Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan
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Scholarly obervations about Ramayana
The Times of India, Oct 19, 2011
An objective record of diverse oral traditions
Ramanujan’s scholarly observations — not interpretations — about different Ramayana traditions set off the protests that culminated in the elimination of his essay from DU’s undergraduate syllabus.
Two ‘provocative’ excerpts:
“Some later extensions (of the Ramayana) like the Adbhuta Ramayana and the Tamil story of Satakantharavana even give Sita a heroic character: when the ten-headed Ravana is killed, another appears with a hundred heads; Rama cannot handle this new menace, so it is Sita who goes to war and slays the new demon. The Santals, a tribe known for their oral traditions, even conceive of Sita as unfaithful…. In Southeast Asian texts, as we saw earlier, Hanuman is not the celibate devotee with a monkey face but a ladies’ man who figures in many love episodes. In Kampan and Tulsi, Rama is a God; in the Jaina texts, he is only an evolved Jaina man who is in his last birth and so does not even kill Ravana. In the latter, Ravana is a noble hero fated by his karma to fall for Sita and bring death upon himself, while he is in other texts an overweening demon.”
“The Ramakirti (another version of Ramayana) admires Ravana’s resourcefulness and learning; his abduction of Sita is seen as an act of love and is viewed with sympathy. The Thais are moved by Ravana’s sacrifice of family, kingdom, and life for the sake of a woman. His dying words later provide the theme of a famous love poem of the nineteenth century, an inscription of a Wat of Bangkok. Unlike Valmiki’s characters, the Thai ones are a fallible, human mixture of good and evil. The fall of Ravana here makes one sad.”
