300 Ramayanas

A. K. Ramanujan remains one of South Asia’s finest exponents of the poetic form and literary criticism. In light of that, it is perhaps some redemption that he is not alive to see the kinds of degenerate and dangerous political challenges his work has to face today. The dominant Hindu orthodoxy in India, represented and supported by its communal and fundamentalist organisations, have wanted to sell the idea that the epic poem about Rama’s life, the Ramayana, is actually just one cohesive authentic story and any other version differing from it is blasphemous. They attempt to chart a clear lineage from what is arguably the oldest version, written by Valmiki in the fifth century B.C., to another version written a few centuries ago called the Rama Charita Manas by Tulsidas. Besides this narrowly bracketed narrative, all others are either silenced or forcibly discouraged by the mainstream Hindu conservatives.

As a result, it wasn’t surprising when the student wing of the foremost Hindu fundamentalist organisation in the country, decided to violently try and remove A. K. Ramanujan’s famous essay on the various ‘tellings’ of the Ram-katha, or Tales of Rama, from the University syllabus of the University of Delhi. This essay, titled 300 Ramayanas, describes using five instances of how the tales of Ram have travelled across the terrains of South Asia and South East Asia and gradually mutated according to changes in customs and literary imaginations. Ram has remained a central character, but instead of there being one seamless narrative, as is suggested by the word Ramayana, the scholarly work of Ramanujan informs us of the variations and deeper readings that are possible when one takes the multiple traditions around Rama’s stories. 

Murals depicting scenes from Ramayana in Thailand

Given the history of the tales itself, one can only be blind to believe that the narrative hasn’t transformed in more than two and a half thousand years, given that the primary nature of the dissemination of the tales was either oral or through performative arts like theatre or dance. Ramanujan himself leaves the question of the number of such ‘tellings’ open by saying they could be three hundred or even three thousand. An average estimate would put it to a thousand at least. But Ramanujan’s brilliance as a scholar lies in his ability to read between the lines in order to bring out the different social realities with which these stories of Rama were corresponding. He further goes on to show the use of Rama as not divine but a rather human warrior and the journey of that image through other religious texts and tales like those of Jainism or Buddhism. 

Sadly however, the undemocratic tendency in the University of Delhi as well as the original publishers, Oxford University Press, has prevailed in the face of severe protests in India and abroad. While students of Oxford University signed en masse against the removal of the essay and the discontinuation of publication along with several other scholars from various disciplines, the authorities have refused to give in. 

Ramanujan’s essay puts together one of most lucid studies of how stories have a life of their own as they are passed on over generations, from oral forms to written ones. Poetry, prose and drama have been used as forms of narrating the different tales of Rama and their continuing longevity in the face of attempts to pigeonhole their values provides a strong glimmer of hope for those curious minds which are willing to discern between the elaborate and the mediocre. For travellers in South and South East Asia, the tales of Rama would continue to be crucial markers of religious and social realities and it is within these tales of human and divine that a significantly more humane understanding of culture can be perceived.