One of the greatest of world epics, the most enduring and passionate of legends that Indians across generations have embraced, the Ramayana remains the most influential of classics in the world of letters ever. Believed to have been composed around 300 BC by Valmiki, there have been innumerable forms and shapes that the Ramayana has assumed since then that have added to its abiding charm, and contributed to its influence in organising ways of life and beliefs in the subcontinent. Thus, countless avatars of this epic, born and reborn through millenia, in protean shapes and innumerable languages have tapped the interpretative possibilities of its inexhaustible imagery and theme. B.Sandhya’s Ithihasathinte Ithalukal, along with an introduction by M.Leelavathi, is the latest in the numerous retellings of the Ramayana story.
Sandhya begins the book with a prefatory note that is both telling and touching in its simplicity, honesty and humility. She speaks of a lore that says there are a billion Ramayanas in this world. There are folk Ramayanas, Mappila Ramayanas and even anti-Ramayanas.
The understanding that the millions of imitations, interpretations and subversions only increase the lustre of the original served to alleviate her anxieties and helped her gather courage to put in her mite to reinvent the Ramayana story in twenty-first century Kerala.
Sandhya’s Ramayana places Bharata and his wife Mandavi as central to the story. In the character of Mandavi Sandhya seeks an epitome for the modern woman, intelligent, educated and accomplished, who can rule the world as well as or better than any man. In a free-wheeling interpretation of the Ramayana, Sandhya installs her heroine as the god mother of literacy and education in an ancient yet Pan Indian world. Mandavi fantasises of a world where each newborn child would begin its training in arts, music and the sciences, irrespective of caste, class or gender. The ancient University of Takshashila is Mandavi’s dream according to Sandhya and the book ends with its consecration to the whole world. The epiphany the book offers is that the eternal light that animates all knowledge and art in Takshashila is the absent Sita, the feminine principle that illuminates and guides the world, without which there can neither be serenity, nor joy nor wisdom.
This book has attractions and charms of its own. It offers a feminist, Dalit and ecological critique of the Ramayana . Sandhya is both overtly and covertly critical of Rama for aiding and abetting the institutionalisation of Brahmanical traditions. She uses the prisms of gender, caste and race to destabilise many entrenched readings of the Ramayana stories. She attempts a scathing satire of the socio-cultural paradigms and dominant practices of the times. For example the ritualistic yajnas of kings and sages fill the forest with pollution and fires according to her. The Rakshasas are in truth the original keepers of the forest and protect it from the trespassing tendencies of the rishis and Kings. Through the sharp analytical skills of Mandavi she questions the logic of denying the Vedas to women and the so called lower castes. While some of these subversive readings are all too familiar to us by now and cannot lay claims to originality, the author does take pains to offer a subaltern rendering of the Ramayana .
The cover page does however evoke nostalgic memories of the Amar Chithra Katha childhood days of many readers. But then the tale is always in its telling and not in the tale itself. And it is in the telling of the tale that Sandhya flounders. The overly Sanskritised language and over stylisation add a false ring to the rendering that could have been avoided. Thus, ironically enough, the thematic brilliance of making marginalised subjects speak the Ramayana does not attain its aesthetic fulfilment by remaining mired in a high flown and stilted language. However in this month when many households across Kerala resound with the Ramayana , Sandhya successfully illustrates that there are as many Ramayanas as there are readers of it.
(A column on some of the best reads in Malayalam. The author is director, School of English and Foreign Languages, University of Kerala)
