The Ramayana (2 page)

When Dasaratha decides to retire from worldly duties, he chooses Rama as his successor. This greatly dismays his second wife, who wants her own son to be king. Just as the coronation of Rama is about to begin, she asks her husband to redeem two boons he had once made to her at a weak moment in his life. She demands that Rama be banished from Ayodhya for fourteen years and her son be anointed king in his place.

Dasaratha is deeply distraught by this unreasonable demand. But he is unable to refuse her—to keep one’s vow is deemed one of the highest moral achievements in
The Ramayana
. Similarly, it is part of Rama’s virtue to be obedient to and unquestioning of his parents. He accepts his father’s decision and, accompanied by his wife, Sita, and half-brother Lakshmana, he abandons Ayodhya, much to the grief of its inhabitants.

Traveling through forests, Rama and his companions have many adventures. But none proves more dramatic than Rama’s encounter one day with a demoness called Soorpanaka. She falls in love with Rama and proposes marriage to him, and then concludes that Sita’s great beauty is to blame for his indifference to her. When she tries to attack Sita, Lakshmana mutilates her. Soopanaka flees to her brother Ravana, the all-powerful demon king of the island of Lanka, and tells him of the cruelty inflicted upon her.

The accounts of Sita’s beauty stir Ravana’s curiosity and desire. He arranges for a distraction that draws Rama and Lakshmana away from her hermitage. Then, dressed as a holy man, Ravana manages to enter Sita’s dwelling and kidnaps her.

Now begins Rama’s pursuit of Ravana, which leads him to unexpected friends and allies in a monkey kingdom. His most devout monkey ally, Hanuman, crosses the ocean to Lanka and alerts Sita that help is on the way. Hanuman also allows himself to be captured and produced in Ravana’s court. Ravana disregards his warning of impending doom at the hands of Rama and orders Hanuman’s tail to be set alight. But Hanuman escapes and, in the process, sets all of Lanka on fire. On his return, he helps Rama plan for the inevitable assault on Lanka, which comes after the monkey army builds a bridge over the ocean to the island.

After a long and bloody battle, Rama kills Ravana and his closest associates. But he suspects that Sita’s virtue has not survived her long confinement in Lanka and refuses to accept her. A distraught Sita undergoes a trial by fire in order to prove her chastity, and survives. A chastened Rama returns with her to Ayodhya to be crowned king. But doubts about Sita’s virtue haunt him and when he hears of rumors against her among the general public he banishes her from his kingdom. In exile she gives birth to two sons. Not long after this, she passes away, and a bereft and heartbroken Rama decides to join her in heaven.

 
This is the basic story on which many variations have been made through the centuries. It is not clear when it first came into being: bardic literature that has been orally transmitted cannot be precisely dated. Moreover, the story of Rama has proliferated bewilderingly across India and Southeast Asia. It exists in all major Indian languages, as well as Thai, Tibetan, Laotian, Malaysian, Chinese, Cambodian, and Javanese. In places as remote from India as Vietnam and Bali, it has been represented in countless textual and oral forms, sculpture, bas-reliefs, plays, dance-drama, and puppet plays.

Little is known about the poet Valmiki, who apparently wrote the first narrative in Sanskrit, probably around the beginning of the Christian era. Many Indians consider Valmiki’s
Ramayana
to be the standard version, and it is still presented as such in many translations into English. But its version of Rama’s story has been repeatedly challenged, repudiated, or simply ignored in multiple artistic forms that originate not so much from an ur-text as from what the Indian poet and critic A. K. Ramanujan called an “endemic pool of signifiers (like a gene pool).”
¹

Valmiki presented an idealized, if not beatified, image of Rama, establishing the basis for his popular reverence. Later versions present Rama as an incarnation of Lord Vishnu, the principal Hindu deity who helps preserve moral order in the world, giving epic literature a sacred dimension, and helping make
The Ramayana
part of the cult of Vishnu, one of the major cults of popular Hinduism. But many of these versions, reflecting as they do the social diversity of India, contradict one another, often self-consciously. In the version preferred by Jains, an Indian sect organized around the principles of asceticism, Ravana is a sympathetic character, and Rama and Sita end up as world-renouncing monk and nun, respectively. The devotional
rasik
tradition in North India focuses on the marriage of Rama and Sita and ignores most of the events before and after it. The nineteenth-century Anglicized Bengali writer Michael Madhusudan Dutt chose to exalt Ravana over Rama in a long narrative poem. Ravana remains one of the heroes of low-caste Dalits in Maharashtra.

The many
Ramayana
s also reflect the ideologies of their time: like most influential literature,
The Ramayana
has never been exempt from the struggles for political power. This became clearer after the eighth century A.D. as small kingdoms arose in India, and rulers sought legitimacy through association with the cult of Rama, the supposedly ideal king (the practice continues in Thailand, where nine kings in the previous two centuries have called themselves Rama). Even during the long centuries of Muslim rule over India, people used
The Ramayana
to project the view of their particular social group. The
Ramacharitamanas,
the work of a North Indian Brahmin called Tulsi Das, laments the decay of caste hierarchy and the rise of low-caste men to positions of influence: a state of affairs that for Tulsi stands in distinctive contrast to the situation in the kingdom of Rama where everyone knew his place.

