Culture has always been like the flowing river. Meandering its way through various lands, mingling and interacting with other cultures, giving and receiving they acquire new ideas and characteristics and thus many a times resulting in the formation of a new culture.
A culture is composed of its people who carry their cultural baggage along with them, and as the people move from one place to another their intercultural interaction and exchanges leads to the formation of newer or heterogeneous entities. A part of the cultural entity resides in the folk tales and narratives which remains an intrinsic part of all cultures. These tales are one of the many entities among others which can be found in the cultural baggage (of its people). Humans from time immemorial have had the nomadic attribute, and with their wanderings they played an important role in spreading their various seeds of their culture. Thus we find traces of similarity between various customs and folk tales irrespective of their geographical distance and differences.
In this paper I propose to address the entity of the folk narrative taking into consideration the tradition of The Ramayana in the light of A. K. Ramanujan’s essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”. The essay addresses the question of how many Ramayanas there have been citing few examples from the major ones. Ramanujan specifically says that he would like to sort out for himself, and for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other. He does agree that these hundreds of tellings differ from one another but they still contain some traces of similarity. He says, “The story may be same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different. Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the style, details, tone, and texture—and therefore the import—may be vastly different.”
He then gives the example of two tellings of the “same” episode, i.e. the story of Ahalya and shows in what ways Valmiki and Kampan treat the same episode differently. This brings into one’s mind the various versions of the myth of Oedipus, as Claude Lévi-Strauss shows in his essay “Structural study of Myth”.
Folk narratives are to a great extent myths which have been handed down from one generation to the other. In the words of Strauss “[they] speak of mythological figures which are considered as personified abstractions, divinized heroes, or fallen Gods.” Folk narratives like myth have to be told, it is a part of human speech. Like myth they always refer to events alleged to have taken place long time ago and yet the specific pattern described is timeless; it explains the present and the past and the future. Thus folk narratives like myths have a double structure of being historical and ahistorical, which explains how myth, while pertaining to the realm of parole (nonreversible) and calling for an explanation as such, as well as to that of langue (reversible time) in which it is expressed, can also be an absolute entity on a third level which, though it remains linguistic by nature, is nevertheless distinct from the other two.
The essay not only relates the tradition of Folk Narrative to myth, but it also shares other themes from Strauss’ “Structural study of Myth.” One such theme is of the autochthonous origin of man. Just as the myth of Oedipus confront this question, quite a few versions of the Ramayana touch upon this, namely Valmiki and Kampan’s version which speaks of Sita being found in a furrow by Janaka, for which she got her name (Sita in Sanskrit meaning ‘furrow’). Also in the end Sita enters a fissure in the earth, the mother from whom she had originally come. Whereas in the Kannada version of the Ramayana Sita is born from the sneeze of Ravana (Sita in Kannada meaning ‘he sneezed’, thus her name is also given a Kannada folk etymology as in Sanskrit text it has a Sanskrit one).
Another theme which is visible is the theme of the oedipal complex which Freud coined from the myth of Oedipus. The abnormal birth of Sita as the daughter born directly to the male Ravana brings to the story a new range of suggestions: the male envy of the womb and childbirth, which is a frequent theme in Indian literature, and an Indian Oedipal theme of fathers pursuing daughters and in this case, a daughter causing the death of her incestuous father.
Just as Lévi-Strauss questions how all these myths have an astounding similarity in widely different regions, Ramanujan does the same. To understand this similarity one must first know the concept of the Great Tradition and the Little Tradition. The term was coined by Robert Redfield, the American sociologist after his studies of the Mexican communities. This model influenced McKim Marriot and Milton Singer to carry out research on Indian villages. Great Traditions refer to all traditions that derive their origins from the ancient culture of the Aryans and the Vedas. They also consist of traditions contained in the epics, Puranas, Brahmanas and other classical sanskritic work. Whereas the cultural processes that operate among the folks or unlettered peasants in India are referred to as Little Tradition. These develop because of change in village culture due to internal growth of a village. These traditions are sensitised to the needs of the local village, area or community in which it operates. Little Tradition consists of its own role incumbents such as the folk artists, medicine men, tellers of riddles, proverbs and stories, poets, bards and dancers.
In the past whatever writings were done they were written on palm leaves (bhojpatra). These leaves could not be bound together like a book. Therefore they were stored between two wooden panels and tied together sometimes by punching holes and letting a cord pass through them. Thus they could be easily rearranged and their sequence could also be altered as one wished. This corresponds to the slated structure Strauss described of about arranging the various variants of a myth. These slates can be arranged and rearranged to suit the different requirements. This is how the Little Traditions emerged. So in the Great Tradition we have the idea of the Mother Goddess, which gets interpreted in various forms like Durga, Kali, and others, becoming a part of the Little Tradition.
