How Hundreds Of Ramayanas, Across Languages And Cultures, Relate To Each Other

How many Rmyanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Rmyanas, a question is sometimes asked: How many Rmyanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one. 

One day when Rma 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, Hanumn, was at his feet. Rama said to Hanumn, ‘Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me.’

Now Hanumn 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.

He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld. There were women down there. ‘Look, a tiny monkey! It’s fallen from above!’ Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thli). The King of Spirits (bht), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat animals. So Hanumn was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with his vege­ tables. Hanumn sat on the platter, wondering what to do.

While this was going on in the netherworld, Rma sat on his throne on the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahm came to see him. They said to Rma, ‘We want to talk privately with you. We don’t want anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?’

‘All right,’ said Rma, ‘we’ll talk.’

Then they said, ‘Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are talking, his head should be cut off.’

‘It will be done,’ said Rma.

Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanumn had gone down to fetch the ring. Rma trusted no one more than Laksmana, so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. ‘Don’t allow anyone to enter,’ he ordered.

Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Vivmitra appear­ed and said, ‘I need to see Rma at once. It’s urgent. Tell me, where is Rma?’

Laksmana said, ‘Don’t go in now. He is talking to some people. It’s important.’

‘What is there that Rma would hide from me?’ said Vivmitra. ‘I must go in, right now.’

Laksmana said, ‘I’ll have to ask his permission before I can let you in.’

‘Go in and ask then.’

‘I can’t go in till Rma comes out. You’ll have to wait.’

‘If you don’t go in and announce my presence, I’ll burn the entire king­dom of Ayodhya with a curse,’ said Vivmitra.

Laksmana thought, ‘IfI go in now, I’ll die. But if l don’t go, this hot­ headed man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things living in it, will die. It’s better that I alone should die.’

So he went right in.

Rma asked him, ‘What’s the matter?’ ‘Vivmitrais here.’

‘Send him in.’

So Vivmitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end. Brahm and Vasistha had come to see Rma and say to him, ‘Your work in the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now be given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods.’ That’s all they wanted to say.

Laksmana said to Rma, ‘Brother, you should cut off my head.’

Rma said, ‘Why’ We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why should I cut off your head?′

Laksmana said. ‘You can’t do that. You can’t let me off because I’m your brother. There’II be a blot on Rma’s name. You didn’t spare your wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave.’

Laksmana was an avatar of esa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His time was up too. He went directly to the river Saray and disappeared in the flowing waters.

When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rma summoned all his followers, Vibhsana, Sugrva, and others, and arranged for the corona­tion of his twin sons, Lava and Kua. Then Rma too entered the river Saray.

All this while, Hanumn was in the netherworld. When he was finally taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rma. ‘Rma Rma Rma ... ’

Then the King of Spirits asked, ‘Who are you?’

‘Hanumn.’

‘Hanumn? Why have you come here?’

‘Rma’s ring fell into a hole. I’ve come to fetch it.’

The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands of rings. They were all Rma’s rings. The king brought the platter to Hanumn, set it down, and said, ‘Pick out your Rama’s ring and take it.’

They were all exactly the same. ‘I don’t know which one it is,’ said Hanumn, shaking his head.

The King of Spirits said, ‘There have been as many Rmas as there are rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find Rma. This incarnation of Rma is now over. Whenever an incarnation of Rma is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep them. Now you can go.’

So Hanuman left. (1)

This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rma there is a Rmyana. The number of Rmyanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan-to say nothing of Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kvyas or ornate poetic compositions, purnas or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the clas­sical and folk traditions. the number of Rmyanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadows plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures. Camille Bulcke (1950), a student of the Rmyanas, counted three hundred tellings. It’s no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth century, Kumravysa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahbhrata, because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Rmyana poets (tinikidanu phanirya rmyanada kavigala bhradali). In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cul­tures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.

