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6.1 Many Ramayanas: text and tradition
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En provenance du cours de The University of Melbourne
Contemporary India
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The Ramayan
This week we will discuss one of India's ancient epics - The Ramayana. Here you will not just be introduced to the text but the various Ramayana traditions, which include a wide range of performance traditions, be it in folk theatre, women's Ramayana songs or shadow puppetry. At the core of these traditions is the idea of morality or dharma, which continues to find resonance in contemporary India even though it was written around 500BC. Because there are innumerable interpretations of the Ramayana, often the sacred becomes the source of controversy. But these disagreements often reinforce the relevance of the epic in the daily lives of Indian society.
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Anthony D'CostaProfessor
School of Social and Political Sciences
Hi, welcome back.
My name is Ian Woolford and
I'm a lecturer in Hindi language at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia.
Today I'm going to talk about many Ramayanas,
the life of an ancient narrative in Modern India.
This lecture is about the Ramayana.
Broadly speaking, Ramayana tradition refers to many things.
A spectrum of texts, many of which are important in Hindu devotional traditions,
sacred texts, dramatic works, epic poetry.
The Ramayana tradition also refers to a wide range of performance traditions found
in South Asia all the way through Southeast Asia.
Shadow puppet traditions of South India and Indonesia, weeks
long Ramleela performances of Varanasi or women's Ramayana song traditions,
some examples of which you will encounter in this lecture.
The Ramayan is often considered alongside the Mahabarit
as one of the great examples of Sanscrit epic literature.
Here, you see a popular image of the sage, Valmiki.
Hailed as the Avikovi, the first poet,
the creator of Sanskrit poetic forms that shape not only Sanskrit poetry but
also the poetic structure in many of north India's vernacular languages.
The Sanskrit text of Valmiki's Ramayana has been dated to some point
between 500 BC and 100 BC.
The text includes information about its author.
Valmiki describes his early life as a thief, a criminal
who gained salvation by meditating on Rama, Rama the hero of the Ramayana Story.
He then writes the story of Ram, a great king and
a great warrior who's also considered an avatar.
An incarnation of the god Vishnu.
Valmiki details Rama's childhood in the city of Ayodhya.
His marriage to Sita, his banishment to the forest with Sita and
his brother Lakshman.
Sita's abduction by the demon King Ravan, and then Rama's rescue of
Sita with the help of his devotee Hanuman, divine chief of a monkey army.
And then Rama's return to rule Ayodhya and then further details
on dilemmas in just and moral ruling and the complications of family life.
This text says much about morality and
the way to achieve the Hindu concept of dharma.
Which can refer to the just or right way of living.
And one source of dharma is a category of text called Sruti,
which means hearing or listening.
The Vedas are an example of Sruti.
In certain traditions, this ancient body of Sanskrit verse is said to be of divine
origin, hence it's heard.
Valmiki's Ramayana belongs to a type of text called Smriti,
which means that which is remembered.
These are texts, like the Ramayana, composed after 500 BC in which dharma,
the correct way of living, is demonstrated through the description of virtuous
individuals such as Ram, the hero of the Ramayana tradition.
I work in north India with Hindi and various local language
traditions in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, so the textual version of
the Ramayana that I'm most familiar with is the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas.
Tulsi was a sixteenth century poet
who lived in the city of Arnaci in the present day state of Uttar Pradesh, and
he didn't write in Sanskrit, he wrote in the Awadhi language.
This is a vernacular language of North India, very much related to Hindi.
It's part of the spectrum of Hindi languages spoken in North India.
And Tulsidas's text is read, it is recited.
And it also forms the basis for many performance traditions in Varanasi and
in the surrounding region, indeed, around the world.
I've attended performances of the Ramcharitmanas in Trinidad, in Mauritius,
and in Fiji, each home to large Indian community populations.
Parts of Tulsidas' text mirror the Ramayana of Valmiki from
almost two millenia earlier.
The Tulsidas also leaves some parts out, he innovates others, and
his own astonishing, poetic style shines through.
There are many ramayanas.
There are versions in many of India's languages.
Tulsi and Valmiki are but two of India's many Ramayanas.
They are composed in two different languages, one in the ancient Sanskrit
language, the other in Awadhi, the language closely related to Hindi.
As many languages as there are in India,
there is many hundreds of times as many Ramayanas.
It's difficult to say how many languages there are in India.
The Indian constitution list 22 scheduled languages, but there are many,
many more spoken at local levels.
And the majority of India languages fall into one of two broad groups.
The Indo-Aryan language family to which Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati,
Punjabi belong, these are some of the most widely spoken languages in the world.
The ancient Sanskrit language is also an Indo-Aryan language, and
as you can see from this map the Indo-Aryan languages is generally spoken
on the north side of India.
Some of the main Dravidian languages, which are spoken in the southern part of
India, are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam.
And despite occasional appearances of shared vocabulary, the Dravidian languages
and the Indo-Aryan languages are from completely different language families.
Speakers of Indo-Aryan languages don't generally understand
Dravidian languages unless they've studied them.
And there are Ramayanas in each of these languages.
Each langauge region may have its own separate Ramayana traditions.
And these stories, they can vary based on language tradition, but they can also vary
based on other factors, some of which we'll look at in this lecture today.
