The Ramayana was also the book of answers to the little problems adults could never sympathise with, writes historian J. Devika
Come the month of Karkkatakam—July 16-August 16 this year—and Malayalam newspapers trip on each other to publish photos of senior ladies sitting in old family mansions, reading Thunjathu Ezhuthachan’s Adhyathma Ramayanam to children. I remember a far more plural scene when I think of Hindu faith in my Malayali Sudra family.
There were family members so devoted to Siva that they flinched at the very mention of the names of Vishnu. Some preferred Vishnu or Krishna. But Ayyappa, the fruit of the union of Siva and Vishnu, and Velayudha, the son of Siva and Parvathi, found great favour among the Sudras of our locality. There were rivalries between the Siva devotees of Vaikom and Ettumaanur. Or between the devotees of Guruvayurappan and the Ambalappuzha Sreekrishna. There were relatives who were Sakti worshippers and senior uncles who became Siddhas and practised spirituality in a way that left most of us in awe (the leading lights of Kerala’s spiritual liberation from Brahminism would arise from this stream).
The reading of the Ramayana and chanting of Rama’s name were projected as essential to ‘refined’ Hindu existence in Brahmin and Sudra social reform here. In contrast, the daily prayer routine suggested by the anti-caste spiritual leader Sree Narayana Guru was radically different. In this amazing variety of gods and faiths, Ram was a very minor presence, especially in temple worship.
Ezhuthachan’s Ramayanam was, however, a constant presence in our lives, in a curiously non-religious, spiritual way. For the most, it was a book of sorrows—one that contained the great, eternal griefs of this world. Listening to it prepared you to face those. My earliest memories of the Ramayanam are not of the Karkkatakam readings. They are associated with the deaths of loved ones—of the text being read as the last rites were being performed. Each night of mourning would resound with the Ramayanam.
It covered the pain like balm—some phrases would inevitably stick even when one developed more critical readings of the text later—and thus so, many of the Ramayanam’s poetic coinages linger in everyday Malayalam. There is something incredibly poetic about the choice of the month of Karkkatakam for the yearly reading: this was the time of the monsoon when the sky was invariably overcast and the rain fell slow, steady and quiet, like weeping, and the wind sobbed softly.
But for us children, the Ramayanam was also the book of answers to the little problems adults could never sympathise with. For example, “Will the green barbets have eaten all our guavas by tomorrow?” To find out, open the Ramayanam randomly, skip seven lines and seven words, read. The word you encounter there will reveal an answer. The point is not whether the revelation was true. What mattered was that it quelled worry in a little heart, one that adults would laugh off.
But later in life, I noticed that what a reader/listener took away from the Ramayanam could be a good guide to the kind of person they were. As a young listener, I was filled with questions about the idea of human duty and the dilemmas it posed in the Ramayana. I read both the Bhagavatham and the Ramayanam to my daughter when she was nine. She soon lost interest in the former, but listened to the latter raptly, her huge eyes welling and shining alternately. The difference, she told me, was about love. In the Ramayanam , all of them, in different ways, loved truly, suffered for it and were cleansed by that pain. But that was not so in the Bhagavatham.
In a way, the reading of the Ramayanam against the backdrop of the sunless, intensely lush greenery of Karkkatakam in Kerala was also revealing of the extent to which nature was part of our inner worlds—our subjectivity. That we have lost this connection is what makes images of the reading in our newspapers so hollow and false. And of course, the fact that suffering is no longer embraced for its purifying fire; it is merely inflicted on those who stand in the way, wittingly or unwittingly, of the ruthless game of power.
(The author is a historian, feminist and critic from Kerala. Views are personal).