My trepidation was compounded by the fact that I was contracted to produce an ‘abridged translation’ of Vālmīki’s epic poem, an abridgement that carried the original, but that fitted snugly into a single volume. Abridging, i.e., deciding what would be left out rather than what would be left in, became the most critical question I faced during the translation.
The source for this translation is the Critical Edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa prepared by the Oriental Institute at M.S. University, Baroda. As I began to work on the text, many of the issues that bothered me actually resolved themselves. Readers who are already familiar with the Rāmāyaṇa and other tellings of Rāma’s story will notice that some of the incidents they know best are absent from this translation. For example, many of us know that when Lakṣmaṇa leaves Sītā alone in the forest and goes in search of Rāma, he draws a circle around her, telling her that she will be safe as long as she stays within it. This incident is so well known that the idea of Lakṣmaṇa’s circle, the lakṣmaṇrekha, has passed into many Indian languages as a metaphor for a boundary that cannot be transgressed. But it does not appear in the Critical Edition of Vālmīki’s text, not even in the appendies.
As it turns out, there are few incidents that have actually been left out in this translation. The major excisions have been story cycles, primarily from the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas. The only incidents that have been completely left out are those that I firmly believe would have no bearing on the reader’s understanding or appreciation of the text as a whole. Generally, passages have been shortened rather than excluded so that the story as well as the flavour of the text is retained.
Complete (and modern) translations of Vālmīki’s text are readily available, most notably Hari Prasad Shastri’s and N. Raghunathan’s three-volume versions. An academically oriented Rāmāyaṇa translation is already in process. Robert Goldman heads a team of Rāmāyaṇa scholars, each translating one of Vālmīki’s kāṇḍas, to produce a scholarly but readable version of the Baroda Critical Edition of the Sanskrit text. Parallel to these complete Rāmāyaṇas, there have always existed ‘retellings’ of the tale. As diverse a group as C. Rajagopalachari, R. K. Narayan, P. Lal, Kamala Subramaniam and William Buck have ‘retold’ or ‘transcreated’ the Rāmāyaṇa in English.
Given the fact that longer and shorter English Rāmāyaṇas abound, what then is the value and purpose of this translation? To begin with, it distinguishes itself from the shorter versions, the retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa, by being a translation of the Sanskrit text. While some material has been left out, nothing has been added to the story or to the nuances and tone of the original Sanskrit. In terms of the longer, complete Rāmāyaṇa translations that already exist, this particular one has the advantage of being contained within a single volume. It is also directed at the lay reader, someone with an active interest in ancient Indian texts and stories but who is not necessarily interested in scholarly details.
This translation would never have been completed without the support and cooperation of Prof. V. L. Manjul, Chief Librarian at the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Pune. I am deeply grateful to him and his staff, Satish, Megha and Gauri, for all their help. Since I have been involved with the Rāmāyaṇa and its accompanying materials for more than ten years, there are many people I must thank for helping me develop a familiarity with the text. Profs Alf Hiltebeitel, David Gitomer, Wendy Doniger and A. K. Ramanujan all shared their valuable insights with me and taught me newer and better ways to approach and understand the material. A. K. Ramanujan suggested that I translate the Rāmāyaṇa many years ago, at a time when it seemed unlikely that I would ever do so. I wish he could have been alive to see this published. Wendy Doniger has always been more to me than a teacher. Through this project, too, she provided long-distance support, advice and encouragement. I thank her for keeping the faith and bearing witness. Laurie Patton was instrumental in helping me clarify my thoughts about the Introduction as well as cheering me through the last few weeks of my work. Anmol and Sarita Vellani deserve sincere thanks for careful reading and helpful suggestions, for their patience with endless conversations about the Rāmāyaṇa, for food, drink and other kinds of sustenance. Ravinder Singh’s timely interventions helped me fine-tune my thoughts on translation and I thank him for that. R. S. Iyer patiently read through early drafts and offered helpful suggestions. Ravi Singh, my editor, made my task infinitely easier with his careful readings and insightful queries. Thanks are also due to Sorab Mehta for silent but solid support and to Amrita Shodhan for always having something wise to say about anything that I do. Most of all, I thank Sanjay Iyer, who is a presence in all that I do and all that I write. He is in this book, too, and I can say with certainty that it would have been less without him.
