a clever paradox; it becomes a declaration of literary ontology. The “real” Ayodhya of bricks and mortar (or even of archaeology) is secondary. The true Ayodhya is the one that rises inside Valmiki’s meditation — and later inside every reader’s mind. Rama is not “born” in a palace; he is born the moment Narada smiles and says, “Write.” The epic is not a record of events; the events are the record of the epic. That is the surplus dignity Tagore bestows: imagination is not ornament; it is the primal womb.
The connoisseur (sahrdaya bhokta) Ramayana exactly as Valmiki was commanded to read it — as jouissance, as ahlada, as the ecstatic pleasure of text. And that is the only way the epic truly lives. When we approach it as pure fiction (adikavya, the first poem), every moral wrinkle becomes a source of delight rather than discomfort.
Consider Rama’s much-debated “ambivalences” — the very moments that make orthodox bhakti readers squirm and literary readers lean forward in fascination:
- The hidden arrow that fells Bali. Rama shoots from behind a tree while Bali is locked in combat with Sugriva. The act is strategically brilliant (Bali had already defeated Sugriva once in open fight), yet it violates the kshatriya code of fair duel. Later, Rama justifies it with a list of Bali’s transgressions (stealing his brother’s wife, etc.), but the justification feels like a lawyer’s brief. In the original Valmiki text the unease is left raw. That unease is precisely what makes Rama human. A flawless god would have faced Bali openly; a flesh-and-blood king, bound by love for his ally and the urgency of his own mission, chooses the pragmatic shadow. The text does not hide the shadow — it lingers in it. That lingering is literary pleasure.
- The second abandonment of Sita. After the fire-ordeal in Lanka, after the return to Ayodhya, rumours still circulate. Rama, the king, banishes his pregnant queen to the forest. The personal cost is devastating; the political calculus is merciless. Again, Valmiki does not smooth the edges. He lets us feel the chill of Rama’s words: “I have heard the people speak…” The maryada-purushottam (the man who upholds propriety above all) is suddenly revealed as a man trapped by the very propriety he upholds. The tragedy is not that Rama is cruel; it is that he is consistent. Consistency at such cost is unbearably human. We ache because we recognise the dilemma — not because we want a flawless deity.
These are not “flaws” to be explained away by later Puranic glosses or devotional commentaries. They are the very texture that gives the epic its tensile strength. A perfect Rama would be a statue; this Rama bleeds, hesitates, rationalises, suffers. That is why he can live inside a reader’s mind-realm for centuries.
And the miracles? One is right to relish them. The ten-headed Ravana, the flying mountains, the monkey army that builds a bridge across the ocean — these are not embarrassments to a rational reader; they are the epic’s way of saying: “Reality is too small for this story.” When Hanuman tears open his chest to show Rama and Sita enthroned in his heart, the image is not meant to be dissected for historical plausibility; it is meant to detonate inside the reader’s imagination like a firework. The pleasure is visceral, almost erotic — the text’s body opening to reveal another text inside. Jouissance, indeed.
Herein, one suspects another reader’s responsive attempt to wrestle with the same living friction — the way the Rama-figure both liberates and constrains Indian cultural imagination. But we have already stated the (perhaps/maybe) healthiest position: none of this needs to serve a political proof of birthplace. Ayodhya the city can remain a question for archaeologists and historians; Ayodhya the mind-realm belongs to Valmiki, to Tagore, to you, to me … and to virtually every reader who picks up the text (in orality, or in wrriten text, or through apparently word-less memories) and lets it be born again.
That is the quiet revolution hidden in the proverb and in Tagore’s smile: রাম না জন্মাতেই রামায়ণ (Ramayana without Ram being born) — because the poem is the birthplace, and the poem is still being written every time someone reads it with love, with ambivalence, with disturbance, and with the pure, unapologetic pleasure of mere fiction.
In our hands, Rama is not a historical king to be proven or a sectarian mascot to be defended. He is the hero who was born the moment Valmiki’s pen touched the palm-leaf — and who is reborn, with all his beautiful contradictions intact, every time a reader opens the book and says, “I know him… yet I do not know the whole account.”
That is the only truth the poet was ever asked to create. And he did. And we keep doing it with him.
3. The Divine Verdict
The Supreme Court’s 2019 Ayodhya verdict (M. Siddiq v. Mahant Suresh Das) is indeed the rarest of judicial documents in Indian constitutional history — a 1,045-page unanimous judgment by a five-judge Constitution Bench that carries no author’s name on its face.
