The Rāmāyaṇa is completely self-conscious about its connection with kāvya. In the opening chapters of the text, we hear the story of how Vālmīki’s compassion at the death of a mating bird was spontaneously expressed in metre. Vālmīki is then encouraged by Brahmā to recite the deeds of Rāma in this new metrical form and he teaches his poem, the Rāmāyaṇa, to his students Kuśa and Lava. They, in turn, recite the poem to Rāma. Rāma thus hears his own story for the first time as a poem. At the same time as the Rāmāyaṇa establishes itself as a poem, it is equally firm about its original oral status. The story is heard and retold many times before it reaches us, the last and outermost audience of the written text.
Even a cursory reading of the Rāmāyaṇa shows that its style is ornate, laden with similes and metaphors, metonymy and other features of classical Sanskrit poetry. Nature functions almost as another character. Descriptions of nature abound, especially in the sections where Rāma and Sītā have been separated. Easily the most beautiful parts of the poem are the ones where Rāma is waiting for Sugrīva to fulfil his promise and begin the search for Sītā. It is the rainy season, the conventional season for love in Sanskrit poetry, and Sītā is far away. Everything around him reminds Rāma of his gentle, sweet wife.
Further, the Rāmāyaṇa is a heroic poem, a heroic romance, in fact, and can be compared to classical Sanskrit nāṭakas. Under this set of parametres, the story is simple—the lovers meet, they fall in love, they are separated, and after a period of unhappiness and trial, they are reunited. As in the paradigmatic nāṭaka, Kālidāsa’s Abhijnānaśakuntalām, Rāma, the hero from the city, falls in love with the woman of nature (Sītā is born from the earth and her name literally means ‘furrow’) and their union results in the birth of crucial male heirs.
Ramanujan believes that to classify the Rāmāyaṇa as an epic is to deprive it of the religious significance it holds in India and parts of South-east Asia.‡‡‡‡‡‡ On the other hand, since the Rāmāyaṇa cannot obviously be contained by any single genre, the more genre considerations we apply to it, the more we open up the text for exploration. Each particular categorization highlights another aspect of the story and of the text and each of these deepens our understanding of the multiple layers the poem holds within itself. None of the genres, whether Eastern or Western, are mutually exclusive and it is entirely possible, perhaps even necessary, for a text as multivalent as the Rāmāyaṇa to straddle many boundaries. Seeing the Rāmāyaṇa as kāvya or a nāṭaka or as an epic or a fairy tale, or even as all of them, provides a rich and complex backdrop to the religious significance the text has acquired over the centuries.
The Critical Edition and the Greater Rāmāyaṇa Tradition
It is very likely that the bulk of the Rāmāyaṇa was composed by a single author (or at least by like minds at a single period in time). Nonetheless, more and more scholars have come to believe over the years that Rāma’s story was in circulation for a long time before Vālmīki composed it into his particular version.§§§§§§ The existence of the Daśaratha Jātaka and the Rāmopakhyāna in the Mahābhārata have been cited as evidence that Rāma’s adventures were known before Vālmīki, that Vālmīki retold the story in his own unique way. Equally though, it has been argued that the Vālmīki version is the oldest Rāma story we have and that the Daśaratha Jātaka and the Rāmopakhyāna are derived from it.¶¶¶¶¶¶ Whichever camp scholars fall into, there is almost no one who suggests that Vālmīki’s is an original tale.
The Rāmāyaṇa has had a long history of transmission, from its presumably oral origins to written manuscripts and now to the printed text.******* Even though Vālmīki probably composed his text sometime between 750 and 500 BCE, the earliest extant Rāmāyaṇa manuscript dates only to the eleventh century CE. Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts appear in different scripts from all over the Indian subcontinent. Because of the plethora of manuscripts and the multiplicity of manuscript traditions, scholars are compelled to sort through them and value them in terms of age and authenticity.
