Our thoughts can only be satiated with actions — reading in-depth, having conversations, and analysing the subject to get answers.
One such thought on dramatic, life-altering change in human behaviour stayed with Lakshmi Devnath, a storyteller, scholar, and chronicler of Indian art, music and philosophy. As a student of Sanskrit reading Valmiki Ramayana, she found herself intrigued by Kaikeyi and her unexpected demand to send Rama into exile, despite having deep affection towards him — one that wavers when Manthara manipulates her.
“What happened to cause her mind to change so diametrically?” It was a question that eventually found an answer in another ancient text, Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, when an editor of a reputed academic press suggested she explore Valmiki’s text through the lens of the Yoga Sutras. “Truth be told, I hadn’t considered this possibility previously and had actually surprised myself with this suggestion. Looking back, I can only say that I had manifested something that had been lying dormant in my subconscious for quite a while,” shares Lakshmi with CE.
Soon, she realised that Yoga Sutras is not just philosophy, but about mind management. “The verses provided several answers to the problems that I was facing in my personal life. And through that, I also got the answer to the questions I had been mulling over about Kaikeyi’s behaviour for a long time,” she says.
These answers form the foundation of the book Tale of Two Realities, which was launched on Thursday by Bharatanatyam exponent Padma Subrahmanyam and published by The Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram (KYM) as part of its Golden Jubilee Celebrations. It brings the Yoga Sutras into conversation with episodes from the Valmiki Ramayana to examine the ways in which the mind perceives, interprets, and responds to the world.
Lakshmi began working on the book in 2019. Across 23 chapters, the book looks at how emotions, temptations, and conditioning can influence perception and, in the process, cloud judgment. “When the thinking is clouded, you become biased, prejudiced,” Lakshmi believes.
One of the episodes that illustrates this is the story of Dasaratha shooting an arrow and killing the young rishi putra (hermit boy) Shravan Kumar, whom he believed was an elephant drinking water, whereas in reality he was filling a pot of water for his blind parents.
For Lakshmi, the incident is an example of how conditioning can alter perception. She explains how Dasaratha entered the forest with a specific purpose and mindset: to hunt. Faced with ambiguous sensory information, he interpreted what he heard according to what he expected to hear.
The idea is hardly confined to an ancient story. “Mankind has remained the same for aeons. There is no difference. Everything, as far as the mind is concerned, we are still plagued by our own complexes, superiority, inferiority complex, or whatever you term it,” Lakshmi notes.
This is also why she chose the Ramayana as the narrative framework; the epic’s timeless characters take readers through varied situations, often holding up a mirror to our thinking and gently nudging self-introspection. “The external world is a reflection of the inward, and vice versa,” she says. “Clarity only comes when the mind functions like a clear lens. Then you can see well.”
Around 25 commentaries on the Yoga Sutras and 10 on the Ramayana were consulted while working through the material. One of them included a little book by Rishi Patanjali, which she notes, “was a veritable tome of wisdom on mind-management.”
Talking of the research and the writing process, she says, “I learned so many things from the Ramayana, because I went through every shloka, and the Yoga Sutras in depth. I like the wisdom that is contained in these texts. I like the fact that the Yoga Sutras is not pertinent just to any one religion or one God, and that makes it relevant to the whole world.”
This intersection of two important ancient Indian texts acknowledges that even as the world changes, the mind with its insecurities, prejudices, desires, and fears remains remarkably familiar. Perhaps the first step towards understanding the mind is simply becoming aware of that thought before it takes hold. “I think it is the biggest takeaway. The journey to have your inner voices speak to you has to begin somewhere. And it could well begin here, reading this book,” concludes Lakshmi.