History of Quit India, Nehru & CPI split

HISTORY Of Quit India, Nehru & CPI split

A.G. NOORANI

Stalin upbraided CPI leaders for not supporting the Congress on the Quit
India Movement.


OF all the Communist leaders interviewed in the Oral History
Programme of the Nehru Memorial Museum & Library in New Delhi,
Makineni Basavapunniah was the most outspoken. The armed struggle in
Telangana, which began in 1946, was directed against the Nizam's
government. But ?from September 1948 onwards it was regular armed
invasion. It was not a police action. Either the special armed police or
the Malabar Police or the army, nearly 50,000 were employed for three
full years to suppress the movement. Indian Army was not more than one
and a half lakh or two lakhs in those days. A good part of it was locked
up in Kashmir. Other part had to remain somewhere stationary. Then to
spare as nearly 40,000-50,000 armed forces at one spot was not a small
thing. So they concentrated their best and did their worst. Ten thousand
people were put as detenus for three-four years; nearly a lakh of
people were put in concentration camps for months on end; thousands of
women were raped.? Dr Hari Dev Sharma asked: ?By the military??
Basavapunniah replied: ?Of course, military and the other armed forces,
like Central Reserve Police, Malabar Police, Special Police, like that
so many.?
He added: ?Particularly after September 1948 when the Government of
India intervened, as I said earlier, it intervened with very big armed
forces. The entire modern military technique was used against us.
General J.N. Chaudhuri, who intervened there on behalf of the Government
of India, took hardly half a dozen days to manage the army of the Nizam
and the Razakars, etc. After that the main direction was against the
Communist Party which was leading the struggle.?
He explained why he developed reservations over the Ranadive thesis
adopted by the Second Party Congress at Calcutta in February 1948.
Experience in Telangana flew against the thesis. ?The Andhra document
was submitted in the month of May 1948. The Politburo was keeping its
discussions confined to it till the month of November 1948. So it was
only in the month of November and December 1948 that this reached all
the State units. The whole of the year 1949, there was an inner party
discussion going on. By March 1950 the whole cycle was complete and the
line that was adopted at Calcutta was proved wrong and we were asked to
take the responsibility of the Central Committee leadership. Then came
the question of going and meeting Stalin, and then working out all the
lines.? The Communist Party of India unit in Andhra disagreed with the
leadership. In the earlier articles, we have Basavapunniah's account of
the Moscow meeting, which was arranged to avert a split.
Like his colleagues, P. Sundarayya also dilated on the alliance with
the Congress Socialist Party in the 1930s and how the Kerala, Andhra and
Madras units of the CSP went over to the CPI. Conflict was inherent in
the alliance. ?Right from the beginning, from 1934 itself, this conflict
had been there. Because in the earlier period, some of our writings
[aid] that Congress Socialism was contradictory in words and would pave
way to fascism. Such kind of articles were written. The [Congress]
Socialist Party leadership also attacked [saying] that the communists
were responsible for fascism coming in Germany by not having a united
front. They had their own ideology; Gandhian ideology also influenced [
sic] that the communists were anti-national. They also used to say all
these things?. Similarly, Sajjad Zaheer, Dr K.M. Ashraf, Dr Z.A. Ahmed,
[Soli] Batliwala were all big Congress leaders; they were all leftists
and were in the Congress Socialist Party. They were all pro
[communists]; some of them were party members also.? So, this struggle
went on till they found that they could not function in a united way.
Then they decided to remove us and we also found that it was difficult
to convince a good chunk of them. We had to function more and more
independently than through the Congress Socialist party. That phase came
towards the end of 1938.?

Dange's role
Sadly, S.A. Dange's recorded Interview ends abruptly before the
crises of the 1940s. He was a fascinating character, a brilliant
pamphleteer, orator and a supple tactician. He was known to be close to
the mill owner Sir David Sassoon. On March 7, 1964, Current, a Bombay
[now Mumbai] tabloid, edited by D.F. Karaka, published a letter from
Dange to the Governor-General of India dated July 28, 1924, from Sitapur
jail in the United Provinces (U.P.) where he was serving a four-year
sentence in the Kanpur Conspiracy Case.
It said: ?Exactly one year back, the Deputy Commissioner of Police of
Bombay, Mr Stewart, was having a conversation with me, in his office
regarding my relations with M.N. Roy and an anticipated visit to me of
certain persons from abroad. During the course of the conversation the
Honourable officer let drop a hint in the following words, the full
import of which I failed to catch at that moment. Mr Stewart said, ?You
hold an exceptionally influential position in certain circles here and
abroad. Government would be glad if this position would be of some use
to them.' I think I still hold that position. Rather it has been
enhanced by the prosecution. If Your Excellency is pleased to think that
I should use that position for the good of Your Excellency's government
and the country, I should be glad to do so, if I am given the
opportunity by Your Excellency granting my prayer for release.


THE HINDU ARCHIVES

S.A. DANGE. HE was a member of the Communist delegation that met Stalin
in Moscow. Here, he is giving a talk on "My visit to Russia" in the
weekly BBC Marathi magazine programme "Radio Jhankar". The others in the
delegation were Ajoy Ghosh, M. Basavapunniah and C. Rajeswara Rao.


?I am given the punishment of four years' rigorous imprisonment in
order that those years may bring a salutary change in my attitude
towards the King Emperor's sovereignty in India. I beg to inform Your
Excellency that those years are unnecessary, as I have never been
positively disloyal towards His Majesty in my writings or speeches nor
do I intend to be so in future.
?Hoping this respectful undertaking will satisfy and move Your Excellency to grant my prayer and awaiting anxiously a reply.
I beg to remain,
Your Excellency's Most
Obedient Servant,
Shripat Amrit Dange.
Written this day 28th July, 1924
Endorsement No. 1048, dated 31-7-1924.
Forwarded in original to I.G. [Inspector General] of prisons U.P. for disposal.
Sd/- W.P. Cook
Col. I.M.S.
Superintendent of Jail.
Seal of I.G. Prisons
13070 Dated 1-8-1924.?
On March 16, Basavapunniah and P. Ramamurthi went to the National
Archives in New Delhi and again on March 17 and 19. What they found was
set out in a pamphlet published by the Communist Party of India
(Marxist) after the split later in the year. It was entitled Dange
Unmasked (for a detailed analysis of the texts of the documents,
including comments by the formidable Lt Col Cecil Kaye, Director of the
Intelligence Bureau, perhaps its most able ? ?he is personally, a mere
worm? ? vide the writer's article ?Dange Letters?; Survey (London)
Spring 1979; pages 160-174).
Years later I sought an interview with Dange. What he said of the
famous meeting with Stalin rang true. Stalin upbraided the CPI leaders
for not supporting the Congress on the Quit India Movement when they
mentioned that their stand had cost them dear. ?Why didn't you support
it? Do you think we won the war because of the 100 rifles you sent us??
Stalin was informality itself. Dange sat on the armrest of his chair
when Stalin pored over the map of India he had sent for. ?Is this your
Yenan?? he asked with unconcealed contempt. It lay at the very heart of
India. What followed the meetings is well recorded but not completely in
a single volume.
Significantly, later Soviet writers also criticised the CPI's 1942
decision. Dr Alexander I. Chicherov, Head of the International Relations
Research Department and Institute of Oriental Studies, Academy of
Sciences USSR in Moscow, was an erudite scholar. He found in the
archives a letter from Bal Gangadhar Tilak to the Russian Consulate in
Bombay in 1905 outlining his plans for intensifying the freedom
struggle. He admired Tilak.
On a visit to Bombay, Chicherov told Indian Express that the CPI's
decision to keep out of the Quit India Movement was ?tragic? (October
15, 1982).
One question arises. One of the interviewers said that they had no
direct contact with Moscow, only with the Communist Party of Great
Britain, that is, with Rajani Palme Dutt and Harry Pollit. Was it Palme
Dutt, then, who instructed the switch in 1942?
Basavapunniah's interview mentions the disagreement between the
Andhra thesis and the thesis of the Central leadership. The party was on
the verge of a split. It was averted by Stalin. Like Dange, Mohit Sen
supported the Emergency. Both left the CPI, But Mohit Sen's memoir is of
absorbing interest. Sadly, it did not receive the review it deserved ( A
Traveller and the Road: The Journey of an Indian Communist; Rupa &
Co.; 2003). The two remained close.
Mohit Sen's account
Mohit Sen wrote: ?I was to have the privilege of carrying the ?China
path' document to China. The CPI leadership hoped and expected that the
leadership of the CPC would endorse this understanding and back it....
?At that time, I did not know that this line had been challenged by
an important section of the CPI leadership headed by Ajoy Ghosh, S.A.
Dange and S.V. Ghate. They had produced a joint document which had gone
down in the history of the party as the ?Three Ps' document?.
?This document shared the viewpoint that India had not won
independence and that the Nehru government upheld the interests of
British imperialism, landlords and those sections of the bourgeoisie
that collaborated with imperialism. The document also held the view that
armed revolution was the only path of advance. It differed from both
the Ranadive line and the China path line [ the Andhra thesis] on its
insistence that Indian conditions differed in the 1950s from both Russia
and China. The strategy of the CPI should, therefore, be that of the
Indian path. The armed revolution in our country would be a combination
of peasant guerrilla actions in the countryside with working class
insurrections in the urban areas. This was an updated version of what
S.A. Dange had advocated decades ago in Gandhi vs. Lenin published in
1920, which had caught the attention of Lenin himself.


RAJEEV BHATT

MOHIT SEN. HE wrote: "I was to have the privilege of carrying the `China
path' document to China."

?The other point of difference of ?the three Ps' document was its
realistic appraisal of the actual situation of the CPI. It was on the
verge of annihilation. Its mass organisations were shattered and the
party itself almost totally disintegrated. The first task was to save
the party itself and to reforge its ties with the masses, taking into
account the existing civil liberties.
?The proponents of the ?Chinese path' led by Comrade C. Rajeswara Rao
and those of the ?Indian path' led by Comrade Ajoy Ghosh had set up
their own centres and the CPI was on the verge of a split. It was then
that the Soviet Communists intervened.
?Four leaders, two from each centre, were brought to Moscow. They
travelled, incognito as manual workers on a Soviet ship from Calcutta.
They were Comrades Ajoy Ghosh, S.A. Dange, C. Rajeswara Rao and M.
Basavapunniah. None of them divulged any details of how they were
contacted and what their exact itinerary was. Nikhil Chakravartty, who
attended to all the technical details of planning the journey, has also
not said anything.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

A GROUP OF Telangana fighters. "[Stalin] strongly advised that the armed
struggle being conducted in various areas, especially the Telangana
region of Andhra Pradesh, should be ended."

