The Hindus

by Wendy Doniger

  As the historian Romila Thapar pointed out, “All this uncertainty is quite apart from the question of the technical viability of building a bridge across a wide stretch of sea in the centuries BC.”38 There are also other issues here—ecological, economic, sociological, and practical. The Indian Supreme Court determined that the “bridge” was not man-made (or, presumably, monkey-made). West Bengal’s Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee argued that the Ramayana was “born in the imagination of poets,” but Nanditha Krishna, the director of the C. P. Ramaswami Anjar Foundation, countered that the Ramayana was not fiction. Advocates for the monkey bridge have cited, in evidence, NASA photos suggesting an underwater bridge (that is, a causeway) between India and Sri Lanka,39 yet another instance of our old friend the myth of the submerged continent.

  Two days later the headline read, REPORT ON HINDU GOD RAM WITHDRAWN, and the BBC news ran this story:

  The Indian government has withdrawn a controversial report submitted in court earlier this week which questioned the existence of the Hindu god Ram. The report was withdrawn after huge protests by opposition parties. . . . In the last two days, the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has launched a scathing attack on the government for questioning the “faith of the million.” Worried about the adverse reaction from the majority Hindu population of the country, the Congress Party-led government has now done a U-turn and withdrawn the statement submitted in court. . . . In the meantime, the court has said that dredging work for the canal could continue, but Ram’s Bridge should not be touched.

  But how are they to avoid touching the mythological bridge?

  MANY RAMAYANAS

  Another major issue here is the question of who has the right to say what the Ramayana is and is not. The arguments about this in many ways parallel those about what Hinduism is and is not. The question of when Sita ceases to be Sita is one that different people will answer in different ways. One of the qualities that allow great myths to survive over centuries, among very different cultures, is their ability to stand on their heads (indeed, to turn cartwheels), to invite complete reversals of the political stance taken by the interpretation of the basic plot.40

  This is certainly true of the political uses of the Ramayana, which has been constantly retold in literature and performance throughout India, most famously in the version of Tulsidas in the sixteenth century, which to this day is performed in Varanasi during a festival that lasts for several weeks each winter. Repressive tellings of the myth use the mythological moment of Ram-raj (Rama’s reign), as an imagined India that is free of Muslims and Christians and any other Others, in the hope of restoring India to the Edenic moment of the Ramayana.

  But many subversive tellings cast Ravana and the ogres as the Good Guys (as some of them are, in some ways, even in Valmiki’s version) and Rama as the villain of the piece (as he certainly is not, in Valmiki’s version). Michael Madhusudan Datta (1824-1873), a Bengali poet who converted to Christianity, wrote a poem, “The Slaying of Meghanada” (1861), based on the Bengali Ramayana of the poet Krittibas, but Datta made Ravana the hero and Ravana’s son, Meghanada, the symbol of the Hindus oppressed by the British, whom Datta equated with Rama, the villain.41 Equally subversive was the Ramayana that Tamil separatists told in South India in the early twentieth century, casting Ravana as a noble Tamil king who was treacherously murdered by the forces of the evil Rama coming from the north. Both North and South Indians often identified Rama with the north and Ravana with the south, but the north demonized the “Dravidian” Ravana, the south the “Aryan” Rama, through the composition of explicit “counter epics.”42 In a Dalit telling, Sita, on behalf of the ogres, rebukes Rama for killing innocent people.43

  The Ramayana monkeys were already mixed up in colonial history in ways that still resonate. In the nineteenth century some Hindus in North India made monkeys of the British, calling them “red monkeys,” and Orissan narratives still depict them as monkeys. Others say that Sita blessed the eighteen million monkeys who had helped Rama, promising them that they would be reborn as the English. A North Indian folktale tells us that two of the monkeys were rewarded with a “white island” in the far west (that is, England, replacing Lanka). From there, it was prophesied, their descendants would rule the world in the Kali Yuga, the dark age that is to end the world,44 a time when barbarians (i.e., the British) will invade India, the old political myth distilled from the many actual invasions of India by foreign powers. According to a story told in Maharashtra, when one of Ravana’s ogress wives befriended Sita, during her period of captivity in Ravana’s harem, Sita promised her that she would be rewarded by being reborn as Queen Victoria.45

