Valmiki's Ramayana
Page 4
At the same time, Rāma must transcend his human limitations and restrictions if he is going to vanquish the king of the rākṣasas, the most powerful creature on earth. On an entirely mundane level, Rāma inverts the patterns of his father’s life, rising above the temptations of anger, desire and greed to which Daśaratha was subject. Daśaratha unknowingly kills an ascetic in his youth, Rāma actively protects the ascetics, first on his journey with Viśvāmitra and then later when he is exiled into the forest. Daśaratha succumbed to desire (kāma) by agreeing to Kaikeyī’s wishes, Rāma upholds dharma by publicly humiliating and then punishing his innocent and chaste wife. Both Rāma and Daśaratha as kings obtain their sons at sacrifices: Daśaratha’s sons are born because of the efficacy of his sacrifice and Rāma is united with his unknown sons at his horse sacrifice.
As a human hero, Rāma does all he can to avoid repeating the mistakes of his father. As an avatāra of Viṣṇu (and as a human king), it is his job on earth to uphold dharma and protect the brahmins and the ascetics. As a human, Rāma sacrifices everything, his kingdom and his wife, to uphold dharma. As a god, he plays along with a cosmic plan. It is the tension between his mortal limitations and the conceivably unlimited powers he enjoys as Viṣṇu that makes his dilemmas and his resolution of them compelling.
The Rāmāyaṇa is the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself; or, one might say, of an identity obscured, and only occasionally, in brilliant and poignant flashes, revealed to its owner. The problem is one of forgetting and recovery, of anamnesis: the divine hero who fails to remember that he is god, comes to know himself, at least for brief moments, through hearing (always from others) his own story.*****
If we hold that the core Rāmāyaṇa includes the first and last books, where Rāma knows and understands his own divinity, the situation becomes even more complex and Rāma’s condition even more poignant. Imagine if Rāma knew he was god and was still constrained to act as a man would and should. This is, in fact, the situation in the Rāma stories that come after Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa. Rāma has to continue to act as a man precisely because he is a god and not in spite of his divinity.
Kingship in the Rāmāyaṇa
Since the dominant set of replications in the Rāmāyaṇa explores the theme of brothers and disputed thrones, one could argue that the central issue the Rāmāyaṇa tackles is that of rightful and the righteous kingship. Through the multiple variations on the theme of disputed kingship, we see that Rāma is clearly both the rightful and the righteous king while Rāvaṇa is not. Rāvaṇa is the rightful king of Lankā because he is the eldest of the brothers, but he is by no means the righteous king. After Rāvaṇa is killed, Vibhīṣaṇa becomes the righteous and rightful king of Lankā.
It is the relationship between the monkey brothers, Vālī and Sugrīva, and the throne of Kiṣkindha that is the most complicated. Vālī is the elder brother and, from all that we know about him, seems to be a good and righteous king. Sugrīva, on the other hand, takes over his brother’s throne claiming that he is probably dead. He also takes over his brother’s wife, a woman he should have treated as a mother. Sugrīva makes Rāma kill Vālī by saying that he was cruel and unrighteous. Once his older brother is dead, Sugrīva becomes the rightful king of Kiṣkindha. But once again, he takes Tārā, Vālī’s wife, as his own. Ironically, taking another’s wife is one of the unrighteous deeds for which Vālī is killed. Thus, Sugrīva’s righteousness would appear to devolve from the fact that he makes an alliance with righteous Rāma and not from any of his own actions.
It is when he acts as the righteous king that Rāma commits the two deeds that appear incomprehensible for a man such as him—the killing of Vālī and the rejection of Sītā. Rāma forms an alliance with Sugrīva and takes his word that Vālī has wronged him and deserves to die. This expediency is compounded by the fact that Rāma kills Vālī while Vālī is fighting Sugrīva and Rāma himself is hidden behind a tree. As we learn more and more about Vālī, it would appear that he was a wise and just ruler, compassionate even towards his brother, whom he could have killed on several occasions.
