Ramanujan's Ramayana...

Having renounced facebook and other social activities to avoid accumulation of negative energies in me…in little time that I have, I decided to redirect my randomness into some passionate web contents like economic political weekly, livemint.com, information weekly journal and tehelka.com. I considered these options as to keep me alive and abreast of happenings around me in my non-happening world... for coming few months. This will also help my grey cells from succumbing to numbers and logics that my thesis is!

So as expected, when I opened my eclipse IDE, I had this craving for facebooking and posting some arbit and attractive thought coming to my mind (which I am not able to recall now…interestingly). I channelized myself to epw site where I caught up with an article on banning of Ramanujan's essay on 300 versions of Ramayanas by DU. This is an old news I remember. Essay's exact title is "Three Hundred Ramanyanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation". Author of epw article elucidates (in a bit abstract manner… due to lack of space I guess) five examples and three thoughts. Few excerpts from the essay were cited giving hints of an analytical, unbiased and crisp…and very academic language that Ramanujan applied.

Five examples in the article mentioned some interesting differences between versions like that of Valmiki, Thai, Kampan's (Tamil), Jain's etc….differences like those of style of writing (e.g. symbolic meanings of characters), facts (like Sita was Ravana's daughter via some indirect context) etc….and with such differences, reflecting upon different versions of Ramayanas to observe what actual Ramayana could have meant for us. Not having read either the Ramayana or the Ramanujan's essay on first place, I feel incomplete but nonetheless let my bounded rationality reign for now.

Just imagining the merit of such an article I too agree with epw author that banning such piece of analysis is not only a big loss for students but also foe understanding our culture. Culture must be studied, analysed…not with a closed mind and senses. To put it to use….one must dismarry oneself from the rigidities and blind faiths that are side products of a culture which is older than the oldest banyan tree alive….to let the culture understand contemporaries and vice versa and let the new wind blow….otherwise both the new and old beings dwelling on our earth will be lost in their own worlds without accepting and learning from each other...

I think I have started thinking monotonously these days whenever it comes to our culture...but I stand for it...always!