Maithili versions of Ramayana embody the quintessence of our collective national consciousness which is effectively being reinforced by the linguistic plurality and cultural diversity in India
What I wish to do in this article is to situate some versions of the Ramayana, such as the Mithilabhasha Ramayana by Chanda Jha, Rameshwar Charit Mithila Ramayan by Laldas, Maithili Ramayana by Baiju Mishra ‘Dehati’, Sita Ramayan by Krishna Nandan Singh and Sitayan by Vaidyanath Mallik ‘Vidhu’. All these books have been written in my mother tongue, Maithili, in order to foreground the idea of aesthetic along the lines as suggested by ancient Indian theoritician, Bharat Muni, in Natyashastra and later by philosopher Abhinavagupta in Abhinavbharati. This article will make an attempt to contest the formulation of the creative representation of Ramkatha by distinguished Ramayana studies scholar Paula Richman and also dispute the very idea of a nation, as it appeared in the writings of another distinguished scholar, a historian of subaltern persuasion, Partha Chatterjee. While doing so, this article will aim to establish the fact that dharma (religion) is central to the conceptualisation of a nation as it exists outside literature in the works of Mohandas Karamachand Gandhi and Deen Dayal Upadhyay respectively.
Aesthetic preoccupations have almost always held centrestage in our country. As a matter of fact, they have charted an extremely impressive trajectory since the days of Bharat Muni, who wrote an enormously engaging, encyclopedic treatise on performing arts, Natyashatra. His works had a great deal of influence on the literary practices of our country due to their highly influential Rasa theory that emphasised that pleasure is, of course, a desirable outcome of artistic performance, but it should not be understood and interpreted as the primary purpose. The main objective actually is to transport the audience to a higher realm; a transcendental space where one can effortlessly undergo a certain kind of blissful experience about the essence of one’s own being. A place where one can also reconcile with consciousness that enables one to make genuine reflections on the moral and spiritual dimensions of human life.
Later, the 10th century Kashmiri Shaivite literary commentator, Abhinavagupta, who wrote perhaps the finest commentary on Bharat Muni’s Natyashatra, went on to elucidate the Rasa theory in terms of the idea of abhivyakti (expression) as conceptualised by Anandavardhana in his Dhvanyaloka and the principles of pratyabhijna doctrine of Kashmir. For Abhinavagupta, an aesthetic experience was like a spiritual awakening when an individual is enabled to transcend the limitations of one’s own self. It becomes possible for him by virtue of a certain kind of contemplation generating as it does the sense of pure bliss. Looking at the Rasa theory as the foundation of art and literature, he firmly focussed on the significance of harmony for the formulation of an aesthetic expression.
Such harmony is conspicuous by its absence from the contemporary literary climate in which, for examples, Dalit, feminist and post-colonial literatures, have all largely focussed on conflicts along the lines of caste, gender and political categories, called the East and the West. The aesthetic consciousness for practitioners of these literatures appears to be primarily defined by certain ideological assumptions that almost completely lost sight of the importance of harmony and confluence. They seem to almost exclusively care for conflicts and differences alone.
Paula Richman, who tremendously contributed to the spread of Ramayana studies worldwide, showed a particular kind of perception about it that suggested similar kinds of preoccupations with which the aforementioned practitioners of contemporary literature remain occupied. All her major works such as Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition and Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An Anthology are in a significant way defined and determined by those political persuasions that seem to highlight the North-South conflict. In her opinion, all four southern languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam — do have re-tellings of Ramkatha that vehemently challenge the narratives of Valmiki’s Ramayana or Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas. In turn, they perhaps successfully supplant the cultural hegemony of North India.
Revisiting the already mentioned Maithili Ramayanas will enable us to tell a different story. To begin with, they popularised Sitaram Kavya in Maithili as Vidyapati had done with Radhakrishna Kavya among the Maithilis during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. These writers of Ramayana were the quintessence for Maithili poets in the sense that they consolidated during the 19th and 20th centuries the cornerstone of what we call nowadays ‘Maithili literary culture’. They are genuinely admired for their creatively satisfying attempts to showcase the cultural and linguistic distinctiveness of Mithila along with foregrounding the moving character of Sita.
