The Story That Would Not Stay Still

In one of the oldest tellings of the Ramayana that survives, Ravana is not a demon. He is a learned and noble king, a being of a high celestial order, devout and accomplished, brought down by his own flawed choices rather than by any inborn evil. And at the end of that telling, when the great enemy must fall, it is not Rama who kills him. Rama, in this version, does not kill at all. His brother Lakshmana strikes the final blow.

This is the Ramayana of the Jains, the Paumacariya attributed to Vimalasuri, and it is not a heresy or a corruption. It is one of the tradition’s own ancient tellings, written by people who loved the story and understood it differently. Set it beside a Buddhist version, the Dasaratha Jataka, where the relationships among the characters are rearranged so far that, in some tellings, Sita is cast as Rama’s sister, and beside Valmiki’s Sanskrit, and a simple fact becomes undeniable. There is no the Ramayana. There is a vast family of Ramayanas, and they do not agree.

This final chapter of the volume is about that plurality, and about the argument that it is the deepest truth of how the epics exist, rather than a problem to be solved.

Three hundred Ramayanas

The scholar who put this most memorably was A. K. Ramanujan, in an essay whose title has become a slogan: “Three Hundred Ramayanas.” He chose the number partly for effect, drawing on an older survey, and was the first to say it was rhetorical; the real count is uncountable. His argument was that the wrong way to picture the tradition is as one original, Valmiki’s, with everything else a derivative or a deviation. The right picture is a great common pool of tellings, into which each new poet dips and from which each draws a complete and self-sufficient work, shaped to a particular language, region, religion and age. There is no single tree with one trunk. There is a forest.

The essay would later become the centre of a public storm, removed from a Delhi University syllabus in 2011 after protests, three years after activists had vandalised the history department over it. The irony was sharp. An essay arguing that the tradition had always been plural and capacious was attacked in the name of a single authorized version that the tradition itself had never actually held.

The great vernacular retellings

Long before any modern controversy, the story had been retold by some of the greatest poets the subcontinent produced, and each retelling became a scripture for the people who spoke its language.

In Tamil, in roughly the twelfth century, Kamban composed the Iramavataram, a magnificent devotional poem in its own right rather than a translation of Valmiki, in which Rama is the Lord and the telling carries the whole texture of Tamil country and Tamil bhakti. In the sixteenth century, in the Awadhi speech of the Hindi heartland, Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas, begun by his own account in Ayodhya in 1574, and it became and remains the living Ramayana of north India, recited and enacted in the Ramlila every year by millions who have never read a line of Valmiki. The shorter guide What is the Ramayana? gives the core story. Tulsidas’s Rama is God without reservation, the poem an outpouring of devotion. Behind it stands the Sanskrit Adhyatma Ramayana, set inside a Purana, which reads the whole story as a philosophical allegory in which Rama is Brahman, the absolute itself. In Bengali there was Krittibas, in Telugu and Malayalam and Assamese and Oriya and Kannada still others. Each region met Rama in its own tongue, and each telling subtly remade him.

The epic that crossed the sea

The Ramayana did not stop at the edge of the subcontinent. It became one of the great cultural currents of Asia, and in each land it touched it put down roots and grew a local form.

In Thailand it became the Ramakien, the glory of Rama, woven so deeply into the kingship that the kings of the ruling dynasty take the name Rama, its definitive text composed under the first of them around the turn of the nineteenth century, its scenes danced in the masked khon theatre. In Java, in Old Javanese, the Kakawin Ramayana was composed more than a thousand years ago, drawn from a later Sanskrit poem rather than directly from Valmiki, and the story was already being carved onto the walls of the Prambanan temples around the year 900. In Cambodia it is the Reamker, in Laos the Phra Lak Phra Lam, named for Lakshmana and Rama, retold through a Buddhist sensibility. A poem the tradition calls the first poem became a possession of half a continent, told by people who were not Hindu at all.

The Mahabharata, also plural

The Mahabharata, vast as it already is, has lived the same branching life. It too was retold in the great vernaculars, by Sarala Dasa in Odia, by Pampa in Kannada centuries earlier, by Villiputtur in Tamil, by Kashiram Das in Bengali, each a substantial work, none a mere copy. The Sanskrit dramatist remembered as Bhasa built plays from its episodes that take unexpected sides, one of them mourning the dying Duryodhana, the villain, with something close to tenderness.

And the Mahabharata lives as much in cult and performance as on the page. In the Tamil country, as Alf Hiltebeitel documented across two volumes, there is a living tradition that worships Draupadi as a goddess, with firewalking and an all-night street theatre that performs the epic in the open air. Here the story is more than recited. It is walked through fire.

The living epic

In our own time the retelling has only accelerated. When Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan ran on Indian television in 1987 and 1988, the country is said to have come to a halt on Sunday mornings, streets emptying, sets garlanded as if the screen were a shrine. B. R. Chopra’s Mahabharat followed, opening each week with Time itself, Samay, as the narrator, and drew audiences in the hundreds of millions. On the other side of the world, the director Peter Brook staged a nine-hour Mahabharata with a cast drawn from many nations, first as theatre in 1985 and then as film, presenting the Indian epic as a story belonging to all of humanity. These are not departures from the tradition. They are the tradition doing what it has always done, telling the story again, in the newest available form, for a new set of listeners.

This is where the volume that began with the word itihasa, thus it was, comes to rest. The epics make their claim to be history, and the tradition holds them as true. But the form in which they are true is not the fixed form of a chronicle locked in a single text. It is the form of a story told and retold, in a hundred tongues and three religions and ten countries, across two and a half thousand years, changing as it goes and somehow remaining itself. The plurality is not the wearing-away of an original. It is the life of the thing.

The first poem was born from a single cry of grief on a riverbank.

It has not stopped being sung since, and it has never once been sung the same way twice.