?S.A. Dange and C. Rajeswara Rao have both told me about the meeting
with the leaders of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]. The
first meeting was attended from the Soviet side by Comrades [Mikhail
Andreyevich] Suslov, [Georgy] Malenkov and [Vyacheslav Mikhailovich]
Molotov. It was on the third day that it was announced that Comrade
Stalin would attend. So he did for the subsequent days. Dange and
Rajeswara Rao said that he was an attentive listener though he rarely
sat at the table but kept pacing up and down smoking a pipe. But he
intervened subtly to turn the discussion beyond dogmatic disputes to
assessments of the existing situation and immediate tactical tasks.
Stalin's view on Nehru government
?Stalin's view also was that India was not an independent country but
ruled indirectly by British colonialists. He also agreed that the
Communists could eventually advance only by heading an armed revolution.
But it would not be of the Chinese type. His view on this point
coincided with that of ?the three Ps'. He also agreed with their
appraisal of the concrete situation in which the party was placed. He
strongly advised that the armed struggle being conducted in various
areas, especially the Telangana region of Andhra Pradesh, should be
ended. He said that it was Comrade Rajeswara Rao who should travel to
the different camps and see that the arms were surrendered. This would
be difficult but it was he alone who could do it. That, in fact, was
done and Rajeswara Rao later told me that this was the most difficult
task he had ever performed for the party.
?Stalin also cautioned the CPI leaders that the Nehru government was
not a puppet government. It had a social base and mass support and could
not be overthrown easily. He asked the leaders to unite, work together,
save the party and take it forward. He strongly advised them to make
the CPI participate in the general elections? (pages 80-81).


BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT


P. SUNDARAYYA AND (below) Basavapunniah in the 1950s.


The record has him say: ?I cannot consider the government of Nehru as
a puppet. All his roots are in the people.? He was polite to the
visitors, but they did not win his respect. His interpreter and the
diplomat Nikolai Adyrkhayev's memoirs, released on Stalin's 118th birth
anniversary (December 21, 1879), reveal that later in the year Stalin
scolded a delegation of the Japanese Communist Party: ?In India they
have wrecked the party and there is something similar with you.?

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

As it happens some interesting documents have surfaced in the pages
of a journal, Revolutionary Democracy, published by Vijay Singh. The
issue of April 2011 published documents from the papers of Rajani Palme
Dutt in the archives of the Communist Party of Great Britain, which are
deposited in the Labour Archive and Library, Manchester.

BY SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT

THE NINE MEMBERS of the first Polit Bureau of the Communist Party of
India (Marxist) after the 1964 split in the Communist movement:
(standing, from left) P. Ramamurthi, Basavapunniah, E.M.S. Namboodiripad
and Harkishan Singh Surjeet; (sitting, from left) Promode Dasgupta,
Jyoti Basu, Sundarayya, B.T. Ranadive and A.K. Gopalan.

One was a letter dated November 1, 1962, from B.N. Datar, Minister of
State for Home, to P.K. Sawant, Home Minister, Maharashtra. It read :
?I am enclosing herewith in original a list handed over personally by
Shri S.A. Dange, to Home Minister recently giving the names and
addresses of CPI persons in Bombay and other individuals who in the
opinion of Shri S.A. Dange are pro-Chinese. I would request your
immediate comments and action in the matter under advice to me.? The
other letter contains charges too scandalous to be reproduced, still
less vouched for.

Authentic material on Moscow talks

Three other issues contain authentic material on the Moscow talks
from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History
translated from the Russian by Vijay Singh. There is a stenographic
record of the discussions between the two delegations on February 4, 6
and 9, 1951 (September 2006; pages 162-200). As one might expect, the
Indians did most of the talking on the first two days, explaining
internal differences and replying to pointed questions by the hosts.
Stalin spoke at great length on February 9 (pages 186-200).
The issue of April 2007 published a record of the discussions with
Malenkov and Suslov on February 21 (pages 126-130). The issue of April
2010 has three letters by the CPI leaders; Stalin underlined parts of
the letters and gave his comments in the margin. All these documents
merit detailed analysis in the light of the CPI's internal debates in
1948-51.

Postscript: Aloke Banerjee of Hindustan Times reported from Kolkata
on November 26, 2005: ?Marxist Patriarch Jyoti Basu had been against a
split in the CPI and had urged all his comrades to keep the party
united. This was in 1963, a year before some CPI leaders left the party
and formed the CPI(M).

?Documents portraying the final days before the CPI split have been
made public with the CPI(M) publishing the fourth volume of Communist
Movement in Bengal: Documents and Related Facts. The book contains a
letter Basu wrote from the Dum Dum Jail on October 9, 1963, titled ?Save
the party from revisionists and dogmatic extremists'. ?We must stay
within the party and continue our ideological struggle against Dange's
revisionism. It will not be right to split the party,' Basu had said in
the letter. ?Yet, the reckless dogmatists seem to be determined to break
up the party.'

?Four decades on, Basu cannot remember having written such a letter.
Informed that his party had published his letter, Basu told HT on
Friday, ?I don't remember having written such a letter. But it's true
that I had tried till the last moments to stop the imminent split. I was
of the opinion that it would be incorrect to break the CPI and form a
new party. But I failed. There were many differences. We could not stay
together any longer.' The CPI(M)'s book also contains the minutes of a
crucial meeting of the party's working committee.? Unfortunately, the
book is in Bengali. An English translation is overdue.
______________________________

HUMANITIES Magazine: November/December 2011: The Islamic Scholar Who Gave Us Modern Philosophy

'Bhagavad Gita' faces 'extremist' branding, legal ban in Russia | Deccan Chronicle

'Bhagavad Gita' faces 'extremist' branding, legal ban in Russia | Deccan Chronicle

Burmese days

Burmese days

India’s growth in the 2000s: Four facts | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

India’s growth in the 2000s: Four facts | vox - Research-based policy analysis and commentary from leading economists

Bengal Famine

Churchill’s Man-Made Famine

Death Toll: 4,000,000

This Forgotten holocaust committed by British imperialism was caused by the diversion of shipping normally used to bring food to Bengal. The shipping was used instead to bring military supplies to the British army in North Africa in 1942.

According to Dr. Gideon Polya, a professor in Victoria, Australian, the 1943-44 famine that killed an estimated 3.5 to 5 million people in Bengal was “man-made”. Dr. Polya says that “the British brought an unsympathetic and ruthless economic agenda to India” and that “the creation of famine” was brought about by British “sequestration and export of food for enhanced commercial gain.”

He says that “British disinclination to respond with urgency and vigor to food deficits resulted in a succession of about 2 dozen appalling famines during the British occupation of India.” These swept away tens of millions of people. One of the worst famines was that of 1770 that killed an estimated 10 million people in Bengal (one third of the population) and which was “exacerbated by the rapacity of the (British) East India Company”.

Dr. Polya writes that “An extraordinary feature of the appalling record of British imperialism with respect to genocide and mass, world-wide killing of huge numbers of people (by war disease and famine) is its absence from public perception. Thus, for example, inspection of a selection of British history texts reveals that mention of the appalling Irish Famine of 1845-47 is confined in each case to several lines (although there is of course detailed discussion of the attendant, related political debate about the Corn Laws). It is hardly surprising that there should be no mention of famine in India or Bengal.”

How Destructive Was Colonialism to India?

Colonial era (1765–1947)
Great Bengal Famine  1769–1770      10,000,000
Madras city famine     1782–1783    Unknown
Chalisa famine            1791–1792      11,000,000
Doji bara or Skull famine        1789–1795      11,000,000
Agra famine of 1837–38         1837–1838      800,000
Eastern Rajputana       1860–1861      2,000,000
Orissa famine of 1866 1865–1867      1,000,000
Rajputana famine of 1869      1868–1870      1,500,000
Bihar famine of 1873–74        1873–1874      Unknown
Great Famine of 1876–78       1876–1878      10,300,000
Orissa, Bihar   1888–1889      150,000
Indian famine of 1896–97      1896–1897      5,000,000
Indian famine of 1899–1900  1899–1900      1,000,000
Bombay Presidency    1905–1906      230,000
Bengal famine of 1943           1943–1944      5,000,000
Independent India
Bihar famine of 1966-67         1966–1977   Unknown

Winston Churchill blamed for 1m deaths in India famine

Sir Winston Churchill may be one of Britain’s greatest wartime leaders, but in India he has been blamed for allowing more than a million people to die of starvation.

Dean Nelson in New Delhi
According to a new book on the famine, Sir Winston ignored pleas for emergency food aid for millions in Bengal left to starve as their rice paddies were turned over to jute for sandbag production and supplies of rice from Burma stopped after Japanese occupation.
Between one and three million died of hunger in 1943.
The wartime leader said Britain could not spare the ships to transport emergency supplies as the streets of Calcutta filled with emaciated villagers from the surrounding countryside, but author Madhusree Mukerjee has unearthed new documents which challenge his claim.
In her book, Churchill’s Secret War, she cites ministry records and personal papers which reveal ships carrying cereals from Australia were bypassed India on their way to the Mediterranean where supplies were already abundant.
“It wasn’t a question of Churchill being inept: sending relief to Bengal was raised repeatedly and he and his close associates thwarted every effort,” the author said.
“The United States and Australia offered to send help but couldn’t because the war cabinet was not willing to release ships. And when the US offered to send grain on its own ships, that offer was not followed up by the British,” she added.
The man-made famine and the contrast between the plight of starving Indians and well-fed British officers dining in the city’s many colonial clubs has been described as one of the darkest chapters in British rule on the Indian subcontinent.
Miss Mukerjee blames Churchill’s ‘racism’ for his refusal to intervene.
He derided Gandhi as a “half-naked holy man” and once said: “I hate Indians. They are a beastly people with a beastly religion.”
He was known to favour Islam over Hinduism.
“Winston’s racist hatred was due to his loving the empire in the way a jealous husband loves his trophy wife: he would rather destroy it than let it go,” said Miss Mukerjee.

The Hindu : States / Andhra Pradesh : Vote for no trust motion, T-Congress MLAs urged

The Hindu : States / Andhra Pradesh : Vote for no trust motion, T-Congress MLAs urged

Scores of Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) workers and its students' wing members took out a motorcycle rally from Warangal railway station to Kazipet railway station demanding Telangana Congress leaders to vote in favour of no-confidence motion.

The TRS wanted the Telangana Congress MLAs to pull down the State government by supporting the no confidence motion moved by the TDP, as the Congress failed to keep up its promise of giving separate Telangana State.

The rally was led by former MLA T. Rajaiah, a former Congress MLA who recently joined the TRS and resigned for his Assembly membership. Hundreds of students of Kakatiya University and other private educational institutions took part.

The Students JAC leaders said they would take the responsibility of ensuring the victory of all the Telangana Congress MLAs if they brought down the government. “We will go door-to-door and see that all those MLAs who resigned for the cause of separate Telangana are elected,” said K. Vasudeva Reddy and others.

The students said those who do not support the cause of separate Telangana would have to face the ire of people. They said they would not allow the Congress MLAs to move in villages if they failed to utilise the opportunity to bring down the government that went back on its promise of creating separate Telangana State.

Meanwhile, the members of Telangana Advocates Association staged a demonstration at the Congress Bhavan and urged the Telangana Congress MLAs to support the no confidence motion moved by the TDP. “The Congress MLAs are not asserting themselves even as the Praja Rajyam MLAs are doing it. It's a shame,” the advocates said.