VLMKI AND KAMPAN: TWO AHALYS

Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. I have come to prefer the world tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or Ur-text—usually Vlmki’ s Sanskrit Rmyana, the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Vlmki’s narrative that is carried from one language to another.

It would be useful to make some distinctions before we begin. The tradition itself distinguishes between the Rma story (rmakath) and texts composed by a specific person—Vlmki, Kampan, or Krttivsa, for example. Though many of the latter are popularly called Rmyanas (like Kamparmyanam), few texts actually bear the title Rmyana; they are given titles like lrmvatram (The Incarnation of Rma), Rmcaritmnas (The Lake of the Acts of Rama), Ramakien (The Story of Rama) and so on. Their relations to the Rma story as told by Vlmki also vary. This traditional distinction between kath (story) and kvya (poem) parallels the French one between sujet and récit, or the English one between story and discourse (Chatman 1978). It is also analogous to the distinction between a sentence and a speech act. The story may be the same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different. Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the style, details, tone, and texture—and therefore the import—may be vastly different.

Here are two tellings of the ‘same’ episode, which occur at the same point in the sequence of the narrative. The first is from the first book (Blaknda) of Vlmki’s Sanskrit Rmyana; the second from the first canto (Plakntam) of Kampan’s lrmvatram in  Tamil.  Both narrate the story of Ahaly.

THE AHALY EPISODE: VLMKI

Seeing Mithila, Janaka’s white
and dazzling city, all the sages
cried out in praise, ‘Wonderful!
How wonderful!’

Rghava, sighting on the outskirts
of Mithil an ashram, ancient,
unpeopled, and lovely, asked the sage,
’What is this holy place,

so like an ashram but without a hermit?
Master, I’d like to hear: whose was it?’
Hearing Rghava’s words, the great sage
Vivmitra, man of fire,

expert in words answered, ’Listen,
Rghava, I’ll tell you whose ashram
this was and how it was cursed
by a great man in anger.

It was great Gautama’s, this ashram
that reminds you of heaven, worshipped
even by the gods. Long ago, with Ahaly
he practised tapas (4) here

for countless years. Once, knowing that Gautama
was away, Indra (called Thousand Eyes),
ac’s husband, took on the likeness
of the sage, and said to Ahaly:

“Men pursuing their desire do not wait
for the proper season, O you who
have a perfect body. Making love
with you: that’s what I want.
That waist of yours is lovely.”

She knew it was Indra of the Thousand Eyes
in the guise of the sage. Yet she,
wrongheaded woman, made up her mind,
excited, curious about the king
of the gods.

And then, her inner being satisfied,
she said to the god, ’I’m satisfied, king
of the gods. Go quickly from here.
O giver of honour, lover, protect
yourself and me.”

And Indra smiled and said to Ahaly,
“Woman of lovely hips, I am
very content. I’ll go the way I came.“
Thus after making love, he came out
of the hut made of leaves.

And, O Rma, as he hurried away,
nervous about Gautama and flustered,
he caught sight of Gautama coming in,
the great sage, unassailable
by gods and antigods,

empowered by his tapas, still wet
with the water of the river
he’d bathed in, blazing like fire,
with kua grass and kindling
in his hands.

Seeing him, the king of the gods was
terror-struck, his face drained of colour.
The sage, facing Thousand Eyes now dressed
as the sage, the one rich in virtue
and the other with none,

spoke to him in anger: “You took my form,
you fool, and did this that should never
be done. Therefore you will lose your testicles.“
At once, they fell to the ground, they fell
even as the great sage spoke

his words in anger to Thousand Eyes.
Having cursed Indra, he then cursed
Ahaly: “You, you will dwell here
many thousands of years, eating the air,
without food, rolling in ash,

and burning invisible to all creatures.
When Rma, unassailable son
of Daaratha, comes to this terrible
wilderness, you will become pure,
you woman of no virtue,

you will be cleansed of lust and confusion.
Filled then with joy, you’ll wear again
your form in my presence.” And saying
this to that woman of bad conduct,
blazing Gautama abandoned

the ashram, and did his tapas
on a beautiful Himalayan peak,
haunt of celestial singers and
perfected beings.

