Saturday, November 18, 2017

The Indian epics - II

In certain versions of the Ramayana, Sita is Ravana’s daughter. She has a curse on her head that she would bring death to her father. Knowing about the curse, Ravana tries to get rid of her, and she ends up in a strange northern land where she marries Rama. An unsuspecting Ravana kidnaps Sita and ultimately gets killed by Rama. Here Rama, as the son-in-law of Ravana, can be seen as the substitute son.  Thus the story has shades of the Oedipus story in Greek mythology where the son kills the father.

Ramanujan says that folk versions of the epics often contemporise the action at various points, often raising a laugh. He gives one example from a folk play in Northern Karnataka. When Rama was exiled, the weeping people of Ayodhya followed him to the river bank where he bid them to return, ‘Brothers and sisters, please go home now. I’ll be back in fourteen years.’ When he returned after fourteen years, he found a small group of people standing at the same spot in tattered clothes, long and grey hair and beards and dirty uncut nails.

When he  asked them why they stood the way they did, they said that they were the eunuchs of Ayodhya. Rama had bid goodbye only to the men and women of Ayodhya by addressing them as brothers and sisters. ‘You didn’t bid us goodbye. So we stood here waiting for you.’ Rama was touched by their devotion and ashamed of his oversight. So he blessed them and gave them a boon, ‘O eunuchs of Ayodhya, I’m greatly touched by your devotion. May you be reborn as the next Congress party of India and rule the country!’

Another example of contemporisation of the Ramayana: Since the 18th century, the British had been a powerful presence in India and Ramanujan gives an example of how this fact got reflected in a folk narrative of an epic. In  village enactments of the Ramayana, suitors from all over the universe come to the function where Sita was going to choose her bridegroom. In a North Indian folk version, an Englishman with a  pith helmet, a solar topee, and a hunting rifle regularly appears as one of the suitors of Sita!

The oral traditions give a different picture of women from  that in the written texts. Ramanujan gives two examples. When the Tamburi Dasayyas of Mysore sing the Ramayana, the focus is on Sita's birth, marriage, exile etc.The Tamil story of Mayili Ravanan is set in a time when Rama has defeated the 10-headed Ravana. A 100-headed Ravana arises to threaten the gods and this time he is not able to win. It is Sita who goes to war and defeats the demon.

Ramanujan contrast the characters and moral tone of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The heroes of the Mahabharata are polyandrous, two of the brothers also have other wives while the hero of the Ramayana is strictly monogamous. In Mahabharata,  the characters are complex and each fails spectacularly in the very quality for which he is well-known. For eg., Arjuna, the greatest of warriors, loses his nerve at the first moment of war or the strong Bhima who can defeat Duryodana only by cheating. Ramanujan writes:
The values are ambiguous; no character is unmixed; every act is questionable, and therefore questioned. Not dharma, the good life of right conduct, but dharmasuksmata, or the subtle nature of dharma that mixes good and evil in every act, the impossible labyrinth of the moral life, is the central theme of the Mahabharata. So, the character of every person and the propriety of every major act is the subject of endless legal debate and moral scrutiny.
But in the Ramayana, personal integrity..., fidelity, is supreme. Like an existential hero, Rama picks his way toward his ideal, through accident, obstacle and temptation.  He is in fact, untemptable, cruel in his vow of chastity, admirable but unlovely in his literal insistence on what is just, even against faithful and obedient wife. As character is all, the Ramayana is full of suspicions and doubts - every character and virtue, even the chastity of Sita and the fidelity of Lakshmana, are tested in the crucible of doubt. The Mahabharata is replete with legal debates because dharma itself is subtle, the Ramayana is replete with doubts, tests and acts of truths because everything in dharma depends on character. 


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