Three Hundred Ramayanas - Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation

by A.K. Ramanujan

तीन सौ रामायण बहुभाषाविद, लोकवार्ताकार,अनुवाद, कवि और अध्यापक रामानुजन द्वारा संसार में रामकथा की अद्भुत विविधतापूर्ण व्याप्ति और इसके भीतर छिपे अर्थ -संसार के विराट -संभावना लोक का अत्यंत ही संवेदनशील दृष्टि से किया गया उदघाटन है। सहस्रों वर्षों से अनेकानेक संस्कृतियों की अनेक पीढियां धर्मों की बाधाओं से परे इस कथा में अपने जीवन अर्थों का सृजन करती आई हैं। यह देख कर आश्चर्य होता है कि इस कथा में कितना लचीलापन रहा है। रामानुजन इस लेख में राम-कथा की विविधता के माध्यम से अर्थ-निर्माण और अनुवाद की प्रक्रिया पर भी विचार करते हैं।

Genres: Nonfiction, History

Unknown Binding

About the author

Ramanujan was an Indian poet, scholar and author, a philologist, folklorist, translator, poet and playwright. His academic research ranged across five languages: Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Sanskrit, and English. He published works on both classical and modern variants of these literature and also argued strongly for giving local, non-standard dialects their due.

He was called "Indo-Anglian harbingers of literary modernism". Several disciplinary areas are enriched with A.K.Ramanujan`s aesthetic and theoretical contributions. His free thinking context and his individuality which he attributes to Euro-American culture gives rise to the "universal testaments of law". A classical kind of context-sensitive theme is also found in his cultural essays especially in his writings about Indian folklore and classic poetry. He worked for non-Sanskritic Indian literature and his popular work in sociolinguistics and literature unfolds his creativity in the most striking way. English Poetry most popularly knows him for his advance guard approach.

Reviews

[Sujoya - theoverbookedbibliophile · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read and reread multiple times over the last few decades. Was reminded of this scholarly essay today while discussing The Ramayana with my family. Read it today once again - brilliantly researched, informative and enlightening. There is so much we don't know! Growing up on these stories , reading and listening to the sources available to us, many of us are unaware of the variations in the different versions of The Ramayana. I remember being fascinated by the paintings depicting scenes from the Ramakien at the Grand Palace in Bangkok, Thailand and pondering over how it seemed a bit different from the story I had read (as a child and adult in India).

The author limits his discussion to five “tellings” of the story - highlighting both the similarities and the differences, namely Kampan’s Tamil Iramavataram , Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, the Jain tellings, the South Indian folk Ramayana and the Southeast Asian Thai Ramakirti /Ramakien. The author mentions, “I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or Ur-text—usually Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana , the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki's narrative that is carried from one language to another.”

A.K. Ramanujan’s “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation" is an excellent research-based essay that would appeal to those who are interested to know how the stories from The Ramayana have been told, retold, shared and interpreted through the ages. However, I would strongly recommend that you familiarize yourself with the story before you read this.

[Nayaz Riyazulla · Rating 4 out of 5]

ಇದೊಂದು ಸುದೀರ್ಘ ಮತ್ತು ಬಹು ಪ್ರಸಿದ್ಧ ಲೇಖನ, ಇದರ ಬಗ್ಗೆ ಅನೇಕ ಲೇಖಕರು ಹೆಮ್ಮೆಯಿಂದ ಮಾತನಾಡಿದ್ದನ್ನು ಕೇಳಿದ್ದೇವೆ.

ಕುಮಾರವ್ಯಾಸ ತನ್ನ ಭಾರತದಲ್ಲಿ "ತಿಣುಕಿದನು ಫಣಿರಾಯ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಕವಿಗಳ ಭಾರದಲಿ" ಎಂಬ ಸಾಲೊಂದನ್ನು ಹೇಳಿದ್ದಾನೆ, ಈ ಸಾಲಿಗೆ ನಾನಾ ಅರ್ಥಗಳಿದ್ದರೂ ಒಪ್ಪುವ ಅರ್ಥ - ನಮ್ಮಲ್ಲಿ ಅನೇಕ ಕವಿಗಳು ರಾಮಾಯಣವನ್ನು ಆಧಾರಿಸಿ ಕೃತಿಗಳನ್ನು ಬರೆದಿದ್ದಾರೆ ಎಂಬುದು. ಅಂತಹ ಮುಖ್ಯ ರಾಮಾಯಣಗಳ ತುಲನೆ ಈ ಲೇಖನದ ಮುಖ್ಯ ತಂತು. ಮೂಲ ರಾಮಾಯಣದ ಜೊತೆಗೆ ಜೈನ ರಾಮಾಯಣ, ಕಂಪಣನ ರಾಮಾಯಣ, ಜಾನಪದ ರಾಮಾಯಣ ಕಥೆಗಳು, ಬುಡಕಟ್ಟು ಜನಾಂಗದ ರಾಮಾಯಣಗಳು ಹೇಗೆ ಭಿನ್ನವಾಗಿವೆ ಎಂಬುದನ್ನು ಉದಾಹರಣೆಗಳ ಜೊತೆಗೆ ಅರ್ಥೈಸುತ್ತದೆ. ಒಂದು ಚಿಕ್ಕ ಉದಾಹರಣೆ : ಜೈನ ರಾಮಾಯಣದಲ್ಲಿ ರಾವಣನನ್ನು ಕೊಲ್ಲುವುದು ರಾಮನಲ್ಲ ಲಕ್ಷ್ಮಣ, ಇಷ್ಟು ದೊಡ್ಡ ಬದಲಾವಣೆಗೆ ಕಾರಣ ಜೈನ ಧರ್ಮದ ಪದ್ಧತಿಗಳು, ಅಲ್ಲಿ ಕ್ಷಮೆಗೆ ಮುಖ್ಯ ಆದ್ಯತೆ ಜೈನರ ಪ್ರಕಾರ ರಾಮ ಅವರ ತೀರ್ಥಂಕರರಂತೆ ಒಬ್ಬ ಆದರ್ಶ ಪುರುಷ ಕೆಲವರಿಗಂತೂ ಆತನು ಕೂಡ ಒಬ್ಬ ತೀರ್ಥಂಕರ, ರಾಮ ಕೊಲ್ಲುವುದು ಅವರ ಸಂಸ್ಕೃತಿಗೆ ವಿರುದ್ಧವಾಗಿ ಕಾಣಬಹುದು, ಹಾಗಾಗಿ ಇಲ್ಲಿ ರಾವಣ ಸಂಹಾರ ಲಕ್ಷ್ಮಣನ ಮುಖೇನ ನಡೆಯುತ್ತದೆ. ಹೀಗೆ ಅನೇಕ ರಾಮಾಯಣಗಳನ್ನು ವಿವರಿಸುವ ಈ ಲೇಖನವನ್ನು ಒಮ್ಮೆ ಓದಲು ಅಡ್ಡಿಯಿಲ್ಲ

