The Epic Epiphany

One of the earliest memories about the capaciousness of Indian epics I have as a child was a ‘joke’ told by a Chakyar in a village deep inside Palakkad district in central Kerala. Chakyars, traditionally, are neither Namboodiris who perform rituals inside the temple nor a military, farming and artisanal class that includes Nairs and Ezhavas. Stuck between these vast enclosures of social segregation, they were a minority who came face to face with the impieties and hypocrisies of the priests above them in the social order and the cunning and brutalities of the peasants below in the varna system. Thus, they were uniquely placed to offer social, literary and religious critiques through their ‘chakyar koothu’, which literally means performances by a Chakyar. Ostensibly, what they performed were retellings of episodes from the Mahabharata, the Ramayana or the Srimad Bhagavatam: say, the preparations for the wedding of Draupadi or the travelogues of Hanuman as he scampered through the urban marvels of Ravan’s Lanka. The Chakyar on stage that day spoke about one of his ancestors who had been ordered to narrate the Ramayana—from ‘Balakanda’ to the ‘Uttarakanda’—within one year, failing which he would have to begin all over again. Filled with purpose and enthusiasm, this ancestral Chakyar went about his task with eagerness. Before long, a year had passed when both he and his patron realised that the narration hadn’t even reached the birth of Ram. And so, in order to fulfill the original stipulation, he began his narrative all over again. Innumerable narrations marked innumerable years, with each year’s narrative different from the previous iteration, but never did his storytelling get past the point of Ram’s birth.

Years later, I have often wondered about this atishyokti, this exaggerated logic of narrative meanderings possible within Indian epics. But to a child, this story smacked of transgression. Was one allowed to tell the Ramayana, without even speaking of Ram? What is one to make of the genealogies of God himself? In retrospect, what the world of chakyar koothu reveals is that within traditional expressions and critiques, there exists performative latitude to interrogate the epics. But not everybody could do this. Only those who studied the rules were afforded the space to interrogate and sidestep them. More fundamentally, what a chakyar koothu relied on in its narration is the construction of the individual—to create from the tumult of epics believable, flesh and blood characters aware of their contingent presences in the narratives. What both these aspects reveal is that the prodigious freedoms to extrapolate and wander must be earned through learning, but eventually even the learned must return to the canon. In critique and explorations, there must be purposefulness that doesn’t strain credibility. The great French poet Paul Valéry wrote: ‘One should be light like a bird, and not a feather.’

The Ramayana has offered authors, playwrights and dramatists this freedom to creatively wander over the course of Indian literary history more than any other, including the Mahabharata. In parts, this is because the Ramayana is the story of a man while the Mahabharata is the story of humans. Thus, like the River Ganga, the Ramayana’s origins are known, it travels through the Indian mental landscape as a marvel and a cure, it welcomes tributaries as long as they sublimate themselves in it, it collects refuse and excesses with little complaint and yet it is precisely in those very parts that it regenerates itself. Like the Ganga, the Ramayana begins as a slender stream, its narrative acquires girth and complexity in its middle and ends with an expansive grace. All this is unlike the Mahabharata, which is more like an ocean: to define its beginnings and ends are perilous endeavours. It evokes wonder and fear rather than compassion and tenderness. When asked where the ocean’s centre is, all answers are legitimate and all answers provisional. It is therefore little surprise that the Ramayana has seen great many more experimentations. But these digressions from the original telling have also precipitated anxieties among the authors, even if they have become popular over the centuries.

One such experiment is the Ascharyachoodamani, often translated as ‘The Wondrous Crest Jewel’, by the ninth-century playwright Shaktibhadra. It is, according to the great Sanskrit scholar Kuppuswami Sastri (1880-1943), the ‘best of the Rama-plays, perhaps barring Bhavabhuti’s Uttaramacharita in certain respects’. Despite these accolades that have trickled down across centuries, per tradition, the play was almost lost. Shaktibhadra had narrated the original version of to his contemporary, Adi Shankara. As luck would have it, it happened to be the day of Shankara’s vow of silence. Thus, after hearing Shaktibhadra narrate this play of seven parts—an abridged retelling of the Ramayana, packed with action, eros and devotion—Adi Shankara kept silent. As any author will attest, Shaktibhadra’s reaction was a familiar one. Struck by self-doubt and devastated at having made a fool of himself, especially in the presence of an eminence like Shankara, he did what authors have done for centuries. He destroyed the play, one palm-leaf at a time, by consigning it all to the fire. Months later, when Shankara returned from his travels, he met his friend and sought clarification about a particular verse fragment from the play. Thinking he was being mocked, Shaktibhadra demurred. To convince him about the earnestness of his request, Shankara narrated the entire play from memory. Relieved that his work wasn’t trivial, and not lost, Shaktibhadra transcribed his own words from Shankara’s narration.

