Against the Current: Sita and Her Foils in - Bad Request

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such as Bhavabhuti’s eighth-century play, Uttararamacarita. In addition, over the centuries the story has been retold in regional languages and been recited, sung, and enacted, generating many performances and occasions for exegesis. 4 Simultaneously, orally transmitted folk versions that vary widely from locality to locality have spread throughout the land. With the coming of relatively inexpensive printing in India’s regional language scripts, diversity has taken yet a fourth form, as self-consciously modern bhasha (regional language) writers have retold Ramkatha, for their own time, in prose genres such as the short story. Yet Ramayana scholars have hitherto given short shrift to twentieth-century prose renderings of Ramkatha in regional Indian languages, even though some are among the most artfully crafted and renowned stories in modern Indian literature. In earlier centuries, poets earned a name for themselves by composing a “classic” Ramayana or Mahabharata in their mother tongue (e.g. Kamban in Tamil, Krittibasa in Bengali, Eluttachan in Malayalam). Today some of India’s most creative, perceptive, and widely- hailed writers have turned to the short story to develop the very components of Ramayana tradition that Hindutva proponents have ignored. In order to demonstrate the extent to which such writers have explored Ramkatha’s complexities and multiple facets, this essays examines a selection of outstanding modern short stories on Ramkatha themes. Today one can gain familiarity with Ramkatha in a number of ways. One can memorize verses of Valmiki with a guru; study sections of a “classic” regional version (e.g. by Kampan) at school, listen to a grandparent recount the story in the mother tongue at bedtime, watch a drama troupe perform at festival time, read an Amar Chitra Katha comic book, or watch the 72-episode Doordarshan serial on video-cassette. Still, a large 2
number of Indians assume that whatever version of the story they know is, essentially, “the” story. Homogenization of Ramkatha through television and comic books has made many people less aware of other ways to tell the story than would have been the case a century earlier, when most people learned the story in fluid oral versions from itinerant storytellers or kin. 5 To insure a broad and robust collection of examples in this essay, I draw from two regional literary traditions: Tamil and Telugu. 6 By doing so, I show that even within the modern regional tellings, a undeniable diversity exists in how characters and events are envisioned. A talented set of modern prose writers of Tamil and Telugu have retold Ramkatha incidents in new idioms with fresh perspectives. This essay explores how Tamil and Telugu writers construct gender within the Ramayana tradition at both the ideological and formal level. The portrayal of Sita has generally been an endeavor loaded with cultural freight since she is often identified as the quintessential exemplar of the self-sacrificing wife. In Tamil and Telugu short stories, writers seldom emphasize Sita’s identity as Goddess Lakshmi on earth. Instead, they portray her acting according to local custom. In addition, since authoritative Ramkatha texts deal with only a small part of Sita’s lifespan, lots of room for creativity exists. In addition, new perspectives emerge when the author considers particular events from Sita’s point of view, rather than from Rama’s or Valmiki’s point of view. The most common characteristic shared by the short stories analyzed in this paper is “domestication,” a pattern whose main characteristics were first identified by A.K. Ramanujan in his study of how folk performers transformed classical Sanskrit stories. First, avataras tend to become subject to human limitations. For example, they must blow their noses like other people, and sometimes find themselves constrained by social 3
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