Ontology of Jain authors: Ramayana
I
I am not sure what the discussions are about. Here are some of the problems that have surfaced.
1. Do (did) people in India believe that Ramayana is (was) a narration of ‘what really happened’? Even without specifying the ‘when’ and the ‘where’, the answer is obvious: some (did) do; some (did) do not; some are agnostic. The question, however, is: What is the question about? What problem is it meant to solve? Does the answer I give solve any problem? If it does not, that shows that this is not the issue at stake. So, what is the issue then?
2. Can we talk about truth in Fiction? (The example of Holmes.) Yes, we can and do so very regularly, not only in common parlance but also in literary studies. However, the issues are: how should we understand this way of talking (there is controversy about it) and why is this relevant to Ramayana?
3. Did some Indians begin a discussion about the existence of Ramasethu and the temple of Rama in Ayodhya (of today) only relatively recently? Yes, I think so. I do not know of any discussion that occurred on this issue, say, a thousand years ago. Again, what is the problem?
4. Did Indians have no notion of the ‘truth of Ramayana’ before their contact with non-heathen cultures? This is an ill-formed question, as far as I am concerned, because it is unclear what counts as an answer. Equally, it is unclear what the question is about: (a) is it about the Indian notions of ‘truth’? (b) is it about the ‘truth’ of historiography? (c) Is it about the relation between ‘belief about the truth of historiography’ and the ‘truth of historiography’ independent of people’s beliefs about its truth?
These are merely some of the questions that have surfaced. May I request that we resume the threads with clear problem statements so that we can make some headway?
II
You say that the Jain rewriting of Ramayana shows that they were “trying to write a more “historically accurate” Ramayana, and that Indians even “back then” saw the Ramayana as history”. I do not quite see how these conclusions follow.
(a) Some Jain authors (the one you quote), quite obviously, did not agree with the ontology of Ramayana: they did not allow creatures (like Rakshasas and Vanaras) to populate their universe (of discourse) but chose, instead, to populate their universe only with human beings (and creatures like Indra). In conformity with this philosophical choice, they wrote more ‘plausible’ stories (plausible to those who shared this ontology) that were humanly realizable. Once such a choice is made, all claims about non-existing creatures (according to that ontology) become false and, in this sense, lies.
(b) From this, it does not follow either (i) that their stories were ‘historically more accurate’ or that (b) Ramayana is ‘seen as history’. Their stories are also made-up (according to other ontologies, for instance) and lies because of that.
(c) Such conclusions can follow if, and only if, a mere rewriting of some set of events and episodes just by calling an extant writing false guarantees that the rewriting is true. Or that a choice of some hybrid variety of common-sense ontology guarantees the truth of a text. Neither is the case.
(d) Therefore, the dissent of Jain authors allows us to merely note that they disagreed with the ontology of Valmiki Ramayana and that their claims about falsehoods in Valmiki are logically necessary in light of their ontology.
So, what is the debate about?
III
Just one more observation on your post. One of the debates in the Indian traditions is about the kind of creatures that exist in the world and about the reality of what exists. The Jains, for instance, disagreed that the “deva’s” of other traditions (with the properties they were supposed to possess) existed in this world or were real. (Their so-called ‘atheism’ is a result of this debate.) Consequently, when they call Valmiki Ramayana false, they are making claims about the logical falsehood. They did not, on the basis of some or another empirical enquiry, establish that Ravana was a vegetarian or that Rakshasas were human beings (in fact, in many parts of India, people believe that Ravana was both a Brahmin and a rakshasa at the same time) or that Rama was different from what Valmiki said he was. The same applies to Anjaneya: the claim of some or another author that he was a human being and was married does not either ‘prove’ or ‘disprove’ the claim of Valmiki.
Thus, if we want to use the Jain Ramayanas to claim that Indians were also doing ‘history’, we need to do more than show that they called Valmiki’s Ramayana false. They were speaking of logical (and thus contingent) falsehoods; they were not making contingent claims on the basis of empirical research. We need more logical acumen that what Romila Thapar displays, if we want to appeal to the Jain tradition which was far more logical than the set of intellectuals that the JNU has produced in the last 50 years or so.