Alongside Vidyapati, Sita is often seen as the uniting force for the otherwise deeply divided Maithili community. Typically, the Maithili mindset can opt for unpredictably different pulls and pressures of life. But all the conflicting Maithili traits and attributes prefer to come together in an unusually harmonious manner on the issue of Sita.
In an arguably multilingual and multicultural country like India, where different versions of the Ramayana are available in modern Indian languages, disseminating enormously interesting, and sometimes even contradictory narratives of Sitaram Katha, the importance of versions of the Maithili Ramayana appears to lie in the depiction of an extremely sensitive but movingly powerful character of Sita. She always respected the sanctity of human love and marital relationship but never lost an opportunity to question Ram and put him in place whenever it was required. By and large, these Ramayana versions emphasise a definite kind of structural, thematic and aesthetic unity with the Sanskrit version of Valmiki and other regional versions from languages such as Assamese, Bengali and others, which so remarkably underline the existence of a nationalist outlook and an identical sense of aesthetic experience.
Against a backdrop of debates on issues related with nationalism between Western scholars, like Ernest Gellner and Anthony Smith, as well as immensely popular interventions made by Benedict Anderson, Partha Chatterjee chose to discuss the genesis and growth of Indian nationalist discourse during the colonial and post-colonial periods of our history in his influential books such as The Nationalist Thought in the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse and The Nation and its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial Histories. What is very noteworthy in these discussions is that Chatterjee places the Gandhian thought outside the scope and parameter of Indian nation and nationalism. Thus, he separates the concept of nation from the idea of religion. His premise as well as perception does not seem to be valid and justifiable in view of what Gandhi consistently said and successfully did with the help of religion for the re-awakening of our national consciousness.
The production, reception and consumption of Sitaram Katha, particularly in the Maithili literary canon, strengthen the Gandhian understanding of dharma and its primacy in the growth story of a nation. Such inseparable relationship between religion and nation, which was so succinctly formulated by Gandhi, who thought about the possibilities of an ideal and citizen-centric political order through the emergence of the metaphorical Ram rajya, reappears again in the conceptualisation of Integral Humanism by nationalist thinker Deen Dayal Upadhyay. He unequivocally attached utmost importance to the notion of dharma for the making of a just and responsible nation. Centenary celebrations of Upadhyay and commemorating the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi across the nation make tremendous sense in the light of their reflections on the inextricably interlinked relationship between religion and nation.
Ramayana editions in Maithili were written rather late. The plausible reason for the delay is often said to be the enduring dominance of Radhakrishna Kavya since the time Vidyapati began to write exhilarating songs about the eternal love of Radha and Krishna. But the upsurge of the creative representations of Sitaram Katha by those modern poets cited above explains the fact that indigenous cultural traditions enabled the litterateurs of the Mithila region for quite a long time to resist the impact of a colonial education system which did not feel reluctant to undermine, rather erase the traces of our civilisational core embedded in the Ramayana story.
A veteran scholar, Avadhesh Kumar Singh, in his book, Ramayana: Through the Ages, made a highly pertinent point when he mentioned that the existence of Ramkatha in numerous Indian languages acted as the “bridge amongst various regional, linguistic and cultural identities.” I entirely agree with this perceptive observation and only wish to add that the different versions of regional Ramayana drawing upon Avikavi, Valmiki’s Adi Kavya, are indeed the cultural expressions of our nationalist thought in diverse ways. Their availability in the majority of modern Indian languages points to the cultural interconnectedness and, in turn, the pervasive sense of nation in the pre-colonial India much before the advent of colonial moment. In fact, these Ramayana versions embody the quintessence of our collective national consciousness which is being so effectively reinforced by the kind of linguistic plurality and cultural diversity we have in our country.
(The writer is Assistant professor of English at Rajdhani College, Delhi)