Epic shift: A once gentle, contrite Ram is now a weaponised Superman and Sita is reduced to a meek figure

AS children in a traditional Pahadi household, we were introduced to Ram Katha early via the local Ramlila mounted annually in little hill towns: Almora, Bhowali, Mukteswar, Nainital. Historically, Ramlila was a re-enactment of the grand and tragic life of Lord Ram, dreamt of first by Tulsidas, whose Awadhi version, the ‘Ram Charit Manas’, was a venerated epic.

As EM Forster said, each Indian hole has at least two exits. So, Ram Katha over the centuries has produced nearly 300 versions in Indian languages and dialects. The original ritualistic play first staged in Kashi has by now mutated, with various local versions of Ram Katha conveniently appended to it. But the basic structure of the story of Ram, or Ram Katha, has survived everywhere.

It denotes a heroic battle waged by a David against a bully Goliath and defeating him. Ram’s victory thus became a thread on which a long colonised nation had strung its own memories of oppression and defiance, of odds that may befall the just and the noble but they would emerge to serve the oppressed eventually by crushing out the Evil.

The bare bones of Ram’s life as a human avatar of Vishnu are those of a grand but tragic life of any epic hero. Ram is a prince married to a princess, Sita of Mithila, the adopted daughter of the philosopher-king Raja Janak. Being his father’s first-born son, Ram is destined to be king. But as our music Masterji sang in the Ramlila, “Muni ji kusal bhai vipreeta” (Oh my saints, things went horribly wrong). A day before his crowning, Ram was banished to the forest for 14 long years. Young Ram’s loyal teenage wife and one of his devoted brothers, Laxman, chose to go live with him in the forest. But tragedy struck. Sita was abducted by the 10-headed arrogant bully king Ravana of Lanka. Ram and Laxman searched frantically for her. Finally, with the help of some humble simian and bear kings, the brothers managed to cross the seas and rescued Sita after a fierce battle.

Ayodhya celebrated Ram’s homecoming and he was crowned the king. A few years of great rule created Ram Rajya, still a synonym for an ideal ruler and his reign. This is where Tulsidas chose to finish his tale and the Ramlilas we saw ended with a glorious scene of family togetherness and people’s joy at the return of their Raja Ram. Valmiki, however, pursued the tragic tale, having witnessed Sita’s unfair exile.

Valmiki is a fair narrator. His version of ‘Ramayana’ admires Ram and understands his compulsions but does not black out the dark bits after his crowning. Ram was told by his spies of a certain malicious gossip doing the rounds among ordinary citizens, who questioned Queen Sita’s chastity after being abducted by the evil Ravana. To quash the rumours, Ram finally decided to banish a pregnant Sita to the forest once again. But that, to the poet, was a grave slight to his wife. When Sita gave birth to twins and they came of age, the sage taught them to recite the tale and tell truth to power fearlessly.

A contrite Ram, the ideal ‘people’s king’, a leader of Ram Rajya, rushed to bring back Sita, but the proud wife returned to Mother Earth instead. Ram returned, bequeathed his throne to his twin sons and retired to a cave, which was guarded by Laxman, to meditate alone. Ram is then said to have taken jal samadhi.

This bit remained untold in Ramlila, so for us the 10-day staging of Ramlila in the town’s maidan was a wonderful joyous tale of how truth wins and evil gets decimated. We hung around the venue, usually a vast stone courtyard of an ancient market place, cleared and canopied with a makeshift stage that showed colourful painted backdrops and wigs, bought second-hand from travelling Parsi theatre companies by now gone defunct.

We devoured the musical rendering of the tale by our local music teacher as the Lila began. We laughed and cried with the travails of Ram and Sita and the melodramatic death of King Dashrath. During the bit where monkeys and bears joined the rag-tag army of Ram (usually a bunch of our classmates lured by the glamour), we regaled ourselves by sharing our roasted peanuts and salted grams with the Vanar Sena. The local sweet-seller Mamu in Nainital acted out Ravana’s role with a booming laugh and even though we were regular customers of his, those 10 days he was a fierce rakshas!

