śrī-rāma rāma rāmeti rame rāme mano-rame

sahasra-nāma-tat-tulyam rāma-nāma varānane

In our puranas and itihasas, we sometimes encounter the idea of sounds (or mantras) as defensive weapons, or at least forces for our protection. A powerful utterance from an accomplished rishi is enough to stop the designs of the meanest foe, human or demon.

Mantras are the source of our strength and, indeed, our strength itself. Even Rama, as a recent discourse on Sri Rama Navami noted, received from Vishwamitra Rishi timely mantras known as the Bala and Ati Bala Mantras to aid in his battle with the demons harassing the tranquil dwellers of the forest.

We rely on mantras like our life relies on breath. When in danger, we utter the names and glories of Hanuman. When in an academic setting, we chant the praises of Goddess Saraswati. When we witness the rising of the sun, we chant the Gayatri Mantra.

And this we do, despite changing fashions and contexts and technologies and trends, with reasonable respect for both the form and the substance of these sacred sounds which have been passed down from generation to generation long before media of preservation such as writing and recording were invented.

Mantras are the form of communication in which our culture lives, survives, thrives. As we write these words on Sri Rama Navami, all it takes is one thought to rejoice at what it all means. Rama! Rama! His name itself weighs as much as all the thousand names of Vishnu (as the saying above tells us)!

The simplicity, intensity, and the integrity of this tradition of the chant are important. But there is another cultural form which is a part of our traditions that we need to consider too, which has been a source of our strength, joy, and life despite challenges from the time of colonialism. This cultural form is the story.

We receive stories, retell stories, and even live in stories. For example, while we chant the mantras that will empower us in adoration with our Rama and Hanuman, we also take delight in listening to the stories of their lives, deeds, and adventures. This has been the case generation after generation, one new technology after another; from oral traditions and puppet-shows to cinema to TV to comics to animation. Our stories of the gods are as much a part of our lives as are the gods themselves.

But we should also be aware that there is a fundamental divide growing in our experience of, and understanding of, our sacred stories today.

Stories, in our cultural traditions, are about conveying aesthetic and ethical experiences and points (a “rasa-dharmic" framework, we might call it). Now, we may also have stories which do not always stick to these goals as priorities. As modernity seeps into Hindu life and imagination, it is inevitable that neither ethics nor aesthetics matter as much as, say, commerce or entertainment in storytelling. But this is still a mild problem compared to what is looming. Increasingly, we find new narratives being circulated about our traditional stories about our gods, which are designed to destroy our own sense of memory and cultural integrity. This is something we are not well equipped, or at least well-invested, in analysing, and countering. We need to understand the way stories have functioned as weapons in the colonisation of the world.

The use of stories to obtain control over populations is a key theme in Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Nexus. This book is an ambitious project which tries to trace the history of information networks and social control from the dawn of humanity to the present frontier of AI and globalisation.

Harari’s thesis is that evolution gave Homo Sapiens the ability to believe fictional stories and this enabled different tribes to co-operate and build societies, civilisations, empires, and finally, the great global enterprise we have today. But stories are not necessarily benign. “History," he writes, “is often shaped not by deterministic power relations, but rather by tragic mistakes that result from believing in mesmerising but harmful stories" (p. 31).

Harari discusses examples of such harmful stories ranging from ancient religious tales to medieval........

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