A PERSONAL RAMAYANA
There may be 300 Ramayanas but there is only one Ramcharitmanas. Pavan Varma’s latest book celebrates Tulsidas’s rendition
PPavan K. Varma’s prodigious output triggers an anecdote: on being presented with yet another volume of Edward Gibbon’s monumental Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, his patron, the Earl of Gloucester, is said to have remarked: “Another damn’d thick, square book! Always scribble, scribble, scribble, eh Mr Gibbon?” In point of fact, Varma does a lot more than merely “scribble”. And what is more, the volume in question is neither thick nor square. In fact, it is a handsome book of selections, in Nagari and Roman script, from Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas: The Greatest Ode to Lord Ram—along with English paraphrases. And for those who might want the paraphrases in Hindi, those, too, are provided in an appendix.
So, unexceptionable. But that is precisely why this reader is a trifle disappointed. The cultural centrality of the figure of Ram was true long before the current controversies. George Grierson, the linguist who supervised the Linguistic Survey of India—he even makes a sly appearance here, disguised as George Griffith (p.xi)—reports that he was told by ‘an old missionary’, that one could only hope to understand north Indians “after he had mastered every line Tulsi Das had written”. And certainly what was true at the turn of the 20th century, still holds, albeit in somewhat inflected forms. The saga of Rama, and the violent and legal shenanigans associated with identifying the exact place of his alleged birth, are crucial to understanding India today.
This is an unending subject, but one must, minimally, notice the way in which Ramanand Sagar’s TV Ramayan of the 1980s played a role in the creation of what was, in the first instance, a narrative community, but was deftly transformed into a political one. Clearly, such a profound development could hardly leave Ram himself untouched—Tulsidas’s maryada purushottam was transformed into the militant Ram, tense with a bow and arrow. It is difficult to imagine this Ram as being the one Tulsidas sang of in “thumak chalat Ram Chandra, baajat paijaniya”. Varma, though, enters this minefield armed with a formidable innocence, and doesn’t seem to notice that the landscape has changed.
Fair enough, it’s a free country—or at least it used to be. There is a venerable tradition of crafting selective personal Ramayanas from the vast corpus of Ramarelated material. Ramanujan’s famously controversial essay reminds us that there are “three hundred Ramayanas”, at least. In a sense, even Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas is, in fact, just such another, enormously influential, selection and retelling—in the service of a conservative, Brahminical, agenda. Dalits, feminists, all use this material to grind their personal axes. But I cannot detect any such an “axe” in Varma’s selection.
I can’t imagine who would actually read this book. The Hindi reader has recourse to the duly-glossed original in a million editions, and the “Anglo” reader, seeking insight into Tulsidas’s greatness, may feel short-changed. Given the lacklustre selections and paraphrases, she may well wonder what the fuss is all about, which is a pity. But then, even the original Manas often sits unread, next to the gods, in many homes. Many will buy this volume, particularly in the NRI market—lucrative testimony to the semi-literate’s belief in the magical power of holy books. Their mere presence is redolent of sanctimony, and confers benediction.
A lackustre selection and paraphrase, renders Varma’s volume on Rama a mere showpiece