In one section Ramanujan compares the two Ahalya stories in Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana and Kampan's Tamil Ramayana. There is an entire section on the Jain tellings of the Ramayana. Vimalasuri the Jain poet, Ramanujan says, opens the story not with Rama's genology and greatness, but with Ravana's. Ravana is considered to be one of the 63 leaders or salakapurusas of the Jain tradition. Hence, there is a set of rigorous questioning in the Jain texts: 'How can monkeys vanquish the powerful raksasa warriors like Ravana? How can noble men and Jain worthies like Ravana eat flesh and drink blood?' etc. In Jain tellings, Rama does not even kill Ravana. It is left to Lakshmana. Even the conception of Ravana as a ten-headed demon is rationalised in these tellings. It is said that when Ravana was born, his mother was given a necklace of nine gems, which she put around his neck. She saw his face reflected in them ninefold and so called him the ten-faced one.
In a Kannada folk narrative, rendered by an untouchable bard, Ramanujan points out, there are separate poems on Sita's birth. Ravana is said to become pregnant with Sita after he consumes the Mango given by Siva. He delivers Sita through his nose when he sneezes. "In Kannada, the word 'Sita' means 'he sneezed': he calls her Sita because she is born from a sneeze. Her name is thus given a Kannada folk etymology, as in the Sanskrit texts it has a Sanskrit one: there she is named Sita because King Janaka finds her in a furrow," says Ramanujan. There are many such stories collected in the essay that indicate how the Ramayana gets translated, transplanted and transposed across cultures.
When there are such heterogeneous Ramayana narratives, which version has the Sangh imported for its ideological purposes? As I mentioned earlier, it is not certainly the one by Valmiki. Ramayana or the Mahabharata are not the only epic poems that witness this diversity of renderings. In fact, it appears to be the trait of all epic poems. They flower with new imagination in different cultural milieus, accommodating the angst of that time. In this context, I would like to mention the book Singer of Tales by Alfred B. Lord that speaks of Homer as not the only narrator of Illiad and Odyssey but just one member of a larger group of singers who continue the oral narration of the epic poems.
Since I learnt of this controversy, I find myself wondering how Ramanujan himself would have reacted to it. I won't hazard a guess by transposing myself into his genius self, like it so often happens in the folktales that he has retold. But I am certain that he would have answered this controversy with his 'own brand of light-hearted self-mockery' by narrating yet another story. In his preface to Ramanujan's collected essays, Vinay Dharwadker says, that for Ramanujan "an ideal critical essay was the one proposed by Walter Benjamin, where a scholar-critic ought to hide behind 'a phalanx of quotations which, like highwaymen, would ambush the passing reader and rob him of his convictions.' Particularly in the second half of his career, Ramanujan constructed an essay as an 'anthology of quotations'." This essay on the Ramayana too is full of enchanting stories. Its sparkling clarity makes it accessible to a non-academic, but yet it 'ambushes' the mind and firmly implants the idea of the many Ramayanas. It snatches the reader away from a monolithic conception of the epic. Which perhaps explains the Sangh Parivar's fear about the essay and why they want it off the History Department's reading list.
Since I may seldom get a chance to write about Ramanujan, I want to end with a personal note about him: As an undergraduate student in Bangalore, I was enormously lucky to attend a few literary meetings at the lounge of Ravindra Kalakshetra where Ramanujan would present his new poems, short stories, translations and folk stories he had discovered to his fellow Kannada writers. I remember all big names of Kannada literature like P. Lankesh, U. R. Ananthamurthy, Girish Karnad, Chandrashekar Kambar being in attendance for those meetings. Then, the joke in the Kannada literary circles was that themes and trends would realign after Ramanujan made his annual or bi-annual visit to Bangalore. At the meetings, I was completely in awe about the ease with which Ramanujan switched between languages, cultures and genres of literature. His serene flow of thoughts; his lexical choice and gentle intonation; his total immersion in work which was more than apparent, naturally made him my hero.
My father, who was himself a writer and celebrated publisher in Kannada, was the first to emphasise the importance of occupying the bilingual intellectual space (Kannada and English) to me, but I seem to have taken to the idea only after having met and read Ramanujan. He also bridged the conflicting gap between classical scholarship and studying the present for me. If I am pardoned the usage, he made both appear 'sexy.' His reading sessions would invariably have both classical Tamil or Telugu poetry and translations from modern poets like Yehudi Amichai. I once mustered the courage to talk to him after one of the sessions and asked if he would permit me to photocopy a particular poem he had read out. He smiled, pulled out the sheet and recalled a new proverb doing the rounds among his students in Chicago: "Xeroxing is learning," he said. India has produced very few intellectuals who are so rootedly cosmopolitan. Now tell me, how can the Sangh Parivar tolerate anything like that?