The many versions of Ramayana need to be saved from our broken politics

Our politics has reached a point where re-imagining the epics will have to be subject to religious tests

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, at Davos, spoke of an India that is proud of the diversity that gives it strength. Us mere mortals, listening, might wonder if there was some small divergence between the prime minister’s words and the reality on the ground, in which movies based on legends and old books need to be cleared by a group of ex-“royals”, not to mention survive the veto of groups of marauding thugs.

Mr Modi will return from Davos to host, for Republic Day, the leaders of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. And here, again, we might endure some cognitive dissonance. For one of the events planned to coincide with this historic meeting is a performance of variants of the Ramayana from each of the Asean countries. Yes, you heard that correctly: Variants. In some of them, from Malaysia, Ravana is Sita’s father. In others, Hanuman has been written out, or marries an ocean princess, or is Rama’s son. Many are far more sympathetic to Ravana than the version, by Tulsidas, that is now being imposed upon the rest of India as the “only” appropriate narration of the epic. Some are written down, others are oral traditions, yet others serve as the basis of ballets or plays or shadow puppet theatre.

The question of whether the two great epics, which have great religious significance for millions, can also be subject to variation, and be the feed-stock of literary and narrative imagination, is contested to say the least. A few years ago, an A K Ramanujam essay that dealt with the multiple telling of the Ramayana was removed from the Delhi University history syllabus after protests. Our politics has reached a point, perhaps, where re-imagining the epics will have to be subject to religious tests. But this is clearly not how these epics have come down to us, and how living traditions and great writers have dealt with them.

In bookstores even today you will find multiple such attempts to revisit the epics, to retell the stories in them, to reinterpret characters and their motivations. The writer Samhita Arni and the patua artist Moyna Chitrakar a few years ago produced a graphic novel they called Sita’s Ramayana, in which Sita tells the story of her abduction, the war, and her banishment to the Dandaka forest. Devdutt Pattanaik has also written an illustrated version of a Sita-centric Ramayana, as well as one, targeted at younger readers, from the perspective of Hanuman (with Mithila-style illustrations from Nancy Raj). Of course, if you want something with a soundtrack, then the brilliant Nina Paley animated movie Sita Sings the Blues is available for you to stream on YouTube. And if you’re interested in getting multiple versions of the Sita story in one package, then you can’t do better than In Search of Sita, a collection of shorter pieces collated by Namita Gokhale and Malashri Lal. Nor is Sita the only queen who has been given voice recently: Aashish Kaul, a professor at SUNY-Albany, wrote The Queen’s Play from the point of view of Mandodari, Ravana’s wife. 

You might expect that popular fiction has largely been more “respectful” of the now-dominant version of the story. But even so, those alive and conscious in the mid-2000s will remember Ashok Banker’s multi-volume telling of the Ramayana, which was interestingly subversive in its own way — and perhaps kicked off the current taste for mythological bestsellers. Nor are all more recent bestsellers straightforward renditions of Tulsidas’ Ramayana: Consider for example Anand Neelakantan’s Asura, which centres the experience of Ravana and his people, and which became a surprise hit a few years ago. (Mr Neelakantan is so mainstream now that his latest book is a tie-in with the Baahubali movie series.)

It isn’t surprising that the Ramayana and the Mahabharata serve as a constant fount of inspiration for so many novelists, artists, and film-makers. They aren’t just irreplaceable parts of our mental landscape, but also smashing great stories, with innumerable different facets and multiple points of entry for the ingenious writer. Can you imagine what would be lost to us if the rising tide of fanaticism prevented such tellings and re-tellings from being invented, recounted, and embellished? Can you imagine how much of our soft power, our cultural capital, would be wiped out? It isn’t just Southeast Asia in which Ramayana stories are told, in fact: China, Mongolia, Tibet, and Japan have their own, Buddhist-inflected versions. As the Asean performances leave Delhi and go on a tour of India, thanks to ICCR — to Lucknow, Ahmedabad, Kolkata, Hyderabad, and even Ayodhya – I’ll leave you with the memory of another time when Hindutva was riding high, the Babri moment of the early 1990s. In 1992, partly to mark the 40th anniversary of India-Japan diplomatic engagement, the brilliant Japanese director Yugo Sako made an animated Ramayana which had a visual style that was halfway between anime and traditional Indian art, and which was produced using the talent of hundreds of Japanese artists. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad didn’t let it be released; they didn’t like the notion of divinities being “cartoons”. (Nobody tell them about Chhota Bheem.) We were deprived of a great movie then. Let us hope we are not deprived of great books in the future.