As Vālī is dying, he excoriates Rāma for his unrighteous act and Rāma offers a series of arguments in his own defence. These include the fact that since Vālī was a low creature, a mere monkey, Rāma could kill him in any way he pleased because the ethics of battle did not apply. At the same time, Rāma says that Vālī deserves to die because he has violated dharma by taking his brother’s wife. The sophistry in this argument is clear: if Vālī belongs to a lower order of being and the ethics of battle do not apply to him, why, then, should he be judged by the stringent rules of human dharma in his personal life?
The matter becomes somewhat clearer when Rāma states that he is acting on behalf of Bharata and the righteous Ikṣvāku kings who hold dominion over the earth. There can be no violations of dharma under their jurisdiction. The functions of a king include the meting out of punishments (danḍa), the nurturing of dharma and the righteous organization of society. Rāma is attempting to fulfil those functions in this case. He is compelled to act as a righteous king, no matter how specious his arguments may be for doing so.
Rāma’s unjustified rejection of the chaste and virtuous Sītā, not once, but twice, is as problematic as the episode with Vālī. Through no fault of her own, Sītā is abducted and imprisoned by Rāvaṇa. When the war to reclaim her is over, Rāma humiliates Sītā, first by calling her out in public, and then by saying that he has no use for her any more, that the war was fought to salvage the honour of his clan. Sītā walks into the fire but is rescued by the fire god, who vouches for her innocence and chastity. At this point, all the gods appear and tell Rāma who he really is. Rāma takes Sītā back because the gods tell him to and also, he says, because he had always believed in her innocence but wanted to prove it to the common people. Later, after they have lived happily in Ayodhyā for many years, Rāma hears that the people still doubt Sītā. He decides that he must banish her from the kingdom because he cannot allow gossip and scandal to tarnish his reputation.
Once again, in both cases of rejection, Rāma plays the part of the righteous king who must always be above reproach. Anything or anyone connected with him must be equally so. Rāma has to sacrifice his personal feelings about Sītā in order to uphold dharma, as he had to do earlier when his father exiled him to the forest for fourteen years. It is here that the epic trope of the hero’s personal destiny being inextricably linked with the plan of the gods is most clearly visible. But Rāma as a human hero proves equal to the task. Even though he is not always aware of his divinity, he acts in accordance with a higher law, dharma, which is divinely sanctioned and which it is his duty, as a king (albeit in waiting), to uphold.
The Internal and External Audiences
Like the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa is enclosed within a frame story. Besides that, it tells its own story several times within itself. There are, thus, at any given time, two audiences for the Rāmāyaṇa, the internal audience and the external audience.†††††
The opening frame of the Rāmāyaṇa involves the composer of the poem, Vālmīki, who is told Rāma’s story by the celestial sage Nārada. Shortly thereafter, Vālmīki is moved to compassion when he sees the grief of a bird whose mate has just been killed by a hunter. His compassion expresses itself spontaneously in a new metre and Brahmā encourages him to sing Rāma’s tale in this new metrical form. Vālmīki looks around for the students most likely to do justice to the tale and the metre and decides upon teaching it to the twins Kuśa and Lava. As Wendy Doniger O’Flaherty points out, the names Kuśa and Lava constitute the two parts of the noun Kuśilava, meaning ‘wandering bard’.‡‡‡‡‡ Needless to say this has an added significance in the context of what is going to happen next.
Kuśa and Lava are also Rāma’s estranged sons, born in Vālmīki’s settlement when their mother, Sītā, was banished from Ayodhyā. Vālmīki encourages
the boys to sing the story of Rāma’s life at a huge sacrifice that Rāma himself is performing. The twin boys are handsome and charming, with melodious voices and fine musical talent. Their listeners are enthralled by the tale and are drawn to the young men. The audience notices that they are like mirror images of Rāma and even Rāma is fascinated by his own story.
As the boys sing the tale in the intervals between the rituals of the sacrifice, Rāma finally recognizes them as his own sons. He asks them to bring their mother to him. Vālmīki brings Sītā to the sacrificial enclosure and when she is asked to prove her chastity again, she disappears forever into the earth. Rāma is heartbroken, but Brahmā appears and encourages him to listen to the rest of his own story from his sons. The young princes continue with their tale, reciting, apparently, even the death of Rāma.
