Dushyanth Sridhar’s Ramayanam is a contemporary translation that makes the ancient epic accessible to modern readers, preserving its themes of love, duty, and human relationships
My first-ever foreign tour was to Indonesia in 2011 as an Indian delegate to attend an international workshop on the Tsunami Early Warning System. I was put up at Hotel Borobudur in Jakarta by the hosts, the UNDP.
While the workshop was from 8 am to 6 pm (with an hour-long lunch break and two high-tea sessions each of 15 minutes’ duration), the delegates were free after the day’s engagements. What caught my attention was the Ramayana Ballet staged daily in the ballroom of the hotel. Since admission was restricted by tickets, I had to collect the details from the hotel staff about the show.
A hotel staff member told me that Ramayana Ballet was a daily event not only in this star hotel but in most of the islands in the archipelago. “The story is the same as that played out in India. Maybe the dance and music associated with the Ramayana are different from what they are in your country,” he said.
Lord Anjaneya (Hanuman) was the mascot of the 1997 edition of the South East Asian Games held in Jakarta. This shows the kind of reverence with which the commander of the Monkey Brigade is held in Indonesia, the country with the largest Muslim population in the world.
Nicholaz Kazanas, director, OMILOS Meleton Cultural Institute, Greece, in his 2011 lecture held at Madras University, said that the Rig Veda is the oldest published literature of science and culture in the world and the Ramayana and Mahabharata are not mere epics but chronicles of events.
We Indians are still to accord the due status to these works. But for Ramanand Sagar and B. R. Chopra, who took the initiatives in making television series about the Ramayana and Mahabharata which were telecast through Doordarshan, these epics would have been forgotten long ago. I can still remember the cynicism on the faces of the Left Liberals when these works were aired by Doordarshan. Our contempt for our own culture and tradition inspired Wendy Doniger, the modern-day Lucille Ball (of I Love Lucy fame), to write The Hindus: An Alternative History. She had to meekly surrender and withdraw the book following a suit filed by Dinanath Batra under Section 295A of the IPC. The lady had to withdraw the book lest she would have to undergo imprisonment and pay a hefty amount for offending sentiments of religious communities.
The Sanatanis do not react to the insults meted out to them by self-styled intellectuals who publish all kinds of nonsense against the culture, literature, and great epics of India. Many “scholars” have tried to tarnish Indian culture. The name that comes to mind is that of A. K. Ramanujan, who authored an essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas; Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”. Ramanujan, known as a poet and scholar of Indian literature and linguistics, portrayed Lord Rama and Sita as siblings and this upset the believers. Batra himself approached the court and dragged the essay by Ramanujan to the court demanding it be withdrawn from the undergraduate curricula of Delhi University, and the academic council removed the same from the syllabus. The move by the University antagonised the Left intellectuals who described Batra’s action as Fascist.
It is in this background that Dushyanth Sridhar, a young Vedic scholar, chose to translate the Ramayanam by Valmiki into English. Sridhar is familiar to people in South India as a leading Harikatha artist (an art form of telling stories from the Puranas and that too with eloquence). The dying art of Harikatha Kalakshepam got a new lease of life thanks to scholars like Sridhar. His latest work Ramayanam Translation proves that his achievements in the field of Vedic literature are not a flash in the pan and Sridhar is here to stay for many decades. Volume one of the book has Ayodhyakhanda (Ayodhya Canto) and concludes with Lord Rama mourning the passing of his father, King Dasaratha. The information about Dasaratha’s death was conveyed to him by Bharata and his entourage who went to the forest pleading with Rama to return to Ayodhya and take over the reins of the kingdom. The remaining volumes are expected shortly, and it is worth waiting to read how Sridhar has portrayed Lord Anjaneya and other characters.
What is unique about the Ramayana is the theme Mata, Pita, Guru, Deivam (Mother, Father, Teacher and God) – a statement that makes it unambiguously clear that it is through the first three named that one is led to spirituality and truth, the two terms that encompass God. The Indian system of knowledge makes it clear that the Guru is as important as mother and father. For Rama, Sage Vasishta was the God incarnation because he had his education under him. A student organisation in Kerala has put flex boards in all college campuses and schools stating that “Teachers are not Gods. Students are not slaves!” This is what information technology and artificial intelligence of the modern day propagate.
Sridhar, having directed a Sanskrit movie Sakuntalam, displays his prowess in movie making in the book. The intercuts between what happened after Rama’s return to Ayodhya from the Vana Vasa and spurning his royal consort in the jungles as the beginning of the story is intriguing. But more than that, what stands out is Dasaratha’s consultation with other Kings about who should be the future emperor of Ayodhya. It is not a namesake discussion but a serious exchange of views. The Kings wanted Rama to be coronated as the next emperor, and they had their own reasons for their stance. It is not like the meetings of the working committees and political affairs committees summoned to sign on the dotted line choosing the son/daughter handpicked by the family patriarch as his heir apparent.
We learn new and newer things each time we read the Ramayana. Sridhar’s mission is to take the Ramayana to the new age youth who may not be well-versed in Sanskrit. He has edited 24,000 slokas from Valmiki’s Ramayana and made it easy for the modern-day youth to comprehend the great epic. People do not just read the Ramayana; they comprehend the work and learn new things each time they go through the work.
What adds to the beauty of the book is the caricatures by Keshav, formerly working with a newspaper known as the English edition of Deshabhimani, the CPI(M) mouthpiece. Now over to you, dear readers.