Opportunity for leaders

Nizamabad Staff Reporter writes: TRS and its students wing TRSV took out a rally from Phulong to NTR Chowrasta urging the Telangana Congress MLAs to vote for the no- trust motion. Speaking on the occasion, TRS district president Alur Ganga Reddy said that it was an opportunity for the Telangana Congress MLAs to overthrow the government, which proved itself to be against the formation of the Telangana State.

He said if the Telangana Congress MLAs had any sincerity over the cause of the Telangana and respect for the youth, who sacrificed for Telangana, they should vote for the no-confidence motion.

‘Introduce T-bill'

Nalgonda Correspondent writes: The Telangana Students' Joint Action Committee (TSJAC) on Monday demanded the legislators from the region to vote in favour of the no-confidence motion. The demand was put forth by the TSJAC leaders Pidamarti Ravi, Rajaram Yadav, Charan Kaushik Yadav, while addressing a ‘Poru Garjana' organised by the student body.

Balladeer Gaddar was the chief guest. Telangana Political JAC leaders G. Venkateshwarlu and G. Amarender Reddy were among the speakers.

The student leaders also demanded immediate introduction of the Telangana bill in the Parliament and withdrawal of the cases registered against the agitators, including the preventive detention of TRS Polit Bureau member Cheruku Sudhakar.

Gaddar said the Centre should immediately introduce the Telangana bill in Parliament in deference to the wishes of the people of the region. He favoured withdrawal of police forces from Telangana and dropping of all cases against the agitators.

Earlier, students of various colleges in the town marched to Clock Tower to take part in the ‘Poru Garjana', which was a show of strength by youth to press the statehood demand.

What's in a name?

What's in a name?

psuedo-science Uncertain ancestries

UNCERTAIN ANCESTRIES
- Who are the Indians?
Writing on the wall - Ashok V. Desai

There are many similarities between Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages like Greek and Latin. But the similarity does not extend to the people who speak them. Europeans are taller and fairer, and often have blue eyes and blonde hair, whereas Indians generally stick to brown eyes and black hair. These facts have caused confusion, and generated copious academic and pseudo-scholarly literature.

According to Christian mythology, every human and animal is descended from those whom Noah accommodated in his boat at the time of the great flood. Thus, humans are all descended from Noah’s three sons. His family lived on the mountain of Ararat in Armenia. It spoke the same language. But after the Tower of Babel was built, verbose debate broke out, and different languages emerged. Thus Père Coeurdoux, a French priest, stated in 1768: “The Samskroutam language is that of the ancient Brahmes; they came to India from Caucasia. Of the sons of Japhet, some spoke Samskroutam.” The linguistic similarities were noticed even earlier. Soon after Vasco Da Gama discovered the Cape route to India. Filippo Sassetti, an Italian Jesuit priest who was in Goa in the 1580s, noted that the terms in Sanskrit and in Mediterranean languages for six, seven, eight and nine, God, snakes, etc were similar. Some held that Sanskrit was the original language whence all others emerged. In the 19th century, philologists formulated rules of linguistic evolution, which went against that notion. But even if Sanskrit was not the mother of all languages, it was believed to be the oldest surviving daughter of the original Indo-European language.

The 19th century saw the beginnings of anthropology. One of its first conceptual categories was race: Caucasian, negroid, mongoloid, etc. Strangely, anthropologists did not specify a race for Indians. They were dark like negroes, but did not have their curly hair or broad noses. Some British colonials referred to Indians as niggers; but this was not a commonly accepted classification. But whatever they were, Indians were not regarded as Caucasian once India was colonized. So the question arose: how did these un-Aryan people have their scriptures in an ancient Aryan language?

The answer in the 19th century was that Sanskrit was the language of Aryans who came to India from Iran, Afghanistan or central Asia, and that they intermarried with local Dravidian and Munda people until the present mixture emerged. The geography of languages fitted the theory. Northerners spoke Aryan languages, southerners Dravidian languages, and Mundas were scattered towards the east. A few Dravid and Munda words were found in Sanskrit, which seemed to support the story of migration.

When did the Aryans come to India? Evidently before the Vedas were written. No references to European or central Asian flora and fauna are found in the Vedas. So they were written in India; the Aryans must have come to India before they composed their Sanskrit literature. Max Müller, professor of Sanskrit in Oxford in the second half of the 19th century, found a reference to one Katyayana Vararuchi in Kathasaritsagara, the Ocean of Stories. He was supposed to have been made prime minister by King Nanda. Nanda ruled before the Mauryas. So Max Müller placed him in 350-300 BC. He assumed this was the same Katyayana who had written some sutras. So he assigned them to 600-200 BC. The sutras refer to parts of Vedic texts called Brahmanas, so the latter must have been written before the former; he assigned them to 800-600 BC. Brahmanas were preceded by certain mantras, and mantras by chhandas.

Max Müller gave each a period of 200 years, and so came to 1200-1000 BC for the earliest parts of Vedic literature. He thought that 200 years was too short, but one had to start somewhere. Later, he himself said that it was impossible to determine the date of the Vedas. But it did not matter; Western scholars adopted Max Müller’s dates as definitive.

Meanwhile, Sir Alexander Cunningham, while wandering across Punjab and Sind, came across Harappa and Mohenjo Daro in 1853. His discoveries were forgotten till the 1920s, when Sir John Marshall excavated Mohenjo Daro. He had found an urban civilization; it did not fit with the Vedas, which hardly mention cities. Indus seals found in Mesopotamia, which placed the Indus civilization in 2000-1500 BC at the latest. The (still undeciphered) script of the Indus seals was unrelated to Devanagari, and ruled out the civilization as having been Aryan. If the Aryans came to India, crossed the Indus valley and wrote the Vedas in 1200-1000 BC, they must have crossed the path of the Indus people. On the basis of 37 skeletons he found in the citadel of Mohenjo Daro, Sir John concluded that the city had been overrun by Aryan hordes. Later examination showed that only one of the 37 could have met a violent death. If Aryans had destroyed the Indus civilization, they should have left substantial evidence of destruction and death. It has not been found yet, so the story of invasion remains unproved.

The Indus civilization was so called because Harappa and Mohenjo Daro, the first sites discovered, were in the Indus valley. With Partition, Indian archaeologists lost the Indus valley sites. They had to find something else to do, so they started excavating sites in India. They found plenty of Indus valley sites; Lothal in Gujarat and Dholera in Kutch are the best known.

Vedic literature talks of Saptasindhu, the seven rivers. Five are the rivers of Punjab — Beas, Sutlej, Ravi, Chenab and Jhelum. Indus is the sixth; where is the seventh? The Vedas called it Saraswati, but it has disappeared meanwhile. C.F. Oldham made a guess in 1893 that a dry riverbed called Ghaggar or Hakra running through Bikaner and Bahawalpur was once the Saraswati about which the Vedic writers waxed so lyrical. Satellite imagery has revealed that both the Sutlej and the Jumna once flowed into the Ghaggar; they would have made it a substantial river. Both changed course and left Ghaggar dry. Sir Aurel Stein found many Harappan and post-Harappan sites along its course. In Pakistan, Rafique Mughal has found 414 sites from 4000-2000 BC along the Hakra. Potsherds known as Painted Grey Ware, found in the bed of the Ghaggar, are dated to 1000 BC, so the river must have dried up before then. These dates place the Vedas much before 1000 BC. And if they are older, their composers must have coincided with or preceded the Harappans.

The Vedas show no awareness of any region outside India; but there is outside literature that bears close resemblance to them. The oldest part of Avesta, the holy book of Zoroastrians, is called yasna; it consists of five gathas whose language is close to Sanskrit. It mentions Hapta Hendu, Harahvaiti and Harayu. Then there is a 14th-century BC treaty between a Hittite and a Mitanni king (Turkish and Iraqi in modern parlance) which mentions the gods Indara, Mitras, and Uruvanass, who could be Indra, Mitra and Varuna. Edwin Bryant tells us all this in his The Quest for the Origins of Vedic Culture (Oxford, 2003), but does not answer in the end who Indians are.

On April 3, 1941, a man claiming to be an Italian diplomat arrived in Berlin, demanding to meet with Ernst Woermann, Germany’s undersecretary of state. Woermann listened carefully to the man’s plans, which sought to create a government in exile and launch a military strike against a shared enemy. The government the diplomat planned would be Indian, and the target would be British India.

“Orlando Mazzotta” was in fact Subhas Chandra Bose, an Indian leftist radical nationalist and former president of the Indian National Congress. Just a few months earlier Bose had escaped from Calcutta with the help of German and Italian officials. One of India’s national icons, practically on par with Gandhi, Bose eventually became a hero of the anticolonial resistance, establishing the Indian National Army and recruiting thousands to fight imperial power.


Despite the strategic benefits of partnering with Bose, the Nazis did not know what to do with him, and the rebel’s irrepressible radicalism only further complicated their overlapping aims. Very little has been published on Bose’s activities in Nazi Germany and his overtures to fascist regimes. Romain Hayes is the first to focus exclusively on Bose’s interactions with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, making extensive use of German, Indian, and British sources, including memoranda, notes, minutes, reports, telegrams, letters, and broadcasts. He also draws on rare materials from recently released German archives. Hayes ultimately reveals lesser known aspects of Nazi foreign policy and challenges Ghandi-centric portrayals of the Indian independence movement.

 October, 2011
Cloth, 224 pages,
ISBN: 978-0-231-70234-8
$30.00

Subhas Chandra Bose In Nazi Germany: Politics, Intelligence, and Propaganda 1941-43

Romain Hayes

A union made of unwieldy states - Views - livemint.com

A union made of unwieldy states - Views - livemint.com

Yourfamily.com - finding ancestors and lost relatives

tamilsantham's Channel - YouTube

tamilsantham's Channel - YouTube

France's 'Untouchable' awarded grand prix at Tokyo film festival | Kyodo News

France's 'Untouchable' awarded grand prix at Tokyo film festival

TOKYO, Oct. 30, Kyodo

French film ''Untouchable,'' directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, was awarded Sunday the Tokyo Sakura Grand Prix, the top prize at the 24th Tokyo International Film Festival.

The Special Jury Prize was given to the Japanese production ''The Woodsman and the Rain'' directed by Shuichi Okita. The award presentation ceremony on the festival's final day was held at Roppongi Hills in Tokyo.

The French production is a comedy drama based on a true story of a rich man paralyzed from the neck down in an accident and a young black man chosen as his caregiver.

The Japanese movie is about an improbable friendship between a woodsman who lives in the mountains and the rookie young director who along with a crew arrives in the mountains to shoot a zombie film.

Ruben Oestlund was given the Best Director award for his ''Play,'' while Glenn Close in ''Albert Nobbs'' was chosen Best Actress, and Francois Cluzet and Omar Sy in ''Uncouthcable'' shared the Best Actor award.

Best Artistic Contribution went to ''Kora'' and ''Detachment.'' The Audience Award was given to ''When Pigs Have Wings.''