The story is over. But the shocking and moving fact is that we experience these final chapters as Rāma does—not in the backward movement of the story, but rather with the past become present or future (and the future presented as past). There is no visible seam separating the text’s statement that Kuśa and Lava sang the end of the poem from the actual content of this ending—the description of Rāma’s depression, the golden image of Sītā, and so on. The frame has melted away, our sense of time is confused, past conflates with future—as it does already at the very beginning of the epic, in Vālmīki’s proleptic vision of past and future combined—and we find ourselves once again listening with Rāma to the story of his own life, but at this point to that part of it that is still to unfold. We might ask ourselves if the ‘actual’ narrator, Vālmīki, is continuing his narration through the mouths of his pupils, or on his own, as it were—but does it matter?§§§§§
According to the outer frame of the Rāmāyaṇa, the first audience of the poem are the kings, brahmins, townspeople, monkeys and rākṣasas who are present at Rāma’s sacrifice. The monkeys and the rākṣasas have participated in some parts of the story they are listening to and many of them have already heard about the events that they did not participate in. This was possible because the Rāmāyaṇa tells itself internally on several occasions.
When Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā first meet the sage Agastya, Lakṣmaṇa introduces himself and his companions by telling Agastya’s student how Rāma came to be exiled into the forest. After Sītā has been abducted and the princes reach Kiṣkindha, Lakṣmaṇa again tells Hanumān all that has happened up to that point. Once Hanumān enters the picture, he becomes the carrier of the story within the story, from one person to the next (from Rāma to Sītā and Rāma to Rāvaṇa, then back from Sītā to Rāma and finally, from Rāma to Bharata) as well as from one location to the next (from Kiṣkindha to Lankā, from Lankā to Kiṣkindha and then from Kiṣkindha to Ayodhyā). The tale precedes Rāma’s presence in Lankā as well as his return to Ayodhyā.
Hanumān as the carrier of the tale assumes significance in terms of the boon Rāma grants him at the end of their adventures together. In the very last book (‘Epilogue’), once Rāma has been crowned king of Ayodhyā, he lavishes gifts on the main monkeys and rākṣasas. On Hanumān, his special helper, he bestows the boon of conditional immortality: Hanumān will live as long as Rāma’s story is told on earth. Thus, Hanumān has a vested interest in keeping the story alive, telling it again and again, in all the places that he can and to all the people that he can.
Scholars of oral epics will argue that the reason the Rāmāyaṇa tells itself within itself is to maintain the integrity of the text, i.e., to ensure that future tellers and scribes are reminded of the grid of major episodes upon which they can work. For example, the opening chapters of the first book (‘Childhood’) have Nārada telling Vālmīki the entire story of the Rāmāyaṇa which provides future tellers with an outline of the story. Further on, the frequent recapitulations of the story up to that point would, arguably, serve the same function.
However, if we keep in mind the fact that the Rāmāyaṇa always has more than one audience (i.e., there are multiple audiences inside the story itself) we can see how the repetitions are necessary and valid for narrative reasons as well as compositional ones. If we add Hanumān’s boon to this, we see that for at least one of the storytellers within the tale, this is a matter of life and death. Besides, Shulman argues that Rāma himself has to keep hearing his own story told because the Rāmāyaṇa is ‘the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself’ and that Rāma remembers his divine nature only through his story as told by someone else.
The Rāmāyaṇa as Epic
The Rāmāyaṇa is considered by Western scholars to be one of the two Indian epics, the other being the Mahābhārata. The indigenous tradition, however, classifies these long poems differently. The Rāmāyaṇa is called ādikāvya, ‘the first poem,’ and the Mahābhārata is held to be itihāsa, ‘legend’ or ‘history’. While scholars have yet to define ‘epic’ satisfactorily, there is a strong consensus that, as a genre, epic is circumscribed by certain compositional and formal features. Most simply, an epic is often oral, it is narrative and it is heroic.
