Anek Ramayan WEBCAST on NDTV.com

Shikha Sen's Anek Ramayan will now be webcast on NDTV.com, for a month. So whoever would like to, can see it online. This is a drastically shortened version of the film - 40 mins of the original 70. Please share it with all you know who can access it online. They can also leave their comments on the page or write to the film maker at the id given at the end of the film. Here is where you can see it:

http://www.ndtv.com/video/player/documentary-24x7/anek-ramayan-a-film-by-shikha-sen/218125


This weekend, on Sat, 17th Dec at 10 pm and on Sun, 18th Dec, at 5 pm, NDTV PROFIT will telecast a 50 min version of the film.

Rama's story revisited: Arshia Sattar

Sanskrit scholar Arshia Sattar's new book, “Lost Loves…”, sees Rama with all his human follies... No other character from Hindu mythology, perhaps, has been as enmeshed in modern Indian politics as Rama. While mystic poet Kabir once saw Rama as the ideal man who can't be tied down in idols or holy places, the controversy over the place of his birth threatened to rip apart the secular fabric of the country in the 1990s. More recently, A.K. Ramanujan's celebrated essay on the Ramayana was taken off the Delhi University syllabus under pressure from Right wing activists.

As a Sanskrit scholar and translator, Arshia Sattar has studied Rama through all these avatars. A Ph.D. from the Department of South Asian Languages and Civilizations at the University of Chicago, her translation of Valmiki Ramayana is an acclaimed work. Her recent book, “Lost Loves: Exploring Rama's Anguish”, looks at Rama as an angst-ridden character constantly torn between divinity and humanness. Wendy Doniger, well known Indologist, says that the book makes us see how deeply conflicted Rama is, and therefore, “what a valuable guide he provides for contemporary mortals like us, a far better model than a hero who knows he is a God and therefore can do no wrong.”

Excerpts from an interview with Arshia Sattar:
What compelled a feminist like you to psychoanalyse Rama's character?
It is an attempt to create a psychological landscape for a character that has become more and more opaque over the centuries either because he has been divinised or because he has been demonised. If you reject Rama and ignore him, you don't give him any emotional depth, he becomes flat and uni-dimensional. Equally so if he is a God. It's precisely as a feminist that I felt I had to examine Rama more closely — not to defend or justify some of his actions but to try and understand how and why he can act the way he does. We need to examine the characters and the ideas that trouble us as much as we need to examine the ideas that make us comfortable instead of simply going along with them. Our comforts and our discomforts need to explored, opened up, so that we can understand them and ourselves better.

Despite all efforts to “understand” Rama, is it not hard for a woman or a Dalit to come to terms with the character of Rama? Of course it's hard for many of us to come to terms with the idea of Rama. It's been hard for me to do that as well. I don't think “coming to terms with Rama” means liking him or approving of him or endorsing his actions. It means we've thought about what he is and what he does for ourselves, rather than slipping into received and unreconstructed perceptions about him.

What do you think is Rama's central tragic flaw? I'm not sure we can use this category here. It's rather too Shakespearean. Rama's tragedy is that he chooses the public over the personal, his role as a good king becomes supremely important to him. But it's this same choice, of giving up his love and personal happiness that makes him a hero to so many. There are many ways to read the character of Rama, many ways to understand exactly the same set of actions. Mine is just one among the many. And for me, the tragedy is that he is left so utterly alone at the end of Valmiki's story.

You make a distinction between Rama of the “middle books” and of Book 1 & Book 7 It's in Books 1 and 7 that Rama is most clearly god. The middle books are more ambivalent about this and that's what gives us the space to enter the story and ask questions about this man who would be king. Books 1 and 7 seem to attempt to iron out the contradictions and inconsistencies in the stories that have been told thus far. They answer the questions that we have as readers. As A.K. Ramanujan said, the epics grow around their own flaws. In that sense, they make the narratives richer and more complex and more diverse. Which is what we're having a hard time accepting these days. Source: http://www.thehindu.com/life-and-style/metroplus/article2674973.ece

Also see: http://dilipsimeon.blogspot.com/2011/10/valmiki-ramayana-book-of-wilderness.html

Mukul Kesavan - Delhi University and the purging of Ramanujan

'The essay is a marvellous account of the hundreds of ways in which the Ramayana has been told, complete with examples of this narrative diversity. I can’t imagine that the vice-chancellor, a member of that urbane cohort, the Class of ’75, wanted the essay removed because he agreed with the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad goons who first agitated on the issue three years ago. They did this by trashing the department of history and physically assaulting the head of the department. This happened during the tenure of the previous vice-chancellor, but no holder of this office could possibly wish to further the work of thugs who seek to violently limit the intellectual freedom of a university. So that couldn’t be the reason.

Nor could it be expert opinion. The expert committee appointed by the Supreme Court to investigate the matter had four members, three of whom endorsed Ramanujan’s essay without reservation. The fourth, while praising the essay’s scholarship, came to the conclusion that it would be difficult for college lecturers to teach with sufficient context, especially those who weren’t Hindu.

Now, one of the assumptions behind the idea of a university education is that people learn about things they didn’t know before. Then, if they so choose, they become teachers themselves and pass that knowledge on to others. If our fitness to teach a subject was predicated on the cultural context into which we were born, we wouldn’t have universities as we know them today. I teach history at Jamia Millia Islamia. For years, I taught a course called ‘The History of Islam in India’. My department had many distinguished historians who happened to be Muslim, but not one of them was crass enough to suggest that my being non-Muslim rendered me unfit to teach that course.

This is, in essence, the objection of the solitary dissenting expert to Ramanujan’s essay being a part of the BA syllabus: it can’t be properly taught by college teachers who aren’t Hindu. I can’t bring myself to believe that university teachers (and the vice-chancellor and the members of the academic council are, first and last, academics) voted to banish “Three Hundred Ramayanas” on grounds that would effectively destroy the rationale and foundation of university education...'

by Mukul Kesavan. Read on..

http://www.telegraphindia.com/1111027/jsp/opinion/story_14672561.jsp

The essay by AK Ramanujan censored by DU's Academic Council

Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation
A. K. Ramanujan: How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of someRamayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one..One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet. Rama said to Hanuman, "Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me." Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing. So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole.. Read on..
http://publishing.cdlib.org/ucpressebooks/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254