The author, an English professor and poet, linguist and grammarian chiefly, was initiated into the subject of his writing after reading historian Gangaram Samarat'sbook Aryavarta, where the Iliad is said to have overtones of the Ramayana and there is a possibility of strong links between the two. For driving his point home, he studied the origin of the Aryans and their various settlements in the world. He says that with Greece, we had ancient relations because our culture, civilisation and philosophy reached Greece through Turkey which in turn is connected to India via Iran and Iraq. Greeks came to India to study philosophy and literature and being the original Aryans, they had frequent interactions between the two.
In the book under review, the author has presented the 33 similarities between the Ramayana and the Iliad and said that the origin of Aryans was in Tibet at Meru in the Himalayas. The Aryans reached India to spread over America, Europe, Italy, Germany, England and Egypt which was civilised by the Aryans in the remote past. Egyptians take pride in being called Aryans and in belonging to the dynasty of Sun whom they worship. It is said that the original name of Egypt was Mishar which means a mixture of different cultures. The modern name of Egypt came down from King Ajapeth who was an Aryan from Sind. After his name, it was called Ajapet, which got distorted to Egypt over passage of time.
Comparing the Ramayana and the Iliad, the author quotes Arther Lely who wrote, ?The Iliad and the Ramayana have so much similarity that one is forced to conclude that the Iliad is composed after reading the Ramayana.?
The listing of similar events in both the Ramayana and the Iliad could but be merely coincidental but it did need some conscious effort to mould a historical event in the existing structure of an epic which Homer found in the Ramayana. Homer used his poetic genius, keeping the ?role model of the Indian epics in his mind and giving the world a beautiful legacy of his epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey.? He concedes that though the Iliad texture is that of the Ramayana, ?the colours are Homeric in all sense of the term.?
?M.G.
(N.P.Tindwani and Vallabhacharya Society, near S.M. Bridge, Jivraj Park, Ahmedabad-380051.)