  One device used to accommodate multiple versions of a story is by reference to multiple eras of cosmic development. One Purana refers explicitly to this technique: “Because of the different eras, the birth of Ganesha is narrated in different ways.” On another occasion, the bard recites a story in which a sage forgives his enemies; the audience (built into the text) then interrupts, saying, “We heard it told differently. Let us tell you: the sage cursed them in anger. Explain this.” And the bard replies, “That is true, but it happened in another era. I will tell you.” And he narrates the second version of the story.46 Another Purana introduces a second variant of another story by remarking, “The Puranas tell it differently.”47

  There has always been a Darwinian force that allows the survival of some tellings rather than others, determined in part by their quality (the ones that are well told and/or that strike a resonant note with the largest audience survive) and in part by their subsidies (the ones with the richest patrons survive). Money still talks (or tells stories), but mass media now can pervert that process; the tellings that survive are often the ones that are cast or broadcast into the most homes, greatly extending the circle of patrons. Amar Chitra Katha comic books have flooded the market with bowdlerized versions of many of the great Hindu classics, in a kind of Gresham’s law (bad money driving out good) that is not Darwinian at all but merely Adam Smithian, or capitalist.

  Over the past few decades the growing scholarly awareness of the many different Ramayanas opened out all the different variants, only to have the door slammed shut by Bollywood and television and the comic books, so that most Hindus now know only one single Ramayana. The televising of the Ramayana (78 episodes, from January 1987 to July 1988) and Mahabharata (108 episodes, a holy number, from 1988 to 1990, on Sunday mornings) was a major factor leading to the destruction of Babur’s Mosque in 1992. So powerful were the objections to the proposal of Salman Khan, a Muslim (though with a Hindu mother), to play the role of Rama in a 2003 Bollywood production that the film was never made. On the other hand, though the televised Mahabharata was based largely on the Amar Chitra Katha comic book, the screenwriter was a leftist Muslim, Rahi Masuma Raza, and the opening credits were in English, Hindi, and Urdu—Urdu for a presumed Muslim audience. Lose one, win one—and the Mahabharata was always more diverse than the Ramayana.

  The Internet too has facilitated the mass circulation of stories that substitute for the storyteller’s art the power of mass identity politics. Salman Rushdie, in Midnight’s Children, imagined a private version of radio, a magic ether by which the children born at midnight on the day of India’s independence communicated. Now we have that in reality, the Web site, the chat room, the LISTSERV, the blog from outer space. A self-selecting small but vociferous group of disaffected Hindus have used this Indian ether to communicate with one another within what is perceived as a community. This accounts in large part for the proliferation of these groups and for the magnitude of the reaction to any incident, within just a few hours; it’s more fun than video games, and a lot more dangerous too. Another radio metaphor comes to mind, from two American filmslo in which a bomber pilot is instructed to turn off his radio as soon as he gets the command to bomb, so that he will not listen to false counterinstructions. It is this tendency to tune out all other messages that characterizes the blog mentality of the Hindu righ
t.

  NO MORE RAMAYANAS

  The Hindu right objects strenuously, often by smashing bookstores and burning books, to versions of Hindu stories that it does not like, particularly of the Ramayana, more particularly to retellings of the Ramayana that probe the sensitive subject of Sita’s relationship with Lakshmana. Here is a version recorded from the tribal people known as the Rajnengi Pardhan at Patangarh, Mandla District, and published in 1950:

  LAKSHMAN AMONG THE TRIBALS

  One night while Sita and Rama were lying together, Sita discussed Lakshman very affectionately. She said, “There he is sleeping alone. What is it that keeps him away from woman? Why doesn’t he want to marry?” This roused suspicion in Rama’s mind. Sita slept soundly, but Rama kept awake the whole night imagining things. Early next morning he sent for Lakshman from his lonely palace and asked him suddenly, “Do you love Sita?” Lakshman was taken aback and could hardly look at his brother. He stared at the ground for a long time and was full of shame. Lakshman gathered wood and built a great fire and shouted, “Set fire to this wood and if I am pure and innocent I will not burn.” He climbed onto the fire holding in his arms a screaming child. Neither of them was even singed. He left Rama and Sita and would not return, though Sita kept trying to lure him back.48