Not surprisingly,
The Ramayana
has invited its share of politically motivated critics. The South Indian activist E. V. Ramasami saw it as a tool of North Indian upper-caste domination. In an essay in 1989, the distinguished Indian historian Romila Thapar claimed that the televised
Ramayana
was an attempt to create a pan-Indian version for the more homogeneous modern age—one that India’s ambitious and politically right-wing middle class could easily consume. In retrospect, Thapar seems to have been proved right: the television serial’s immense popularity set the stage for the violent Hindu nationalist campaigns, in which Rama appeared as Rambo, his delicate features and gentle smile replaced by a muscular mien and grimace, and
The Ramayana
itself became a central text in the nationalists’ attempt to weld Hinduism’s plural traditions into a monotheistic religion.

R. K. Narayan was most certainly exposed to a benign version of
The Ramayana
in his childhood. He would have first imbibed it through the classical tradition of Carnatic music, the calendar-art images and gemstone-set portraits of Rama and Sita that are commonly found in bourgeois South Indian homes, and the great literary classic in the Tamil language,
Kamba Ramayana
.

But it took him some decades to get around to writing his own version of
The Ramayana
. Born in 1906 into a rising, urban family of Tamil Brahmins, which sought to enter, with one foot planted in tradition, the colonial Indian world of jobs and careers, Narayan had, as a young man, a bolder ambition than anyone around him could have possessed. He wanted to be a “realistic fiction writer” at a time when realistic fiction writers in English were almost entirely unknown in India. It is partly why he was, as he relates in his memoir,
My Days
(1974), indifferent to the classical Tamil literature his uncle wanted him to read.

Not surprisingly, Narayan wrote his abridged version of
The Ramayana
and
The Mahabharata
only in the seventies, after having produced some of his finest fiction:
Swami and Friends
(1935),
The Financial Expert
(1952),
Waiting for the Mahatma
(1955),
The Guide
(1958), and
The Vendor of Sweets
(1967). “I was impelled,” he once said, “to retell the
Ramayana
and the
Mahabharata
because that was the great climate in which our culture developed. They are symbolic and philosophical. Even as mere stories they are so good. Marvellous. I couldn’t help writing them. It was part of the writer’s discipline.”
²

The writerly compulsion Narayan expresses through his choice of words—“impelled,” “couldn’t help”—seems to have been greater than the one felt by a storyteller alighting upon good material. There is a mythic and religious dimension to Narayan’s later fiction, in which acts of personal devotion, self-effacement, and renunciation become a shield against the hard demands and uncertainties of the modern, impersonal world.

This religious aspect of Narayan is explicit in his
Ramayana
. His admiration for Rama as a cultural and social ideal is clear throughout the book. It leads him to preface his chapter on the controversial killing of the monkey king with these rueful words.

 
Rama’s cruelty to Sita at the end of his battle with Ravana is one of the strangest episodes in
The Ramayana
—one which directly challenges Rama’s image as an exemplary moral being. In fact, the Tamil poet Kamban, Narayan’s literary inspiration, makes Rama say some unsettlingly harsh things to Sita.

 
But Narayan drops Kamban’s account at this crucial moment in the book and chooses to bring in Valmiki’s much more moderate version of Rama’s decidedly odd behavior. It is as though he cannot fully acknowledge Rama’s lapse into cruelty, although such an omission may also be due to Narayan’s aversion to scenes of overt violence, verbal or physical—an aversion that his fiction with its careful avoidance of extremity makes clear.

Happily, Narayan doesn’t linger much over battle scenes, where his prose seems to be weighed down by untranslatable archaisms. The realistic fiction writer in him is more at ease with the detail of everyday life. Here is a description of the great crowd walking to attend Rama’s wedding.

Many of Narayan’s virtues familiar to us from his fiction are present in this retelling of
The Ramayana
—particularly an English prose so lucid and lightly inflected that it loses its foreign associations and seems the perfect medium of swift and action-packed storytelling. Indeed,
The Ramayana
contains some of Narayan’s finest prose set-pieces. Here is how he describes the end of the monsoons:

 
And so instinctively scrupulous and fair-minded is Narayan as a writer that not only Rama but also Ravana emerges as a fully rounded, even somewhat sympathetic, character. Though a dedicated sensualist, Ravana does not seem intrinsically bad or evil. Narayan shows clearly how he is led astray by greed, and then succumbs to the particular illusion of power: the dream of perpetual dominance. As his younger brother, who defects to Rama’s side, tells him,

 
How often in Narayan’s fiction does one come across a similar pragmatic realism, a gentle refusal to regard good and evil as unmixed, and a melancholy sense of the real limitations of life? It is this ethical and spiritual outlook that attracted countless people to
The Ramayana
for more than a millennium. In Narayan—the sage of Malgudi who always knew how to connect our hectic and fraught present to a barely remembered past—this ancient tale found its perfect modern chronicler.

 
NOTES

Books by R. K. Narayan

NOVELS

Swami and Friends
(1935)
The Bachelor of Arts
(1937)
The Dark Room
(1938)
The English Teacher
(1945)
Mr. Sampath
—
The Printer of Malgudi
(1949)
The Financial Expert
(1952)
Waiting for the Mahatma
(1955)
The Guide
(1958)
The Man-Eater of Malgudi
(1961)
The Vendor of Sweets
(1967)
The Painter of Signs
(1976)
A Tiger for Malgudi
(1983)
Talkative Man
(1986)
The World of Nagaraj
(1990)