There is no longer any doubt about the fact that while books 2 through 6 were composed by a single person at a particular time, the first and the last books of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, the Balā and Uttara Kāṇḍas, were very likely to have been composed later than the rest of the text. From their style, content and linguistic features, they are also likely to have been composed by someone other than Vālmīki. Nonetheless, the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa as it is constituted today consists of all seven books, the first and the last serving as bookends, almost, to the central books where the main story is contained.
Since 1975, scholars of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa have had at their disposal the Baroda Critical Edition of Vālmīki’s poem. This presents a standard edition that can be cited easily and efficiently. The enterprise of critically editing an ancient text that has several recensions and manuscript traditions is primarily motivated by the scholarly desire to reconstruct the original text. On the basis of linguistic, cultural and historical evidence, experts attempt to reconstruct, as closely as is possible, the original text as it was composed by the author.
The critical edition is constructed by the meticulous and painstaking comparison of manuscripts and manuscript traditions. The passages that constitute the body of the critical text are those that appear in all (or at least most) of the manuscript traditions. These are considered to be indubitably a part of the original composition. Verses that are not substantiated by several manuscripts are judged to be late in composition and/or as the work of later redactors and editors of the text and these are placed outside the main body of the critical edition.
Such an enterprise involves, for example, the labeling and separation of verses and passages that were composed at a date later than the bulk of the text. These, then, are regarded as ‘interpolations’ or ‘additions’ to the main text. The material in these passages is marked off from the rest of the verses and placed either in appendixes or in multiple footnotes marked by asterisks and a separate set of numbers.
Opponents of the text critical method are accused of ascribing a non-rationality to the original producers of the text. Those who reject the critical edition and its findings are charged with romanticizing the oral tradition and crediting the composers with an entirely different method of text production, one that makes the criteria of critical apparatus irrelevant. On the other hand, complete reliance on and belief in the construction of such critical texts devalues the native traditions that produce them. This belief insists that the critically edited product is the legitimate text and ignores the cultural differences that inform the production and development of a text outside Western modes of authorship. Nonetheless, the idea that the critical edition defines the boundaries of the ‘text’ itself persists, despite the fact that all those familiar with Indian texts agree that a unique notion of tradition (paramparā) informs and circumscribes these texts.
The Rāmāyaṇa as we receive it today, whether it is Vālmīki’s Sanskrit telling or the Rāma story as a cultural artefact (replete with all its multiforms in the performing and fine arts and different genres of literature), is more than a putative original or source text attributed to a legendary composer. The power of the Rāmāyaṇa lies in the stories it tells and it lives well beyond the confines of bound volumes. Each retelling is as integrally linked to the source as it is different from it. And it is the constant retellings and reformulations of the basic story that make the text both organic and dynamic—tied to its mythic origins as well as to its real multiforms.
In speaking of the Mahābhārata, Hiltebeitel declares that he prefers to think of the text as a
narrative continuum, as a ‘work in progress’, rather than . . . a fixed or original text. By the same token, it strains matters to regard all the variants as synchronically equal in value. Some features must be older than others, and though indisputable rules for determining textual priorities will probably never be established,
historical development through such processes as alteration, interpolation, and perhaps sometimes abridgement, must not be ignored.†††††††
The same can be said about Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa as well as of the greater Rāmāyaṇa tradition which is, in fact, predicated on Vālmīki’s text. While there are considerable differences of style, composition and perhaps even modes of production between the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, Hiltebeitel’s observation applies equally to the former since he makes a point with regard to the way scholars should approach these ‘reconstructed’ texts, rather than a point about the possible way in which the texts come together.
Conclusions
The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and its critical edition eventually become layers within the greater tradition of Rāma stories that have proliferated over the centuries. Most Indian languages have their own tellings of Rāma’s adventures and even cultures as far from India as Indonesia have made the tale of the exiled prince their own. But the question that remains is, what is it about this essentially simple tale that has compelled so many different kinds of people to hold it close to their hearts? The story is hardly unique, and some have argued that the idealized characters within it have little or no psychological complexities. Why then is it told and retold, by professional bards, by grandmothers, by teachers?