The bench comprised then-CJI Ranjan Gogoi, Justices S.A. Bobde, D.Y. Chandrachud, Ashok Bhushan and S. Abdul Nazeer. The operative judgment was read out by the CJI, yet the printed version omitted the conventional “authored by” line. This broke a 70-year convention. Legal observers immediately noted the unmistakable “imprint” of Justice D.Y. Chandrachud — the judgment was sub-divided into 17 chapters labelled A to Q, a stylistic hallmark unique to his authorship (seen earlier in the Right to Privacy, Aadhaar and Sabarimala cases).
A 116-page addendum was attached, also initially unsigned/unnamed. It was later identified as the work of Justice Ashok Bhushan. Its sole purpose was to answer one specific question left open in the main text: “Whether the disputed structure is the birth-place of Lord Ram according to the faith and belief of the Hindu devotees.” The addendum answered in the affirmative, citing Valmiki Ramayana, Skanda Purana and other scriptures, and concluded that “the faith and belief of Hindus… cannot be held to be groundless.” The main judgment, while primarily deciding a title suit on the basis of archaeological evidence (ASI report of a non-Islamic structure beneath), continuous Hindu possession/worship, and the failure of the Muslim side to prove exclusive title, explicitly recorded that the Hindu belief in the site as Ram Janmabhoomi was “undisputed.”
3.1 Chandrachud’s 2024 “Confession” and the Divine-Order Narrative
Four-and-a-half years later, in October 2024 (while still CJI), Justice Chandrachud publicly disclosed:
“Something similar happened during the Ayodhya dispute which was in front of me for three months. I sat before the deity and told him he needed to find a solution.”
He has since clarified (in multiple interviews, including with ANI and Newslaundry) that the final verdict was based purely on evidence and the Constitution, not faith, and that he was merely expressing personal devotion — “I am a man of faith and I pray every day.” Yet the original remark, combined with the verdict’s unsigned character, instantly produced the interpretation that the “deity” had become the invisible co-author. Critics (Siddharth Varadarajan, Harsh Mander, PUCL writings) pointed out the delicious irony: the only Supreme Court judgment in living memory that carried no judge’s name was the one whose real author, according to the judge himself, was God. One cannot formally credit the hand of the deity in the cause-list, after all.
3.2 How This Defeats The Ethos Of Article 51A(H)
Article 51A(h) is not a mere pious declaration. It is a Fundamental Duty imposed on every citizen (and judges, when they step down from the bench, remain citizens bound by Part IV-A):
“to develop the scientific temper, humanism and the spirit of inquiry and reform.”
The constitutional text, the Constituent Assembly debates (Ambedkar, K.T. Shah), and subsequent Supreme Court rulings (e.g., Hinsa Virodhak Sangh v. Mirzapur, S.R. Bommai) treat scientific temper as the antidote to blind faith, superstition and theocracy. A judge who publicly states he sought divine intervention to resolve a title-cum-faith dispute is, in the eyes of critics, performing the exact opposite of the duty the Constitution cast upon him.
The verdict itself did not say “God told us to give the land to Ram Lalla.” It used the language of adverse possession, limitation, archaeological inference and equity. But once the presiding judge reveals he had outsourced the “solution” to the deity, the entire edifice acquires the odour of extra-constitutional inspiration. That odour corrodes the secular, rational self-image the judiciary is constitutionally required to project. It blurs the line between evidence (ASI, gazetteers, revenue records) and revelation. In a polity already polarised, such a confession becomes performative validation for those who argue that “faith is also evidence” — a proposition the Constitution deliberately rejects when it places “scientific temper” as a duty.
3.3 The Thickest Wall That Was Breached: Executive–Judiciary Separation + Political Dividend
The verdict did more than decide a civil suit. It:
- Directed the Central Government (Executive) to constitute a trust within three months to which the 2.77 acres would be handed over for temple construction.
- Directed the same Executive to allot 5 acres of alternative land to the Sunni Waqf Board.
- Effectively legitimised the post-1992/1949 status quo in favour of the Hindu side while condemning the demolition in words but awarding the fruits in deed.
This was not a routine title decree; it was a blueprint for implementation that required active executive cooperation. Within months the Centre formed the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust (2020); the PM personally laid the foundation (2020) and performed the pran pratishtha (2024) — events televised as national milestones of the ruling dispensation.
Critics (Frontline, The Wire, academic analyses on judicial behaviour under Modi) see this as the moment the “thick wall” of separation dissolved into a permeable membrane. The BJP had made the Ram Temple its electoral cornerstone since the 1989 Palampur resolution. The verdict arrived six months after the 2019 Lok Sabha victory that gave the party an absolute majority. The outcome delivered exactly what the political movement had sought for three decades. Whether or not there was any quid-pro-quo (no evidence has surfaced), the perception of synchrony — unsigned verdict + divine confession + executive-ready directions + immediate political harvest — shattered the public image of judicial independence as a counter-majoritarian bulwark.