Emasculated Indra then
spoke to the gods led by Agni
attended by the sages
and the celestial singers.

“I’ve only done this work on behalf
of the gods, putting great Gautama
in a rage, blocking his tapas.
He has emasculated me

and rejected her in anger.
Through this great outburst
of curses, I’ve robbed him
of his tapas. Therefore,

great gods, sages, and celestial singers,
help me, helper of the gods,
to regain my testicles.” And the gods,
led by Agni, listened to Indra

of the Hundred Sacrifices and went
with the Marut hosts
to the divine ancestors, and said,
“Some time ago, Indra, infatuated,

ravished the sage’s wife
and was then emasculated
by the sage’s curse. Indra,
king of gods, destroyer of cities,

is now angry with the gods.
This ram has testicles
but great Indra has lost his .
So take the ram’s testicles

and quickly graft them onto Indra.
A castrated ram will give you
supreme satisfaction and will be
a source of pleasure.

People who offer it
will have endless fruit.
You will give them your plenty.“
Having heard Agni’s words,
the Ancestors got together
and ripped off the ram’s testicles
and applied them then to Indra
of the Thousand Eyes.

Since then, the divine Ancestors
eat these castrated rams
and Indra has the testicles
of the beast through the power
of great Gautama’s tapas.

Come then, Rma, to the ashram
of the holy sage and save Ahaly
who has the beauty of a goddess.’
Rghava heard Vivmitra’s words

and followed him into the ashram
with Laksmana: there he saw
Ahaly, shining with an inner light
earned through her penances,

blazing yet hidden from the eyes
of passersby, even gods and antigods.

(Sastrigal and Sastri 1958, knda 1, sargas 47-8; translated by David Shulman and A.K. Ramanujan)

THE AHALY EPISODE: KAMPAN

They came to many-towered Mithila
and stood outside the fortress.
On the towers were many flags.

There, high on an open field,
stood a black rock
that was once Ahaly,

the great sage’s wife who fell
because she lost her chastity,
the mark of marriage in a house. [Verse 547)

Rma’s eyes fell on the rock,
the dust of his feet
wafted on it.

Like one unconscious coming to,
cutting through ignorance.
changing his dark carcass
for true form
as he reaches the Lord’s feet,

so did she stand alive
formed and coloured
again as she once was. [548]

Rma then asks Vivmitra why this lovely woman had been turned to stone. Vivmitra replies:

’Listen. Once Indra,
Lord of the Diamond Axe,
waited on the absence

of Gautama, a sage all spirit,

meaning to reach out
for the lovely breast
of doe-eyed Ahaly, his wife. [551]

Hurt by love’s arrows,
hurt by the look in her eyes
that pierced him like a spear, Indra
writhed and cast about
for stratagems;

one day, overwhelmed
and mindless, he isolated
the sage; and sneaked into the hermitage
wearing the exact body of Gautama

whose heart knew no falsehoods. [552]

Sneaking in, he joined Ahaly;
coupled, they drank deep
of the clear new wine
of first-night weddings;
and she knew.

Yet unable
to put aside what was not hers,
she dallied in her joy,
but the sage did not tarry,
he came back, a very iva
with three eyes in his head. [553]

Gautama, who used no arrows
from bows. could use more inescapable
powers of curse and blessing.

When he arrived, Ahaly stood there,
stunned, bearing the shame of a deed
that will not end in this endless world.

Indra shook in terror,
started to move away
in the likeness of a cat. [554)

Eyes dropping fire, Gautama
saw what was done,
and his  words flew
like the burning arrows
at your hand:

“May you be covered
by the vaginas
of a thousand women!”
In the twinkle of an eye
they came and covered him. [555]

Covered with shame,
laughingstock of the world,
Indra left.

