That is the popular Indian culture from which so many of us have emerged. Let us hope Bollywood always remains true to it, and that the self-appointed guardians of bharatiya sanskriti don't try to change it into something more “authentic” and less true.
7. Epic Interpretations
THE QUESTION OF EXCLUSIONIST INTERPRETATIONS of Indian authenticity keeps coming up. Some years ago, I found myself responding to a literary critic who wrote extensively about my clothing and (presumed) Hollywood haircut, essentially to make the point that I wasn't authentic enough an Indian writer for her taste (the episode is recounted in my Bookless in Baghdad). The notion of Indianness as something sanctified by a prescribed list of acceptable attributes is not just highly contestable, it is positively un-Indian.
Apropos of the way in which some authors have retold the works of others, I once remarked that a Ramayana from Ravana's perspective would bring the lumpen Hindu zealots of the Bajrang Dal onto the streets in protest. (Ravana, the demon-king of Lanka who kidnapped the virtuous Sita, Lord Rama's queen, is the traditional villain of the epic narrative.) To this suggestion, an erudite Indian ambassador, Shyamala Cowsik, then serving in Cyprus, wrote me to say that what I imagined had already been done, apparently before the Bajrang Dal was even a gleam in its founders’ eyes. In the late 1960s, she informed me, the Ramayana was indeed retold from Ravana's point of view in a play called Lankeswaran by noted Tamil playwright and actor Manohar. I am informed that Manohar played the hero Ravana himself, and Lankeswaran was staged literally hundreds of times in Tamil Nadu, to great applause, so much so that he was from then on known only as “Lankeswaran Manohar.”
This is almost the equivalent of retelling the Bible from the point of view of Satan, but it is profoundly authentic to the Indian cultural heritage. Ambassador Cowsik went on to add: “Ravana, as you know, was the son of the Rishi Visravas and a great scholar, a much greater one than Rama, besides being a tremendous Shiva bhakta. In Lankeswaran, Sita was Ravana's daughter. Due to some curse that I do not now remember, having seen the play when I was just a little girl, she had to be put into a box and buried in a field in Janaka's kingdom, where of course she was found when the king was indulging in a spot of ceremonial plowing. Ravana actually carries his infant daughter, Sita, in that little box, underwater, all the way from Lanka to Mithila, and leaves her underground in the field where she is eventually found. The whole subsequent Rama-Ravana battle was interpreted by Manohar as an attempt by Ravana to get his beloved daughter back.” Interestingly, Ravana was portrayed in Lankeswaran as a tragic hero, rather like the protagonists in Greek drama, which is more interesting than simply rewriting the Ramayana from the point of view of the traditional villainous Ravana.
Ambassador Cowsik's second point concerned the idea of the Ramayana as seen from Sita's perspective, which, I had warily suggested in my column, “might tremble on the brink of sacrilege to some.” When she was ambassador to the Philippines from 1992–95, she told me, she was “astounded to find that in this ultra-Catholic corner of Southeast Asia, there was a local Tagalog [the main Filipino language] version of the Ramayana, the Radiya Mangandari. This version had traveled northward up from Indonesia, where of course it is very familiar, through the Muslim south of the Philippines to the main island of Luzon. In the process, it acquired various undertones and overtones, besides the very interesting concept of Rama's alter ego. Now this alter ego was stoppered up in a bottle, something like the djinn in the Arabic fairy tales. Deprived of his alter ego, Rama degenerates from a noble philosopher king to a rapacious, common or garden variety of conqueror. He stays so till the end of the play, which I sat through for three-and-a-half hours while the playwright translated it for me line by line into English, when he finally regains his alter ego and becomes once more the noble Rama. However, Sita remained unchanged throughout the play, and was a strong, self-reliant, highly principled, and fairly aggressive woman who does not indulge in any of the traditional husband-worship. The group that had staged the play wanted to take it to India and perform it at various small places besides the metros. I had to warn them that public reaction in the smaller towns (these days possibly also in the metros) might not be entirely favorable to such an interpretation of Rama's character, and so the idea was dropped.”
As a footnote to this episode, Ambassador Cowsik added that she got hold of a detailed account of the Radiya Mangandari in English and sent it to Vinod C. Khanna, who was then our ambassador to Indonesia. He used it for a book on various versions of the Ramayana that he was writing, which has since been published. (What an outstanding example, if I might be permitted the digression, this pair is of the remarkable intellectual quality of our senior officialdom. Whatever unkind thoughts many of us may nurture about the Indian bureaucracy, ours is, clearly, a mandarinate of merit.)
I recount these stories at length because they remind us of how far we have traveled from the questing spirit of Indian epic tradition to the uncritical worship of today. When the Indo-British writer Aubrey Menen wrote a rationalist version of the Ramayana in 1956, Rama Retold, the book was promptly banned in India, and — deprived of its natural audience in our country — it has faded away without enriching our collective consciousness of the possibilities of the great epic. The Sahmat exhibition a few years ago of various depictions of Rama and Sita in art from around our country was attacked by intolerant Hindu fanatics outraged that some of the versions shown did not conform to their orthodoxy.
The Hindu tradition has always been a heterodox one: we have always believed there are versions of divinity for every taste, and uncountable ways of reaching out to the Unknowable. What a shame that the Hindu banner is now so visibly and volubly being waved by those who have shrunk the grandeur of the Hindu spiritual and philosophical heritage to the intolerant bigotry of their slogans. Our epics were constantly retold and reinvented for centuries; the Hindu imagination was not fettered by fear of experiment. Today, sadly, that is no longer the case. Writing about Lankeswaran, Ambassador Cowsik remarks that Manohar “faced absolutely no protest those days. Of course, I cannot say what would happen if this were to be tried out in North India these days.” I am sure she would not recommend it.
2. India at Work and at Play
8. Hooray for Bollywood
THE NEWS THAT EMERGED IN EARLY 2007 that a leading political party, the Samajwadi Party (then in power in India's most populous state, Uttar Pradesh) wished to nominate the Bolly-wood superstar Amitabh Bachchan to India's highest office — that of the president of the Republic — should hardly have come as a surprise. Bachchan declared himself unworthy of the post, a view widely shared by the citizenry, who expected to see in the office a symbol of the state, usually of more advanced years than the sexagenarian heartthrob. But in India, the film world has proved a perfectly adequate stepping-stone to higher office.
This is, of course, not unknown in California, which has given the United States a president (Ronald Reagan), a senator (George Murphy), and a governor (Arnold Schwarzenegger). But Hollywood's muscle-bound hero has further to go than he thinks. He may have become governor, but he can't become God. That privilege is reserved for the Indian movie-star-turned-politician N. T. Rama Rao, who played so many mythological heroes in so many hit films that starstruck fans in his home state of Andhra Pradesh set up a temple to worship him. “NTR,” as he was popularly known, traded his near-divine celebrity for the dross of office by founding his own political party, Telugu Desam, in 1980 and romping to victory in state elections. That made him chief minister of Andhra Pradesh, the equivalent of an American governor in a state of (then) some 50 million people.