This book is dedicated to my parents, Hameed and Nazura Sattar. Not only did they help me with the mechanics of books and libraries and the postal system, they fed, watered and sheltered me with unquestioning devotion for the last few months of this work. In many ways, this translation of the Rāmāyaṇa is the completion of a journey they allowed me to embark on many years ago. I can only hope that the book will bring them as much joy and satisfaction as the journey has brought me.
Arshia Sattar
December 1995
* The first part of this Note initially appeared as an essay on translation, ‘A Classic Problem’, in The Indian Review of Books, vol. 5, no. 1 (Sept.–Nov. 1995), pp. 17–18.
Introduction
The story of Rāma spreads all over the cultures of the Indian Subcontinent and Southeast Asia. It appears in literatures, in music, dance and drama, in painting and sculpture, in classical and folk traditions, in hundreds of languages, in thousands of tellings and retellings from thousands of tellers. Each of these versions has its own special flavour, ambience and distinctive style. A. K. Ramanujan goes as far as to say that ‘in India and South-east Asia, no one ever reads the Rāmāyaṇa or the Mahābhārata for the first time. The stories are there, “always already.”’*
Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is arguably the oldest surviving version we have of Rāma’s tale, but in the multiplicity of Rāma stories received today, Vālmīki’s Sanskrit poem is just one more version of Rāma’s adventures.† Nonetheless, scholars hold that this telling is perhaps the most prestigious and influential of them all.‡
Like any other monumental work of literature, the Rāmāyaṇa has always functioned on a variety of levels. Through the millennia of its popularity, it has attracted the interest of many kinds of people from different social, economic, educational, regional and religious backgrounds. It has, for example, served as a bedtime story for countless generations of Indian children, while at the same time, learned śāstrins, steeped in the abstruse philosophical, grammatical and metaphysical subtleties of classical Indian thought, have found it a subject worthy of their intellectual energies.§
Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa tells the tragic story of a virtuous and dutiful prince, the man who should be king, who is exiled because of his step-mother’s fit of jealousy. Rāma’s real troubles begin when he enters the forest for fourteen years with his beautiful wife Sītā and his devoted younger brother Lakṣmaṇa. Sītā is abducted by the wicked rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, who takes her away to his isolated kingdom on the far side of the southern ocean. Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa set out to rescue her and, along the way, they make an alliance with a dispossessed monkey king. The monkey king’s advisor, Hanumān, becomes Rāma’s invaluable ally and is instrumental in making the mission to rescue Sītā a success. At the end of a bloody war with the rākṣasas, Rāvaṇa is killed and Sītā is reunited with her husband. Rāma and his companions return to the city and Rāma reclaims the throne that is rightfully his.
Rāma’s equanimity and grace in the face of all the terrible things that happen to him, Sītā’s unflinching devotion to her husband, Lakṣmaṇa’s and Hanumān’s fierce loyalty to R�
�ma: these qualities have made the characters of the Rāmāyaṇa ideals in Indian culture, valued for their virtues and exemplary behaviour. Rāma is not just the perfect man, he is the ideal son, the ideal brother, and, most important, the ideal king. Likewise, Sītā, Lakṣmaṇa and Hanumān loom large in the cultural imagination as the perfect examples of their social roles.
Within this idealized and heroic tale of public honour and kingship is another intensely personal and intimate story. It is one of family relationships, of love between fathers and sons, brother and brother, friends and allies, husbands and wives. The Rāmāyaṇa is as much a tale of personal promises and private honour, of infatuation and betrayal, of harem intrigue, petty jealousies, destructive ambitions and enormous personal loss as it is a tale of rightful and righteous kings. Even as questions of kingly duty and nobility of character for the public realm are raised, the story revolves around fidelity, obligations and the integrity that refines individual relationships.
