CHENNAI : Another Deepavali has gone by slightly wet and for some, dampened further by the regulation on the ‘vedis’. This one has been different for me as well sitting far away from home with neither the sound of the crackers from my childhood nor the first day show of the cinema of my adulthood but as I see the festival celebrated around me in the name of Ram, I sense the largest disconnect yet, because there seems to be a single story told to the western world while in fact each part of India celebrates Deepavali for different reasons.
Now, do not get me wrong, for I have nothing against the Ramayana as a story. It was in fact the first one I remember hearing from my father and favourite story-teller. I knew the epic by-heart at four, side stories and small characters included, and high-school memories suggest that I was summarising C Rajagopalachari’s textbook for my peers. But, growing up in the south meant Deepavali was not about Ram, and growing older having learnt the ‘danger of a single story’ meant Ram was only some people’s reason to celebrate Deepavali.
Just as there is no single Deepavali story is the fact that there are over a thousand Ramayanas, each another passed down from person to person orally. It’s survival, all of its versions, I think is meant to point to us that it is indeed a good story as its core, but it emerges with all this versions that it is not a simple good winning over the evil story, rather a complex philosophical quest on the repercussions of actions, love and faith — no, do not reduce the story to Ram-Ravan-Sita as you imbibe this for the story goes back generations before these characters came into being.
I don’t know many versions of Ramayana, just enough to go looking for more. But, what I have been doing to counter this romanticisation of Ram as the ideal man in popular retelling is immerse myself in narratives that do not. The first one I read was Anand Neelakantan’s Asura which, as the title makes clear, is the story of Ravana and then there was Sita by Devdutt Patnaik, which also, as made evident by the cover, is about the epic’s heroine.
But it is feminist retellings and speculative fiction on the Ramayana that I must confess I love the most. Breaking the Bow and The liberation of Sita are the two books that I would recommend, because they take down the ‘single story’ that is told as the Ramayana, while countering the erasure of the women’s stories even in them.
A line amongst others in Volga’s book The liberation of Sita that made me smile was one in which it states that Sita was well-versed in warfare to defeat Ravana and return to Rama, but the only reason she doesn’t is because Ram had requested that she give him the privilege of protecting her. I smiled in knowing that there is another person and probably more out there who have wondered like me since I was four why Sita waited that long for Ram to rescue her.
In the stories of Ahalya and Shoorpanaka are the resolutions to many more unanswered questions, and I insist you read these books if you have wondered about stories beyond the boundaries of telling. And just like there is no one Deepavali, and there is no one Ramayana, there is also the frequently forgotten woman’s narrative — these books show us that. They also leave us with another important question — From Sita to Jashoda, why do we valorise the ‘Ram’ that abandons his wife, and look past it, especially if it is done in the name of the state?