Disclaimer: The views expressed in this post are entirely personal and are not intended to hurt any sentiments whatsoever.
The recent furor over the scraping of A K Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and three thoughts on translations by the Delhi University from its history syllabus raises an important concern over who should be considered as an absolute authority and which power bestows them the right to choose their favorite version as the official and disregarding others. The argument that religious texts such as Ramayana are meant to be consumed and not studied relegates God to be rather one dimensional and monotonous, and to be seen only as some purists wish everyone else to see.
My Ramayana is a rather harmless and straight forward narrative of a righteous man winning back his wife by fighting the antagonists in an equally righteous manner thereby setting a quintessential example of a man who led his life by the principles he believed in. It did not come from any of the three hundred Ramayanas that Ramanujan’s essay details, but from the cartoons by Bapu and exemplary portrayal of Lord Sri Rama character by NTR and other Telugu film icons, and with retellings from my parents and grandparents regularly on Sri Rama Navami, a festival which we celebrate yearly. For me, whether or not He was a God, would not take anything away from the virtuous life he lived and the values he stood for in adverse conditions.
I was really surprised when I read that Jains had a Rama of their own with conflicting values with that of Hindus, written by their scholar Vimalasuri (Paumacariya) and a Thai version of Ramayana or the Ramakriti, which does not end with Rama’s reunion with Sita but goes ahead to with Sita’s banishment, the birth of Lava and Kusa, their war with Rama, Sita’s descent into the earth, and the appearance of the gods to reunite Rama and Sita. I have not read any completely comprehensive telling of Ramayana from its inception to the denouement, to be certain of any version and critical of others, but the irony in the dismissal of the essay was that, it does not even take sides with any version of the epic, but presents the facts in the most objective manner. It neither eulogizes one Ramayana nor criticizes any of the other subsequent retellings; it is just an academic view of a passionate historian on the various available versions of the tale of the mythical Lord.
Guide Raju after completing his sentence for a forgery case passes through a village and rests there when he is unable to walk anymore. He is mistaken to be a holy sage and soon the villagers flock to him daily and ask for his advice, which Raju even with all his reluctance could not deny. When the village is struck by a famine, the villagers believe that Raju’s fast would bring the rains back. Though he could not see the sense in the argument, out of hope or to test their faith (which the reader is free to assume, since it is not explicit) Raju fasts .Towards the end, when he dies though we are left ambiguous about his death or the end of famine, the villagers believe him to be a holy man whose fast can bring back rains. This poignant tale by RK Narayan according to me explains the concept of divinity of simply its attribution. For all we can imagine, some two thousand years down the line, Gandhi can be taken for a God who fought thousands of Britishers without spilling a drop of blood.
Stepping into the modern times with the abundance of information stimulating more people towards carefully researched and newly obtained pragmatism, the divinity of God is being questioned more vociferously than ever and the recalcitrant purist would have to do better than just trying to merely suppress everything, which is never a solution in itself in the first place. The undeniable fact is that a ban can never stop any work from reaching enthusiasts who are looking for it and on the contrary it renders an enigmatic quality to the work fuelling the reader interest. What was just an essay in the history course of a university has now reached to lot more individuals than when it was taken away from the syllabus. If we consider this particular instance or any other work being banned elsewhere in the world, the motivations are mostly and invariably political and are carried out by people who are less knowledgeable than the authors or artistes they were trying to interdict.
Though, we have been setting uglier precedents with each ban (Rushdie, Hussein, Mistry, Ramanujan), the public interest these acts are getting should make a call to the perpetrators to become more knowledgeable themselves on the facts or the versions they are trying to endorse since only a learned man would be able to appreciate the efforts that go into another’s work and would be able to judge it rationally without an artificially imbibed or prejudiced hatred and to that wishfully optimistic view, I hope we would someday be able to subscribe.
The recent furor over the scraping of A K Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five examples and three thoughts on translations by the Delhi University from its history syllabus raises an important concern over who should be considered as an absolute authority and which power bestows them the right to choose their favorite version as the official and disregarding others. The argument that religious texts such as Ramayana are meant to be consumed and not studied relegates God to be rather one dimensional and monotonous, and to be seen only as some purists wish everyone else to see.
My Ramayana is a rather harmless and straight forward narrative of a righteous man winning back his wife by fighting the antagonists in an equally righteous manner thereby setting a quintessential example of a man who led his life by the principles he believed in. It did not come from any of the three hundred Ramayanas that Ramanujan’s essay details, but from the cartoons by Bapu and exemplary portrayal of Lord Sri Rama character by NTR and other Telugu film icons, and with retellings from my parents and grandparents regularly on Sri Rama Navami, a festival which we celebrate yearly. For me, whether or not He was a God, would not take anything away from the virtuous life he lived and the values he stood for in adverse conditions.
I was really surprised when I read that Jains had a Rama of their own with conflicting values with that of Hindus, written by their scholar Vimalasuri (Paumacariya) and a Thai version of Ramayana or the Ramakriti, which does not end with Rama’s reunion with Sita but goes ahead to with Sita’s banishment, the birth of Lava and Kusa, their war with Rama, Sita’s descent into the earth, and the appearance of the gods to reunite Rama and Sita. I have not read any completely comprehensive telling of Ramayana from its inception to the denouement, to be certain of any version and critical of others, but the irony in the dismissal of the essay was that, it does not even take sides with any version of the epic, but presents the facts in the most objective manner. It neither eulogizes one Ramayana nor criticizes any of the other subsequent retellings; it is just an academic view of a passionate historian on the various available versions of the tale of the mythical Lord.
Guide Raju after completing his sentence for a forgery case passes through a village and rests there when he is unable to walk anymore. He is mistaken to be a holy sage and soon the villagers flock to him daily and ask for his advice, which Raju even with all his reluctance could not deny. When the village is struck by a famine, the villagers believe that Raju’s fast would bring the rains back. Though he could not see the sense in the argument, out of hope or to test their faith (which the reader is free to assume, since it is not explicit) Raju fasts .Towards the end, when he dies though we are left ambiguous about his death or the end of famine, the villagers believe him to be a holy man whose fast can bring back rains. This poignant tale by RK Narayan according to me explains the concept of divinity of simply its attribution. For all we can imagine, some two thousand years down the line, Gandhi can be taken for a God who fought thousands of Britishers without spilling a drop of blood.
Stepping into the modern times with the abundance of information stimulating more people towards carefully researched and newly obtained pragmatism, the divinity of God is being questioned more vociferously than ever and the recalcitrant purist would have to do better than just trying to merely suppress everything, which is never a solution in itself in the first place. The undeniable fact is that a ban can never stop any work from reaching enthusiasts who are looking for it and on the contrary it renders an enigmatic quality to the work fuelling the reader interest. What was just an essay in the history course of a university has now reached to lot more individuals than when it was taken away from the syllabus. If we consider this particular instance or any other work being banned elsewhere in the world, the motivations are mostly and invariably political and are carried out by people who are less knowledgeable than the authors or artistes they were trying to interdict.
Though, we have been setting uglier precedents with each ban (Rushdie, Hussein, Mistry, Ramanujan), the public interest these acts are getting should make a call to the perpetrators to become more knowledgeable themselves on the facts or the versions they are trying to endorse since only a learned man would be able to appreciate the efforts that go into another’s work and would be able to judge it rationally without an artificially imbibed or prejudiced hatred and to that wishfully optimistic view, I hope we would someday be able to subscribe.
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