Surfing news channels is an exercise one has begun to dread. But last weekend I was pleasantly surprised. There was a documentary playing on NDTV 24X7 which was making a point without resorting to shock and awe tactics or bombarding with high brow stuff. Called Anek Ramayan, it talks about many Ramayanas we have grown up with peacefully through a play enacted by the parents of a Delhi school. It initially looks a fun exercise on surface but gradually transcends into a serious discourse on diminishing plurality of thought from our society. Director Shikha Sen never gets didactic, the bane of many documentaries. It starts with Allama Iqbal’s poem on Ram where he says, “Hai Ram Ke Wajood Pe Hindustan Ko Naaz, Ahl-e-Nazar Samajhte Hain Unko Imam-e-Hind”.
Sen has used the e-mails exchanged between the parents to reflect the pressures of mounting a play and different versions of Ramayan they have grown up with. The language they use in these mails indicate the parents have a sense of humour and it keeps the mood light. On the frequent change of the parent playing Ram, Raavan comments, “Its fast becoming a case of Aya Ram Gaya (b) Ram”. The acting is amateurish but the scriptwriters have ensured that nobody – including the vanaras – is seen in a poor light and the detailing in costumes catches the eye. One decided to track Sen down, and discovered that she is a History graduate from JNU, an alumna of MCRC, Jamia Millia Islamia and has been editing documentaries for a long time.
Over to Sen: “In November 2007, some of the parents at a school in Delhi decided to enact a Ramleela for their children, where parents would script the play in good Hindi to set an example to the kids, who rarely spoke the language well. However, when the parents got together, they realised that the Ramayan they wanted to script was not one uni-dimensional story shared by everybody. There were some who thought Ram could not be shown as anything but as an ideal man, a god. There were others who wanted Ram to be brought out as a multifaceted character, as he is seen differently in different texts. There were arguments within the group about how he was to be portrayed, and the only way to negotiate different understandings of the epic was to portray the episodes faithfully from the texts, which is why the portrayals were faithful to different texts. It was also important to do this from older texts, so that variations were not imputed to a modern understanding of society. So while many authors came in as characters to talk about how they saw the epic, most of the episodes were taken wholly from Valmiki and Tulsidas, the two authors who are accepted as the main tellers of the story in the North and who are mistakenly regarded to be similar.” While Valmiki sees Ram as a mortal, Tulsidas portrays him as an avatar of Lord Vishnu. Interestingly, none of the two talk about the Lakshman Rekha episode. It has come from Krittibas, who wrote the Bangla version. Sen says only two 20th Century authors were used to script episodes. “One was Mythili Sharan Gupt who saw Kaikeyee in sympathetic light. The other was Amit Chaudhuri, whose short story we used to script the Shurpanakha episode.” However, the script writers have discussed a lot of versions from South India, Buddhist and South East Asian interpretations. So we have Kamban and Molla taking stage. Some Buddhist Jataka tales see Ram as a previous birth of Buddha and one of them indicate that Ram had already nine years of vanvas when Dashrath died.
The film has become all the more relevant in the light of removal of Ramanujan’s essay from the Delhi University’s MA syllabus. “Yes. In many ways the play is saying the same thing that Ramanujan’s essay brought out that the epic is a vibrant story teeming with wonderful differences right through our written history. The existence of different versions says that we are a diverse country and this diversity should be celebrated rather than denied.”
It shows the society is quite open about a dialogue. “Our society has for the last two decades been getting increasingly intolerant, whereas if you were to ask anybody who knows the Ramayan well, they would tell you about many variations that they have always lived with. And anyone who has not grown up on Tulsidas but has seen Ramanand Sagar’s tele serial also would be able to spot the differences between that telling and those that he or she has grown up on,” says Sen adding the film has been shown in many colleges in Delhi and in the US and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.
(A 40 minute version of Anek Ramayan will now be webcast on NDTV.com for a month at
>http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/documentary-24x7/anek-ramayan-a-film-by-shikha-sen/218125 )