==Kyodo

Mumbai eve-teasing murders accused identified | Firstpost

Mumbai eve-teasing murders accused identified

Nov 16, 2011

Mumbai: An identification parade of four accused in the murder of two youths who resisted eve-teasing in suburban Amboli was today conducted in a city jail in which the eyewitnesses recognised the attackers, police said.

“An identification parade was today conducted in the Arthur Road jail when the 12 eyewitnesses identified the four accused saying they were the ones who killed the youths,” said VD Bhoite, senior inspector of DN Nagar police station.

Victims of mindless violence. PTI

The victims’ friends and people standing at the spot were among the witnesses present in the jail today, police said.

On 20 October, Reuben Fernandez (28) and Keenan Santos (25) were attacked by a group of four after the duo objected to their acts of indecent behaviour against girls with whom they had gone on an outing. Keenan died on the spot, while Fernandez died in a hospital after a few days.

Santos and Fernandez, along with five others, including three girls, had gone to a restaurant to have dinner and watch a cricket match on a giant screen put up there. After a while, they came out of the restaurant and were standing near a pan-shop when the incident had occurred.

“An executive magistrate was present during the parade. The result was positive as the witnesses have identified all the accused and this will strengthen our case, which is already watertight. The report by the executive magistrate will be now compiled and sent to court concerned,” said deputy commissioner of police Pratap Dighavkar.

The accused have been charged under sections 302 (murder), 354 (insulting the modesty of woman) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of IPC.

“When I went to identify them, they had no guilt at all … no remorse at all,” said Priyanka Fernandes, Keenan’s girlfriend.

Conversation: Stephen Mitchell, Author of the New Translation of Homer's 'The Iliad' | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Conversation: Stephen Mitchell, Author of the New Translation of Homer's 'The Iliad' | Art Beat | PBS NewsHour | PBS

Watch Conversation: Stephen Mitchell's 'The Iliad' by Homer on PBS. See more from PBS NEWSHOUR.

The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8) - YouTube

The Most IMPORTANT Video You'll Ever See (part 1 of 8) - YouTube

Dr. Kiki's Science Hour 84 | TWiT.TV

Dr. Kiki's Science Hour 84 | TWiT.TV

Now, Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts | Firstpost

Now, Cambridge to study ancient Sanskrit texts

Nov 8, 2011

London: A major exercise in ‘linguistic archaeology’ has set out to complete a comprehensive survey of Cambridge University South Asian manuscript collection, which includes the oldest dated and illustrated Sanskrit manuscript
known worldwide.

Written on now-fragile birch bark, palm leaf and paper, the 2,000 manuscripts in the collection at the University Library express centuries-old South Asian thinking on religion, philosophy, astronomy, grammar, law and poetry.

The project, which is led by Sanskrit-specialists Dr Vincenzo Vergiani and Dr Eivind Kahrs, will study and catalogue each of the manuscripts, placing them in their broader historical context, a university release said.

In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance. Reuters

Most of the holdings will also be digitised by the library and made available through the library’s new online digital library. “In a world that seems increasingly small, every artefact documenting the history of ancient civilisations has become part of a global heritage to be carefully preserved and
studied,” explained Dr Vergiani, who is in the University’s Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.

“Among such artefacts, manuscripts occupy a distinctive place – they speak to us with the actual words of long-gone men and women, bringing their beliefs, ideas and sensibilities to life”. He added: “One reason this collection is so important is because of the age of many of the manuscripts.

“In the heat and humidity of India, materials deteriorate quickly and manuscripts needed to be copied again and again. As a result, many of the early Indian texts no longer exist”. Some of the oldest holdings of the Library’s South Asian collection were discovered not in India but in Nepal, where the climate is more temperate.

In the 1870s, Dr Daniel Wright, surgeon of the British Residency in Kathmandu, rescued the now-priceless cultural and historical artefacts from a disused temple, where they had survived largely by chance.

An early catalogue of part of the collection in 1883 found among its treasures a 10th-century Buddhist Sanskrit manuscript from India – the oldest dated and illustrated Sanskrit manuscript known worldwide.

More than half of the collection is in Sanskrit, a language that has dominated the literary culture of pre-modern South Asia for almost three millennia.

Its earliest attestations are found in the Vedic hymns (texts that are still central to Hinduism), dating from the end of the second millennium BC. “The word Sanskrit means refined or perfected. From a very early stage, its speakers were obsessed with handing down their sacred texts intact,” said Vergiani.

“Out of this developed an attention to how the language works. A grammatical tradition arose that produced, around the 4th century BC, the work of Panini, an amazing intellectual achievement and arguably the beginning of linguistics worldwide, which made the language constant, stable and transmissible”. It is this robustness that Vergiani believes explains how the language became so prevalent across South Asia – a situation that has been likened to the spread of Latin across Europe.

“It was used by religious figures and royalty, scholars and scientists, administrators and artists. Well into modern times, Sanskritic culture was very much alive throughout India, and the language is still used by a number of intellectuals and religious figures today”.

The widespread use of Sanskrit as the language of power and communication across South Asia makes the collection at the Library so significant.

The manuscripts, written in centuries that spanned momentous political and economic change, are an invaluable and untapped source for understanding the pre-colonial past of South Asia, and therefore its present. By combining traditional philological methods with advanced information technology, the project will make these extraordinary documents available in new ways, helping to further research on the intellectual traditions, religious
cults, literature and political ideas of South Asia.

PTI

Justice Karnan

Madras HC judge claims victimization - The Times of India

NEW DELHI/CHENNAI: A serving judge of the Madras high court has claimed to being victimized on caste grounds, accusing his brother judges of trying to put him down and subjecting him to humiliation for taking up litigations in an independent manner.

Justice C S Karnan has petitioned the National Commission for Scheduled Castes and sought an inquiry. While he has not mentioned caste as the reason for alleged prejudice against him, the judge's decision to approach the dalit watchdog has seen the commission view the case as one of caste discrimination.

Sources said NCSC chairman P L Punia has written to Chief Justice of India S H Kapadia urging him to look into the matter. When contacted, Punia refused to dwell on details, saying the aggrieved judge was a dalit and the complaint was being treated with all seriousness.

Justice Karnan, in his three-page letter to NCSC, said his independent way of dealing with petitions had annoyed brother judges.

He claimed colleagues humiliated him by deliberately pointing their shoes at him at a social function and by crushing a name plate carrying his name.

Justice Karnan even alleged that lawyers backed by judges tried to instigate him in the court premises and an investigation of their telephone call records could be carried out to prove their involvement.

When contacted, Justice Karnan told TOI that he was ready for a "public inquiry" to prove his allegations of harassment and discrimination. Justice Karnan, who has been in the eye of a storm over some of his rulings, said he would use the inquiry to disprove allegations against him as well.

In his petition, the judge said, "... at one of the marriage celebrations in Chennai where one of my brother judges, who was seated to the right side of me, crossed over his leg deliberately touching mine and on the second occasion at the Republic Day celebrations, the same judge again seated next to me and slyly removed the name slip which was attached to the arm of my chair with a string and stuck it to the bottom of his right leg where it got crumpled."

Attempts to instigate are repeatedly mentioned by Justice Karnan. "On another public occasion when we brother judges congregated once again for a public celebration, one of the brother judges behind the row of mine kept on shaking my chair repeatedly with the intention to annoy me," he said.

According to Justice Karnan, his refusal to be part of a group or coordinated consultations on cases was not liked by some judges who expected him to conform to the unwritten code. He said the objective behind such behaviour was to "reduce (his) role to subjugation".

His decision not to kowtow to expectations in court proceedings led to his sidelining. He said he had been deprived of participating in (events) in his native district of Cuddalore as special guest while he had also been denied participation in the National Judicial Academy except once when he had just joined the HC.

In a serious charge, the judge said 70 lawyers "encouraged and financed" by a few judges would assemble on the fifth floor of the HC during court hours in an inebriated state and would try to instigate him, and some of them would even gather in the corridor outside his room with the same objective.

Justice Karnan, talking to TOI, referred to canards and allegations against him. He said, "Just because I hail from a humble background, they cannot target me. I rose to this level due to sheer hard work and merit. During a felicitation after my elevation to the high court, lawyers offered me a crown. I have been living up to their expectations. Now, my reputation is in tatters. As a public servant receiving salary from public exchequer, I owe an explanation to people. I am ready for a public inquiry."