Such as caste, such as gender.
People from different communities may interpret the Ramayana story
in different ways.
In terms of the academic study of the Ramayana.
These different perspectives, the perspectives from communities that have
maybe traditionally been marginalized, has sometimes caused controversy.
Earlier this year, in 2014, the publisher Penguin India faced some legal pressure
regarding Wendy Doniger's book The Hindus.
The subtitle of Wendy Doniger's book is An Alternative History of Hinduism.
She considers the centuries of contributions to
Hindu tradition made by marginalized and oppressed groups of people.
And the criticism made against the book can be boiled down to a single notion.
The notion that it offends the religious instabilities of some
Hindu readers to consider these perspectives.
Obviously this isn't a criticism shared by everyone in India, but
there are some people that have made this charge.
Most of the people that took offense are not necessarily readers of the book, but
rather heard about it second hand, often through social media.
So when faced with this legal challenge, Penguin India caved to pressure and
agreed to remove all copies from book stores and
to destroy the remaining copies, to pulp them.
The Organization that mounted the legal challenge,
the Shiksha Bachao Aandolan, the movement to save education.
Has targeted many other academic works on Hindu tradition including
AK Ramanujan's celebrated essay entitled Three Hundred Ramayanas.
This is a piece that examines the multifaceted Ramayana tradition and
suggests that the Ramanujan is not a single text but
rather a pool of signifiers,
a collection of units of great meaning, which can be drawn on at any time.
The pressure placed by this group regarding this essay,
resulted in the University of Delhi removing Ramanujan's essay from their
history syllabus.
Many felt this was a terrible decision.
A more charitable reading of the universities decision to remove the essay
would be this.
Might not the essay be confusing, they worried.
How could a student or even a teacher make sense of the multi-faceted Ramayanan
tradition if they're not first introduced to some sort of stable fixed text?
Some kind of frame of reference.
And I think this is a very interesting question.
It's a question I'd like to address in this lecture.
You'll be listening to four performances that offer four
different perspectives on the Ramayana.
When you hear them, you might consider this.
That for the performers themselves and also for
their audiences, these are not necessarily expressions of a multi-faceted tradition.
Rather each of these performances represents a central part of the Ramayana
tradition for those involved.
These debates over Ramayana scholarship made the news recently.
With the book pulpings and
also in July of 2014 when the Indian government appointed Y Sudershan Rao
as a Chairperson of the Indian Council of Historical Research, the ICHR.
Rao's appointment caused controversy in academic circles when it became clear that
he believed historians should look at milleni old text and traditions like
the Ramayana and attempt to prove their historical accuracy.
Rao believes that most academic work under Ramayana tradition has been governed by
modes of history and modes of archeology that he argues are Western imports.
So he said, Western schools of thought look at material evidence of history.
We can't produce material evidence for everything.
India is a continuing civilization, and to look for evidence would mean digging
right through the hearts of villages and displacing people.
And we only have to look at the people to figure out
the similarities in their lives, and the depictions in the Ramayana and
the Mahabharata to compare the lives of people today in villages.
To the lives of people in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The search for material evidence,
for historical proof of the events in the Ramayana, has wide implications.
For example, disputes at the city of Ayodhya, known as Ram Janmabhoomi,
or the birthplace of Ram, the hero of the Ramayana.
The disputes all center on questions of history and archaeology.
This is a picture of the now destroyed Babri Masjid,
a mosque built in the 16th century by the emperor Babri.
In recent decades some Hindus began to argue that Babri had destroyed a Hindu
temple to build this mosque.
They argue that this Hindu temple had been built right on Ram's birthplace.
Tensions at the site reached a peak in 1992,
when a group of Hindus arrived at the site, led by political leaders, and
the event turned chaotic and they tore the mosque down with their bare hands.
The dispute over this site is far from settled today.
Archeological evidence has revealed that there was likely
a temple at this site before the 16th century mosque was built.
But most distressing is the violence that has come out of this situation.
This dispute is linked to terrible communal violence between Hindus and
Muslims and Indi over the past few decades.
Ayodhya is also a political flash point.
The topic of a Hindu temple at Ram's birthplace is often raised at elections,
but Sudershan Rao,
the current chair of the Indian Council of Historical Research, says the evidence for
the historical truths in the Ramayana cannot be found by digging.
It can only be seen in comparison between today's village communities and
the Ramayana traditions.
To go digging there, he says, will be impossible.
That's exactly what I would like to do here in this lecture.
Let's do a bit more digging.
Let's make that comparison and see what evidence that we come up with.
So in this lecture, I'll present four Ramayana performances from a village
in North India, from a single village.
And consider Sudershan Rao's contention that the village is the place to look for
similarities between modern India and the Ramayana.
What we'll find when we look at these performances is not exactly a direct link
between today's village and ancient times, as Rao the chair of the Indian Council for
Historical Research argues.
Instead we'll see a tradition where the Ramayana is questioned and
reinterpreted based on many factors.
Gender and caste, for example.
So beginning in the next section we'll hear a womens wedding song from
North India, in which the performers refuse to fashion their family wedding
after the wedding of Ram and Sita, the hero and the heroine of the Ramayana.
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