  Lakshman then went down to the underworld, where he had many adventures. Here Lakshman, rather than Sita, calls for the fire ordeal to prove his chastity, and Rama’s jealousy is directed against him, rather than against Sita. The detail of the screaming child may have crept into the story from the traditions of suttee, in which the woman is not allowed to enter the fire if she has a child and is often said not to scream; here, where the genders are reversed, those tropes seem to be reversed too.

  Right up until the present day, stories of this sort have been recorded and published. Then, in 2008, the Delhi University course on Ancient Indian Culture in the BA (honors) program assigned an essay entitled “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” by A. K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), who had taught for many years at the University of Chicago and in 1976 had received from the Indian government the honorary title of Padma Sri, one of India’s highest honors. Now Hindu organizations voiced objections to the content of some of the narratives Ramanujan had cited, said to be derogatory toward Hindu gods and goddesses:

  [Ramanujan] even sorts out a tale from Santhal folklore and puts forth the greatest outrage to Hindu psyche before the students of literature that Ravan as well as Lakshman both seduced Sita. No one on Earth so far dared to question the character of Sita so brazenly as Shri Ramanujan has done, though all through under the convenient cover of a folklore! . . . The Delhi University for its BA (Hons) second year course has included portions defaming and denigrating the characters of Lord Ram, Hanuman, Lakshman and Sita and projecting the entire episode as fallacious, capricious, imaginary and fake.49

  The Lakshmana-Sita relationship was also the sore point in my egg-punctuated London lecture in 2003.

  On February 25, 2008, a mob of more than a hundred people, organized by the All-India Students’ Council (ABVP), linked with the RSS, gathered outside the building of the School of Social Sciences at Delhi University. Eight or ten of them then went inside and ransacked the office of the head of the department of history, breaking the glass panes and damaging books and other objects in the office, as media and the police watched. The group threatened faculty members and warned them of dire consequences.50 The protesters also carried placards saying, in Hindi, “The university says there were three hundred versions of the Ramayana, not one”—indeed, indeed! In subsequent interviews, one of the protesters said: “These academics don’t understand that they are toying with our faith. They have this idea that it’s a written story, a literary text, so it doesn’t matter if you say there are 3000 versions of it.” Though he admitted the plurality of Hindu traditions, he proposed that “every deviant telling,” mostly tribal and Dalit, be erased.51 The bright side of this dark story is that other students organized massive counterprotests, and editorials strongly critical of the attempts to stifle free speech and diversity appeared in several leading papers. 52 One columnist remarked that Ramanujan was “a scholar who did more for Indian culture than all of the ABVP put together,” and added: “The violence around this essay was disturbing, as was the complete obtuseness of people who attacked Ramanujan.”53

  THOROUGHLY MODERN SITAS

  Over the centuries, Sita’s ordeal has proved problematic for different reasons to different South Asians, from pious apologists who were embarrassed by the god’s cruelty to his wife, to feminists who saw in Sita’s acceptance of the “cool” flames an alarming precedent for suttee, and, most recently, to Hindus who objected to alternate Ramayanas that called into question Sita’s single-minded devotion to Rama. Some peasant retellings emphasize Sita’s anger at the injustices done to her and applaud her rejection of Rama after she has been sent away, while Dalit versions even depict Sita’s love for Ravana (“indicating perhaps that this may be a subterranean theme of even the orthodox version in which she is only suspected”). Maharashtra women praise Sita for disobeying Rama, going to the forest with him when he told her not to. In a folk poem from Uttar Pradesh, Sita refuses to go back to Rama even when Lakshsmana has been sent to bring her and instead raises her sons on her own.54

