by Ramesh Menon
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Introduction
A Note on Hindu Time
The Demon’s Boons
Prologue
BOOK ONE
BOOK TWO
BOOK THREE
BOOK FOUR
BOOK FIVE
BOOK SIX
BOOK SEVEN
Notes
Appendix
Ravana’s Daughter: A Southern Tale
The Story of Viswamitra
Glossary
Copyright
FOR
JANAKI AMMA AND REKHA JANAKI
INTRODUCTION
The Ramayana is an epic tale set in the forested India of prehistorical times. One of India’s most beloved and enduring legends, it represents historical fact to millions, who worship Rama, prince of Ayodhya, as an incarnation of the God Vishnu. Regardless of their religious orientation, Indians see it as a great work of literature, the story of a war between good and evil, and as a document prescribing a code of conduct that is still widely regarded. Rama is the hero of the legend, and the ayana is his journey, both physical and spiritual.
The plot is fairly simple, but the path that the main characters have to follow to fulfill their missions and attain grace is arduous. Prince Rama is about to be crowned yuvaraja, the heir apparent, by his father King Dasaratha, who wants to hand his kingdom down to his adored eldest son. Instead, a palace intrigue involving one of the king’s wives ends in Rama’s banishment to the forest for fourteen years. His wife Sita, whom he has just married, and his brother Lakshmana accompany him.
Wandering in exile, the three encounter several sages, or rishis, living austere lives in asramas, hermitages, and meditating in the wilds. From them the travelers hear many wondrous legends of bygone ages, the beginnings of the world. The kshatriyas, the warrior princes Rama and Lakshmana, also rid the jungles of countless rakshasas, demons that prey on the hermits who, by their constant worship, are the very holders of the earth.
When Ravana, Emperor of the rakshasas, hears that thousands of them have been slain, and when he is told of Sita’s peerless beauty, he abducts her to his island home of Lanka (the Sri Lanka of today). Rama and Lakshmana immediately set out to rescue the princess. A race of monkeys with extraordinary powers, called vanaras, help them find her. A vanara army, which includes Hanuman, who is the son of the wind and worshipped as a God in India, goes with the brothers to fight Ravana and his awesome demon legions and to rescue Sita.
As a reward for years of penance, the God Siva has granted Ravana a boon of invincibility from death at the hands of any of the greater races of divine and demonic beings. Ravana has quickly become undisputed monarch of the world, “the greatest of all the created beings of his time.” Though he is a matchless warrior, a powerful king, and an unequaled scholar, he is the epitome of evil, and his blood-thirsty demons have overrun the earth to tyrannize and corrupt helpless humankind. However, Ravana had not asked Siva for invincibility against mortal men, believing them too puny to harm him. Thus Vishnu, the Blue Savior in the Indian Trinity, is born as a human prince, Rama, to rid the world of the Demon. As an Avatara, a divine incarnation, Rama has the qualities of a human being but the weaponry and the strength of a God. Rama comes to kill the rakshasas, break the bonds of darkness, and restore dharma to creation. The notion of dharma is as old as the Indian tradition; its meaning encompasses such broad concepts as duty, work, righteousness, morality, justice, cosmic law and harmony, and eternal truth.
The themes of the Ramayana are timeless and universal. Goodness and love figure in significant ways—a father’s love for his son, a son’s love for his father, four brothers’ love for one another, a husband’s love for his wife and a wife’s for her husband, and, not least, the love of friends for each other—as do avarice, evil, deceit and treachery, nobility of character, and selflessness and devotion. In short, all the experiences and values of the human spirit are woven throughout the legend, though they are rendered in titanic proportions.
Rama himself is the Maryada Purushottaman: the man of perfect honor; the perfect man. He is perfect because he is God incarnate. Yet, because of who he is and because his mission is in essence to save humankind, he must suffer more than any other man. In this sense, the epic certainly invites comparison to that other great ancient work, the Bible. The spirit of the extraordinary prince Rama permeates the epic, even as the spirit of Jesus of Nazareth does the New Testament. Both suffer and each one is crucified in his way, to save humankind. Both finally triumph.