The answer to this question may well lie in the two unresolved issues that linger and haunt the reader/listener long after Vālmīki’s story is over: Rāma’s unlawful acts and his ignorance of his divine status. The killing of Vālī and his rejection of Sītā are so outrageously out of character that there is almost nothing within the premises and assumptions of Vālmīki’s tale that can justify them. We can suggest that all the Rāma stories that follow Vālmīki’s are attempts to resolve this issue narratively as well as structurally.
For example, Tulasidāsa’s Hindi Rāmcaritmānas from the fifteenth century assumes Rāma’s divinity as a starting point. Rāma kills Vālī so that the monkey will be liberated from his earthly life and body. This motif of salvation has already been established by the killings of Virādha and Kabandha, both of whom are liberated from their curses by their ‘deaths’ at the hands of Rāma. As in Vālmīki’s story, Tulasi’s Ahalyā, too, is freed from her petrified condition by Rāma’s presence. Tulasi follows Vālmīki to justify Rāma’s rejection of Sītā—he knew that she was innocent but had to prove it to the common people. But additionally in Tulasi, Sītā the goddess, was spirited away by the gods in the moment before Rāvaṇa grasped her hand in the abduction. The Sītā that suffered the separation and torment was but an illusion of the ‘real’ Sītā who returned only after the trial by fire. She is, therefore, utterly pure, untouched by the vile creature that Rāma must kill.
In Krittibasa’s Bengali story, Rāma is filled with remorse after he has killed Vālī and after listening to Vālī’s arguments Rāma apologizes profusely, saying that since he had already formed a pact of friendship with Sugrīva, he was bound to kill his ally’s enemy. Instead of justifying Rāma’s unrighteous killing of the righteous monkey king, Krittibasa has Tārā, Vālī’s wife, curse Rāma: because he had killed Vālī and separated Tārā from her beloved husband, he, too, would not enjoy Sītā’s company for long. He would regain her now but would end his days in loneliness and misery. If Rāma’s acts cannot be justified, he can at least receive retribution for them.
Krittibasa again employs the curse to make sure that Rāma suffers. When the war is over and Rāvaṇa has been killed, Mandodarī, the rākṣasa king’s virtuous wife, curses Sītā—because she has caused the death of Mandodarī’s husband, her own husband will look upon her ‘with poisoned eyes’. Rāma demands that Sītā prove her innocence in public and she walks into the fire. She was not to return, except that the gods are moved by Rāma’s grief over the loss of his beloved and they restore Sītā to him.
These few examples show how the later tradition struggles with Rāma’s odd behaviour and how various narrative devices are employed to exonerate him from censure. If he knows that he is god, as in Tulasi’s story, all his ‘wrong’ actions are actually right ones from the correct perspective. In Krittibasa’s case, curses are used to punish Rāma and to prevent him from acting freely.
As mentioned earlier, we can think of all the other Rāma stories as predicated on Vālmīki’s for two reasons: they take Rāma’s divinity for granted as a starting point for their stories, and they implicitly cite Vālmīki’s text as they tell their own story.
To some extent, all later Rāmāyaṇas play on the knowledge of previous tellings: they are meta-Rāmāyaṇas. I cannot resist repeating my favourite example. In several of the later Rāmāyaṇas (such as the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, 16th century), when Rāma is exiled, he does not want Sītā to go with him into the forest. Sītā argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his suffering, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, ‘Countless Rāmāyaṇas have been composed before this. Do you know of one in which Sītā does not go with Rāma to the forest?’‡‡‡‡‡‡‡
Ramanujan’s example demonstrates that Rāma stories absorb each other and nowhere, perhaps, is this more apparent than in the issue of Rāma’s divinity. Each Rāma story that succeeds Vālmīki’s version addresses this particular question head-on, usually in the opening chapters of the book. It is as if the later versions know how subtle Vālmīki’s statement is and, therefore, they take it upon themselves to open out the issue, bring it into the foreground. It is almost possible to see the greater Rāmāyaṇa tradition as a commentary on this primary text.