Encoded inside this telling of, what we would now describe as, the ‘creative process’ is the little remarked parallel between the writing of the Ramayana (Valmiki needs Narada to remind him about Ram) and the birth of this Ram play (Shaktibhadra needs Shankara to remember his own creation). In both cases, an omniscient mind assuages the fear that strikes any author: the lack of appropriate inspiration, the prospect of failure to record a hard-won image, a turn of phrase or an alternative denouement. The true enemy of the epic poet is not the inappropriateness of metre or the entanglement of narrative threads within—it is the question of how to transmit it from one generation to another. Much like Milman Parry’s discoveries (‘the Darwin of Homeric scholarship’) in the Balkans that told us that Homer survived as an oral composition rather than as a textual one, with formulaic phrases set to metre, with meaning superseded by euphonic rhythms, the Ramayana too was an oral phenomenon. But unlike many other epics, the Ramayana periodically returns to perils of forgetfulness. Memory, or failing to remember, is one of the the epic’s favorite themes. We see this from the first line of the Ramayana when the author Valmiki beseeches Narada, who prefigures in much of Indian mythology as the repository of all memory, to tell him if there exists anybody who possesses extraordinary qualities. Narada replies: ‘I will tell you about such a man. I have heard about him.’ It is yet again not necessarily firsthand knowledge about Ram that matters but remembrances that birth the epic. (The Mahabharata’s first chapter, ‘Anukramanika’, is similarly a concatenation of memories.) What grants Narada’s remembrances credibility is the authority that he has accreted from his meditations; the very first word of the Ramayana is ‘tapah’—often described as austerities (by Bibek Debroy) or ardour (by Roberto Calasso)—which is used to describe Narada. The Ramayana we hear is a poet’s memory of Ram’s journeys, alone and in society, burdened by duty and freed by its very performance. André Gide, the great French writer, notes in his novel The Counterfeiters, ‘It is only after our death that we shall really be able to hear.’ The Ramayana is the story we hear after Ram has ceased to be.

Like the Ganga, the Ramayana begins as a slender stream, its narrative acquires girth and complexity in its middle and ends with an expansive grace. All this is unlike the Mahabharata, which is more like an ocean: to define its beginnings and ends are perilous endeavours. It is therefore little surprise that the Ramayana has seen great many more experimentations

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What is of trickier provenance is the memory of the Ramayana that takes shape in our lives in present-day India, which is an agglomeration of nations upon which a singular state has been grafted. This is in contrast to America which, as the historian Jill Lepore tells us, was a state first and then slowly discovered the vocabulary to become a nation. But beyond this dynamic between nations and state, in India there also exists a thread of continuity facilitated by collective memories drawn from memory and texts. The poet Vijay Seshadri opined recently, borrowing from a Hegelian end-of-history trope, that the Hindutva disposition of the present Government is a logical endpoint of the quest to make the Ramcharitmanas a national book. There is much truth in this view but it is also an incomplete reading. The Ramayana’s primacy in Indian imagination is not political—although so extraordinary has been the shadow cast by the Ram Janmabhoomi movement that one can hardly fault such a conclusion. To understand how the Ramayana has imbricated itself in our collective life, we must try to see how the text has been consumed and by whom.

For political Hinduism, and ironically, for its enemies, the Ramayana is entirely the story of Ram’s triumphant return. Ram, thus, becomes a vessel into which many reactionary tropes—the return, the reversion to an old order, the defeat of a tyrannical interloper—are poured into. For many devout Hindus, however, irrespective of any political shading, the Ramayana is the story of Ram ’s journey—from his improbable birth to his inevitable end in the river Sarayu. This literal reading of the text is, in many ways, natural given how the epic sets up its original premise. In the very first passage of the Ramayana is a series of questions posed by Valmiki which act like, what present-day mathematicians would call, a constrained optimisation problem. Questions like: ‘Who knows about dharma? Who is truthful in his words? Who has control over his own self and has conquered anger?’ Hearing this, Narada tries to ‘solve’ for a solution that fulfills all these boundary conditions. He admits: ‘The many qualities you [Valmiki] have recounted are extremely rare.’ But, he continues, there is one unique answer that satisfies these conditions: that man, born in the Ishwaku lineage, is called Ram. The epic thereafter is a vast poetic exercise to justify why Ram fulfils each of these conditions. Thus, by construction, if we are to deny that Ram is the answer to these questions it demands either the writing of another kind of Ramayana or to deny that the values pregnant in those questions are not the values worth striving for.

