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Ramayana row divides India
India's liberal intellectual tradition has received a stunning blow with the removal of an essay that celebrates diversity from Delhi University's BA history (honors) syllabus. The decision marks the "surrender of academic freedom to political pressure", eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar has lamented.
The essay in question is the late A K Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations. Written in 1987, the essay drew attention to the "astonishing" number of "tellings" of the Indian epic, Ramayana (the story of Ram) over the past 2,500 years in different languages, regions and mediums.
"Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian [Khmer], Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan - to say nothing of Western languages.
Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some 25 or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres. If we add plays, dance-dramas and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger," Ramanujan wrote.
Drawing on Valmiki's Ramayana, the Thai Ramakein and Ramkirti, Kamban's Iramavataram, the oral Rama Katha of the Santhal tribals, the Jaina Ramayana of Vimalsuri and a host of other "tellings" of the epic, Ramanujan showed how Ram, Sita (his wife), Ravana (the king of Lanka) and others are portrayed variously in them.
The Jain telling, for instance, focuses not on the greatness or goodness of Ram as does Valmiki's Ramayana but on Ravana's learning and devotion. In Valmiki's telling Ravana is the demon king, who abducts Sita but in the Jain and Thai versions, he emerges a tragic figure, evoking the reader's sympathy. In several traditions, Sita is the daughter of Ravana. The chaste and devout Sita in Valmiki and Kamban's versions is conceived as unfaithful in the Santhal telling. She is seduced by Ram and his brother, Lakshman.
The rich diversity in the various tellings of the Ramayana that Ramanujan wrote about raised the hackles of the Hindu right in 2008, when activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Sangh Parivar (a family of Hindu right-wing organizations) vandalized Delhi University's history department to protest against the teaching of this essay, describing it as a "blasphemous" essay that was "malicious, capricious, fallacious and offensive to the beliefs of millions of Hindus".
Ramanujan's essay "deliberately highlights those narratives of the Ramayana which paint Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Laxmana, etc, in dubious hues," A K Bhagi, a member of the university's academic council and of the National Democratic Teachers Federation, the teachers' wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told Frontline newsmagazine. He has described the essay as "partly pornographic".
In the Sangh Parivar's narrow view of the world, the only Ramayana is Valmiki's Ramayana. To them there is only one Rama story and that is the one which Valmiki told, where Ram is the perfect son, ruler and husband, never mind that he treated his wife rather shabbily. "This is the Aryan, Sanskrit, north Indian telling of the story that iconizes Ram and its the version that the Parivar approves. Since Ramanujan's essay challenges that view, it had to go," a history professor at Delhi's Hindu College told Asia Times Online.
Delhi University refused to drop Ramanujan's essay back in 2008. The Sangh Parivar persisted by taking the matter to the courts. In July last year, the Supreme Court directed Delhi University to constitute an expert committee to look into the matter and submit its report to the university's Academic Council. An expert committee comprising four historians was set up.
Although three of the four historians were in favor of retaining Ramanujan's essay in the reading list, the academic council went by the views of the single historian who claimed the essay would affect the "sensibilities of impressionable minds" and doubted the students' ability to "tolerate the objectionable parts" of the essay.
Delhi's university's decision to drop the essay despite the majority opinion of the history department and the expert panel has been described by several academics as an abject surrender to right-wing pressure.
Spurred by their triumph, the Parivar and its affiliates are making plans. Bhagi said that a "nationwide campaign to resist the nefarious but systematic attempts by left-wing historians and their cohorts to present a distorted picture of the ancient Indian culture and religious epics" is on the anvil.
The Parivar has objected earlier too to other tellings of the Ramayana that it didn't approve. In the 1980s, Polanki Ramamurthy, a Kannada professor in the University of Mysore, incurred the wrath of ABVP activists for his book Sitayana. The book is a telling of the story from Sita's point of view.
A climate of intolerance has gripped India in recent decades with the left, right and center of the political spectrum determined to allow only their telling of India's history and culture. For decades, it was the Congress' Gandhi-Nehru dominated version of India's freedom struggle that children were taught in schools. When the BJP came to power, projects were put in place to rewrite Indian history textbooks to dwell on the pain inflicted on "Hindu civilization" by (mainly Muslim) invaders.