Many Ramayanas

Many Ramayanas

Two Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation

Two Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation A. K. Ramanujan How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is one. One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet. Rama said to Hanuman, "Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me." Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing. So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole. He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld. There were women down there. "Look, a tiny monkey! It's fallen from above? Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thali ). The King of Spirits (bhut ), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with his vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, wondering what to do. While this was going on in the netherworld, Rama sat on his throne on the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him. They said to Rama, "We want to talk privately with you. We don't want anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?" "All right," said Rama, "we'll talk." Then they said, "Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are talking, his head should be cut off." "It will be done," said Rama. Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman had gone down to fetch the ring. Rama trusted no one more than Laksmana, ― 23 ― so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. "Don't allow anyone to enter," he ordered. Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Visvamitra appeared and said, "I need to see Rama at once. It's urgent. Tell me, where is Rama?" Laksmana said, "Don't go in now. He is talking to some people. It's important." "What is there that Rama would hide from me?" said Visvamitra. "I must go in, right now." Laksmana said, "I'11 have to ask his permission before I can let you in." "Go in and ask then." "I can't go in till Rama comes out. You'll have to wait." "If you don't go in and announce my presence, I'll burn the entire kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse," said Visvamitra. Laksmana thought, "If I go in now, I'll die. But if I don't go, this hotheaded man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things living in it, will die. It's better that I alone should die." So he went right in. Rama asked him, "What's the matter?" "Visvamitra is here." "Send him in." So Visvamitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end. Brahma and Vasistha had come to see Rama and say to him, "Your work in the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now he given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods." That's all they wanted to say. Laksmana said to Rama, "Brother, you should cut off my head." Rama said, "Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why should I cut off your head?" Laksmana said, "You can't do that. You can't let me off because I'm your brother. There'll be a blot on Rama's name. You didn't spare your wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave." Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His time was up too. He went directly to the river Sarayu and disappeared in the flowing waters. When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rama summoned all his followers, Vibhisana, Sugriva, and others, and arranged for the coronation of his twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama too entered the river Sarayu. All this while, Hanuman was in the netherworld. When he was finally taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama. "Rama Rama Rama . . ." Then the King of Spirits asked, "Who are you?" "Hanuman." "Hanuman? Why have you come here?" ― 24 ― "Rama's ring fell into a hole. I've come to fetch it." The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands of rings. They were all Rama's rings. The king brought the platter to Hanuman, set it down, and said, "Pick out your Rama's ring and take it." They were all exactly the same. "I don't know which one it is," said Hanuman, shaking his head. The King of Spirits said, "There have been as many Ramas as there are rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep them. Now you can go." So Hanuman left. This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there is a Ramayana .[1] The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan—to say nothing of Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures.[2] Camille Bulcke, a student of the Ramayana , counted three hundred tellings.[3] It's no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata , because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Ramayana poets ( tinikidanuphanirayaramayanadakavigalabharadali ). In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed. Valmiki and Kampan: Two Ahalyas Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or ― 25 ― Ur -text—usually Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana , the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki's narrative that is carried from one language to another. It would be useful to make some distinctions before we begin. The tradition itself distinguishes between the Rama story (ramakatha ) and texts composed by a specific person—Valmiki, Kampan, or Krttivasa, for example. Though many of the latter are popularly called Ramayanas (like Kamparamayanam ), few texts actually bear the title Ramayana ; they are given titles like Iramavataram (The Incarnation of Rama), Ramcaritmanas (The Lake of the Acts of Rama), Ramakien (The Story of Rama), and so on. Their relations to the Rama story as told by Valmiki also vary. This traditional distinction between katha (story) and kavya (poem) parallels the French one between sujet and recit , or the English one between story and discourse.[4] It is also analogous to the distinction between a sentence and a speech act. The story may be the 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. Here are two tellings of the "same" episode, which occur at the same point in the sequence of the narrative. The first is from the first book (Balakanda ) of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana ; the second from the first canto (Palakantam ) of Kampan's Iramavataram in Tamil. Both narrate the story of Ahalya. The Ahalya Episode: Valmiki Seeing Mithila, Janaka's white and dazzling city, all the sages cried out in praise, "Wonderful! How wonderful!" Raghava, sighting on the outskirts of Mithila an ashram, ancient, unpeopled, and lovely, asked the sage, "What is this holy place, so like an ashram but without a hermit? Master, I'd like to hear: whose was it?" Hearing Raghava's words, the great sage Visvamitra, man of fire, expert in words answered, "Listen, Raghava, I'll tell you whose ashram this was and how it was cursed by a great man in anger. It was great Gautama's, this ashram that reminds you of heaven, worshiped even by the gods. Long ago, with Ahalya he practiced tapas[5] here ― 26 ― for countless years. Once, knowing that Gautama was away, Indra (called Thousand Eyes), Saci's husband, took on the likeness of the sage, and said to Ahalya: 'Men pursuing their desire do not wait for the proper season, O you who have a perfect body. Making love with you: that's what I want. That waist of yours is lovely.' She knew it was Indra of the Thousand Eyes in the guise of the sage. Yet she, wrongheaded woman, made up her mind, excited, curious about the king of the gods. And then, her inner being satisfied, she said to the god, 'I'm satisfied, king of the gods. Go quickly from here. O giver of honor, lover, protect yourself and me.' And Indra smiled and said to Ahalya, 'Woman of lovely hips, I am very content. I'll go the way I came.' Thus after making love, he came out of the hut made of leaves. And, O Rama, as he hurried away, nervous about Gautama and flustered, he caught sight of Gautama coming in, the great sage, unassailable by gods and antigods, empowered by his tapas , still wet with the water of the river he'd bathed in, blazing like fire, with kusa grass and kindling in his hands. Seeing him, the king of the gods was terror-struck, his face drained of color. The sage, facing Thousand Eyes now dressed as the sage, the one rich in virtue and the other with none, spoke to him in anger: 'You took my form, you fool, and did this that should never be done. Therefore you will lose your testicles.' At once, they fell to the ground, they fell even as the great sage spoke ― 27 ― his words in anger to Thousand Eyes. Having cursed Indra, he then cursed Ahalya: 'You, you will dwell here many thousands of years, eating the air, without food, rolling in ash, and burning invisible to all creatures. When Rama, unassailable son of Dasaratha, comes to this terrible wilderness, you will become pure, you woman of no virtue, you will be cleansed of lust and confusion. Filled then with joy, you'll wear again your form in my presence.' And saying this to that woman of bad conduct, blazing Gautama abandoned the ashram, and did his tapas on a beautiful Himalayan peak, haunt of celestial singers and perfected beings. Emasculated Indra then spoke to the gods led by Agni attended by the sages and the celestial singers. 'I've only done this work on behalf of the gods, putting great Gautama in a rage, blocking his tapas . He has emasculated me and rejected her in anger. Through this great outburst of curses, I've robbed him of his tapas . Therefore, great gods, sages, and celestial singers, help me, helper of the gods, to regain my testicles.' And the gods, led by Agni, listened to Indra of the Hundred Sacrifices and went with the Marut hosts to the divine ancestors, and said, 'Some time ago, Indra, infatuated, ravished the sage's wife and was then emasculated by the sage's curse. Indra, king of gods, destroyer of cities, ― 28 ― is now angry with the gods. This ram has testicles but great Indra has lost his. So take the ram's testicles and quickly graft them on to Indra. A castrated ram will give you supreme satisfaction and will be a source of pleasure. People who offer it will have endless fruit. You will give them your plenty.' Having heard Agni's words, the Ancestors got together and ripped off the ram's testicles and applied them then to Indra of the Thousand Eyes. Since then, the divine Ancestors eat these castrated rams and Indra has the testicles of the beast through the power of great Gautama's tapas . Come then, Rama, to the ashram of the holy sage and save Ahalya who has the beauty of a goddess." Raghava heard Visvamitra's words and followed him into the ashram with Laksmana: there he saw Ahalya, shining with an inner light earned through her penances, blazing yet hidden from the eyes of passersby, even gods and antigods.[6] The Ahalya Episode: Kampan They came to many-towered Mithila and stood outside the fortress. On the towers were many flags. There, high on an open field, stood a black rock that was once Ahalya, the great sage's wife who fell because she lost her chastity, the mark of marriage in a house. 547 ― 29 ― Rama's eyes fell on the rock, the dust of his feet wafted on it. Like one unconscious coming to, cutting through ignorance, changing his dark carcass for true form as he reaches the Lord's feet, so did she stand alive formed and colored again as she once was. 548 In 550, Rama asks Visvamitra why this lovely woman had been turned to stone. Visvamitra replies: "Listen. Once Indra, Lord of the Diamond Axe, waited on the absenceLord of the Diamond Axe, of Gautama, a sage all spirit, meaning to reach out for the lovely breast of doe-eyed Ahalya, his wife. 551 Hurt by love's arrows, hurt by the look in her eyes that pierced him like a spear, Indra writhed and cast about for stratagems; one day, overwhelmed and mindless, he isolated the sage; and sneaked into the hermitage wearing the exact body of Gautama whose heart knew no falsehoods. 552 Sneaking in, he joined Ahalya; coupled, they drank deep of the clear new wine of first-night weddings; and she knew. Yet unable to put aside what was not hers, she dallied in her joy, but the sage did not tarry, he came back, a very Siva with three eyes in his head. 553 ― 30 ― Gautama, who used no arrows from bows, could use more inescapable powers of curse and blessing. When he arrived, Ahalya stood there, stunned, bearing the shame of a deed that will not end in this endless world. Indra shook in terror, started to move away in the likeness of a cat. 554 Eyes dropping fire, Gautama saw what was done, and his words flew like the burning arrows at your hand: 'May you be covered by the vaginas of a thousand women!' In the twinkle of an eye they came and covered him. 555 Covered with shame, laughingstock of the world, Indra left. The sage turned to his tender wife and cursed: 'O bought woman! May you turn to stone!' and she fell at once a rough thing of black rock. 556 Yet as she fell she begged: 'To bear and forgive wrongs is also the way of elders. O Siva-like lord of mine, set some limit to your curse!' So he said: 'Rama will come, wearing garlands that bring the hum of bees with them. When the dust of his feet falls on you, you will be released from the body of stone.' 557 The immortals looked at their king and came down at once to Gautama in a delegation led by Brahma and begged of Gautama to relent. ― 31 ― Gautama's mind had changed and cooled. He changed the marks on Indra to a thousand eyes and the gods went back to their worlds, while she lay there, a thing of stone. 558 That was the way it was. while she lay there, a thing of stone. From now on, no more misery, only release, for all things in this world. O cloud-dark lord who battled with that ogress, black as soot, I saw there the virtue of your hands and here the virtue of your feet."[7] 559 Let me rapidly suggest a few differences between the two tellings. In Valmiki, Indra seduces a willing Ahalya. In Kampan, Ahalya realizes she is doing wrong but cannot let go of the forbidden joy; the poem has also suggested earlier that her sage-husband is all spirit, details which together add a certain psychological subtlety to the seduction. Indra tries to steal away in the shape of a cat, clearly a folklore motif (also found, for example, in the Kathasaritsagara , an eleventh-century Sanskrit compendium of folktales).