Goswami Tulsidas
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Sought shelter in mosque?
The Times of India, Jan 24 2016
Swati Mathur
`Tulsidas sought shelter in mosque'
Delhi University professor Harish Trivedi kicked up a row when he said the writer of Ramcharitmanas, Goswami Tulsidas, had sought shelter inside a mosque -possibly the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya -while writing the epic. Trivedi was speaking during a discussion on Ramcharitmanas with Philip Lutgendorf, professor of Hindi and modern Indian Studies at the University of Iowa, who has translated the text to English, and poet Ashok Vajpeyi, at the ongoing Jaipur Literature Festival. Titled `Ramcharitmanas: The Life of a Text', speakers Trivedi, Lutgendorf and Vajpeyi emphasised the need to cultivate the rich tradition of poetry and language of the Ramcharitmas, and to separate the political from the cultural.
Trivedi said, “Ram isn't just a religious concept. He can't belong to one group of people. What happened in 1992 was not Ram's fault. Someone else was responsible.Those of us who do not believe in that ideology bear the re sponsibility of not letting a group of people setting off with the rich poetic tradition of Ram of Ramcharitmanas.It is our responsibility to separate the political from the cultural.“
He also said it was “secular“ of the organisers of the festival to hold a discussion on Ramcharitmanas at a venue called `Mughal Tent' when in a sense Tulsidas had written the Ramcharitmanas under the Mughal tent too -during the reign of emperor Akbar. The first set of tweets about Trivedi's statement by author Rashmi Bansal led to outrage among the Twitterati. Debate and counters to Trivedi's comments followed.