In 2004, activists calling themselves the Sambhaji Brigade vandalized a renowned research institute in Pune to protest James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. The institute and the people Laine mentioned in his acknowledgements were attacked by the activists, forcing the publisher Oxford University Press to pull out the book from the market.
Last year, Mumbai University withdrew Rohintan Mistry's novel Such a Long Journey from its reading list as it contained "derogatory" references to the Shiv Sena. Eminent artist M F Hussain was forced to live abroad as his paintings of Hindu goddesses in the nude irked the Sangh Parivar's moral police, who accused him of insulting Hinduism. This despite the fact that Hinduism is comfortable with artistic depictions of nudity and sexuality as evident in temple sculptures for instance. Hussain's life was under threat and exhibitions of his paintings were routinely vandalized.
It is not just the illiberal among Hindus who prevent the expression of views different from their own. And neither is Delhi University alone in surrendering to the forces of intolerance. In the southern state of Kerala, Muslim fanatics hacked off the arm of a lecturer in a Catholic college last year for preparing an examination question paper that allegedly hurt Muslim sentiments. Instead of standing up to the intimidation and acting against the fanatics, the college management suspended the victim.
When asked about the Ramayana, many Indians will narrate to you "their" Ramayana, the version they and their friends in the neighborhood enacted as children during vacations. Dutiful Ram rarely dominated these dramas; it was Jatayu, the eagle who dies trying to protect Sita from being abducted, who stood out in the dramatization as the real hero. It was Hanuman, the monkey, who set alight Lanka that everyone fought to play. Children in India grow up listening to their parents and grandparents narration of Ramayana tales, then go on to reinterpreting it and telling it their way.
It is this right to tell and retell, interpret and reinterpret that has kept people connected with the Ramayana for millennia. It this connection with an enchanting epic that the illiberal right is severing by imposing its vision of "the telling" of the Ramayana.
Asia Times Online :: Ramayana row divides India
India's liberal intellectual tradition has received a stunning blow with the removal of an essay that celebrates diversity from Delhi University's BA history (honors) syllabus. The decision marks the "surrender of academic freedom to political pressure", eminent Indian historian Romila Thapar has lamented.
The essay in question is the late A K Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations. Written in 1987, the essay drew attention to the "astonishing" number of "tellings" of the Indian epic, Ramayana (the story of Ram) over the past 2,500 years in different languages, regions and mediums.
"Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian [Khmer], Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santhali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan - to say nothing of Western languages.
Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some 25 or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres. If we add plays, dance-dramas and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger," Ramanujan wrote.
Drawing on Valmiki's Ramayana, the Thai Ramakein and Ramkirti, Kamban's Iramavataram, the oral Rama Katha of the Santhal tribals, the Jaina Ramayana of Vimalsuri and a host of other "tellings" of the epic, Ramanujan showed how Ram, Sita (his wife), Ravana (the king of Lanka) and others are portrayed variously in them.
The Jain telling, for instance, focuses not on the greatness or goodness of Ram as does Valmiki's Ramayana but on Ravana's learning and devotion. In Valmiki's telling Ravana is the demon king, who abducts Sita but in the Jain and Thai versions, he emerges a tragic figure, evoking the reader's sympathy. In several traditions, Sita is the daughter of Ravana. The chaste and devout Sita in Valmiki and Kamban's versions is conceived as unfaithful in the Santhal telling. She is seduced by Ram and his brother, Lakshman.
The rich diversity in the various tellings of the Ramayana that Ramanujan wrote about raised the hackles of the Hindu right in 2008, when activists of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Sangh Parivar (a family of Hindu right-wing organizations) vandalized Delhi University's history department to protest against the teaching of this essay, describing it as a "blasphemous" essay that was "malicious, capricious, fallacious and offensive to the beliefs of millions of Hindus".
Ramanujan's essay "deliberately highlights those narratives of the Ramayana which paint Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Laxmana, etc, in dubious hues," A K Bhagi, a member of the university's academic council and of the National Democratic Teachers Federation, the teachers' wing of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), told Frontline newsmagazine. He has described the essay as "partly pornographic".
