When I was a child I wanted to write a version of the Ramayana where Jatayu did not die. The death of a great bird who tries to save Sita when Ravana abducts her always left me devastated. I would try to will Jatayu to rise like the Phoenix. I wanted to write the Jatayu-ana.
I never did write that story: not because anyone told me I was not allowed to do it. I didn’t have the imagination to give Jatayu a new life. But I loved the Ramayana because it had bears, monkeys, squirrels and epic battles. To me Ram, Lakshman and Sita were less interesting. The real action lay elsewhere.
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Later I realised we all have our own Ramayanas because it belongs to all of us. We see our own stories reflected in its magic mirror. The scholar Rakhshanda Jalil told me once there are some 300 Urdu versions. The brilliant writer of Bengali nonsense Sukumar Ray wrote Lakshmaner Shaktishel, a spoof based on the Lanka-kanda chapter. There Hanuman, reluctant to travel to a far-off mountain to get a magic herb, suggests they try homeopathy first. There are even quips about undying faith in swadeshi medicine long before anyone thought of a ministry for AYUSH.
Bengali jatra folk theatre had a version, Bharat Bidaay, which reimagines the Ramayana as a story where Kaikeyi actually loves Ram more than her own son. But she is coerced by the sage Vishwamitra into sending him into exile because he needed Ram to fight the forces of evil. Chapal Bhaduri, one of the last great female impersonators of Bengali theatre, told me that role was such an emotional powerhouse, the playwright dedicated the script to him.
In America I met Sanjay Patel who grew up in California hearing his parents say ‘Siyaram’ whenever anyone sneezed. Hardly interested in Indian culture, he thought it was just desi gesundheit. Only later he realised they were saying ‘Sita Ram’. In the thrall of X-Men, G.I. Joe and ninjas, he understood much later he had superheroes in his own cultural backyard. By then he was a storyboard artist for Pixar and he turned his skills towards telling those stories he had once ignored. I still remember the thrill of stumbling upon his book Ramayana: Divine Loophole. The illustrations leapt off the page — Hanuman streaking across a sooty chocolate sky, his tail on fire, setting Ravana’s palace ablaze in a bonfire of orange and yellow. It was as if he had opened another portal into my grandmother’s Ramayana.
At a time when a film is yanked off Netflix because devotees are incensed at the suggestion that Ram might have eaten meat, the space for reinterpreting the Ramayana is shrinking. Some would argue that artists and writers need to understand that this is a sacred story for millions, not an artistic plaything for a few. M.F. Husain certainly felt that sting as did animation artist Nina Paley whose film Sita Sings the Blues told the story from a woman’s perspective as a ‘tale of truth, justice and a woman’s cry for equal treatment’. “Just Google ‘ban Sita sings the blues’ and you will see all the petitions out there,” she told me. Paley understood that what to her was a story was a sacred cow to others.
The cultural imprint of stories like the Ramayana run deep. She remembered a woman in Thiruvananthapuram who had grown up Christian but was always being told to be “more like Sita”. Yet when her husband suddenly left her in the U.S. and went into radio silence in India, Paley saw parallels in her own story and the Ramayana. That tells us that an epic written some 2,000 years ago can leap across time and cultures with the ease of Hanuman himself. And there is something profoundly inspiring about that. Very little in the western world, including the Bible, has that kind of cultural currency.
In that sense it’s amusing whenever a new Ramayana controversy arises, to see people wag their fingers and remind us that artists would not imagine taking such liberties with other religions such as Islam, Christianity and Judaism. But that was the strength of the great Hindu gods and their stories as told in our epics. They were apna stories, sacred yet down to earth. We could imagine their characters as our friends, families and neighbours, beloved and fallible, in fact more beloved because of their fallibility. When Chapal Bhaduri quivered with suppressed heartbreak as Kaikeyi, his eyes glistening with unshed tears, his audience, unperturbed by this unfamiliar twist in an old epic, wept with him.
They knew their Ramayana was not hurt in this retelling. There were many Ramayanas even though they told one story. That was always its greatness.
Sandip Roy is the author of Don’t Let Him Know, and likes to let everyone know about his opinions whether asked or not.