Over the history of the epic, there have been many variations that have ranged from the Dasharatha Jataka to Bhavabhuti to the Mapilla Ramayanam, which was last sung in the streets of Malabar by the mendicant Piraanthan Hassankutty (the Mad Hassan) in the 1920s. This has led many to argue that these variations efface or deny Ram’s primacy in the Ramayana cosmopolis that spans from Bali to Mongolia. For AK Ramanujan, these Ramayanas differ by ‘intensity of focus on a major character’. This, of course, is true. But listing out variations of the Ramayana, including local tales, often written in the late medieval or even early modern period, as evidence of many Ramayanas is to repeat the kind of literalism that he decries in other readings. It is precisely by making efforts to portray Ram as irrelevant to these tellings that points us to the centrality of this figure in the canon. By writing a play about Guildenstern and Rosencrantz (capricious friends of Hamlet), the playwright Tom Stoppard doesn’t supersede the primacy of Hamlet in the Shakespeare canon, but rather tells us that these plays derive their value solely because they bask in the reflected glories of the original. We don’t read MT Vasudevan Nair’s Randamoozham or Shivaji Sawant’s Mrityunjay of SL Bhyrappa’s Parva because they deny the primacy of Krishna in the Mahabharata but rather because they are modern day Upapuranas, minor Puranas written for our secular age.

The abiding relevance of the Ramayana to Indian society, and to the Indian mind, is however neither the impossible ideal of Ram himself nor the variations dreamt up by authors over centuries. It lies in the innumerable idealised social relations that abound in the Ramayana—between father and son or husband and wife, fraternal betrayals or loyalties, the tyrant and his victim and so on. This importance of the Ramayana as a template for social bonds is what is often missed in the textual discussions that preoccupy scholars. In the demotic, the result is an identification with not just the characters of the epic but the possibilities of transposing one’s relationships into the epic’s narrative curlicues. The very same person who is praised for loyalty to his brother, like Lakshman is to Ram, could very well be loathed for lusting after another’s wife like Ravan. It is this ‘customisation’ inherent in the Ramayana that makes it the perennial fount of descriptions and identification. Also, perhaps most instructively, the Indian mind which sees itself as an individual who is beholden to the circumstances and social responsibilities she finds herself in begins to recognise the matrix of commitments Ram found himself in.

With the arrival of modernity, as traditional social relations began to break down, the Ramayana offered itself up as a manual of how orderliness as a supervening principle can return after a period of chaos. But this orderliness, the appropriateness of conduct that Ram embodies, is not because he is the embodiment of Vishnu, an avatar of God itself, but precisely because he is human. In fact, Ram’s relation to Vishnu is unknown to all or largely irrelevant for much of the epic. Even outside the Ramayana, when Yudhishthira in the Mahabharata’s ‘Ramopakhyana’ section asks the sage Markandeya if there is another who has suffered as much as him in exile, it is the story of Ram that is narrated. But, not Ram the God, but Ram the human who is pained, angered and even makes ethically questionable choices that include the assassination of Bali to keep his promise to a tactical ally. While for a great philosopher like Bimal Matilal, the invocation of dharma by Ram to justify this killing by deception is merely an enactment of ‘formalistic ethical principal devoid human interest’, the lessons Yudhishthira imbibes from it is more utilitarian. Make allies, make promises even if they are repugnant to you, bide your time and prepare for war. In the Ramayana, the ones who do recognise Ram as a god are his enemies. The old demon Marich, who conspires with Ravan to exploit Ram’s love for Sita, tries to dissuade the hegemon of Lanka by telling his overlord, ‘Ramo vigrahavan dharmah (Ram is dharma personified)’. But it is precisely by ignoring this avuncular advice that the epic can move forward.

The inability to recognise the truth of Ram’s nature is crucial. Forgetfulness and loss of memory about truth is continually important, not just as a plot device but as an omnipresent metaphor that makes the final revelation of Ram being Vishnu all the more extraordinary. Even Ram himself, despite many prompts by others, fails to recollect (or refuses to acknowledge) that he is an avatar of Vishnu. The Ramayana, then, is a story of two kinds of struggle.

One is within the text itself, where dharma wages war against the tyranny of disorder that threatens to undermine society. And two, in the Indian historical mind, the Ramayana is a mental clearing where we try to keep alive the moral intuitions of our ancestors’ struggles against the ever-encroaching forgetfulness imposed by time.

About The Author

Keerthik Sasidharan

Keerthik Sasidharan lives in New York and is the author of The Dharma Forest

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