  Sita has also been made, counterintuitively, into a champion of women’s rights. There is a Sita temple without Rama (far more unusual than a Rama temple without Sita) in a village in Maharashtra, commemorating the year in which Sita wandered, pregnant and destitute, after Rama kicked her out; the temple legend states that when Sita came to this village, the villagers refused to give her food, and she cursed them, so that no grain would ever grow in their fields. In recent years a reformer named Sharad Joshi urged the villagers to redress the wrongs that Rama did to Sita and to erase the curse that has kept them from achieving justice or prosperity, by redressing their own wrongs to their own women, whom they have kept economically dependent and powerless. He told them the story of the Ramayana, often moving big, burly farmers to tears, and suggested that Valmiki had introduced the injustice to Sita not to hold up Sita’s suffering as an example for other wives but rather to warn men not to behave like Rama. (“He could have made Ram into as perfect a husband as he was a son. Instead . . . Valmiki wants to show how difficult it is for even supposedly perfect men to behave justly towards their wives.”) Finally, he argued that they should not wait for government laws to enforce the economic rights of women but should voluntarily transfer land to their women, thus paying off a long-overdue debt to Sita. Hundreds of Maharashtrian villagers have done this.55 In contrast with the ambivalent practical effects of powerful goddesses with their shakti, it was Sita’s lack of power that seems to have done the trick here.

  Sita’s curse was also felt elsewhere in Maharashtra, at an abandoned Sita temple in Raveri. “Rakshasas built it,” the villagers say. After Sita was driven out of Ayodhya, she settled in Raveri and begged for food, house to house, because she had two small babies and could not work. When the villagers refused her (on the ground that such an abandoned woman must be a “bad woman”), she cursed the village so that it could not grow wheat. Activists used this myth to get peasants to put land in the names of the women of their family.56

  THE MAHABHARATA

  Shashi Tharoor retold the Mahabharata as The Great Indian Novel, in which the self-sacrificing Bhishma (the son of Ganga, in the Sanskrit text) becomes Ganga-ji, a thinly veiled form of Gandhi, while Dhritarashtra is Nehru, with his daughter Duryodhani (Indira Gandhi). Karna goes over to the Muslim side and becomes Jinna (where the original Karna sliced his armor off his body, this Karna seizes a knife and circumcises himself) and is eventually exposed as a chauffeur, the “humble modern successor to the noble profession of charioteering.” As Tharoor remarks, “It is only a story. But you learn something about a man from the kind of stories people make up about him.”57

  DRAU
PADI AND SATYAVATI

  Sita is not alone in serving as a lightning rod for Hindu ideas about female chastity; her Mahabharata counterpart, Draupadi, remains equally controversial. One Dalit woman’s take on the disrobing scene, in which Karna teases Draupadi, is skeptical: “Now, even with five husbands didn’t Draupadi have to worry about Karna Maharaj’s intentions?”58 Dalit women are equally dubious about Satyavati and Kunti: “One agreed to the whims of a rishi in order to remove the bad odour from her body, the other obeyed a mantra! What wonderful gods! What wonderful rishis!”59 And a popular song among lower-class women in nineteenth-century Calcutta imagined the objections that Ambalika might have expressed when her mother-in-law, Satyavati, insisted that she let Vyasa impregnate her:

  People say

  as a girl you used to row a boat in the river.

  Seeing your beauty, tempted by your lotus-bud,

  the great Parashar stung you,

  and there was a hue and cry:

  You’ve done it once,

  You don’t have anything to fear.

  Now you can do as much as you want to,

  no one will say anything.

  If it has to be done,

  Why don’t you do it, mother?60

  Despite Satyavati’s checkered, to say the least, sexual record, this possibility apparently never occurred to Vyasa (in either of his characters, as author of the Sanskrit Mahabharata or, within the text, as the grandfather of its heroes), for a very good reason that Ambalika seems to have overlooked: Satyavati is Vyasa’s mother.

  KUNTI AND THE NISHADAS

  The Mahabharata story of the burning of the five Nishadas in the house of lac undergoes a major moral reversal in a contemporary retelling by the Bengali feminist novelist Mahashweta Devi (1926- ):