[Reader-list] Assault upon the Delhi University History

[inder salim]

Two Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation
A. K. Ramanujan
How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some
Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have
there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is
one.
One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When
it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared
into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet.
Rama said to Hanuman, "Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me."
Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power
to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing.
So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole.
He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld.
There were women down there. "Look, a tiny monkey! It's fallen from
above? Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thali ). The
King of Spirits (bhut ), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat
animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with
his vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, wondering what to do.
While this was going on in the netherworld, Rama sat on his throne on
the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him.
They said to Rama, "We want to talk privately with you. We don't want
anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?"
"All right," said Rama, "we'll talk."
Then they said, "Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are
talking, his head should be cut off."
"It will be done," said Rama.
Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman
had gone down to fetch the ring. Rama trusted no one more than
Laksmana,
________________________________________
― 23 ―
so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. "Don't allow anyone to
enter," he ordered.
Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Visvamitra appeared
and said, "I need to see Rama at once. It's urgent. Tell me, where is
Rama?"
Laksmana said, "Don't go in now. He is talking to some people. It's important."
"What is there that Rama would hide from me?" said Visvamitra. "I must
go in, right now."
Laksmana said, "I'11 have to ask his permission before I can let you in."
"Go in and ask then."
"I can't go in till Rama comes out. You'll have to wait."
"If you don't go in and announce my presence, I'll burn the entire
kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse," said Visvamitra.
Laksmana thought, "If I go in now, I'll die. But if I don't go, this
hotheaded man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things
living in it, will die. It's better that I alone should die."
So he went right in.
Rama asked him, "What's the matter?"
"Visvamitra is here."
"Send him in."
So Visvamitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end.
Brahma and Vasistha had come to see Rama and say to him, "Your work in
the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now
he given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods." That's
all they wanted to say.
Laksmana said to Rama, "Brother, you should cut off my head."
Rama said, "Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why
should I cut off your head?"
Laksmana said, "You can't do that. You can't let me off because I'm
your brother. There'll be a blot on Rama's name. You didn't spare your
wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave."
Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His
time was up too. He went directly to the river Sarayu and disappeared
in the flowing waters.
When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rama summoned all his followers,
Vibhisana, Sugriva, and others, and arranged for the coronation of his
twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama too entered the river Sarayu.
All this while, Hanuman was in the netherworld. When he was finally
taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama.
"Rama Rama Rama . . ."
Then the King of Spirits asked, "Who are you?"
"Hanuman."
"Hanuman? Why have you come here?"
________________________________________
― 24 ―
"Rama's ring fell into a hole. I've come to fetch it."
The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands
of rings. They were all Rama's rings. The king brought the platter to
Hanuman, set it down, and said, "Pick out your Rama's ring and take
it."
They were all exactly the same. "I don't know which one it is," said
Hanuman, shaking his head.
The King of Spirits said, "There have been as many Ramas as there are
rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find
Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of
Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep
them. Now you can go."
So Hanuman left.
This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there
is a Ramayana .[1] The number of Ramayanas and the range of their
influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five
hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in
which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese,
Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri,
Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit,
Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan―to say nothing of
Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have
hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone
contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various
narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas
or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays,
dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk
traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must
be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and
shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures.[2]
Camille Bulcke, a student of the Ramayana , counted three hundred
tellings.[3] It's no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth
century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata ,
because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning
under the burden of Ramayana poets ( tinikidanu phaniraya ramayanada
kavigala bharadali ). In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous
previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for
myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a
story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions
relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.
Valmiki and Kampan: Two Ahalyas
Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. I have
come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or
variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that
there is an invariant, an original or
________________________________________
― 25 ―
Ur -text―usually Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana , the earliest and most
prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always
Valmiki's narrative that is carried from one language to another.
It would be useful to make some distinctions before we begin. The
tradition itself distinguishes between the Rama story (ramakatha ) and
texts composed by a specific person―Valmiki, Kampan, or Krttivasa, for
example. Though many of the latter are popularly called Ramayanas
(like Kamparamayanam ), few texts actually bear the title Ramayana ;
they are given titles like Iramavataram (The Incarnation of Rama),
Ramcaritmanas (The Lake of the Acts of Rama), Ramakien (The Story of
Rama), and so on. Their relations to the Rama story as told by Valmiki
also vary. This traditional distinction between katha (story) and
kavya (poem) parallels the French one between sujet and recit , or the
English one between story and discourse.[4] It is also analogous to
the distinction between a sentence and a speech act. The story may be
the same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different.
Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the
style, details, tone, and texture―and therefore the import―may be
vastly different.
Here are two tellings of the "same" episode, which occur at the same
point in the sequence of the narrative. The first is from the first
book (Balakanda ) of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana ; the second from the
first canto (Palakantam ) of Kampan's Iramavataram in Tamil. Both
narrate the story of Ahalya.
The Ahalya Episode: Valmiki
To read more , please click:

