The absurdity of Delhi University’s move to drop an essay on Ram from its syllabus
AK Ramanujam’s essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’ has a fascinating paragraph in it. Describing some of the later Ramayanas, Ramanujam refers to a scene of Sita wanting to accompany Ram when he is exiled. Ram refuses, but she is not so easily spurned. Ramanujam writes, ‘Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on.’ Ram is not convinced. Then, Sita pulls out the trump card. ‘She bursts out, “Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn’t go with Rama to the forest?” That clinches the argument, and she goes with him.’
Recently, Delhi University pulled out the essay from its history department’s syllabus. It did this after the Academic Council voted to drop it. The Academic Council decided to drop it despite three members of a four-member expert committee saying that the essay should continue in the syllabus. The Indian Express accessed the report and published the objection of the lone dissenting committee member. It had nothing to do with the essay’s accuracy. Instead, the man thought undergraduate students would not tolerate it. “If the teacher explains the background of these versions, students may be convinced. But I doubt if college teachers are well-equipped to handle the situation which, I forebear, is likely to become more difficult in the case of a non-Hindu teacher,” he noted. There are so many twisted values on exhibit in this one line: that only truths that are palatable are valid and the entirely communal idea that only Hindus have the ability to judge Hindu myths.
The essay itself is lucid and hardly requires any commentary. While tracing the development of the many Ramayanas, it is laudatory of a faith that can make such a myth so fertile that every imagination seeks to capture it as part of its own culture. The men who had a problem with Ramanujam’s essay were Hindu hardliners who unsurprisingly have no imagination. Sometime back, you saw Mumbai University removing a Rohinton Mistry novel from one of its syllabuses because a boy with a Thackeray surname muttered an objection. When the abiding lesson a student takes from his university is how to immediately bow down to a non-existent threat, is it any wonder that Indians learn to tolerate everything from genocide to magnificent pointless statues of elephants?
About The Author
Madhavankutty Pillai has no specialisations whatsoever. He is among the last of the generalists. And also Open chief of bureau, Mumbai
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