The Two Realms of the Rāmāyaṇa
The universe in which this tale occurs is expanded by gods and celestial beings, boons and curses, magical weapons, flying chariots, powerful sages, wondrous animals, heroic monkeys and terrifying rākṣasas. A crucial aspect of the expanded universe which includes the presence of the divine is the fact that Rāma himself is an incarnation, an avatāra, of the great god Viṣṇu. In Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma does not know this about himself. While the gods are on his side in all that he does and often appear to help him or his allies, he goes through the story not knowing that he was born mortal for the express purpose of killing Rāvaṇa. The gods’ divine plan becomes Rāma’s personal destiny and must be played out to the bitter end. After the war is over, the gods appear and tell him who he is.
Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is divided into seven books: Bālakānda (Childhood), Ayodhyākāṇda (Ayodhyā), Araṇyakāṇda (Wilderness), Kiṣkindhakāṇda (Kiṣkindha), Sundarakāṇda (Beauty), Yuddhakāṇda (War) and Uttarakāṇda (Epilogue). Of these, the first two and the last books (‘Childhood,’ ‘Ayodhyā’ and ‘Epilogue’) are situated firmly in the mundane world, in the kingdom of Ayodhyā, where Daśaratha and later Rāma rule wisely and well. The other books (‘Wilderness’, ‘Kiṣkindha’, ‘Beauty’ and ‘War’) are located in the forests south of Ayodhyā and in Lankā.
As with other Indian genres of literature, the magical and mundane, the natural and the supernatural encounter each other frequently in the Rāmāyaṇa. Usually, the supernatural and wondrous events occur outside the city, in the uncharted and dangerous regions through which the hero must pass. It is here, in the narrative freedom of the forests, deserts, islands and mountains, that Rāma meets monsters and magical beings. The magical and monstrous beings of the forests and wilderness are, most often, liminal creatures. They straddle the boundaries of more than one species, more than one category of being. Some of these liminal creatures test Rāma, others become his allies, as he goes further on his quest.
In the books located outside Ayodhyā, when the story enters the realm of magic and wonder, Rāma has to contend first with powerful sages and then with marauding rākṣasas before he meets the friendly animals who will help him get his wife back. While there are isolated instances of the magical breaking into the mundane world in the first and last books, the incidents either occur outside the kingdom (like the princes’ encounter with Tāṭakā in ‘Childhood’) or under highly circumscribed situations (like Sītā’s disappearance into the earth during the sacrifice in ‘Epilogue’).
Once Rāma leaves the city, the known world has been left behind and from this point on, there are few signposts. In ‘Kiṣkindha’, when Sugrīva is directing his monkey hordes to go out into the world and find Sītā, he provides a fascinating geography that begins with real kingdoms and real peoples and then opens up into a cosmology of wild and dangerous places where neither the sun nor the moon shine, where there are people with ears so long they can sleep inside them, and so on until you reach the regions where the gods and celestial beings live.
It is in the enchanted forests south of the kingdom that Rāma is truly tested for valour, patience and fortitude. Anything can happen here and it does. Rāma’s initial encounters with the monstrous Virādha and Kabandha are only preludes to the larger and deadlier conflicts that await him in Janasthāna and Lankā. The forests, in a sense, represent the underbelly of the Rāmāyaṇa’s idealized human actors and the perfect city of Ayodhyā. There seem to be different rules of conduct in the forests and wilderness and certainly a different set of narrative parameters. Birds that speak, monkeys that fly, form-changing rākṣasas and headless torsos that run amok are not unnatural or bizarre. Rather, they seem to fall into the normal course of events.
It has been suggested that these forest creatures, particularly the monkeys and the rākṣasas, are the shadows of the Rāmāyaṇa’s ideal principal characters.¶ Because Rāma and Sītā cannot or will not act out their baser impulses, the monkeys and rākṣasas, who embody non-perfection, do it for them. For example, the monkey Vālī can banish his younger brother Sugrīva, who usurped the kingship of Kiṣkindha, but Rāma is bound by his dharma and his model nature to let Bharata, his younger brother, keep the kingdom. Likewise, Śūrpanakhā, the rākṣasī, can express her carnal desire for Rāma whereas Sītā can only express sublimated love and devotion.