In Mukteswar, my surgeon uncle’s loyal compounder Buddhi Ballabh, whose needles and tincture we loathed, left us all teary-eyed when, as Sita’s father Raja Janak, he wailed: “Siya (Sita) rahe kunwari, tootey nahin chaap!” [My Siya (Sita) may remain a spinster because no one is able to break Shiva’s bow], until Ram arrived with Laxman in tow. Our math teacher was Parashuram, who was heckled by Laxman and we joined him in doing that.

As we grew and were urbanised and attended college, took on jobs, raised families, the Ram Katha — in particular the figure of Ram — began crystallising around the various versions we were unaware of. AK Ramanujan’s well-known essay, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, which created a furious backlash from a BJP preparing for LK Advani’s rath yatra, was for many a beautiful gateway into the tale with a thousand exit and entry points. He demonstrated with great clarity how the classic epic had mutated through the centuries over the past 2,500 years.

There is Valmiki’s version, then Tulsidas’, Kamban’s Tamil Ramayana, a Jain and even Indonesian and Thai versions. Add to these a whole cluster of orally transmitted lore about Ram and Sita in the Hindi belt. Not just the couplets from ‘Ram Charit Manas’, but the facts embedded in them shaped the mohalla Lilas we saw. Ramanujan calls these a pan-Indian “common pool of narratives” that have added unique interpretations of the text, with a host of cultural reflections.

In Delhi and Varanasi, the Lilas stick mostly to Tulsidas’ version, but then folk songs and satires on local politics get in all the time and are greatly appreciated. The city-born and city-bred have no keen interest in such annexures or their local meanings in Ram Katha. They are mostly tourists or act as non-Awadhi-speaking tourists’ companions.

If they could, we would not need a Freudian to tell modern women why they find it hard to warm up to the hyper-masculine image of an armed Ram as a solo hero sans Sita, as popularised by the Hindutva brigade. Ram is no longer a human being who in Valmiki’s ‘Ramayana’ sighs and confides to his brother: “Te hi no divasah gatah” (Gone are those days). Nor does Tulsidas’ broad hint at a humanised Ram agree with them when Ram goes berserk with grief at his wife’s abduction, asking trees and birds and bees in the forest if they have seen his doe-eyed Sita.

The BJP’s neo-Sanatani jathas see to it that the janata accepts Ram as an unsubmissive man who bends nature to his will, and does not hesitate to kill a mlechha (foreigner or outcast) enemy, if need be. Sita is reduced to a meek mata figure with a sublimated desire to follow her man, bear him sons and never question her public humiliation, and choose to return to her earthy roots instead. It is not too surprising that most heavily indoctrinated women in the party see nothing wrong in the gentle Ram’s portrayal as a weaponised Superman with flying hair, holding a bow.

My own little puddle of knowledge in this age of global humbling — with mega monopolies, and as metropolises sink and burn — my old Ram Katha memories based on local interpretation in a medley of dialects and folk songs, can throw no life rings to save a drowning civilisation and power games their leaders play. The fabled Gen Z has its own geese to roast.

So many folk songs I heard (doubtlessly crafted by women) show a deep ire at Ram’s exile and the hardships it brought on the gentle princess who chose to be by his side.

I am not a scientist or a sociologist. I am just an ageing writer, a narrator of tales and songs I have heard and seen unfurl before me — women’s memories of Ram and Sita. How many of us now want to return and resurrect those memories for our succeeding generations? How much do our young wish to remember or share these?

Our family copies of ‘Ram Charit Manas’ and printed songs belong to the Gutenberg era, their knowledge banks to Zuckerberg’s. This is a generation that has no time for sharing oral transmissions of epic tales. They are almost entirely networked into virtual spaces. Their new virtual world has yet to develop an inter-generational public space.

Families with a long history have long evaporated in a diasporan tsunami. Each migrant family will resist the struggle to remember its dead or those left behind. And yet they long to have roots in the country of their origin. Or else they would not be so keen to post short videos of their new temples or immersion of idols ritualistically in local rivers that they forget how the country where they are views these as disgusting.

“Ram! Ram!” my mother would have said.

— The writer is a veteran journalist