The Hindus (114 page)

On September 12, 2007, BBC headlines read, HINDU GROUPS OPPOSE CANAL PROJECT, and they told this story:

As the historian Romila Thapar pointed out, “All this uncertainty is quite apart from the question of the technical viability of building a bridge across a wide stretch of sea in the centuries BC.”
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There are also other issues here—ecological, economic, sociological, and practical. The Indian Supreme Court determined that the “bridge” was not man-made (or, presumably, monkey-made). West Bengal’s Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee argued that the
Ramayana
was “born in the imagination of poets,” but Nanditha Krishna, the director of the C. P. Ramaswami Anjar Foundation, countered that the
Ramayana
was not fiction. Advocates for the monkey bridge have cited, in evidence, NASA photos suggesting an underwater bridge (that is, a causeway) between India and Sri Lanka,
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yet another instance of our old friend the myth of the submerged continent.

Two days later the headline read, REPORT ON HINDU GOD RAM WITHDRAWN, and the BBC news ran this story:

But how are they to avoid touching the mythological bridge?

Another major issue here is the question of who has the right to say what the
Ramayana
is and is not. The arguments about this in many ways parallel those about what Hinduism is and is not. The question of when Sita ceases to be Sita is one that different people will answer in different ways. One of the qualities that allow great myths to survive over centuries, among very different cultures, is their ability to stand on their heads (indeed, to turn cartwheels), to invite complete reversals of the political stance taken by the interpretation of the basic plot.
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This is certainly true of the political uses of the
Ramayana,
which has been constantly retold in literature and performance throughout India, most famously in the version of Tulsidas in the sixteenth century, which to this day is performed in Varanasi during a festival that lasts for several weeks each winter. Repressive tellings of the myth use the mythological moment of Ram-raj (Rama’s reign), as an imagined India that is free of Muslims and Christians and any other Others, in the hope of restoring India to the Edenic moment of the
Ramayana.

But many subversive tellings cast Ravana and the ogres as the Good Guys (as some of them are, in some ways, even in Valmiki’s version) and Rama as the villain of the piece (as he certainly is not, in Valmiki’s version). Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), a Bengali poet who converted to Christianity, wrote a poem, “The Slaying of Meghanada” (1861), based on the Bengali
Ramayana
of the poet Krittibas, but Datta made Ravana the hero and Ravana’s son, Meghanada, the symbol of the Hindus oppressed by the British, whom Datta equated with Rama, the villain.
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Equally subversive was the
Ramayana
that Tamil separatists told in South India in the early twentieth century, casting Ravana as a noble Tamil king who was treacherously murdered by the forces of the evil Rama coming from the north. Both North and South Indians often identified Rama with the north and Ravana with the south, but the north demonized the “Dravidian” Ravana, the south the “Aryan” Rama, through the composition of explicit “counter epics.”
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In a Dalit telling, Sita, on behalf of the ogres, rebukes Rama for killing innocent people.
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The
Ramayana
monkeys were already mixed up in colonial history in ways that still resonate. In the nineteenth century some Hindus in North India made monkeys of the British, calling them “red monkeys,” and Orissan narratives still depict them as monkeys. Others say that Sita blessed the eighteen million monkeys who had helped Rama, promising them that they would be reborn as the English. A North Indian folktale tells us that two of the monkeys were rewarded with a “white island” in the far west (that is, England, replacing Lanka). From there, it was prophesied, their descendants would rule the world in the Kali Yuga, the dark age that is to end the world,
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a time when barbarians (i.e., the British) will invade India, the old political myth distilled from the many actual invasions of India by foreign powers. According to a story told in Maharashtra, when one of Ravana’s ogress wives befriended Sita, during her period of captivity in Ravana’s harem, Sita promised her that she would be rewarded by being reborn as Queen Victoria.
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One device used to accommodate multiple versions of a story is by reference to multiple eras of cosmic development. One Purana refers explicitly to this technique: “Because of the different eras, the birth of Ganesha is narrated in different ways.” On another occasion, the bard recites a story in which a sage forgives his enemies; the audience (built into the text) then interrupts, saying, “We heard it told differently. Let us tell you: the sage cursed them in anger. Explain this.” And the bard replies, “That is true, but it happened in another era. I will tell you.” And he narrates the second version of the story.
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Another Purana introduces a second variant of another story by remarking, “The Puranas tell it differently.”
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There has always been a Darwinian force that allows the survival of some tellings rather than others, determined in part by their quality (the ones that are well told and/or that strike a resonant note with the largest audience survive) and in part by their subsidies (the ones with the richest patrons survive). Money still talks (or tells stories), but mass media now can pervert that process; the tellings that survive are often the ones that are cast or broadcast into the most homes, greatly extending the circle of patrons.
Amar Chitra Katha
comic books have flooded the market with bowdlerized versions of many of the great Hindu classics, in a kind of Gresham’s law (bad money driving out good) that is not Darwinian at all but merely Adam Smithian, or capitalist.

