With Pitr Paksh going on and millions of people remembering their ancestors, I am reminded of North Indians of diverse religious backgrounds saying, “Hum Ram ke vanshaj hain,” meaning, ‘We are descendants of Rama’. This did not mean they had abandoned their respective religions. It was an assertion of Indian cultural belonging, transcending caste and creed. Indians seem to have three kinds of reactions to the Ramayana—faith, critique and political ploy, forgetting that beyond religion, it’s about culture. The epics are so entrenched in language, literature, visual and performing arts that we would be cultural orphans without their shared heritage.
The critique part has been dinned in our ears via English for decades. But long before that, Sita’s fate tortured even the most dedicated Ram-bhakts, including influential poets like Narayana Bhattadri of Kerala and the Telugu saint-composer Thyagaraja. It was the grain of sand in the story that chafed us down the ages and the biggest pearl it produced as the zeitgeist evolved was the Constitution of India, which enshrined equal rights and justice for women like never before.
The political part too has been analysed to shreds, but I submit that it’s coming from the Ramcharitmanas of Goswami Tulsidas. Not that it is poor Tulsi’s fault. Written at the height of Mughal rule, the Ramcharitmanas changed the history of religion forever in North India. Some Hindus in Kashi opposed Tulsi for daring to retell the epic in the speech of everyday people. Ironically, it was fellow poet Rahim or Abdur Rahim Khan-e-Khanan, then the Mughal governor of Kashi, who protected Tulsi’s spiritual and artistic freedom.
However, Tulsi’s Ram is a faultless figure in monochrome gold, unlike Valmiki’s humanly-textured hero. So, it strikes me that since everything has a socio-historic context, was Tulsi’s Ram the deeply internalised response of North Indian Hinduism to the monotheism of the invaders? The political attempts today to make Ram a warlike rallying point suggest such a possibility. It may be something to consider and consciously delink from our attachment to the Ramcharitmanas.
The Indian relationship with the Ramayana is so organic that we take it for granted. But what was so gripping about this epic across Asia—from Mongolia to Japan to Myanmar, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines and others—that they integrated it into their own culture and folklore? They even developed entire art forms for it, like the Wayang of Indonesia (shadow puppet-theatre on the Ramayana and Mahabharata) and the Ramakien dance-theatre of Thailand.
A mega Ramayana conference in Delhi was held by the Sahitya Akademi in 1975 and international research papers shared were enlightening and amazing. They attested to how the Ramayana is truly ‘the epic of Asia’, widely transcending religion and language. The evidence was overwhelming.
To cite a few instances from personal observation, Southeast Asians instantly recognised Hanuman as an action hero. Thai boxing has sequences of moves dedicated to Hanuman and great Ramakien actors are identified with Hanuman’s role.
The Philippines version of Sita’s agni pariksha displays its particular cultural melange, with Agni in a red dhoti bearing Sita in the Christian bride’s white wedding gown, denoting purity.
In the heart of Asia, I met the Uzbek national poet Muhammed Jon, who translated the Ramayana into Uzbek slokas. He recited a verse to me about the battlefield of Lanka bristling with swords. Why labour for years over the Ramayana? “To build Uzbek literature with a foundational Asian work,” he said. It was Qamar Rais, former head of the Indian Cultural Centre at Tashkent, who translated the Ramayana into its well-known Russian version.
In sum, Asia has a deep engagement with and active ownership of the Ramayana. But due to our colonially-ordered and Delhi-centric view of history, the epic, to us, remains an unsung element in Asia’s cultural bloodstream. Disadvantaged by India’s history books and dragged down by politics of various hues, the Ramayana lacks elegant Indian spokespersons. This is to the scorn and amazement of Asian countries that have created their own exquisite versions irrespective of being Buddhist, Christian or Muslim, and had no qualms naming a national airline ‘Garuda’ or decorating city centrums and international airports with gigantic sculptures of the ‘Parthasarathiyam’ and the ‘Samudra Manthan’.
Asians know the Ramayana came their way from the ancient seafarers of India’s Eastern shores, who sang to them of a beloved prince and his brothers born of a childless king’s sacrifice. That an imperious sage helped the princes win beautiful princesses, that a palace intrigue not only dispossessed the prince overnight but exiled him to the forest for 14 years, that his loyal bride and a devoted brother went with him; that his father died of grief; and of another brother’s selfless love and loyalty.
They told of a vengeful vamp, a lustful demon-king, an alluring golden deer and a shameful kidnap in disguise; that a brave old vulture died trying to save the princess. They sang of the prince’s distraught search through many lands, of demons destroyed, a noble vanara, a pact, a flying leap, a talisman ring, the burning of the proud island city where the princess was captive, the bridge of boulders, the battle, the victory, and the homecoming in the flying chariot.
In depth and range, the Ramayana is the ultimate Asian drama, with not a thing left out—kings, queens, humble folk, wicked people, staunch souls, supernatural beings, a fight against terrible odds and a heartbreaking love story. Is it any wonder that Asia’s peoples were entranced? To know the grander reality of the Ramayana is to transcend divisive paltriness. Will we vanshaj listen?
(Views are personal)
(shebaba09@gmail.com)
Renuka Narayanan