The Ramayana as a plea for Grama Rajya

As Rama, Sita and Lakshmana made their way through the forest, a great variety of trees, creepers, insects, worms, animals and birds met their eyes. Sita declared that she had spotted twenty-one different birds. When asked to identify those birds, though, she was able to name only six. Lakshmana teased her, “Show them to me.” “Lakshmana, you are truly a fool,” Sita retorted, “Are they the court priests of Ayodhya to stand in line when summoned!” She then exclaimed, “Look, a bird with a red beak and a yellow neck is behind that branch!” Lakshmana looked and looked, but only saw an endless green.

Sita, the daughter of the earth, was better at making a life inside the forest than the city-bred Rama and Lakshmana. She identified tubers and roasted meat in fire with ease.

Found in theatre director, writer and activist Prasanna’s new book, Moola Ramayana - Part 1 (Ontidani Prakashana, 2019), the retelling of the initial days of Rama’s exile in the forest, as well as the other parts of Bala Kanda and Aranya Kanda of The Ramayana, gently brings to the fore narrative detail glossed over in its mainstream versions.

In a brief afterword, Prasanna notes that his work was not a translation of Valmiki’s epic but a retelling that kept its original intent and the contemporary context in mind. Rama and Sita, he argues, are metaphors for Purusha (Human) and Prakriti (Nature). The Ramayana does not wish for their separation and regards the latter as demonic or as Ravana-ness. The pain in the separation of lovers is easy to see but not in that of Purusha and Prakriti, a non-recognition that allows for arrogance to rise and generosity to shrink, for cities to dominate villages, for cleverness to take priority over wisdom. Disapproving of the separation, the epic riles against a machine-driven urban civilization. No better proof exists for this claim than the presence of aircraft in the city of Lanka and the contrast of the sophisticated armaments of Ravana’s army with the bows and arrows, sticks and stones seen on Rama’s side.

Emphatic that Rama Rajya is nothing other than Grama Rajya (a decentralized polity of villages), Prasanna notes that the limitations of Rama are not the limitations of The Ramayana. The epic’s greatness consists, in fact, in the revealing of Rama’s limitations. When he is seen as god and not as a human with frailties, the hierarchies of caste and gender do not appear a problem. He is likened to god due to his struggles to live honourably (maryada purushottama). In making these observations, Prasanna is less interested in denying Rama the status of god than in keeping in full view the epic’s concerns with the relation between Purusha and Prakriti.

Moola Ramayana offers other pleasures as well. Its spoken form and the colloquial speech of the characters are a delight. Then, there is the forceful imagery. The descriptions of Rama building a hut or Sita assembling her kitchen or the moment when Shatrughna bemoans that Rama’s hands now held a hoe instead of weapons in the forest: all of them graphically draw out the philosophical concerns that we are asked to notice in the epic. And the original pencil sketches and the redrawings of Jamini Roy’s paintings of The Ramayana that Prasanna has done for his book bring in liveliness and soul.

With rare exceptions like Gandhi and Tagore, modern Indians have kept away the interpretive frames found in religious texts from their intellectual craft. Since religious traditions continue to be a rich source of thought on the ethics of non-violence, the ethics of living together, the ethics of compassion, the ethics of ecological responsibility, to name a few, many have wondered in recent years whether the secular-religious divide in India or, for that matter, anywhere in the world, is better rethought in responsible ways, without it becoming an alibi for fundamentalism.

In the 1960s, the Liberation Theology movement in Latin America powerfully re-read Christian morality as being fundamentally concerned with justice for the poor. Prasanna’s reading of The Ramayana as an affirmation of the moral values of physical work, simple lifestyle and non-violence between humans and nature brings the epic to relevance for contemporary political discussions.