190 FOOTFALLS OF INDIAN HISTORY
The possible date of the Ramayana suggests itself at this point as a subject for examination and decision. For my own part, trying the question on grounds other than that of language, I would suggest that the first part of this work
was written before the Mahabharata was finally edited, and that it opens up a long vista of years
during which Ayodhya had already been the principal Indian capital. The hypothesis is thus that the Asokan capital of Pataliputra was succeeded by Ayodhya, and this again succeeded, under the Guptas by Pataliputra. I am assuming
that the Uttarakanda portion of the Ramayana was written later, according to what is said to be
the tradition of the islanders of Baly and Lombok, east of Java. The fact that a synopsis of the
Ramayana as it then stood is given in the Mahabharata, even as Kalidas's Kumara Sambhava is epitomised in the Ramayana, points possibly to some literary convention of an age when books
were necessarily few. One cannot help feeling that it is the political greatness of Ayodhya and
Pataliputra, each in its own period, that leads it to preach a new religion in the form of a definite incarnation of Vishnu—in the one case Rama, in the other Krishna. And if this be true, it lends an added interest to the fact that the worship of Sita-Rama has now its greatest following in the
Dravida-desh. We may take it perhaps as a law that a religion is likely to survive longest and with greatest power, not in the region of its birth.