More than anything else, reading the Ramayana brings the reader close to the noble, holy, and living spirit of Rama. Regardless of which religion one professes, or if one is an agnostic or an atheist, the touch of Rama’s spirit is a profound, healing contact. This is the essential aim of the epic, for, like Christ, the prince of Ayodhya is an embodiment of goodness and gentleness, of sacrifice, and, above all, of love.
The Ramayana is also infused with the spirit of Rama’s wife Sita. Hindus believe that she was an incarnation of the God Vishnu’s consort, the Goddess Lakshmi. To this day Sita remains the archetypal image of chaste Indian womanhood. The Ramayana says that Ravana of Lanka was so powerful that even more than Rama’s prowess, it was Sita’s chastity and courage that ultimately were needed to vanquish the Demon. Ravana, whom no woman, no queen or princess of any race of heaven, earth, or the netherworlds had ever resisted, finds Sita proof against his every temptation, blandishment, and threat. This undermines and finally breaks his spirit before Rama actually kills him.
If Rama is the perfect man, Sita is no less the perfect woman. She suffers at least as much as he does, perhaps more. In the end she proves herself even Rama’s superior. The image of the faithful Sita and her immaculate love and devotion for her husband have flowed down the ages to become unfading symbols of the ideal woman and wife.
The classical Indian artistic tradition is a devotional one, whether in music, literature, dance, painting, sculpture, or architecture. The sole object of art is worship, to give praise and to invoke bhakti, religious adoration and ecstasy, both in the artist and in those that experience his or her work. The purpose of the Ramayana was never less than to awaken the reader spiritually and set him on the great journey that finally, if after many lives, leads to the last goal of all existence—to moksha, nirvana, the truth that frees, to God. Without exception, the masters of old have said that listening to the Ramayana or reading it serves to exorcise one’s sins, from this life and others, and to purify one’s soul.
At the same time, the Ramayana is an expression of a liberal and earthy tradition, one that deals with the realities of greed, lust and power, war and kingship, nobility, tolerance, heroism, and suffering, and with the magnificent, joyful, and tragic inevitability of fate—the human condition. In this sense, the legend has all the hallmarks that distinguish an immortal classic of literature: it enshrines the deepest, most timeless values of humankind, while also being an incomparably enchanting tale. Above all, the Ramayana is a love story, written more than a thousand years before romantic love became one of the defining themes of Western literature.
The Ramayana is based on some of the oldest surviving legends in the world, though its exact age remains indeterminate. Modern scholars say it is more than two thousand years old, and place its approximate date of composition somewhere around 300 B.C. The de
vout Hindu believes it was composed several hundred millennia ago, in the treta yuga. The epic was called the Adi Kavya, the first poem of the world. A kavya is the work of a kavi, “one who sees”—a seer-poet, a visionary. It is said that the poet Valmiki was first inspired to tell the story of Rama by the God Brahma, the Creator himself. Valmiki composed the legend as an epic poem, in twenty-four thousand slokas, couplets, in high Sanskrit, in a complex meter called the anushtup. The slokas were grouped into sargas, chapters, which formed seven kandas, or sections.
The epic has come to us through countless generations of gurus and sishyas, masters and disciples, transmitted through the ages in the ancient oral tradition. Since its original composition there have been many interpolations and embellishments by numerous, now nameless, raconteurs—from saints and bards to grandmothers passing the story on to their grandchildren during long summer nights—in many languages and traditions.
Since it was first composed, the Ramayana has remained an essential component of the arts. Portions of it have been rendered as song and dance, in the classical and folk traditions of the many regions, languages, and dialects of India. In Kerala, the southernmost state, episodes from the Ramayana are performed in the heavily stylized Kathakali dance form. The dancers wear exaggerated, padded costumes and lofty wooden crowns and paint their faces in bright vegetable dyes to portray the mythic characters. A short episode from the epic is performed over several hours, traditionally in the courtyard of a temple. The Kathakali begins at dusk and extends into the small hours by the light of oil lamps.