Thus, we arrive at the answer to the question of why myths and folk narratives like the Ramayana are so much addicted to duplication, triplication, or quadruplication of the same sequence. As Strauss says,“The purpose of a myth is to provide a logical model capable of overcoming a contradiction, a theoretically infinite number of slates will be generated, each one slightly different from the others. Thus, myth grows spiral-wise until the intellectual impulse which has produced it is exhausted. Its growth is a continuous process whereas its structure remains discontinuous... [So] the kind of logic that goes on in a narrative thought is as rigorous as that of modern science, and that the difference lies, not in the quality of the intellectual process, but in the nature of the things to which it is applied. This is well in agreement with the situation known to prevail in the field of technology: What makes a steel axe superior to a stone axe is not that the first one is better made than the second. They are equally well made, but steel is quite different from stone. In the same way we may be able to show that the same logical processes operate in myth as in science, and that man has always been thinking equally well, the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its unchanged and unchanging powers.”
This brings us to the relevance of the essay or of folk narratives in general in the present times. The Ramayana is a part of the sacred texts of Hindu religion. But with the emergence of these various tellings the issue of ‘sacredness’ has been questioned. This can be resolved by simply going into the very origin of the word ‘Sacred’. The word ‘Sacred’ comes from the Latin word sacrare meaning ‘to consecrate’ i.e. to make or declare sacred. (Thus each community according to its perception of the world decides what is sacred and what is not). In various communities we have the ‘Purohit’ who comes to perform the rights and rituals on behalf of the person concerned because that person is impure. For this reason he ties a sacred thread in his arm to sanctify him. Thus we have the existence of both pure and impure along with each other. In the same manner religious texts to address the issue of sacredness leave out some of the details of a narrative. Thus every text then becomes a selective interpretation of a narrative.
Dr. Romilla Thapar in an interview (with The Hindu) says that simple stories have been transformed into religious dogma “it’s not just mythology but also religion and it was made that. Let me just go back a little bit into history and say that initially, many scholars believe the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were just epic stories about heroes, and that’s the way they continued to be for quite a while. And then they were converted into sacred literature, by making Ram and Krishna avatars of Vishnu. And there’s a superb analysis of this by V.S. Sukthankar in Pune, who talked about the Bhrgu Brahmins converting these epics into Bhagwat literature, which is, converting the heroes into incarnations of Vishnu. And then it becomes sacred literature. Now today, yes, it’s considered sacred literature, but that is really not its roots.”
Dr. Thapar says that “in the colonial period was when they set up the law courts and they said, according to European law, you swear an oath on the Bible. So they went running around asking which is the sacred book of the Hindus. And so you got the Bhagvad Gita, you got the Ramayana, you got the Vedas, you got all kinds of answers, because there isn’t a single sacred book, there’s a multiplicity of sacred books. And there again, the question of variation comes in. Who accepts which book as the primary sacred book?”
One may go further and say that the cultural area in which Ramayanas are endemic has a pool of signifiers, signifiers that include plots, characters, names, geography, even sneer carry allusions to the Rama story. When someone is carrying on, we say, “What’s this Ramayana now? Enough.” In Tamil, a narrow room is called a kiskindha ; a Bengali proverb about a dim-witted person says, “Shaat kaando Ramayan porey Sita kar mashi!”; in a Bengali arithmetic textbook, children are asked to figure the dimensions of what is left of a wall that Hanuman built, after he has broken down part of it in mischief. And to these must be added marriage songs, narrative poems, place legends, temple myths, paintings, sculpture, and the many performing arts. To end it in the words of Ramanujan, “These Various texts not only relate to prior texts directly, to borrow or refute, but they relate to each other through this common code or common pool. Every author, if one may hazard a metaphor, dips into it and brings out a unique crystallization, a new text with a unique texture and a fresh context. The great texts rework the small one, much like the great and little traditions, for ‘lions are made of sheep,’ as Valery said. And sheep are made of lions, too: a folk legend says that Hanuman wrote the original Ramayana on a mountaintop, after the Great War, and scattered the manuscript; it was many times larger than what we have now. Valmiki is said to have captured only a fragment of it. In this sense, no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling —and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time. The stories are there, ‘always already’.”
Works Cited
Ramanujan, A. K. “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” in Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, Paula Richman, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Oxford: University of California Press, 1991, 22-49
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. “The Structural Study of Myth” in Literary Theory: An Anthology, Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 2002,101-115
Thapar, Romilla. http://rupeenews.com/2011/11/three-hundred-ramayanas-or-one-abvp-tightens-temple-indoctrination/