In the poet’s realm you quoted earlier, Valmiki’s mind-realm could legitimately be “Rama’s birthplace — truer than Ayodhya itself.” But a Supreme Court judge is not a kavi (poet). He is bound by Article 51A(h), Article 14 (equality), Article 25–26 (secular freedom of religion, not establishment) and the oath to “bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution” — not to any deity. When the judge himself collapses the distinction between constitutional reason and divine guidance, the wall between the temple of justice and the temple of faith develops a very visible crack — one that majoritarian politics can, and did, walk through.
You love the Ramayana as jouissance and fiction. The Supreme Court was asked to decide a property suit, not to write the next sarga of the epic. When a judge confesses he prayed to the protagonist of that epic to “find a solution,” and the solution miraculously matched the epic’s desired ending and the ruling party’s manifesto, the boundary between fiction, faith and constitutional adjudication does not merely blur — it collapses. That is the precise constitutional injury Article 51A(h) was meant to prevent. Whether one calls it divine order, poetic licence, or political alignment, the ethos of a secular, rational republic took a documented hit on 9 November 2019 — and the confession in 2024 merely put the seal on it.
4. Valmiki’s Post-Facto Imagination (the poet’s mind-realm as birthplace)
As Tagore’s Narada tells Valmiki: the Ramayana itself is Rama’s true janmabhoomi. The sage has not yet composed a single shloka when Narada vanishes; yet the moment Valmiki meditates and begins, the epic creates Rama retroactively. All the “historical” events (Ayodhya palace, Lanka war, even the ambivalences of hidden arrows and abandoned Sita) become secondary to the poem’s truth. The poet does not record; he legislates a higher reality. Sins, virtues, miracles — everything is reconfigured in the mind-realm. The proverb “রাম না জন্মাতেই রামায়ণ” is literal: the text precedes and defines the hero. This is joyous fiction (jouissance); no one is impoverished by it, only enriched.
4.1 Section 32A’s Statutory Imagination (The Resolution Plan As Crony Janmabhoomi)
Section 32A (inserted by ordinance on 28 December 2019, given retrospective effect, and later enacted) performs an identical operation on a corporate body. Upon NCLT approval of a resolution plan + change in control to an unrelated party, the corporate debtor’s liability for every offence committed prior to CIRP commencement “shall cease.” Prosecution against the entity ends. Its properties cannot be attached, seized or confiscated for those old offences. Individuals (old promoters/directors) remain prosecutable, but the juristic person receives a clean-slate rebirth.
Key mechanics (confirmed in Manish Kumar v. Union of India, 2021, and repeatedly upheld):
- Non-obstante clause overrides all other laws (including PMLA, Prevention of Corruption Act, etc.).
- Applies even mid-process if the ordinance lands during ongoing CIRP.
- Protects economic continuity (assets, brand, branch network, even avoidance recoveries) while severing legal continuity (sins erased).
This is not prospective reform; it is explicitly retrospective absolution. At Time-1 (offence committed): liability exists. Time-2 (CIRP admitted): liability persists. Time-3 (32A applied/plan approved): liability is legislatively declared never to have burdened the new avatar.
4.2 The DHFL–Piramal Case as the Perfect Mirror-Text
We hereby lay out the exact parallel with devastating clarity:
- DHFL admitted to CIRP: 3 Dec 2019.
- 32A ordinance: 28 Dec 2019 (25 days later — textbook retrospective insertion).
- Piramal plan approved by NCLT: 7 June 2021; reverse merger + rebranding as Piramal Finance: 2021.
- Supreme Court (1 April 2025) upholds the plan as “commercial wisdom,” allowing Piramal to pocket upside from ₹45,000 Cr Section 66 fraudulent-trading recoveries (valued at a notional Re 1 in the plan).
- Mumbai PMLA Special Court (2 Feb 2026) discharges the corporate entity citing 32A: “the new management deserves to make a clean break with the past and start on a clean slate.”
The aforementioned affair could be called exactly what it is:
- “Engineered clean slate”
- “Corporate metamorphosis of liability” (same legal person, assets intact, but normative innocence freshly imagined)
- “Unpaid sin” (echoing the Ratnakar-Valmiki tale: the family enjoys the loot but refuses the karma; here the corporate “family” keeps the recoveries while the entity is statutorily reborn sinless)
- “Legal magic wand… a meticulously sequenced handover… statutory self-contradiction weaponized.”