[Shayantani · Rating 4 out of 5]

"No text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. "
A
beautifully written essay about the power of a story which most of us grow up with and which will continue to grow even after we are gone.

[Jerry Jose · Rating 5 out of 5]

In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the Adhyatma Ramayana, sixteenth century), when Ram is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, 'Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?' That clinches the argument, and she goes with him (Adhyatma Ramayana 2.4.77-8; see Nath 1913, 39).

Ramayana and Mahabharata are easily identified as the two great Indian epics, though the word “epic” is a weak translation for ‘ithihasa’, popular Sanskrit narrative genre they belong to. In this well researched scholarly article, AK Ramanujan takes readers through the influence of Ramayana in particular, on Indian diaspora and the various tellings of the same basic story structure in South East, Peninsular and Central Asia over past twenty five hundred years.

Author starts by efforts to de-orientalize readers, by differentiating 'katha' and 'kavya', using 'story' and 'discourse', 'sentence' and 'speech act', and finally explains the subtle yet important differences between RamaKatha(Story of Ram) and Ramayana. He uses Ahalya story excerpt from Valmiki Ramyana and Kampan’s Iramavataram to hyphenates the variations in narratives, the increasing God character of Ram in the later, which accordingly was written with knowledge of pre-telling, arguably of the former. Ramanujan carefully compares Thai, Malaysian and South East Asian tellings of Ramayana on the basis of linguistic studies and geopolitical routes through which the ithihasa reached orally, and the culture it got assimilated into. Not to mention the exponential number of variants hosted by Indian vernacular languages in classical and folk traditions.

It was fascinating to learn about the Jain traditional tellings which consider Ravana as a noble Shaivite king who met his end by falling for material desires, instead of the classical text book villain figure we are used to (a good place to refer Asura book). There are even traditions where Lakshmana and Ravana are considered as ‘yin-yang’ style ‘good-evil’ force pair destined to fight time and again, and in this version Lord Ram is venerated as the righteous elevated soul abstaint to violence, which is very understandable once read alongside Jain ideologies. It doesn’t end there, author moves through separate narratives where Sita is Ravana's daughter, Hanuman is depicted as a ladies man, variant where Vanaras are celstial beings than monkeys, Dashamukha tradition that doesn’t literally considers Ravana’s notorious ten heads and even the version where Hanuman is credited as the writer of Ramayana who scattered it across the world from Himalayan mountain tops, of which Valmiki is said to have captured only a fragment.

Ramanujan calls for a Ship of Theseus style philosophy and open mindedness to rejoice the similarities, and cherish the differences. He ends the essay with a funny folktale about the power of Ramayana, where the listener is entranced and caught up in the action, who is compelled to enter the world of the epic rather than being a mere by stander, thus erasing the line between fiction and reality.

Few years before, this essay was a hot topic of controversy, over ABVP objecting its inclusion in Delhi University syllabus, under the argument that there is/was only one version of Ramayana. Though Supreme Court ruled out the radical’s arguments, University decided not to include them in syllabus over obvious reactionary discords.

[Shiwam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Pretty good essay, definitely worth reading.

[Mythbreaker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic is the word.

A.K. Ramanujan's "300 Ramanayas" is an essay on the different versions of Ramayanas that exist today - Valmiki, Jain, Buddhist, etc - from which he chooses five versions, and explores them in details. In this concise but thoroughly well-researched piece, we get to see from where different (controversial) variations such as Sita being Ravan's daughter, etc come from.

While I do not entirely agree with the author that every version is equally authoritative and thus deserves equal space and respect in the academic world of Ramayana, I am grateful that I came across this essay.

Ramanujan is an absolute genius in his articulation.

[Damaru M · Rating 5 out of 5]

How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one.

[Pankaj · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very well researched essay that brings together discourses and narratives from different cultures and by various authors. It is unfortunate that this academic piece has been politicized like many other, leaving no room for honest discourse.

[Anik Nandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

A simple book that justifies its title. Nice summarized comparisons and descriptions of regional differences related to their particular Ramayana Versions.