An Epic across Time and Space

THE SAGE VALMIKI IS SAID TO BE the author of the Ramayana but, in the text itself, the idea to write the epic poem is given to him by Narada on a visit to his hermitage. The latter provides a brief outline and Valmiki fleshes it out over 24,000 verses. He is therefore a poet-biographer but because no one has a copyright over the life of Rama, the story has never remained static. The very popularity of Valmiki’s Ramayana, evident from its veneration even now, is what leads to others feeling the need to write their versions of the story. Every literary enterprise approaches Rama according to its own emotions and perceptions. In Tamil, for example, the most popular Ramayana is the one written by Kamban, based on Valmiki’s work. This was sometime in the 12th century, but much before that the story was being alluded to in other literary works of the language. Tamil’s Sangam literature goes back more than 1,000 years before Kamban and an anthology Puranauru in it has a poem that alludes to Rama and Sita in a metaphor. It says: “It was like the time when a huge family of monkeys/their red mouths gaping open, shone in splendour as they scooped up/the beautiful ornaments fallen to the ground the day the mighty demon/snatched away Sita, the wife of Rama who has the ferocious power of destruction.”

Buddhism and Jainism both have Ramayana in their literary corpus infused with the qualities that these faiths propound. When the Bhakti movement began in Hinduism, Rama’s godly qualities became much more emphasised because the prism is now devout. Like the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. He lived in Varanasi in the 16th century and his conception is very different from Valmiki’s who thought of Rama as the perfect hu­man being. To Tulsidas, he is all god. Much of how Rama is perceived in the popular imagination today stems from Tulsidas. He also did something that contributed to this phenomenon. Even though well-versed in Sanskrit, he chose to write it in Awadhi and thus found a much broader audience than just his peers. The fruition of new vernacular languages, the ones we speak today in different states, added immensely to Rama becoming one of the most admired gods of the Hindu pantheon, but it also worked in the other direction. The Ramayana itself led to such languages becoming more fully formed. Take Malayalam, for instance. Thunchaththu Ezhuthachan is called the father of modern Malayalam and one of the reasons for the title is his translation of the Adhyatma Ramayana in the 16th or 17th century. Like Tulsidas, he composed his work in the language of the masses and his Ramayana remains one of the most popular literary works in Kerala. As Dr K Ayyappa Panikkar wrote in A Short History of Malayalam Literature, “With his absolute sincerity, his adept skill in the use of language, his total dedication to poetry and religion, his disarming humility, Ezhuthachan was able to create and establish once and for all a language, a literature, a culture and a people.”

Ramayana’s journey is over both time and space. Not just all of India, but much of Southeast Asia, like Thailand, Malayasia, In­donesia, etc, have a rich connection with it and their own narrative of the epic. And no matter where or when it was composed, there was always room for the writers to bring in sensitivities in keeping with that period or culture. They could do it in myriad ways. In his essay, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, AK Ramanujan mentions one such aspect: “Another point of differ­ence among Ramayanas is the intensity of focus on a major char­acter. Valmiki focuses on Rama and his history in his opening sections; Vimalasuri’s Jain Ramayana and the Thai epic focus not on Rama but on the genealogy and adventures of Ravana; the Kannada village telling focuses on Sita, her birth, her wedding, her trials. Some later exten­sions like the Adbhuta Ramayana and the Tamil story of Satakantharavana give Sita a heroic character: when the ten-headed Ravana is killed, another appears with a hundred heads; Rama cannot handle this new menace, so it is Sita who goes to war and slays the new demon.”

Malleability, the ability to be all things to all people at all times, while keeping its core eternal messages like good over evil, character over circumstance, etc, underpins the Rama­yana’s journey. It easily adapts as mediums change.

Ramayana began as an oral tradition. When writing was invented, the greatest writers and poets of every period in Indian history connected to the story and participated in it. Kalidasa’s Raghuvamsa, for instance, is a poem about the lineage of Rama written in the 5th century. When mass communication mediums of the modern world come calling like radio, movies, and television, the Ramayana again easily transmutes itself to be readily told through them. When cin­ema first entered India, the Ramayana was too complex and large a story to be made but in 1917, Dadasaheb Phalke, on his second project after making the first Indian feature film Raja Harishchandra, got around the issue by making Lanka Dahan, which took just one episode of the epic—Hanuman visiting the imprisoned Sita in Lanka and burning the place down as he returns.

With television, Ramayana flagged off a new era of Indian politics. The serial, aired in Doordarshan every Sunday beginning in 1987, was hypnotic in its impact with all of India glued at homes watching it. The power of television manifest­ed itself in a nation that was breaking out of a shell made of colonialism and poverty. The rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, from a party that was down to two members of Parliament, began almost simultaneously with the television serial’s airing. The Ram temple was the central plank of what would become Hindutva politics, but would the issue have had the same resonance if television hadn’t made the Ramayana a real vision? When Ram, played by Arun Govil, would come on the television screens, viewers would prostrate themselves as if they were in a temple before the deity. It was not entertain­ment as much as a religious ritual happening every Sunday in numerous homes.

And now, in the age of social media, the Ramayana’s imagery, hymns, and memes travel on WhatsApp posts and Instagram reels. Just on January 22, a digital creator took to X (formerly Twitter) and made a thread that started with, “The COMPLETE RAMAYANA by Maharishi Valmiki, In under 60 posts, Made with AI.” The pictures that followed of its titular characters and locations were imagined by a software programme. Even though the follower count of the digital creator was about 10,000, the number of people who viewed the post was 1.4 million. If it indicates anything, it is that as the artificial intelligence era begins, the Ramayana is set to find vehicles there too.

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