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Ramayana vignettes: To each his own understanding, an epic tale!

The Ramayana is like Truth itself

It was the late polymath-journalist, H.Y. Sharada Prasad, who wrote that “Truth has many sides. The problem is not just that you don't know all sides of the Truth. The real problem is you don't know how many sides Truth has!"

The Ramayana is like Truth itself. There have been hundreds of renderings of the great epic and each of these contains verities, incontrovertible and irrefutable. The grand magic of this classic is also interwoven into the history and legends of not only India but Sri Lanka,Thailand, Malaysia,Cambodia, Indonesia, China (through the Jataka tales) and even Japan.

Indeed, it is on the official tourism website of the country with the largest Muslim population in the world, Indonesia, that the Ramayana ballet is highlighted as a major draw. What then could be the timeless and widespread charm and appeal of this simple Indian tale and its eponymous hero?

Valmiki, the first author, himself is not the foundational owner of the story. In fact, he starts the 24,000-verse-long poem with a tribute to the celestial bard, Narada, who narrated the Ramayana to him, in less than half an hour, going by the short and sweet first canto of the Sanskrit text. The story, in fact, ends there.

Yet, the masterpiece also begins there with Valmiki’s ceremonial bath in the river Tamasa, the killing of a mating crane by a fowler, the spontaneous curse by the sage upon the hunter, his subsequent remorse and grief over his own unnatural act of cursing (and not so much over the fowler’s natural act of hunting) and then flows the poem of piety.

Repeated reading of Valmiki’s magnum opus evokes new sentiments and thoughts, each individualistic and intensely personal. Thus, you can construct and deconstruct your own Ramayana. And each one’s would be as original as the original. And the original, as I said earlier, was not even the original!

In fact, in the Malayalam Ramayana of Ezhuthachan, Sita pleads with Rama to take her also to the forest saying “I have heard many versions of the Ramayana but in all of them, Raghuvara has not gone to the forest without Janaki “! Hearing this, Rama yields. Look at how much licence, the father of modern Malayalam has taken.

It is this novelty of meaning that you derive each time you dive into it, the layered text, the subtle sub-text, the perpetual pathos of a banished king who loses everything including his consort, the silent suffering of a woman who germinated from Mother Earth itself, the commingling of the Naras and Vanaras, exemplified by the ideal of Hanuman and the ultimate, hard-coded victory of good over evil that makes Ramayana timeless.

And no commentary on Rama’s story would be complete without Sita. “Sita is the name in India for everything that is good, pure and holy — everything that in woman we call womanly,” as Swami Vivekananda said.

That is why long after the elegy has been written for the Iliads and Odysseys of the world, the story of the scion of Ikshvaku thrives, for its germane theme, its multi-layered, cross-cultural meanings and integral humanism.

(S. Adikesavan is Chief General Manager of SBT)

( Source : deccan chronicle )
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