[8] He is cursed with a thousand vaginas which are later changed into eyes, and Ahalya is changed into frigid stone. The poetic justice wreaked on both offenders is fitted to their wrongdoing. Indra bears the mark of what he lusted for, while Ahalya is rendered incapable of responding to anything. These motifs, not found in Valmiki, are attested in South Indian folklore and other southern Rama stories, in inscriptions and earlier Tamil poems, as well as in non-Tamil sources. Kampan, here and elsewhere, not only makes full use of his predecessor Valmiki's materials but folds in many regional folk traditions. It is often through him that they then become part of other Ramayanas . In technique, Kampan is also more dramatic than Valmiki. Rama's feet transmute the black stone into Ahalya first; only afterward is her story told. The black stone standing on a high place, waiting for Rama, is itself a very effective, vivid symbol. Ahalya's revival, her waking from cold stone to fleshly human warmth, becomes an occasion for a moving bhakti (devotional) meditation on the soul waking to its form in god. Finally, the Ahalya episode is related to previous episodes in the poem such as that in which Rama destroys the demoness Tataka. There he was the destroyer of evil, the bringer of sterility and the ashes of death to his enemies. Here, as the reviver of Ahalya, he is a cloud-dark god of fertility. Throughout ― 32 ― Kampan's poem, Rama is a Tamil hero, a generous giver and a ruthless destroyer of foes. And the bhakti vision makes the release of Ahalya from her rock-bound sin a paradigm of Rama's incarnatory mission to release all souls from world-bound misery. In Valmiki, Rama's character is that not of a god but of a god-man who has to live within the limits of a human form with all its vicissitudes. Some argue that the references to Rama's divinity and his incarnation for the purpose of destroying Ravana, and the first and last books of the epic, in which Rama is clearly described as a god with such a mission, are later additions.[9] Be that as it may, in Kampan he is clearly a god. Hence a passage like the above is dense with religious feeling and theological images. Kampan, writing in the twelfth century, composed his poem under the influence of Tamil bhakti . He had for his master Nammalvar (9th C.?), the most eminent of the Srivaisnava saints. So, for Kampan, Rama is a god who is on a mission to root out evil, sustain the good, and bring release to all living beings. The encounter with Ahalya is only the first in a series, ending with Rama's encounter with Ravana the demon himself. For Nammalvar, Rama is a savior of all beings, from the lowly grass to the great gods: By Rama's Grace Why would anyone want to learn anything but Rama? Beginning with the low grass and the creeping ant with nothing whatever, he took everything in his city, everything moving, everything still, he took everything, everything born of the lord of four faces, he took them all to the very best of states. Nammalvar 7.5.1[10] Kampan's epic poem enacts in detail and with passion Nammalvar's vision of Rama. Thus the Ahalya, episode is essentially the same, but the weave, the texture, the colors are very different. Part of the aesthetic pleasure in the later poet's telling derives from its artistic use of its predecessor's work, from ring- ― 33 ― ing changes on it. To some extent all later Ramayanas play on the knowledge of previous tellings: they are meta-Ramayanas . I cannot resist repeating my favorite example. In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the AdhyatmaRamayana , 16th C.), when Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, "Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?" That clinches the argument, and she goes with him.[11] And as nothing in India occurs uniquely, even this motif appears in more than one Ramayana . Now the Tamil Ramayana of Kampan generates its own offspring, its own special sphere of influence. Read in Telugu characters in Telugu country, played as drama in the Malayalam area as part of temple ritual, it is also an important link in the transmission of the Rama story to Southeast Asia. It has been convincingly shown that the eighteenth-century Thai Ramakien owes much to the Tamil epic. For instance, the names of many characters in the Thai work are not Sanskrit names, but clearly Tamil names (for example, Rsyasrnga in Sanskrit but Kalaikkotu in Tamil, the latter borrowed into Thai). Tulsi's Hindi Ramcaritmanas and the Malaysian Hikayat Seri Ram too owe many details to the Kampan poem.[12] Thus obviously transplantations take place through several mutes. In some languages the word for tea is derived from a northern Chinese dialect and in others from a southern dialect; thus some languages, like English and French, have some form of the word tea , while others, like Hindi and Russian, have some form of the word cha(y) . Similarly, the Rama story seems to have traveled along three routes, according to Santosh Desai: "By land, the northern route took the story from the Punjab and Kashmir into China, Tibet, and East Turkestan; by sea, the southern route carried the story from Gujarat and South India into Java, Sumatra, and Malaya; and again by land, the eastern route delivered the story from Bengal into Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Vietnam and Cambodia obtained their stories partly from Java and partly from India via the eastern route."[13] Jaina Tellings When we enter the world of Jains tellings, the Rama story no longer carries Hindu values. Indeed the Jaina texts express the feeling that the Hindus, especially the Brahmins, have maligned Ravana, made him into a villain. Here is a set of questions that a Jaina text begins by asking: "How can monkeys vanquish the powerful raksasa warriors like Ravana? How can noble men and Jaina worthies like Ravana eat flesh and drink blood? How can Kumbhakarna sleep through six months of the year, and never wake up even ― 34 ― though boiling oil was poured into his cars, elephants were made to trample over him, and war trumpets and conches blow around him? They also say that Ravana captured Indra and dragged him handcuffed into Lanka. Who can do that to Indra? All this looks a bit fantastic and extreme. They are lies and contrary to reason." With these questions in mind King Srenika goes to sage Gautama to have him tell the true story and clear his doubts. Gautama says to him, "I'll tell you what Jaina wise men say. Ravana is not a demon, he is not a cannibal and a flesh eater. Wrong-thinking poetasters and fools tell these lies." He then begins to tell his own version of the story.[14] Obviously, the Jaina Ramayana of Vimalasuri, called Paumacariya (Prakrit for the Sanskrit Padmacarita ), knows its Valmiki and proceeds to correct its errors and Hindu extravagances. Like other Jains puranas , this too is a pratipurana , an anti- or counter-purana . The prefix prati , meaning "anti-" or "counter-," is a favorite Jaina affix. Vimalasuri the Jains opens the story not with Rama's genealogy and greatness, but with Ravana's. Ravana is one of the sixty-three leaders or salakapurusas of the Jaina tradition. He is noble, learned, earns all his magical powers and weapons through austerities (tapas ), and is a devotee of Jaina masters. To please one of them, he even takes a vow that he will not touch any unwilling woman. In one memorable incident, he lays siege to an impregnable fort. The queen of that kingdom is in love with him and sends him her messenger; he uses her knowledge of the fort to breach it and defeat the king. But, as soon as he conquers it, he returns the kingdom to the king and advises the queen to return to her husband. Later, he is shaken to his roots when he hears from soothsayers that he will meet his end through a woman, Sita. It is such a Ravana who falls in love with Sita's beauty, abducts her, tries to win her favors in vain, watches himself fall, and finally dies on the battlefield. In these tellings, he is a great man undone by a passion that he has vowed against but that he cannot resist. In another tradition of the Jaina Ramayanas , Sita is his daughter, although he does not know it: the dice of tragedy are loaded against him further by this oedipal situation. I shall say more about Sita's birth in the next section. In fact, to our modern eyes, this Ravana is a tragic figure; we are moved to admiration and pity for Ravana when the Jainas tell the story. I should mention one more motif: according to the Jaina way of thinking, a pair of antagonists, Vasudeva and Prativasudeva—a hero and an antihero, almost like self and Other—are destined to fight in life after life. Laksmana and Ravana are the eighth incarnations of this pair. They are born in age after age, meet each other in battle after many vicissitudes, and in every encounter Vasudeva inevitably kills his counterpart, his prati . Ravana learns at the end that Laksmana is such a Vasudeva come to take his life. Still, overcoming his despair after a last unsuccessful attempt at peace, he faces his destined enemy in battle with his most powerful magic weapons. When finally he ― 35 ― hurls his discus (cakra ), it doesn't work for him. Recognizing Laksmana as a Vasudeva, it does not behead him but gives itself over to his hand. Thus Laksmana slays Ravana with his own cherished weapon. Here Rama does not even kill Ravana, as he does in the Hindu Ramayanas . For Rama is an evolved Jaina soul who has conquered his passions; this is his last birth, so he is loath to kill anything. It is left to Laksmana to kill enemies, and according to inexorable Jaina logic it is Laksmana who goes to hell while Rama finds release (kaivalya ). One hardly need add that the Paumacariya is filled with references to Jaina places of pilgrimage, stories about Jaina monks, and Jaina homilies and legends. Furthermore, since the Jainas consider themselves rationalists—unlike the Hindus, who, according to them, are given to exorbitant and often bloodthirsty fancies and rituals—they systematically avoid episodes involving miraculous births (Rama and his brothers are born in the normal way), blood sacrifices, and the like. They even rationalize the conception of Ravana as the Ten-headed Demon. When he was born, his mother was given a necklace of nine gems, which she put around his neck. She saw his face reflected in them ninefold and so called him Dasamukha, or the Ten-faced One. The monkeys too are not monkeys but a clan of celestials (vidyadharas ) actually related to Ravana and his family through their great grandfathers. They have monkeys as emblems on their flags: hence the name Vanaras or "monkeys." From Written to Oral Let's look at one of the South Indian folk Ramayanas . In these, the story usually occurs in bits and pieces. For instance, in Kannada, we are given separate narrative poems on Sita's birth, her wedding, her chastity test, her exile, the birth of Lava and Kusa, their war with their father Rama, and so on. But we do have one complete telling of the Rama story by traditional bards (tamburidasayyas ), sung with a refrain repeated every two lines by a chorus. For the following discussion, I am indebted to the transcription by Rame Gowda, P. K. Rajasekara, and S. Basavaiah.[15] This folk narrative, sung by an Untouchable bard, opens with Ravana (here called Ravula) and his queen Mandodari. They are unhappy and childless. So Ravana or Ravula goes to the forest, performs all sorts of self-mortifications like rolling on the ground till blood runs from his back, and meets a jogi , or holy mendicant, who is none other than Siva. Siva gives him a magic mango and asks him how he would share it with his wife. Ravula says, "Of course, I'll give her the sweet flesh of the fruit and I'll lick the mango seed." The jogi is skeptical. He says to Ravula, "You say one thing to me. You have poison in your belly. You're giving me butter to eat, but you mean something else. If you lie to me, you'll eat the fruit of your actions yourself." ― 36 ― Ravula has one thing in his dreams and another in his waking world, says the poet. When he brings the mango home, with all sorts of flowers and incense for the ceremonial puja , Mandodari is very happy. After a ritual puja and prayers to Siva, Ravana is ready to share the mango. But he thinks, "If I give her the fruit, I'll be hungry, she'll be full," and quickly gobbles up the flesh of the fruit, giving her only the seed to lick. When she throws it in the yard, it sprouts and grows into a tall mango tree. Meanwhile, Ravula himself becomes pregnant, his pregnancy advancing a month each day. In one day, it was a month, O Siva. In the second, it was the second month, and cravings began for him, O Siva. How shall I show my face to the world of men, O Siva. On the third day, it was the third month, How shall I show my face to the world, O Siva. On the fourth day, it was the fourth month. How can I bear this, O Siva. Five days, and it was five months, O lord, you've given me trouble, O Siva. I can't bear it, I can't bear it, O Siva. How will I live, cries Ravula in misery. Six days, and he is six months gone, O mother, in seven days it was seven months. O what shame, Ravula in his seventh month, and soon came the eighth, O Siva. Ravula was in his ninth full month. When he was round and ready, she's born, the dear, Sita is born through his nose. When he sneezes, Sitamma is born, And Ravula names her Sitamma.