In most of the Hindu Rāma stories that follow Vālmīki’s in time, Rāma’s unrighteous behaviour and his divinity are inextricably linked. Rāma killed Vālī to liberate him from his earthly body. Rāma rejected Sītā because he knew all along that she would be proved innocent in the trial by fire. Rāma could do and did these things precisely because he was god, not despite the fact that he was god. Because Rāma is aware of and participates in a higher order, his actions cannot be judged in earthly terms and by earthly conditions. Unlike in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, where he has to be reminded or told who he is, Rāma in the later stories acts in full awareness and full control of his divinity.
Shulman eloquently describes the narrative nexus of the Rāmāyaṇa as ‘the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself . . . an identity obscured and only occasionally, in brilliant and poignant flashes, revealed to its owner.’ This formulation, of the hidden divinity, the obscured identity, can be extended into a heuristic device for a further understanding of the Mahābhārata as well. In the Mahābhārata, Kṛṣṇa’s divinity is hidden from those around him. He reveals himself as the mysterium tremendum to Arjuna in the eleventh chapter of the Bhagavad Gītā. But he saves Arjuna from the memory of the epiphany which would have, in effect, made him utterly unable to act in the world. In the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma must be similarly protected from the knowledge of his own divinity so that he can act effectively as a mortal in the world, most especially to kill Rāvaṇa.
The hidden divinity at the centre of the narrative is a feature of both the Sanskrit epics. The progressive revelation of the true identity of the man-god is one of the drivers of the story. In many ways, the Bhagavad Gītā is the climax of the Mahābhārata and the war that follows is but a denouement, a fulfilling of individual and collective destinies that had been set in motion in the earlier parts of the story. Similarly, the Rāmāyaṇa’s narrative and spiritual climax occurs in the scene when, after Sītā’s trial by fire, the gods tell Rāma who he really is. Once again, the events that follow this critical moment are but the tying up of loose ends as the story moves inevitably towards its conclusion. With the Rāmāyaṇa it is important to note that the revelation of Rāma’s true identity occurs at the end of book 6, the last of the central books of the text. The seventh book, the
Uttara Kāṇḍa, has always been considered an epilogue to Vālmīki’s tale which rightly and powerfully ends in book 6.
The question that looms large over the Rāmāyaṇa is that of the relationship between myth and history, i.e., is the Rāmāyaṇa a ‘true’ story? When the early Orientalists were discovering Indian texts, they were struck by the absence of a formal and proper ‘history’, the kind they had found in ancient Greece and even in ancient China. Indians seemed to mix up their human heroes with their gods. Chronological lists of kings and dynasties were found in the Purāṇas, which were actually compendia of myths. This led them to think that Indians could not write history, that when they did attempt to chronicle the past, their fanciful minds came up with never-ending stories peopled with gods and monsters. Thus, to see the Indian epics simply as history is to fall into an Orientalist trap.
At the same time, most scholars of epic believe that an epic grows around a core legend or tale that probably did occur. Thus, it is possible some king (perhaps not named Rāma) did exist, that his wife was abducted and that he fought a war to get her back. Through many hands and many centuries, this set of events became the Rāmāyaṇa, a tale that no longer has any meaningful dependence on the ‘reality’ that spawned it. What we have now is a remarkable tale that captures the imagination of all kinds of people, not just because it is true, but because of the way it is told, because of the adventure and magic it contains, because of the way it takes a known and familiar reality and enlarges it to dimensions that are unknown and unfamiliar.
It has been argued that to trace Rāma’s journey through the Subcontinent in literal terms, identifying each and every place in which he stopped and bathed, to insist that he was born in a particular spot and died at another, is a matter of faith and that it is critical to the religious sentiments of vast numbers of people. While this may well be true, literalizing a text of this magnitude does it a great injustice. The Rāmāyaṇa does not derive its meaning from a sacred geography or history: rather, it draws its significance from what it can tell us about ourselves, our decisions and the way we choose to live our lives.
Valmiki's Ramayana Page 5