Episode 6 Epic Literature: the Ramayana

A History of India

Michael Fisher (2016)

Film Review

Because Indian had no classical historians similar to those of Greece and Rome, scholars rely on mythological/literary texts to follow the chronology of kings and priests who ruled North India’s emerging kingdoms between 500 BC and 400 AD. Fisher compares the Ramayana, one such text (written been 800 BC and 400 AD), to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeneid. Both recount the involvement of two semi-gods (Ulysses, the son of Mercury, and Aeneas. the son of Venus) in the Trojan War.

An epic poem, Ramayana recounts the story of Rama (a human incarnation of the god Rama) and Sita (a human incarnation of Vishnu’s wife Lakshmi), who is abducted by the demon king Ravana. Valmiki,* a former bandit and forest dweller who reformed and became an ascetic, is the purported author of the Ramayan. He composed it in 32-syllable Shloka meter and is revered as India’s first poet.

In the Ramayana, the demon Ravana, who has no power against human beings, nearly enslaves all the gods. To thwart him, the chief god Vishnu incarnates as the four sons of Dasaratha, the ruler of Ayodhya. After the eldest son Rama marries Sita, Dasaratha abdicates and arranges for Rama to be crowned king. Rama’s stepmother thwarts him by substituting her son Bahrata as king and persuading Dasaratha to exile Rama and Sita.

Rama and Sita wander the length of India and in South India, the demon iRavana carries off Sita. To rescue her, Rama recruits the help of numerous bears and monkeys, including the divine monkey Hanuman, who leaps across 1200 kilometers of ocean to Sri Lanka to find her. Building a bridge from south India to Sri Lanka, Rama kills Ravana and forces Sita to pass through sacred fire to prove her purity. After she conceives and gives birth to twins, she and Rama return to their divine forms.

Originally written in Sanskrit, the Ramayana has been translated numerous times over the centuries:

• In 870 AD it was translated into Javanese in Indonesia.
• In the 13th century the poet Kaban translated it into Tamil (a south Dravidian language presently spoken by 75 million).
• In the 16th century the Mughal empire Akhbar supervised its translation to Persian.
• Tulsigas translated it into Hindi in the 16th century.
• In 2016, Robert and Sally Goldman completed a 40-year project translating it into English.

Over time the teachings of the Ramayana spread to the Southeast Asian countries of Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.

* Under India’s traditional caste system, Valmiki would have been classified as Untouchable. However after Untouchability was outlawed following Indian independence (1948), Valmiki’s descendants proudly declared themselves. In South India’s Tamil speaking region, E V Ramasamy (1879-1973) founded and led the Dravidian Organization (aka the DK Movement) campaigning against the Ramayana as a history of the unjust invasion of South India by Indo-Europeans. His movement particularly objected to the representation of the inhabitants of South India as monkeys and bears and those of Sri Lanka as demons. They organized protests where Rama and Sita idols were paraded without clothes and beaten with shoes.

Film can be viewed free with a library card on Kanopy.

https://pukeariki.kanopy.com/en/pukeariki/video/366254/366183