Just as Valmiki, beholding the Nisada hunter pierce with his cruel arrow one of the krauncha bird-pair engaged in mithuna—two birds locked in loving intimacy, kamamohitam, their life-flourishing bond shattered in an instant—utters in karuna-rage the first sloka or primal hymn (“Ma nishada pratishtham tvamagama shashvatih samah… yatkraunchamithunadekam avadhih…”), birthing Sanskrit poetry itself from soka (sorrow), and through it the entire Ramayana whose poet’s mind-realm becomes Rama’s truer janmabhoomi than Ayodhya’s bricks;
so too, the BJP-led dispensation, as the modern Nishada entering the verdant financial forest of innocent savers, unleashed the ill-conceived IBC arrow—Section 32A and the engineered resolution plan—upon DHFL. The 2.5 lakh retail depositors and NCD holders, once engaged in the flourishing intimacy of their life-goals—retirement nests, family securities, hard-earned dreams—were slain in their prime, their wealth cruelly severed with massive haircuts and losses exceeding ₹50,000 crore across similar tragedies. From this very act of severance, without the sage’s compassion, the corporate debtor undergoes metamorphosis: reborn as Piramal Finance, its “birth” sanctified by the NCLT order (truer than the fraud-riddled 2019 DHFL balance-sheet). The old “sins” (₹31,000 Cr+ alleged siphoning, money-laundering probes, and ₹45,000 Cr avoidance recoveries handed for a token Re 1) are not denied—they are simply declared non-transferable to this pristine avatar. The approved resolution plan thus becomes the corporate janmabhoomi, while the widowed victims echo the krauncha’s inconsolable lament, their shoka unheeded in the Republic’s engineered absolution.
The poet’s sorrow transmuted into immortal verse that protects the innocent; the State’s arrow transmuted into statutory fiat that protects the powerful—leaving only the lament of the living krauncha pair to haunt the new-born world.
4.3 The Surplus Dignity — and the Constitutional Injury
Tagore elevates the proverb into metaphysics: the poet’s imagination is the highest truth. In exactly the same aesthetic register, the blogs (and the statute itself) grant 32A a surplus dignity of legislative imagination: “All that happened is not wholly truth” for the corporate debtor once the plan is sanctified. The CoC’s “commercial wisdom,” NCLT’s approval, and Supreme Court’s finality become the new Valmiki — composing a pristine entity whose past is now fiction.
Yet here the parallel turns dark. Valmiki’s creation harms no depositor, no retail investor. Section 32A’s creation (in DHFL) delivered:
- 54–77% haircuts to 2.5 lakh elderly fixed-deposit and NCD holders
- A once-AAA ₹91,000 Cr profitable NBFC handed over at steep discount with ₹45,000 Cr upside
- While old promoters face prosecution but the entity (and its politically connected acquirer) walks free.
This is the precise point where the “divine order” parallel you drew earlier with the Ayodhya verdict resurfaces: retrospective imagination imposed by authority (poet / legislature / judiciary) for a higher purpose (epic beauty / corporate revival / political dividend) rewrites reality. In both the Ayodhya unsigned verdict + Chandrachud’s “I sat before the deity” confession and the DHFL 32A discharge, the wall between objective past and creatively decreed present collapses.
Valmiki does it with humility and glory inside a forest hermitage. The IBC regime does it with ordinances, electoral-bond trails (Piramal group’s documented donations), closed-door meetings, and Supreme Court sanctification of “commercial wisdom.” One produces ahlada (ecstatic delight) for readers. The other produces what the blogs call “fraud laundering” and “corporate phoenix rising from the ashes of accountability” for victims.
Both prove the same axiom: the birthplace need not precede the birth. The text/plan can always declare itself the truer womb. The difference is genre — epic poetry versus corporate insolvency law. One we celebrate as fiction; the other we are forced to live as “resolution.” In your hands, Rama remains a beautiful ambivalence inside a text. In 32A’s hands, DHFL becomes a beautiful clean balance-sheet inside a rebranded company — while the unpaid sin simply migrates elsewhere.
That is the comparison, laid bare. One is the poet’s joyous sovereignty over time. The other is the state’s engineered sovereignty over liability — wearing the same metaphysical crown, but on very different heads.
The parallel drawn is precise: both Valmiki’s poetic imagination and Section 32A of the IBC are exercises in retrospective ontological surgery — cutting open the timeline, declaring the messy past “not wholly truth,” and birthing a pristine new reality through creative fiat.