Over the past few decades the growing scholarly awareness of the many different
Ramayanas
opened out all the different variants, only to have the door slammed shut by Bollywood and television and the comic books, so that most Hindus now know only one single
Ramayana.
The televising of the
Ramayana
(78 episodes, from January 1987 to July 1988) and
Mahabharata
(108 episodes, a holy number, from 1988 to 1990, on Sunday mornings) was a major factor leading to the destruction of Babur’s Mosque in 1992. So powerful were the objections to the proposal of Salman Khan, a Muslim (though with a Hindu mother), to play the role of Rama in a 2003 Bollywood production that the film was never made. On the other hand, though the televised
Mahabharata
was based largely on the
Amar Chitra Katha
comic book, the screenwriter was a leftist Muslim, Rahi Masuma Raza, and the opening credits were in English, Hindi, and Urdu—Urdu for a presumed Muslim audience. Lose one, win one—and the
Mahabharata
was always more diverse than the
Ramayana.

The Internet too has facilitated the mass circulation of stories that substitute for the storyteller’s art the power of mass identity politics. Salman Rushdie, in
Midnight’s Children,
imagined a private version of radio, a magic ether by which the children born at midnight on the day of India’s independence communicated. Now we have that in reality, the Web site, the chat room, the LISTSERV, the blog from outer space. A self-selecting small but vociferous group of disaffected Hindus have used this Indian ether to communicate with one another within what is perceived as a community. This accounts in large part for the proliferation of these groups and for the magnitude of the reaction to any incident, within just a few hours; it’s more fun than video games, and a lot more dangerous too. Another radio metaphor comes to mind, from two American films
^lo
in which a bomber pilot is instructed to
turn off his radio
as soon as he gets the command to bomb, so that he will not listen to false counterinstructions. It is this tendency to tune out all other messages that characterizes the blog mentality of the Hindu right.

The Hindu right objects strenuously, often by smashing bookstores and burning books, to versions of Hindu stories that it does not like, particularly of the
Ramayana,
more particularly to retellings of the
Ramayana
that probe the sensitive subject of Sita’s relationship with Lakshmana. Here is a version recorded from the tribal people known as the Rajnengi Pardhan at Patangarh, Mandla District, and published in 1950:

Lakshman then went down to the underworld, where he had many adventures. Here Lakshman, rather than Sita, calls for the fire ordeal to prove his chastity, and Rama’s jealousy is directed against him, rather than against Sita. The detail of the screaming child may have crept into the story from the traditions of suttee, in which the woman is
not
allowed to enter the fire if she has a child and is often said
not
to scream; here, where the genders are reversed, those tropes seem to be reversed too.

Right up until the present day, stories of this sort have been recorded and published. Then, in 2008, the Delhi University course on Ancient Indian Culture in the BA (honors) program assigned an essay entitled “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), who had taught for many years at the University of Chicago and in 1976 had received from the Indian government the honorary title of Padma Sri, one of India’s highest honors. Now Hindu organizations voiced objections to the content of some of the narratives Ramanujan had cited, said to be derogatory toward Hindu gods and goddesses:

The Lakshmana-Sita relationship was also the sore point in my egg-punctuated London lecture in 2003.

On February 25, 2008, a mob of more than a hundred people, organized by the All-India Students’ Council (ABVP), linked with the RSS, gathered outside the building of the School of Social Sciences at Delhi University. Eight or ten of them then went inside and ransacked the office of the head of the department of history, breaking the glass panes and damaging books and other objects in the office, as media and the police watched. The group threatened faculty members and warned them of dire consequences.
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The protesters also carried placards saying, in Hindi, “The university says there were three hundred versions of the Ramayana, not one”—indeed, indeed! In subsequent interviews, one of the protesters said: “These academics don’t understand that they are toying with our faith. They have this idea that it’s a written story, a literary text, so it doesn’t matter if you say there are 3000 versions of it.” Though he admitted the plurality of Hindu traditions, he proposed that “every deviant telling,” mostly tribal and Dalit, be erased.
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The bright side of this dark story is that other students organized massive counterprotests, and editorials strongly critical of the attempts to stifle free speech and diversity appeared in several leading papers.
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One columnist remarked that Ramanujan was “a scholar who did more for Indian culture than all of the ABVP put together,” and added: “The violence around this essay was disturbing, as was the complete obtuseness of people who attacked Ramanujan.”
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