[16] In Kannada, the word sita means "he sneezed": he calls her Sita because she is born from a sneeze. Her name is thus given a Kannada folk etymology, as in the Sanskrit texts it has a Sanskrit one: there she is named Sita, because King Janaka finds her in a furrow (sita). Then Ravula goes to astrologers, who tell him he is being punished for not keeping his word to Siva and for eating the flesh of the fruit instead of giving it to his wife. They advise him to feed and dress the child, and leave her some place where she will be found and brought up by some couple. He puts her in a box and leaves her in Janaka's field. It is only after this story of Sita's birth that the poet sings of the birth and adventures of Rama and Laksmana. Then comes a long section on Sita's marriage contest, where Ravula appears and is humiliated when he falls under the heavy bow he has to lift. Rama lifts it and marries Sita. After that she is abducted by Ravana. Rama lays siege to Lanka with his monkey allies, ― 37 ― and (in a brief section) recovers Sita and is crowned king. The poet then returns to the theme of Sita's trials. She is slandered and exiled, but gives birth to twins who grow up to be warriors. They tie up Rama's sacrificial horse, defeat the armies sent to guard the horse, and finally unite their parents, this time for good. One sees here not only a different texture and emphasis: the teller is everywhere eager to return to Sita—her life, her birth, her adoption, her wedding, her abduction and recovery. Whole sections, equal in length to those on Rama and Laksmana's birth, exile, and war against Ravana, are devoted to her banishment, pregnancy, and reunion with her husband. Furthermore, her abnormal birth as the daughter born directly to the male Ravana brings to the story a new range of suggestions: the male envy of 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.[17] The motif of Sita as Ravana's daughter is not unknown elsewhere. It occurs in one tradition of the Jaina stories (for example, in the Vasudevahimdi ) and in folk traditions of Kannada and Telugu, as well as in several Southeast Asian Ramayanas . In some, Ravana in his lusty youth molests a young woman, who vows vengeance and is reborn as his daughter to destroy him. Thus the oral traditions seem to partake of yet another set of themes unknown in Valmiki. A Southeast Asian Example When we go outside India to Southeast Asia, we meet with a variety of tellings of the Rama story in Tibet, Thailand, Burma, Laos, Cambodia, Malaysia, Java, and Indonesia. Here we shall look at only one example, the Thai Ramakirti . According to Santosh Desai, nothing else of Hindu origin has affected the tone of Thai life more than the Rama story.[18] The bas-reliefs and paintings on the walls of their Buddhist temples, the plays enacted in town and village, their ballets—all of them rework the Rama story. In succession several kings with the name "King Rama" wrote Ramayana episodes in Thai: King Rama I composed a telling of the Ramayana in fifty thousand verses, Rama II composed new episodes for dance, and Rama VI added another set of episodes, most taken from Valmiki. Places in Thailand, such as Lopburi (Skt. Lavapuri), Khidkin (Skt. Kiskindha), and Ayuthia (Skt. Ayodhya) with its ruins of Khmer and Thai art, are associated with Rama legends. The Thai Ramakirti (Rama's glory) or Ramakien (Rama's story) opens with an account of the origins of the three kinds of characters in the story, the human, the demonic, and the simian. The second part describes the brothers' first encounters with the demons, Rama's marriage and banishment, the abduction of Sita, and Rama's meeting with the monkey clan. It also describes the preparations for the war, Hanuman's visit to Lanka and ― 38 ― his burning of it, the building of the bridge, the siege of Lanka, the fall of Ravana, and Rama's reunion with Sita. The third part describes an insurrection in Lanka, which Rama deputes his two youngest brothers to quell. This part also describes the banishment of Sita, tile birth of her sons, their war with Rama, Sita's descent into the earth, and the appearance of the gods to reunite Rama and Sita. Though many incidents look the same as they do in Valmiki, many things look different as well. For instance, as in the South Indian folk Ramayanas (as also in some Jaina, Bengali, and Kashmiri ones), the banishment of Sita is given a dramatic new rationale. The daughter of Surpanakha (the demoness whom Rama and Laksmana had mutilated years earlier in the forest) is waiting in the wings to take revenge on Sita, whom she views as finally responsible for her mother's disfigurement. She comes to Ayodhya, enters Sita's service as a maid, and induces her to draw a picture of Ravana. The drawing is rendered indelible (in some tellings, it comes to life in her bedroom) and forces itself on Rama's attention. In a jealous rage, he orders Sita killed. The compassionate Laksmana leaves her alive in the forest, though, and brings back the heart of a deer as witness to the execution. The reunion between Rama and Sita is also different. When Rama finds out she is still alive, he recalls Sita to his palace by sending her word that he is dead. She rushes to see him but flies into a rage when she finds she has been tricked. So, in a fit of helpless anger, she calls upon Mother Earth to take her. Hanuman is sent to subterranean regions to bring her back, but she refuses to return. It takes the power of Siva to reunite them. Again as in the Jaina instances and the South Indian folk poems, the account of Sita's birth is different from that given in Va1miki. When Dasaratha performs his sacrifice, he receives a rice ball, not the rice porridge (payasa ) mentioned in Valmiki. A crow steals some of the rice and takes it to Ravana's wife, who eats it and gives birth to Sita. A prophecy that his daughter will cause his death makes Ravana throw Sita into the sea, where the sea goddess protects her and takes her to Janaka. Furthermore, though Rama is an incarnation of Visnu, in Thailand he is subordinate to Siva. By and large he is seen as a human hero, and the Ramakirti is not regarded as a religious work or even as an exemplary work on which men and women may pattern themselves. The Thais enjoy most the sections about the abduction of Sita and the war. Partings and reunions, which are the heart of the Hindu Ramayanas , are not as important as the excitement and the details of war, the techniques, the fabulous weapons. The Yuddhakanda or the War Book is more elaborate than in any other telling, whereas it is of minor importance in the Kannada folk telling. Desai says this Thai emphasis on war is significant: early Thai history is full of wars; their concern was survival. The focus in the Ramakien is not on family values and spirituality. Thai audiences are more fond of Hanuman than of Rama. ― 39 ― Neither celibate nor devout, as in the Hindu Ramayanas , here Hanuman is quite a ladies' man, who doesn't at all mind looking into the bedrooms of Lanka and doesn't consider seeing another man's sleeping wife anything immoral, as Valmiki's or Kampan's Hanuman does. Ravana too is different here. The Ramakirti admires Ravana's resourcefulness and learning; his abduction of Sita is seen as an act of love and is viewed with sympathy. The Thais are moved by Ravana's sacrifice of family, kingdom, and life itself for the sake of a woman. His dying words later provide the theme of a famous love poem of the nineteenth century, an inscription of a Wat of Bangkok.[19] Unlike Valmiki's characters, the Thai ones are a fallible, human mixture of good and evil. The fall of Ravana here makes one sad. It is not an occasion for unambiguous rejoicing, as it is in Valmiki. Patterns of Difference Thus, not only do we have one story told by Valmiki in Sanskrit, we have a variety of Rama tales told by others, with radical differences among them. Let me outline a few of the differences we have not yet encountered. For instance, in Sanskrit and in the other Indian languages, there are two endings to the story. One ends with the return of Rama and Sita to Ayodhya, their capital, to be crowned king and queen of the ideal kingdom. In another ending, often considered a later addition in Valmiki and in Kampan, Rama hears Sita slandered as a woman who lived in Ravana's grove, and in the name of his reputation as a king (we would call it credibility, I suppose) he banishes her to the forest, where she gives birth to twins. They grow up in Valmiki's hermitage, learn the Ramayana as well as the arts of war from him, win a war over Rama's army, and in a poignant scene sing the Ramayana to their own father when he doesn't quite know who they are. Each of these two endings gives the whole work a different cast. The first one celebrates the return of the royal exiles and rounds out the tale with reunion, coronation, and peace. In the second one, their happiness is brief, and they arc separated again, making separation of loved ones (vipralambha ) the central mood of the whole work. It can even be called tragic, for Sita finally cannot bear it any more and enters a fissure in the earth, the mother from whom she had originally come—as we saw earlier, her name means "furrow," which is where she was originally found by Janaka. It also enacts, in the rise of Sita from the furrow and her return to the earth, a shadow of a Proserpine-like myth, a vegetation cycle: Sita is like the seed and Rama with his cloud-dark body the rain; Ravana in the South is the Pluto-like abductor into dark regions (the south is the abode of death); Sita reappears in purity and glory for a brief period before she returns again to the earth. Such a myth, while it should not be blatantly pressed into some rigid allegory, resonates in the shadows of the tale in many details. Note the many references to fertility and rain, Rama's ― 40 ― opposition to Siva-like ascetic figures (made explicit by Kampan in tile Ahalya story), his ancestor bringing the rivet Ganges into the plains of the kingdom to water and revive the ashes of the dead. Relevant also is the story of .Rsyasrnga, the sexually naive ascetic who is seduced by the beauty of a woman and thereby brings rain to Lomapada's kingdom, and who later officiates at the ritual which fills Dasaratha's queens' wombs with children. Such a mythic groundswell also makes us hear other tones in the continual references to nature, the potent presence of birds and animals as the devoted friends of Rama in his search for his Sita. Birds and monkeys are a real presence and a poetic necessity in the Valmiki Ramayana , as much as they are excrescences in the Jaina view. With each ending, different effects of the story are highlighted, and the whole telling alters its poetic stance. One could say similar things about the different beginnings. Valmiki opens with a frame story about Valmiki himself. He sees a hunter aim an arrow and kill one of a happy pair of lovebirds. The female circles its dead mate and cries over it. The scene so moves the poet and sage Valmiki that he curses the hunter. A moment later, he realizes that his curse has taken the form of a line of verse—in a famous play on words, the rhythm of his grief (soka ) has given rise to a metrical form (sloka ). He decides to write the whole epic of Rama's adventures in that meter. This incident becomes, in later poetics, the parable of all poetic utterance: out of the stress of natural feeling (bhava ), an artistic form has to be found or fashioned, a form which will generalize and capture the essence (rasa ) of that feeling. This incident at the beginning of Valmiki gives the work an aesthetic self-awareness. One may go further: the incident of the death of a bird and the separation of loved ones becomes a leitmotif for this telling of the Rama story. One notes a certain rhythmic recurrence of an animal killed at many of the critical moments: when Dasaratha shoots an arrow to kill what he thinks is an elephant but instead kills a young ascetic filling his pitcher with water (making noises like an elephant drinking at a water hole), he earns a curse that later leads to the exile of Rama and the separation of father and son. When Rama pursues a magical golden deer (really a demon in disguise) and kills it, with its last breath it calls out to Laksmana in Rama's voice, which in turn leads to his leaving Sita unprotected; this allows Ravana to abduct Sita. Even as Ravana carries her off, he is opposed by an ancient bird which he slays with his sword. Furthermore, the death of the bird, in the opening section, and the cry of the surviving mate set the tone for the many separations throughout the work, of brother and brother, mothers and fathers and sons, wives and husbands. Thus the opening sections of each major work set into motion the harmonics of the whole poem, presaging themes and a pattern of images. Kampan's Tamil text begins very differently. One can convey it best by citing a few stanzas. ― 41 ― The River The cloud, wearing white on white like Siva, making beautiful the sky on his way from the sea grew dark as the face of the Lord who wears with pride on his right the Goddess of the scented breasts. 2 Mistaking the Himalayan dawn for a range of gold, the clouds let down chains and chains of gleaming rain. They pour like a generous giver giving all he has, remembering and reckoning all he has. 15 It floods, it runs over its continents like the fame of a great king, upright, infallible, reigning by the Laws under cool royal umbrellas. 16 Concubines caressing their lovers' hair, their lovers' bodies, their lovers' limbs, take away whole hills of wealth yet keep little in their spendthrift hands as they move on: so too the waters flow from the peaks to the valleys, beginning high and reaching low. 17 The flood carrying all before it like merchants, caravans loaded with gold, pearls, peacock feathers and rows of white tusk and fragrant woods. 18 Bending to a curve, the river, surface colored by petals, gold yellow pollen, honey, the ochre flow of elephant lust, looked much like a rainbow. 19 ― 42 ― Ravaging hillsides, uprooting trees, covered with fallen leaves all over, the waters came, like a monkey clan facing restless seas looking for a bridge. 20 Thick-faced proud elephants ranged with foaming cavalier horses filling the air with the noise of war, raising banners, the flood rushes as for a battle with the sea. 22 Stream of numberless kings in the line of the Sun, continuous in virtue: the river branches into deltas, mother's milk to all lives on the salt sea-surrounded land. 23 Scattering a robber camp on the hills with a rain of arrows, the sacred women beating their bellies and gathering bow and arrow as they run, the waters assault villages like the armies of a king. 25 Stealing milk and buttermilk, guzzling on warm ghee and butter straight from the pots on the ropes, leaning the marutam tree on the kuruntam carrying away the clothes and bracelets of goatherd girls at water games, like Krsna dancing on the spotted snake, the waters are naughty. 