The Grand Legend Mesmerizing Asia For Acons!
T The Ramayana is perhaps India's greatest export to the world. The story of Rama had, of course, been circulating for centuries in the oral form until Valmiki fashioned his offering in Sanskrit towards the end of the first millennium BCE. The next in a series of popular variants was Kamban's Iramavataram in Tamil, composed in the 12th century CE, Krittibas's Ramayana in Bengali in the 15th century, followed by Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in the 16th century-all of which managed to completely captivate the Indian subcontinent. Regional retellings soon led to the development of a powerful tradition of the Rama tale that scaled mountains and crossed oceans, manifesting itself in a great many languages-Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Odia, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai and even Tibetan. From South Asia, the Ramayana is believed to have made the journey to the rest of Asia via three routes. The northern route, via land, is said to have carried the tale from Punjab and Kashmir into China, Tibet and East Turkestan; the southern route, by sea, from Gujarat and South India into Java, Sumatra, and Malaya; the eastern route, again via land, from Bengal into Burma, Thailand and Laos; Vietnam and Cambodia obtaining their variants partly from Java and India via the eastern route.
The Indonesian and Malaysian experience of the legend was all about the adaptation of the tale into an Islamic tradition. Thailand, Laos and Cambodia introduced Hindu divinities from the story into the Theravada Buddhist tradition, while in Nepal, the Tibetan Buddhist and Hindu traditions embraced the epic wholeheartedly. A multitude of pan-Asian regional variants, even if not translations of Valmiki's narrative, did rely on it for the basic storyline. Often, religiously neutral elements that had universal appeal were retained, while patterns of heroism, justice and human relations encountered departures from the usual course of action. Manipulation of character, theme and even the choice of episodes were evident in such adaptations. While the romantic love between Rama and Sita formed the central plot for Malay adaptations, the idealization of Rama as a model ruler nurtured the desire of the Thais and Cambodians to see him in their monarch. Primarily, Southeast Asian values found inspiration in themes such as a husband's love for his wife, her chastity, and the ideal of truth. The Far East drew inspiration from the tale in its legendary Chinese monkey king Sun Wukong and his Japanese counterpart Son Goku.
In the subcontinent, alongside narratives of devotion were those interpretations which attempted to substitute the doings of the gods with those of ordinary men and women. Particularly folk artistes, being rooted to the realities of everyday life, were less likely to portray Rama as anything more than human, questioning rather his virtue and victory ever so often. Jain variants went a step further, fixing what they believed to be a gross error-a Hindu Brahmin conspiracy of sorts to malign Ravana and turn him into a villain. If Michael Madhusudan Dutt's Meghanadbadh Kabya all but humanized Ravana, transforming his son Meghnad into a Greek hero along the lines of Hector, the Dalit and tribal communities followed suit with the glorification of Ravana, shifting the focus from the powerful to the powerless. In a farout move to politicize the epic, Periyar E.V. Ramasami actually imagined Ravana to be an embodiment of South Indian virtue, while Molla, Chandrabati and others-through their interpretations of the tale from a woman's standpoint-lent a feminine sensibility to the epic.
Vedas (1254)
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