In northern India, during the Deepawali, the season of lamps, the Ramayana is performed in full as open-air theater, usually at a large fairground. These nightlong performances are called Ramleelas—literally, the play or romance of Rama—and people from every walk of life throng to them, wrapped in thick blankets and warm shawls to keep the cold at bay.
Scenes from the Ramayana have been carved in stone on the walls of temples across India and beyond. The legend of Rama, most wise and loving, powerful and self-effacing prince and deliverer, has spread throughout Southeast Asia, to Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Laos, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, and Indonesia, where it is read, told, sung, and danced in a dazzling array of native forms and idioms.
At least four retellings of the Ramayana into other Indian vernacular languages are literary classics in their own right: the Iramavatara, the Tamil Ramayana by the poet Kampan (twelfth century); the Bengali Ramayana of Krittibas Ojha (late fourteenth century); Tulsidas’s Ramacharitmanas in Hindi (sixteenth century); and Ezhutthachan’s Aadhyatma (or spiritual) Ramayanam in Malayalam (also sixteenth century).
There is a brief and relatively recent tradition of English translations and retellings of the Ramayana by Indian and Western writers. A number of these are far too short to capture the magnitude and grandeur of the original; others are rather too secular in presenting what is also basically scripture. In India, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari’s Ramayana, first published in 1951, R. K. Narayan’s slender 1972 volume, and Kamala Subramaniam’s, published in 1981, are retellings by writers of generations before my own. They have all been very popular, each going into several editions. With the exception of Subramaniam’s book, they are too short to be anywhere near epical. Also, all three either use “Victorian” or “Shakespearean” English or are very matter-of-fact in style. A more recent English Ramayana, contemporary in tone, was written by Arshia Sattar, whose rendering is elegant and knowledgeable but is also a secular and scholarly one.
For their times, these English versions of the Ramayana were path-breaking. When they were written, the Ramayana was being progressively lost to young Indians who had been educated in schools where English was the medium of instruction and the system of education itself had become “modern,” westward-looking, and irretrievably secular. By the twentieth century, it was Shakespeare who was revered by the colonized Indian, rather than Valmiki or Vyasa, author of the Mahabharata. During colonial times and after Indian independence in 1948, the spiritual tradition of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata was sidelined, even actively suppressed, in favor of analytical Western thought and attitudes, especially socialist ones.
Among the retellings by foreigners, the best known recently have been ones by the late William Buck and by the Briton Kenneth Anderson, who calls himself Krishna Dharma because he belongs to the Hare Krishna movement in England. Mr. Buck’s translation is a short, chatty one, which takes a great deal of liberty with the actual story. Mr. Anderson’s is longer, more “epical.”
One must not ignore the actual translations of the epic, of which there are a few, including the three-volume edition by Hari Prasad Shastri. They are full-length, line-by-line endeavors, often with the Sanskrit text included, usually done by an Indian Sanskrit scholar or a member of a Hindu religious order. These have another sort of drawback: the English the translators use tends to be even more archaic than that of the few Indians who sought to retell rather than translate. The Sanskrit scholars’ language is literal rather than literary, and hardly reflects either the poetry or the mystery of the Ramayana. I should also note the ongoing project at the University of California, Berkeley, to translate and annotate the entire text, which will consist of seven volumes and total more than two thousand pages when completed.
Though I have taken few liberties with the story or its sequence as it has come down in India, my Ramayana is not a scholar’s translation, but a novelist’s re-creation of the legend. The book is not based on a Sanskrit text, but on other English versions. The task I set myself, for which there did seem to exist a genuine place in our world of books, was to write an impassioned English Ramayana that is true to the spirit and story of the original. I felt I needed to write it well enough so that a reader of the early twenty-first century would want to read it for pleasure. I must further try to preserve some of the simple lyricism of the Ramayana, in what definitely has to be a prose rendition if anyone at all is to read it. My book must be not so short that it trivializes an epic, nor so voluminous as to be forbidding. It must be, first and last, a work of worship, but it must also be entirely modern and exciting without ever turning into kitsch. As I worked on it for the last ten years, I regarded the completion of this book as an act of faith, an offering to Rama.
