Faith tells us that Rāma is God, benevolent, gracious, all-powerful. Scholarship tells us that the story of his life as recorded in the earliest of the Rāmāyaṇa’s many forms was that of a mortal warrior, heroic, virtuous and mighty, but subject to human passions and frailties. The lecture will examine the growth of different understandings of some major figures in the Rāma story as portrayed in this exhibition, seeking to show that the approach of faith and the approach of scholarship are not mutually ex¬clusive but mutually dependent.
