Till now Left-wing academics were loath to admit either the existence of Rama or the relevance of Ramayana. Suddenly, they are insistent on forcing students of history to read AK Ramanujan’s essay on 300 Ramayanas. Inder Kapahy asks them some tough questions
A question begs itself to be asked. All those ‘eminent’ historians, self-admittedly Left-wingers, who used to debunk Rama and Ramayana as figments of imagination, with no historicity, why are they so keen to teach, and that too compulsorily, ‘300 Ramayanas’ by AK Ramanujan? Have they forgotten their mocking questions: Where is the birth certificate of Rama? Where is his engineering degree, etc?
The answer is simple. AK Ramanujan’s essay purportedly lays claim to informing the reader of diverse tellings of the Ramayana. But the basic purpose of his essay is revealed in his concluding remarks. “Now is there a common core to the Rama’s stories, except the most skeletal set of relations like that of Rama, his brother, his wife, and the antagonist Ravana who abducts her?” he asks. His message is clear. The characters of Rama, Sita, Laksmana, Hanuman, Ravana do not leave any universally accepted moral message.
Ramanujan casts doubts even over the sanctity of the diverse tellings of Rama’s stories being labeled as ‘Ramayana’. “Some shadow of a relational structure claims the name of Ramayana for all these tellings, but on a closer look one is not all that like another. Like a collection of people with the same proper name, they make a class in name alone,” he informs. Now, can this conclusion be considered as the celebration of the diversity of Ramayana as some Left-wingers want us to believe Ramanujan’s essay portrays !
Those who are clamouring for reinduction of Ramanujan’s essay as a compulsory prescribed text make clever attempts to divert attention from the actual contents of the essay. Strategically and tactically they keep the focus on the eminence of AK Ramanujan, the need for intellectual freedom, education encouraging questioning minds, autonomy of university systems and teachers, aversion to hooliganism in the domain of academics, existence of diverse cultural beliefs, existence of hundreds of Ramayana tellings, etc. Nobody in his right mind will disagree with this. But making one essay compulsory reading is antithetical to all tenets of academic freedom. It amounts to Talibanisation, albeit of the Left variety, of cultural history and historiography.
A Left-oriented professorial coterie is wielding enormous power in our university systems, particularly in the departments of History and Political Science. The induction in the late-1960s of Nurul Hassan, an otherwise political lightweight who drew no adverse attention towards himself, began the process of appointing committed Marxists and communists to positions of power in the institutions of higher learning and in the state-funding agencies like the UGC. This process continued unhindered for nearly a decade. Liberal academics feel stifled but choose to remain silent owing to the inordinate power of appointments and promotions exercised by the coterie. The mortal fear of being dubbed Right reactionaries, fascists, Hindutavawallahs, etc, force many into a suppressed silence. Leftists have developed political abuse into an art form. That is why most remain aloof even though they are convinced that Left-led forces are keen to weaken the faith of our youth in our cultural beliefs and in our religious icons.
AK Ramanujan was undoubtedly an eminent literatteur and translator of folklore. But his essay, ‘300 Ramayanas: Five examples and Three thoughts on translation’, is eminently unsuitable to be prescribed as an essential text for any section of students of history. All examples are chosen to lampoon the icons and articles of faith respected by crores of Indians. The diversity of many tellings ofRamayana is only an external facade. Take for example the Ahalya episode. Any person who has read Valmiki or Kampan or Tulsidas Ramayana would know that the moral conclusion of the episode is the redemption of the sinning Ahalya by Rama. But the celebrated essay details only the seduction of Ahalya by Indra. Is it fair and appropriate? Similarly the essay pits Jainas against Hindus; “Jainas consider themselves rationalists — unlike the Hindus, who, according to them, are given to exorbitant and bloodthirsty fancies and rituals.”
The essay ascribes popularity of Hanuman in Thailand not because he is a devout celebate Rambhakt but because “here Hanuman is quite a ladies man, who doesn’t at all mind looking into the bedrooms of Lanka and doesn’t consider seeing another man’s sleeping wife anything immoral, as Valmiki’s or Kampan’s Hanuman does.” Are our students required to be compulsorily taught that in South-East Asia Ramayana owes its popularity to the voyeuristic propensities of Hanuman? The essay further informs us that, according to a Santhal telling ofRamayana, “Sita is seduced both by Ravana and Laksmana”.
This brings us back to the original question. Why this insistence upon the induction of this essay as a compulsory (the singularly suggested) reading. The preface by Paula Richman, who edited the book Many Ramayanas (OUP), of which Ramanujan’s essay is a part, provides the answer. EV Ramaswamy was a well-known anti-North India (read anti-Rama because he maintained that Rama and Ramayana are the principle tools of North India’s hegemony) founder of the Dravida movement. Paula admits that “when I actively analysed his (Ramasami’s) reading of the story of Rama, however I found much of it strikingly compelling and coherent if viewed in light of his anti-north Indian ideology”. Further she takes pride in the fact that essays collected by her in the book “grew in the direction of a study of tellings of the Ramayana that refashion or contest Valmiki’s text”. In the preface to Ramanujan’s essay she says that Doordarshan’s rendering of Ramayana, viewed and appreciated by unprecedented numbers of viewers in the late- 1980s, “possessed a dangerous and unprecedented authority”. It is thus obvious that the purpose of including the essay was only to lessen the impact of Ramayana and not to celebrate its diversity.
It is necessary to mention that Ramanujan’s essay has not been 'banned', as is propagated by the uninformed cacophony raised by a section, but is only excluded from compulsory reading. Any student is free to read and quote from the essay. The Academic Council of Delhi University, comprising learned Deans, Heads, Professors, elected teachers and renowned academic administrators, took this sagacious decision after a detailed discussion and debate. The evenly divided opinion of the ‘experts’ was also before the Academic Council. Only eight members out of more than a hundred present dissented with the majority decision. The Council was under direction of the Supreme Court to formulate its collective view on the issue. The court did not want only the History Department's view but the view of the Council which is the highest statutory body to take decisions on syllabi and readings. The Supreme Court has been informed of the Council's decision.
The insistence of a well-entrenched coterie to reinduct the disputed essay only reflects its desire to maintain its hegemonic control over history syllabi and readings. The collective mind of this coterie is colonised by anti-Hinduism. Even though it is the beneficiary of huge official patronage, and even though it camouflages into communal biases in 'progressive' jargons, this coterie has complete disconnect with the sentiments of the common people. Suppressed volcanic anger at their stranglehold over some social science disciplines constitutes the biggest threat to academic freedom and intellectual autonomy.
It must be emphasised that for centuries it is known, and accepted, that there are hundreds of tellings of the Ramayana. But the epic has a permanent place in the collective psyche of people throughout the world for the moral message it conveys. The Hindi phrase ‘Apni Apni Ram Kahani’ aptly describes the universality of the epic. Ramayana should be spared the protection of our divisive ‘eminent’ historians.
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