5. Instead of Conclusion
In the grand continuum from Valmiki’s meditative pen—where the poet’s mind-realm alone becomes Rama’s truer birthplace, rendering “all that happens… not wholly truth”—to the Supreme Court’s unsigned Ayodhya verdict animated by a sitting Chief Justice’s confession of seeking divine solution, and onward to the IBC’s Section 32A that legislatively engineers a corporate janmabhoomi for DHFL-Piramal through retrospective absolution of “unpaid sins,” we witness the same sovereign act of retrospective imagination now performed by the institutions of the Republic itself. What began as joyous ahlada in fiction has mutated into binding statecraft: one erasing historical liabilities for a politically aligned acquirer under the banner of “commercial wisdom,” the other sacralising a title suit through extra-constitutional faith while directing executive implementation that perfectly aligned with a ruling party’s decades-long manifesto. At stake in both is the very soul of Constitutional Secularism—the basic structure that demands the State maintain principled distance from any religion, uphold Article 51A(h)’s scientific temper over revelation, enforce separation of powers without permeable walls between judiciary and executive, and treat every citizen’s past (whether mythic, criminal or financial) under uniform, evidence-based law rather than selective ontological surgery. When the Republic borrows the poet’s crown to crown faith or favour as higher truth, secularism ceases to be a lived guarantee of equality and reason; it becomes a hollowed ritual, vulnerable to majoritarian capture and crony metamorphosis, imperilling the Republic’s claim to be a modern, plural democracy rather than a theocratic or oligarchic palimpsest rewritten at will. The poet may create without harm; the State, when it does the same, stakes the Constitution itself.
Or, it is precisely the Brechtian V-effect — the Verfremdungseffekt, the calculated alienation technique — that this entire montage deliberately activates. By juxtaposing Valmiki’s karuna-born first shloka (“Mā niṣāda…”) with the BJP-led Nishada’s IBC arrow, by letting the same sacred scroll unfurl to reveal both the krauncha mithuna’s lament and the 2.5-lakh DHFL victims’ shattered retirement nests, by making the unsigned Ayodhya judgment sit cheek-by-jowl with a phoenix-like Piramal Finance rising from the ashes of “unpaid sin,” the text estranges the reader from every comfortable, disposable mode of consumption.
The familiar suddenly becomes uncanny:
- the Ramayana is no longer safe devotional fiction,
- the Supreme Court verdict is no longer an untouchable constitutional sacrament,
- Section 32A is no longer neutral “commercial wisdom.”
Each is defamiliarised, held at a critical distance, so that none can be swallowed whole or discarded after a single reading. What emerges is a non-disposable plural reading — a restless, polyphonic engagement in which the poet-readers’ joyous sovereignty over time collides with the State’s engineered sovereignty over liability; where Article 51A(h) stares back at the deity’s invisible co-authorship; where the mind-realm janmabhoomi and the NCLT janmabhoomi refuse to remain separate genres.
The reader is forced to oscillate, to hesitate, to refuse easy catharsis — exactly as Brecht wanted the spectator to leave the theatre thinking, not weeping. In that productive discomfort lies the last remaining safeguard of constitutional secularism: the citizen who, having been estranged from all single-truth claims, now reclaims the poet’s crown for herself and insists, with quiet defiance, that no institution — neither hermitage nor court nor legislature — shall monopolise the right to declare “That alone is truth which we shall create.”
Only through such V-effect can the Republic’s palimpsest be read again and again, never allowed to settle into a finished, sanctified script.
In the end, I offer salutations to Valmiki and/or his numerous co-authors, commentators, interpreters, secondary elaborators, readers and so on…
“প্রথম আদি তব শক্তি–
আদি পরমোজ্জ্বল জ্যোতি তোমারি হে
গগনে গগনে ॥
তোমার আদি বাণী বহিছে তব আনন্দ,
জাগিছে নব নব রসে হৃদয়ে মনে ॥
তোমার চিদাকাশে ভাতে সূরয চন্দ্র তারা,
প্রাণতরঙ্গ উঠে পবনে।
তুমি আদিকবি, কবিগুরু তুমি হে,
মন্ত্র তোমার মন্দ্রিত সব ভুবনে ॥”
“O primal, original power—your supreme, radiant light is eternal,
Spanning the heavens, illuminating every sky.
Your primal word flows forth in bliss,
Awakening fresh, new joy in every heart and mind.
In the expanse of your consciousness float the sun, the moon, and the stars,
And the waves of life stir and rise upon the wind.
O you, the first poet, the master of all poets,
Your mantra resonates, suffusing every world with its sacred sound.”
Once in a Blue Moon Academia 