The sage turned
to his tender wife
and cursed:

“O bought woman!
May you turn to stone!”
and she fell at once

a rough thing
of black rock. [556]

Yet as she fell she begged:
“To bear and forgive wrongs
is also the way of elders.
O iva-like  lord of mine,
set some limit to your curse!”

So he said: “Rma
will come, wearing garlands that bring
the hum of bees with them.
When the dust of his feet falls on you,
you will be released from the body of stone.” [557]

The immortals looked at their king
and came down at once to Gautama
in a delegation led by Brahm
and begged of Gautama to relent.

Gautama’s mind had changed
and cooled. He changed
the marks on Indra to a thousand eyes
and the gods went back to their worlds,
while she lay there, a thing of stone. [558]

That was the way it was.
From now on, no more misery,
only release, for all things
in this world.

O cloud-dark lord

who battled with that ogress,
black as soot, I saw  there
the virtue of your hands
and here the virtue of your feet.′ [559]

Let me rapidly suggest a few differences between the two tellings. In Vlmki, Indra seduces a willing Ahaly. In Kampan, Ahaly realises she is doing wrong but cannot let go of the forbidden joy; the poem has also suggested earlier that her sage-husband is all spirit, details which together add a certain psychological subtlety to the seduction. Indra tries to steal away in the shape of a cat, clearly a folklore motif (also found, for example, in the Kathsaritsgara, an eleventh-century Sanskrit com­ pendium of folktales; see Tawney 1927). He is cursed with a thousand vaginas which are later changed into eyes, and Ahaly is changed into frigid stone. The poetic justice wreaked on both offenders is fitted to their wrongdoing. Indra bears the mark of what he lusted for, while Ahaly is rendered incapable of responding to anything. These motifs, not found in Vlmki, are attested in South Indian folklore and other southern Rma stories, inscriptions and earlier Tamil poems, as well as in non-Tamil sources. Kampan, here and elsewhere, not only makes full use of his predecessor Vlmki’s materials but folds in many regional folk tradi­tions. It is often through him that they then become part of other Rm­yanas.

In technique, Kampan is also more dramatic than Vlmki. Rma’s feet transmute the black stone into  Ahaly  first; only afterwards is her story told. The black stone standing on a high place, waiting for Rma, is itself a very effective, vivid symbol. Ahaly’s revival, her waking from cold stone to fleshly human warmth, becomes an occasion for a moving bhakti (devotional) meditation on the soul waking to its form in god.

Finally, the Ahaly episode is related to previous episodes in the poem such as that in which Rama destroys the demoness Ttak. There he was the destroyer of evil, the bringer of sterility and the ashes of death to his enemies. Here, as the reviver of Ahalya, he is a cloud-dark god of fertility. Throughout Kampan’ s poem, Rma is a Tamil hero, a generous giver and a ruthless destroyer of foes. And the bhakti vision makes the release of Ahaly from her rock-bound sin a paradigm of Ram’s incarnatory mis­sion to release all souls from world-bound misery.

In Vlmki, Rma’s character is not that of a god but of a god-man who has to jive within the limits of a human form with all its vicissitudes. Some argue that the references to Rma’s divinity and his incarnation for the purpose of destroying Rvana, and the first and last books of the epic, in which Rama is clearly described as a god with such a mission, are later additions. Be that as it may, in Kampan, is clearly a god. Hence a pas­sage like the above is dense with religious feeling and theological images. Kampan, writing in the twelfth century, composed his poem under the influence of Tamil bhakti. He had for his master Nammlvr (ninth century?), the most eminent of the ri Vaisnava saints. So, for Kampan, Rma is a god who is on a mission to root out evil, sustain the good and bring release to all living beings. The encounter with Ahaly is only the first in a series, ending with Rma’s encounter with Rvana the demon himself.

Excerpted with permission from A.K. Ramanujan’s essay Three Hundred Rmyanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation, Oxford University Press.