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oral Tradition
The
Oral Tradition and the many "Ramayanas"
DASARTHA'S
CHOICE
"'You
have promised me the granting of two boons, and you have
sworn to it in the name of Rama -- your darling son Rama.
And now I'll speak out my mind. If you reject my demand,
you will be the first of the Ikshvahu race, proud descendents
of the sun god himself, to go back on a promise for the
sake of convenience.' She took breath and demanded..."
(from Valmiki, trans. R.K. Narayan)
THE
ORAL TRADITION AND THE MANY "RAMAYANAS"
by
Philip Lutgendorf, Chair, South Asian Studies Program, University
of Iowa
Rama
is born in countless ways, and there are tens of millions
of Ramayanas... - Tulsidas (16th cent.) Ramcarittnanas 1:33:6
All
right (you may be asking at this point), just how many of
these things are there, anyway? The title of this curriculum
guide speaks reassuringly of "The Ramayana" but
later subheadings suggest a kind of textual population explosion,
speaking of "many," "a thousand," and
finally, "tens of millions." Is this just epic
hyperbole, like the myriads of arrows that shoot forth whenever
the hero Rama releases his bow? And if not, how are American
educators and students supposed to get a handle on a non-Western
text and tradition that is (as they say) growing even as
we speak?
I've
been teaching the Ramayana for years, and (like most of
the contributors to this guide) have found that it serves
as an excellent window through which to open to American
students great vistas of the world of Indian civilization.
But I always begin by explaining that "the Ramayana"
(in spite of the definitive article) is not a single book
like "the Bible" but rather a story and a tradition
of storytelling. For more than two millennia, this tradition
has enjoyed a unique popularity throughout the subcontinent
of South Asia (comprising the modern states of India, Pakistan,
Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka) and beyond - for versions
of the tale have flourished in Thailand, Cambodia, Laos,
Vietnam, and Indonesia. Although the core story of the travails
of Prince Rama and Princess Sita and their companions remains
much the same everywhere, storytellers and poets in dozens
of languages have chosen not simply to translate some "original"
version, but instead have retold the saga in their own words,
often modifying and embellishing it according to regional
traditions or their own insights and interpretations. At
the same time, this tale has been continuously recreated
orally - with all the fluidity we expect in oral performance
- by a whole spectrum of tellers ranging from traditional
bards and singers to modern film and video producers (an
epic television serialization of the story held Indian audiences
spellbound in 1987-89), and also including countless grandmothers.
Indeed, for most modern Indians, the "original"
Ramayana is as likely to mean a bedtime story heard in childhood
as the 2000+ year old Sanskrit epic of the poet-sage Valmiki.
Since
the Ramayana is a story, and a charming one at that, students
find it relatively easy to get into - even with four syllable
foreign names. Like contemporary fantasy fiction and video-gaming,
it ushers them into a world of superhuman heroes and hyperbolic
deeds, within which a strangely-familiar scenario unfolds:
a handsome prince wins a beautiful princess for his bride,
but is deprived of his kingdom by a scheming step-mother
and unjustly exiled to the forest, where a wizard-king abducts
the prince's wife and imprisons her in a golden island-fortress.
The prince then sets out on a daring quest to recover his
beloved, aided by talking animals and birds, and ultimately
triumphs over his adversary (a villain so egotistical he
has sprouted ten heads!) in a cataclysmic battle, to return
in triumph and reclaim his throne. This skeletal outline
resembles many European folktales, but as students are drawn
deeper into the details of its epic plot, they encounter
much that is unfamiliar, for the Ramayana encodes many of
the cultural values of Hindu civilization: from a cosmology
of cyclically-recurring eons, to a stratified social order
and a patriarchical, extended-family structure based on
arranged marriage, to the overarching theme of Dharma-a
central cultural concept suggested by terms like "morality,"
"duty," "cosmic order," or simply, "the
Way." Thus the story can open a portal leading students
to encounter with the world-view of a great civilization
that both resembles, and markedly differs from, their own
and (a process, by the way, which may enable them to realize
that they have a world view in the first place.)
The
contributions in this guide - the work of educators who
have come to value the Ramayana - are designed to help other
teachers to facilitate such a cultural encounter by helping
them to read "between the lines" of the epic story
and to recognize some of the ethical and social values it
encodes and the issues it raises. This last point is important,
because as a fluid storytelling tradition, the Ramayana
doesn't simply provide set answers. It also raises troubling
questions that have been pondered and debated by audiences
for centuries, and that have resulted, in some cases, in
radical reinterpretations of characters and events, or in
the creation of such "alternative" retellings
as those that give greater prominence to women or that even
cast the "villains" as the real such heroes. In
this way, it has functioned less as a fixed message than
as a kind of language within which South Asian culture thinks
about itself, and projects (and argues about) its ideals
of the good life and the just society. Since one out of
every seven people on earth today lives on the Indian subcontinent,
there are literally "tens of millions" of Ramayanas
out there - and still others "over here" as well,
brought by a prosperous and culturally vibrant group of
recent immigrants. Through studying the Ramayana story,
you and your students will learn something important about
the myriad bearers of this tale, and hopefully about yourselves.
VERSIONS
OF THE RAMAYANA