26 Turning forest into slope, field into wilderness, seashore into fertile land, changing boundaries, exchanging landscapes, the reckless waters roared on like the pasts that hurry close on the heels of lives. 28 ― 43 ― Born of Himalayan stone and mingling with the seas, it spreads, ceaselessly various, one and many at once, like that Original even the measureless Vedas cannot measure with words. 30 Through pollen-dripping groves, clumps of champak, lotus pools, water places with new sands, flowering fields cross-fenced with creepers, like a life filling and emptying a variety of bodies, the river flows on.[20] 31 This passage is unique to Kampan; it is not found in Valmiki. It describes the waters as they are gathered by clouds from the seas and come down in rain and flow as floods of the Sarayu river down to Ayodhya, the capital of Rama's kingdom. Through it, Kampan introduces all his themes and emphases, even his characters, his concern with fertility themes (implicit in Valmiki), the whole dynasty of Rama's ancestors, and his vision of bhakti through the Ramayana . Note the variety of themes introduced through the similes and allusions, each aspect of the water symbolizing an aspect of the Ramayana story itself and representing a portion of the Ramayana universe (for example, monkeys), picking up as it goes along characteristic Tamil traditions not to be found anywhere else, like the five landscapes of classical Tamil poetry. The emphasis on water itself, the source of life and fertility, is also an explicit part of the Tamil literary tradition. The Kural —the so-called Bible of the Tamils, a didactic work on the ends and means of the good life—opens with a passage on God and follows it up immediately with a great ode in celebration of the rains (Tirukkural 2). Another point of difference among Ramayanas is the intensity of focus on a major character. Valmiki focuses on Rama and his history in his opening sections; Vimalasuri's Jaina Ramayana and the Thai epic focus not on Rama but on the genealogy and adventures of Ravana; the Kannada village telling focuses on Sita, her birth, her wedding, her trials. Some later extensions like the Adbhuta Ramayana and the Tamil story of Satakanthavana even give Sita a heroic character: when the ten-headed Ravana is killed, another appears with a hundred heads; Rama cannot handle this new menace, so it is Sita ― 44 ― who goes to war and slays the new demon.[21] The Santals, a tribe known for their extensive oral traditions, even conceive of Sita as unfaithful—to the shock and horror of any Hindu bred on Valmiki or Kampan, she is seduced both by Ravana and by Laksmana. In Southeast Asian texts, as we saw earlier, Hanuman is not the celibate devotee with a monkey face but a ladies' man who figures in many love episodes. In Kampan and Tulsi, Rama is a god; in the Jaina texts, he is only an evolved Jaina man who is in his last birth and so does not even kill Ravana. In the latter, Ravana is a noble hero fated by his karma to fall for Sita and bring death upon himself, while he is in other texts an overweening demon. Thus in the conception of every major character there are radical differences, so different indeed that one conception is quite abhorrent to those who hold another. We may add to these many more: elaborations on the reason why Sita is banished, the miraculous creation of Sita's second son, and the final reunion of Rama and Sita. Every one of these occurs in more than one text, in more than one textual community (Hindu, Jaina, or Buddhist), in more than one region. Now, is there a common core to the Rama stories, except the most skeletal set of relations like that of Rama, his brother, his wife, and the antagonist Ravana who abducts her? Are the stories bound together only by certain family resemblances, as Wittgenstein might say ? Or is it like Aristotle's jack knife? When the philosopher asked an old carpenter how long he had had his knife, the latter said, "Oh, I've had it for thirty years. I've changed the blade a few times and the handle a few times, but it's the same knife." Some shadow of a relational structure claims the name of Ramayana for all these tellings, but on closer look one is not necessarily all that like another. Like a collection of people with the same proper name, they make a class in name alone. Thoughts on Translation That may be too extreme a way of putting it. Let me back up and say it differently, in a way that covers more adequately the differences between the texts and their relations to each other, for they are related. One might think of them as a series of translations clustering around one or another in a family of texts: a number of them cluster around Valmiki, another set around the Jaina Vimalasuri, and so on. Or these translation-relations between texts could be thought of in Peircean terms, at least in three ways. Where Text I and Text 2 have a geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to another (whatever the angles, sizes, or colors of the lines), we call such a relation iconic .[22] In the West, we generally expect translations to be "faithful," i.e. iconic. Thus, when Chapman translates Homer, he not only preserves basic textual features such as characters, imagery, and order of incidents , but tries to reproduce a hexameter and retain the same number ― 45 ― of lines as in the original Greek—only the language is English and the idiom Elizabethan. When Kampan retells Valmiki's Ramayana in Tamil, he is largely faithful in keeping to the order and sequence of episodes, the structural relations between the characters of father, son, brothers, wives, friends, and enemies. But the iconicity is limited to such structural relations. His work is much longer than Valmiki's, for example, and it is composed in more than twenty different kinds of Tamil meters, while Valmiki's is mostly in the sloka meter. Very often, although Text 2 stands in an iconic relationship to Text ! in terms of basic elements such as plot, it is filled with local detail, folklore, poetic traditions, imagery, and so forth—as in Kampan's telling or that of the Bengali Krttivasa. In the Bengali Ramayana , Rama's wedding is very much a Bengali wedding, with Bengali customs and Bengali cuisine.[23] We may call such a text indexical : the text is embedded in a locale, a context, refers to it, even signifies it, and would not make much sense without it. Here, one may say, the Ramayana is not merely a set of individual texts, but a genre with a variety of instances. Now and then, as we have seen, Text 2 uses the plot and characters and names of Text 1 minimally and uses them to say entirely new things, often in an effort to subvert the predecessor by producing a countertext. We may call such a translation symbolic . The word translation itself here acquires a somewhat mathematical sense, of mapping a structure of relations onto another plane or another symbolic system. When this happens, the Rama story has become almost a second language of the whole culture area, a shared core of names, characters, incidents, and motifs, with a narrative language in which Text 1 can say one thing and Text 2 something else, even the exact opposite. Valmiki's Hindu and Vimalasuri's Jaina texts in India—or the Thai Ramakirti in Southeast Asia—are such symbolic translations of each other. One must not forget that to some extent all translations, even the so-called faithful iconic ones, inevitably have all three kinds of elements. When Goldman and his group of scholars produce a modern translation of Valmiki's Ramayana , they are iconic in the transliteration of Sanskrit names, the number and sequence of verses, the order of the episodes, and so forth.[24] But they are also indexical, in that the translation is in English idiom and comes equipped with introductions and explanatory footnotes, which inevitably contain twentieth-century attitudes and misprisions; and symbolic, in that they cannot avoid conveying through this translation modern understandings proper to their reading of the text. But the proportions between the three kinds of relations differ vastly between Kampan and Goldman. And we accordingly read them for different reasons and with different aesthetic expectations. We read the scholarly modern English translation largely to gain a sense of the original Valmiki, and we consider it successful to the extent that it resembles the original. We read Kampan to read Kampan, and we judge him on his own terms—not by his resemblance to Valmiki but, if any- ― 46 ― thing, by the extent that he differs from Valmiki. In the one, we rejoice in the similarity; in the other, we cherish and savor the differences. One may go further and say that the cultural area in which Ramayanas are endemic has a pool of signifiers (like a gene pool), signifiers that include plots, characters, names, geography, incidents, and relationships. Oral, written, and performance traditions, phrases, proverbs, and even sneers carry allusions to the Rama story. When someone is carrying on, you say, "What's this Ramayana now? Enough." In Tamil, a narrow room is called a kiskindha ; a proverb about a dim-witted person says, "After hearing the Ramayana all night, he asks how Rama is related to Sita"; 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. 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 ones, 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.[25] 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." What Happens When You Listen This essay opened with a folktale about the many Ramayanas . Before we close, it may be appropriate to tell another tale about Hanuman and Rama's ring.[26] But this story is about the power of the Ramayana , about what happens when you really listen to this potent story. Even a fool cannot resist it; he is entranced and caught up in the action. The listener can no longer bear to be a bystander but feels compelled to enter the world of the epic: the line between fiction and reality is erased. A villager who had no sense of culture and no interest in it was married to a woman who was very cultured. She tried various ways to cultivate his taste for the higher things in life but he just wasn't interested. One day a great reciter of that grand epic the Ramayana came to the village. Every evening he would sing, recite, and explain the verses of the epic. The whole village went to this one-man performance as if it were a rare feast. ― 47 ― The woman who was married to the uncultured dolt tried to interest him in the performance. She nagged him and nagged him, trying to force him to go and listen. This time, he grumbled as usual but decided to humor her. So he went in the evening and sat at the back. It was an all-night performance, and he just couldn't keep awake. He slept through the night. Early in the morning, when a canto had ended and the reciter sang the closing verses for the day, sweets were distributed according to custom. Someone put some sweets into the mouth of the sleeping man. He woke up soon after and went home. His wife was delighted that her husband had stayed through the night and asked him eagerly how he enjoyed the Ramayana . He said, "It was very sweet." The wife was happy to hear it. The next day too his wife insisted on his listening to the epic. So he went to the enclosure where the reciter was performing, sat against a wall, and before long fell fast asleep. The place was crowded and a young boy sat on his shoulder, made himself comfortable, and listened open-mouthed to the fascinating story. In the morning, when the night's portion of the story came to an end, everyone got up and so did the husband. The boy had left earlier, but the man felt aches and pains from the weight he had borne all night. When he went home and his wife asked him eagerly how it was, he said, "It got heavier and heavier by morning." The wife said, "That's the way the story is." She was happy that her husband was at last beginning to feel the emotions and the greatness of the epic. On the third day, he sat at the edge of the crowd and was so sleepy that he lay down on the floor and even snored. Early in the morning, a dog came that way and pissed into his mouth a little before he woke up and went home. When his wife asked him how it was, he moved his mouth this way and that, made a face and said, "Terrible. It was so salty." His wife knew something was wrong. She asked him what exactly was happening and didn't let up till he finally told her how he had been sleeping through the performance every night. On the fourth day, his wife went with him, sat him down in the very first row, and told him sternly that he should keep awake no matter what might happen. So he sat dutifully in the front row and began to listen. Very soon, he was caught up in the adventures and the characters of the great epic story. On that day, the reciter was enchanting the audience with a description of how Hanuman the monkey had to leap across the ocean to take Rama's signet ring to Sita. When Hanuman was leaping across the ocean, the signet ring slipped from his hand and fell into the ocean. Hanuman didn't know what to do. He had to get the ring back quickly and take it to Sita in the demon's kingdom. While he was wringing his hands, the husband who was listening with rapt attention in the first row said, "Hanuman, don't worry. I'll get it for you." Then he jumped up and dived into the ocean, found the ring in the ocean floor, brought it back, and gave it to Hanuman. Everyone was astonished. They thought this man was someone special, ― 48 ― really blessed by Rama and Hanuman. Ever since, he has been respected in the village as a wise elder, and he has also behaved like one. That's what happens when you really listen to a story, especially to the Ramayana .

Two Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation