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Can’t change history? Rewrite it

by Jawed Naqvi, 20 October 2011

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Dawn, 20 October 2011

Some people change history others censor it. A much-acclaimed 1987 essay by Prof A.K. Ramanujan about the many written and oral legends of Lord Ram was deleted last week from the history syllabus of Delhi University.

The tinkering with high academia had an insidious purpose. Previous assaults on scientific history writing in India occurred when the Hindu revivalist Bharatiya Janata Party was in power. The latest outrage came under the Congress’s watch. Some background would be useful.

As a young boy in Lucknow I was exposed to the legend of Ram as a benign god. Allama Iqbal and Hasrat Mohani were regarded among his better-known Muslim fans. The nawabs of Awadh had ensured enough amity between upper-caste Hindus and Muslims to last a century or more.

This is the time of Diwali; that’s when the elderly Mrs Puri would inaugurate her overnight, uninterrupted readings of the Ramayan in our Lucknow neighbourhood of Nirala Nagar. I was almost always roped in to continue the readings of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, which was in Awadhi — that is whenever the ladies had to leave for their tea or gossip.

The opportunity may not influence the hereafter for me, but it did yield enormous amounts of fruit and sweets as reward. The standard greeting among ordinary Hindus of Lucknow or when they met their Muslim friends was either Aadaab or Ram Ram, occasionally Jai Ramji Ki, long live Ramji.

In the 1990s, the phrase suddenly turned into Jai Shri Ram. One could smell social engineering. It is akin to turning Khudahafiz into Allah Hafiz in Pakistan.

Fundamentalist, however, is not a description we can readily apply to Hindus, no matter how right-wing they may be in politics. Hindus do not have a written code to refer to, nor do they claim fundamental precepts that are shared among close to a billion people who answer to that utterly flexible description.

Hafez, the 12th-century Persian poet, is credited with using ‘Hindu’ early on, to mean black — in his case, a black mole on the beloved’s cheek. Before that Hinduism was know as arya dharma, and one or two other names.

‘Hinduism’ is thus a flexible term, so flexible that many of its votaries feel enthused to include Buddhists and Sikhs in their fold despite strong protests from both. When assorted shades of Hinduism are laced with a strident sense of nationalism it becomes Hindutva.

Hindutva has a political agenda, whereas Hinduism is a way of life with countless variables in beliefs and customs. The points of difference range from castes and sub castes to the vertical and horizontal design of the sandalwood paste adorning the forehead of Tamil Brahmins. Maharashtrian Brahmins have a rigid hidebound hierarchy of their own, so do the Saryuparis, Kanyakubj and Maithili Brahmins of the Indo-Gangetic plains.

It was in this great churning of ideas, of castes and religious beliefs, peaceful and violent as well as secular and communal, that Prof Ramanujan stepped in with an array of insights into Indian history.

The social metamorphosis was not old. It was in fact linked to a 1987 TV serial on the story of Ram. Ramanujan claimed, and so did Prof Romila Thapar, that it was just one of the thousands of stories about Ram and that by broadcasting just one version the state-run TV was harming the cornucopia of traditions surrounding Ram.

“The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past 2,500 years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan — to say nothing of western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story,†wrote Ramanujan.

Sanskrit alone, according to him, contains some 25 or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth).

“If we add plays, dance-dramas and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures.â€

Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. “I have come to prefer the word ‘tellings’ to the usual terms ‘versions’ or ‘variants’ because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or urtext — usually Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, the earliest and most prestigious of them all.â€

This version was the basis for the TV serial, and was watched with enthusiasm across the border in Pakistan. But, as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki’s narrative that is carried from one language to another.

“One may go further and say that the cultural area in which Ramayanas are endemic has a pool of signifiers (like a gene pool), signifiers that include plots, characters, names, geography, incidents and relationships. Oral, written and performance traditions, phrases, proverbs and even sneers carry allusions to the Rama story.â€

When someone is carrying on, you say, ‘What’s this ramayana now? Enough’. In Tamil, a narrow room is called a ‘kiskindha’; a proverb about a dimwitted person goes, ‘After hearing the Ramayana all night, he asks how Rama is related to Sita’; in a Bengali arithmetic textbook, children are asked to figure the dimensions of what is left of a wall that Hanuman built, after he has broken down part of it in mischief.

And to these must be added marriage songs, narrative poems, place legends, temple myths, paintings, sculpture and the many performing arts. It is this cultural variety of India that is being snuffed out by Hindutva and its closet supporters in schools and universities.

The writer Jawed Naqvi is Dawn’s correspondent in Delhi.

P.S.

The above article from dawn.com is reproduced here for educational and non commercial use.