In the Sangh Parivar's narrow view of the world, the only Ramayana is Valmiki's Ramayana. To them there is only one Rama story and that is the one which Valmiki told, where Ram is the perfect son, ruler and husband, never mind that he treated his wife rather shabbily. "This is the Aryan, Sanskrit, north Indian telling of the story that iconizes Ram and its the version that the Parivar approves. Since Ramanujan's essay challenges that view, it had to go," a history professor at Delhi's Hindu College told Asia Times Online.
Delhi University refused to drop Ramanujan's essay back in 2008. The Sangh Parivar persisted by taking the matter to the courts. In July last year, the Supreme Court directed Delhi University to constitute an expert committee to look into the matter and submit its report to the university's Academic Council. An expert committee comprising four historians was set up.
Although three of the four historians were in favor of retaining Ramanujan's essay in the reading list, the academic council went by the views of the single historian who claimed the essay would affect the "sensibilities of impressionable minds" and doubted the students' ability to "tolerate the objectionable parts" of the essay.
Delhi's university's decision to drop the essay despite the majority opinion of the history department and the expert panel has been described by several academics as an abject surrender to right-wing pressure.
Spurred by their triumph, the Parivar and its affiliates are making plans. Bhagi said that a "nationwide campaign to resist the nefarious but systematic attempts by left-wing historians and their cohorts to present a distorted picture of the ancient Indian culture and religious epics" is on the anvil.
The Parivar has objected earlier too to other tellings of the Ramayana that it didn't approve. In the 1980s, Polanki Ramamurthy, a Kannada professor in the University of Mysore, incurred the wrath of ABVP activists for his book Sitayana. The book is a telling of the story from Sita's point of view.
A climate of intolerance has gripped India in recent decades with the left, right and center of the political spectrum determined to allow only their telling of India's history and culture. For decades, it was the Congress' Gandhi-Nehru dominated version of India's freedom struggle that children were taught in schools. When the BJP came to power, projects were put in place to rewrite Indian history textbooks to dwell on the pain inflicted on "Hindu civilization" by (mainly Muslim) invaders.
In 2004, activists calling themselves the Sambhaji Brigade vandalized a renowned research institute in Pune to protest James Laine's Shivaji: Hindu King in Islamic India. The institute and the people Laine mentioned in his acknowledgements were attacked by the activists, forcing the publisher Oxford University Press to pull out the book from the market.
Last year, Mumbai University withdrew Rohintan Mistry's novel Such a Long Journey from its reading list as it contained "derogatory" references to the Shiv Sena. Eminent artist M F Hussain was forced to live abroad as his paintings of Hindu goddesses in the nude irked the Sangh Parivar's moral police, who accused him of insulting Hinduism. This despite the fact that Hinduism is comfortable with artistic depictions of nudity and sexuality as evident in temple sculptures for instance. Hussain's life was under threat and exhibitions of his paintings were routinely vandalized.
It is not just the illiberal among Hindus who prevent the expression of views different from their own. And neither is Delhi University alone in surrendering to the forces of intolerance. In the southern state of Kerala, Muslim fanatics hacked off the arm of a lecturer in a Catholic college last year for preparing an examination question paper that allegedly hurt Muslim sentiments. Instead of standing up to the intimidation and acting against the fanatics, the college management suspended the victim.
When asked about the Ramayana, many Indians will narrate to you "their" Ramayana, the version they and their friends in the neighborhood enacted as children during vacations. Dutiful Ram rarely dominated these dramas; it was Jatayu, the eagle who dies trying to protect Sita from being abducted, who stood out in the dramatization as the real hero. It was Hanuman, the monkey, who set alight Lanka that everyone fought to play. Children in India grow up listening to their parents and grandparents narration of Ramayana tales, then go on to reinterpreting it and telling it their way.
It is this right to tell and retell, interpret and reinterpret that has kept people connected with the Ramayana for millennia. It this connection with an enchanting epic that the illiberal right is severing by imposing its vision of "the telling" of the Ramayana.
Asia Times Online :: Ramayana row divides India