These sets of contrastive figures provide the poets with a vehicle for portraying the ambivalence inherent in all real human beings while keeping the central characters largely free from inner struggle.**
It is also in the same southern lands that Rāma perpetrates the two acts that apparently mar his shining dharmic nature: the unlawful killing of the monkey Vālī and the rejection of his faithful wife Sītā.†† By implication, it would seem that the strict moral and legal codes of Ayodhyā and the world of humans do not apply in the forests and the southern lands. Rāma operates here under a different code of ethics. In fact, in the early chapters of ‘Wilderness’, when Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā have just entered the unpeopled forests, Sītā tells Rāma that here they must abide by separate rules for behaviour. She says that they must leave the codes of the city behind and learn to live by the rules of the forest dwellers. Ironically, though, Rāma’s unlawful acts are the result of his imposing the rules and dharma of human city living upon events that occur outside the city.‡‡
Replications in the Rāmāyaṇa
While most of the animals and rākṣasas function as shadows of the main characters, Rāvaṇa, the wicked king of the rākṣasas, functions as a mirror image, an inversion, of Rāma. Even his city of Lankā is a replica of Ayodhyā: as magnificent, as prosperous and as well-defended. Rāvaṇa is brave, strong and powerful, he is handsome and majestic. He has the capacity to perform fierce austerities and was able to demand the boon of invulnerability from Brahmā. Motivated by the desire to avenge the insult to his sister Śūrpanakhā, Rāvaṇa decides to abduct Rāma’s wife. Sītā refuses to submit to him and though he loves her to distraction, Rāvaṇa is honourable enough not to force himself upon her. Nonetheless, he also refuses to return her to Rāma and this stubborn refusal is, ultimately, the cause of his death.
We have seen that the magical beings of the forests can act as shadows for the Rāmāyaṇa’s principal human characters. This shadowing creates replications, i.e., the repetition of particular themes and structures in various ways in order to create and sustain a dominant mood, in this case, that of personal loss and tragedy.§§ The replications generated by these shadows, the way their stories invert and retell the stories of Rāma, Sītā, Bharata and Lakṣmaṇa, reveal other dimensions to the Rāmāyaṇa, enriching the text and opening up our understanding of it.
The dominant replication in the Rāmāyaṇa is that of brothers, their loyalty and disputed succession. It is through the loss of kingdoms and wives (who are often identified with royal power, śrī)¶¶ that the personal tra
gedies become publicly significant. The stories of Rāma and Bharata, Vālī and Sugrīva and Rāvaṇa and Vibhīṣaṇa all resemble each other. The issue of succession, duty and the rivalry between brothers is developed and explored in the juxtaposition of these three relationships.
Rāma is the rightful king of Ayodhyā. Not only is he the most virtuous and accomplished of all Daśaratha’s sons, he is also the eldest and, therefore, should succeed his father. But, because of promises Daśaratha had made in the past, Bharata, his younger son, is crowned king. Bharata, however, motivated by dharma and his love for Rāma, tries to return the kingdom to Rāma and then swears that he will act as a regent and hold Kosalā in custody until Rāma returns from his fourteen-year exile. After Rāma has lost his kingdom, his wife is abducted, sealing, as it were, the loss of his royal power. But Sītā is stolen by Rāvaṇa and Bharata has not appropriated the kingdom for himself, leaving open the possibility that both wife and kingdom will be restored, unsullied, to Rāma.
In a direct parallel, Vālī, the older son of Ṛkṣarāja, becomes king of the monkeys. He disappears for a long time and his younger brother, Sugrīva, takes over the kingdom as well as his brother’s wife, Tārā. But Vālī returns and accuses Sugrīva of having plotted to overthrow him and banishes his younger brother from Kiṣkindha. Sugrīva swears that he has been honourable and that he was forced to accept the kingship by the council of ministers. Unlike the love that persists between Bharata and Rāma, Vālī and Sugrīva become deadly enemies and the issue of who should rule the monkey kingdom is resolved only when Vālī is killed. Sugrīva inherits both the kingdom and Tārā, his elder brother’s wife.
Valmiki's Ramayana Page 2