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On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Ravikant <ravikant at sarai.net> wrote:
> This post of mine was rejected by the reader list as it had images of the
>  violence in DU.
>
>  Says Lawrence, incidentally for those interested, the entire book Many
>  Ramayanas is available online for free and a delightful read, and also the
>  follow up book, Questioning Ramayanas
>
>  http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3j49n8h7/
>
>  On many Ramayanas: (posted on 27 Feb, 2008)
>  by RAVIKANT
>
>  http://www.kafila.org/2008/02/27/on-many-ramayanas/
>
>  You may have seen the edit in today's HT condemning the act of vandalism and
>  the news of the arrest of three ABVP activists. You must have also seen
>  reports in today's newspapers about the demonstration yesterday in Delhi
>  University of students and teachers demanding punishment to the guilty and
>  reiterating the pledge that the text should not be expunged just because
>  ABVP/BJP finds it objectionable. For those who want to look up, the text in
>  question is A K Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three
>  Thoughts on Translation, also available in a volume edited by Paula Richman:
>  Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (OUP;
>  1991.)
>  You see the ABVP has been sitting on a dharna/hunger strike in DU over this
>  for something like three months. They have been trying to put pressure on the
>  department which is currently headed by Prof. SZH Jafry, quite clearly a soft
>  target. Dr. Upinder Singh's name was also dragged into the controversy to
>  kill two birds with one stone: The ABVP thought it would be able to embarass
>  the Prime Minister as well, as Dr. Singh happens to be his daughter. The PMO
>  was quick to deny having got anything to do with the DU controversy.
>  But beyond these bare facts, the most interesting story is that of media
>  involvement in the incident. After several rounds of meetings with the
>  delegates, the department was not convinced to withdraw the syllabus which
>  was duly passed by the academic bodies in charge of the syllabus making, etc.
>  So the ABVP decided to do something dramatic. About 10 days ago, Rajat Sharma
>  of India TV shame ― which I think lacks both resources and ideas and yet
>  wants to stay up in the ratings ― roped in Vinay Katiyar and others to debate
>  the issue on Prime Time. It was obvious that Katiyar Saheb had not read the
>  text and looked rather unwilling to comment. But Rajat Sharma kept
>  highlighting the text out of context and goading him to do something about
>  it. On which he assured that he would look into the matter. It is not a
>  surprise therefore that the ABVP activists insisted on waiting for the camera
>  crew to arrive before they staged action the day before and even less
>  surprising was the fact that once again it was India TV that played the
>  footage big time. By yesterday of course other TV channels swung into action
>  and now a diversity of voices seems to be emerging.
>  I want to end this with a personal anecdote. I used to be always intrigued by
>  my grandfather quoting or paraphrasing some reference or the other uttered by
>  some Gosain ji. He read, rather sang, Ramcharitmanas everyday after bath but
>  I could not imagine it is Goswami Tulsidas he meant each time he referred to
>  Gosain ji. My confusion also flowed from the fact that our village had a
>  small but respectable population of the Gosain sub-caste of Brahmins, who
>  earned their living by practising Ayurvedic medicine and assisting the
>  Brahmin priests at rituals. I also remember that Akhand Kirtan was held every
>  now and then in the village temple and groups took turns singing 'hare ram
>  hare ram ram ram ram hare hare, hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna
>  hare hare' so that recital chain remained unbroken for a few days. The
>  important thing to note is that the upper caste group had a rather classy and
>  genteel style of singing, but when the other caste people got into the
>  Mandap, it came alive with robust enthusiasm: bhakti seemed to have been
>  transformed into a certain charismatic euphoria. However, I do not have any
>  memories of upper castes either questioning, tutoring or forbidding the
>  non-upper castes to sing the way they did. All these memories came alive to
>  me recently when I listened to Chhannulal Mishra's recital of Sundarkand: the
>  classically trained Banaras artist rendered the Manas in 5 different ways
>  some of which was clearly regional and folksy. He also freely remixed the
>  Manas with local take-offs on the same theme. I wonder what the ABVP would
>  want to do to these obviously pre-Hindutva practices. I am sure they will go
>  mad if they read something like Maithili writer Harimohan Jha's Khattar Kaka.
>  Even if I want them to, I am in a way glad they don't read as much as they
>  should!
>
>
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