Now that my work is finished, I have come to believe that any enterprise such as this one is always severely tested, but finally rewarded. Looking back, I see that along every step of the journey, whether I was aware of it or not at the time, there was help given me, and strength. And I hope that I might even have succeeded, in some measure, in what I set out to do.
A NOTE ON HINDU TIME
Three hundred sixty-five human years make one year of the Devas and Pitrs, the Gods and the manes.
Four are the ages in the land of Bharata—the krita, the treta, the dwapara, and the kali. The krita yuga lasts 4,800 divine years, the treta 3,600, the dwapara 2,400, and the kali 1,200; and then another krita yuga begins.
The krita or satya yuga is the age of purity; it is sinless. Dharma, righteousness, is perfect and walks on four feet in the krita. But in the treta yuga, adharma, evil, enters the world and the very fabric of time begins to decay. Finally, the kali yuga, the fourth age, is almost entirely corrupt, with dharma barely surviving, hobbling on one foot.
A chaturyuga, a cycle of four ages, is twelve thousand divine years, or 365 times 12,000 human years long. Seventy-one chaturyugas make a manvantara; fourteen manvantaras, a kalpa. A kalpa of a thousand chaturyugas, twelve million divine years, is one day of Brahma, the Creator.
Eight thousand Brahma years make one Brahma yuga; a thousand Brahma yugas make a savana; and Brahma’s life is 3,003 savanas long.
One day of Mahavishnu is the lifetime of Brahma.
THE DEMON’S BOONS
The Rakshasa sat in penance on the Himalaya, amidst five fires. Four he lit around himself to heat the blazing rock he sat upon; the fifth was the pitiless sun above. Ravana was the
son of the Rishi Visravas, who was Brahma’s own grandson. Ten-headed, magnificent Ravana sat worshipping the God Siva. But even after he had sat for a thousand years, Siva did not appear before him.
Growing impatient one day, the Demon picked up his sword, cut off one of his ten heads, and, chanting Siva’s name, fed it to the fire. Still the Lord did not come to him. Another thousand years passed; Ravana severed another head and fed that into the fire. But even now, Siva did not come.
Ravana did not flinch. In nine thousand years, the Rakshasa cut off nine of his heads and fed them to the agni. But there was no sign of Siva. When ten thousand years of perfect worship had passed, Ravana reached for his sword again: to hew off his tenth and final head, and make an end of himself. Then his eyes were blinded with light such as they had never seen before. At the heart of the luster stood Siva, the God of Gods, smiling at his fierce devotee.
Raising his hand in a blessing over the Rakshasa, Siva said, “Ask for any boon you want.”
Ravana asked for strength that no other creature in the universe possessed. After the offering of nine heads, Siva could not refuse him. He restored the Rakshasa’s heads and gave him strength that would make him master of the earth one day.
But Ravana was not satisfied with one boon. He resumed his fervid penance, now in the name of his own great-grandsire: Brahma, the Creator. In a hundred years, Brahma also stood, four-faced and iridescent, before the Demon. “What boon do you want, Ravana? Ask me for anything.”
Ravana’s tapasya had been so remarkable he could have asked for moksha, enlightenment. But being a rakshasa, he said, “Siva has already given me boundless strength. Pitama, you make me immortal!”
Brahma replied, “Immortality I cannot give, not to any of the created. Ask for another boon.”
Ravana thought for a moment. Then he said shrewdly, “Then bless me that I never find death at the hands of a Deva, Danava, Daitya, Asura, rakshasa, gandharva, kinnara, charana, siddha, or any of the divine and demonic beings of heaven and earth.”