Early scholars of Indian epics were confounded by the non-linear narrative style of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. Their stories move forward episodically, in fits and starts. Where one might expect a grand elaboration, there is none. Action is often slowed down by a digression into another story or a long description of nature. While the central story does always come to a satisfactory conclusion, it winds and meanders through a ‘chaotic’ abundance of other tales and side tales, diversions into philosophies and moral discourses, genealogies and cosmologies, looping back on itself, framing one story after another, until finally it comes to rest.
Since epics are often oral in origin, they have a particular way of telling their stories. Each teller has the privilege, perhaps even the duty, to tell the tale in her/his own way, dwelling on well-loved parts, elucidating morality and ethics, adding comic relief.
In a social milieu where the vast majority of the audience of traditional literatures are not literate, traditional texts must make heavy use of devices that maximize memorability. Among these devices are iteration, formulaic composition, simple metrical forms preferably subject to musical or quasi-musical recitation, copiousness, heavy use of epigrams and sententia, hyperbole and tales of wonder.¶¶¶¶¶
Inside these formal constructs, epics basically tell the stories of legendary heroes, often kings, who must go through several hardships before they can ‘live happily ever after’. The stories are complicated by disputed kingships, warring kingdoms, abducted or dishonoured wives, and journeys into dangerous unknown and uncharted territories. The hero of the tale must come through a series of adventures that test his valour as much as they test his virtue. He usually has a companion in his quest or on his journey who helps him come through the trials and tribulations that litter his path.
The epic hero has a special relationship with the gods. Sometimes he is fathered by a divine parent, sometimes he has the gods’ particular favour and at other times he can be either a part of a god (amśa) or an incarnation of a god (avatāra). An epic brings the human and cosmic realms together, often in the person of the hero. Epics posit a critical relationship between cosmic order and human destiny: the cosmic plan of the gods becomes the human hero’s fate.****** The gods take sides in the battle that must be fought and the battle is fought primarily to reestablish the dominion of the gods over the earth.
Apart from the gods (daiva) and fate (vidhi), there are other significant forces that are active in the epic universe. In the Indian epics, karma, dharma and kāla (time) operate to determine what the hero can do, what he must do and what will happen to him. Curses and boons are further determining agents in these stories and elevate the stories to the level of mythic events.†††††† The hero’s actions are understood to be affected by any or all of these forces. Thus, the action in an epic, particularly in Indian epics, suffers from a certain degree
of narrative hypercausality, where multiple causes are proffered for a single event.
Vālmīki’s version of Rāma’s adventures displays almost all these epic features: the hero’s trials and tribulations, his intimate relationship with the gods and the operation of extrahuman forces such as boons and curses. But at the same time, the Rāmāyaṇa also shares several themes and motifs with stories that have come to be classified as fairy and folk tales: the beautiful princess who is abducted by the wicked, monstrous enemy and imprisoned in a faraway, inaccessible place, the talking, magical animal companions, the divine maiden who can stay with her husband only for a short time before she returns to her original state, the magical objects (in this case, weapons) that help the hero rescue the princess.
While the Rāmāyaṇa shares structural and thematic features with genres that have been defined primarily by Western scholars against Western texts, we must also take into consideration the fact that there is an indigenous category for the Rāmāyaṇa. The Indian tradition defines the Rāmāyaṇa as the ādikāvya, or mahākāvya, ‘great poem’, a category which appears to straddle the Western genres of drama and narrative lyric.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Sanskrit kāvya is alamkāra, or the adornment of verse with similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. The purpose of this is to create a distilled mood, a rasa. All rasas are based on human emotions. But while emotions are fleeting and rarely encountered in their pure state, a mood can be cultivated and developed through the sustained use of language which can, then, generate the further distillation of an essence.
The most popular mood in kāvya remains viraha, i.e., love in separation. Through various techniques, the poet tries to create this mood of longing for the beloved among his audience which, ideally, consists of sahṛdayas, ‘like-hearted’ or ‘sympathetic’ people. As the hero or the heroine pines for the beloved who is far away, all of nature sympathizes—trees and flowers wilt, animals and birds weep, clouds gather and the world is covered in gloom.