Impoverishing
education
Will they bash up universities in Jakarta and other places for teaching
different versions of the Ramayana?: Romila Thapar
BY PRISCILLA JEBARAJ
The controversial decision earlier this month by the
Academic Council of Delhi University to drop AK Ramanujan’s celebrated
essay on the Ramayana, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five
Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, from the BA history
(honours) course has evoked sharp protests from several historians and
other scholars. Coming three years after the Hindutva student body,
the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), vandalised DU’s history
department to protest against the teaching of this essay, the decision
has been criticised as a surrender of academic freedom in the face of
political pressure.
Romila Thapar, the foremost authority on early
Indian history, spoke to Priscilla Jebaraj about the
decision, its adverse consequences for scholarship and knowledge, and
the efforts by vested interests to project one version of Hindu
cultural heritage and religious tradition over all others.
Q: You have said that this
issue is not purely about history and academia simply because it
involves the Delhi University’s history department and Academic
Council but that there’s a political background to it.
A: I think there’s a political background to it
because the initial attack against this essay [in 2008] was led by the
ABVP which made sure that TV cameras had begun to roll when they
carried out the attack so that it would be properly recorded. Their
demand was that this hurt the sentiments of the Hindu community and
therefore it should be withdrawn. This is hardly an academic demand.
And quite clearly, the way in which the activity was organised, it was
an act of political opposition to the history department and to this
particular essay.
The university initially took an academic position and
appointed a committee of four historians to assess whether this essay
should be withdrawn. Three experts categorically said that under no
circumstances should it be withdrawn. One of them, interestingly, did
not say that it hurt the sentiments of the Hindu community but said
that it was inappropriate for undergraduate teaching, that
undergraduates would not follow the whole question of variants and
nuances and so on. So the expert opinion again did not think it was
necessary to withdraw the essay.
In spite of this expert opinion, and perhaps because
the matter came up in court, it was taken to the Academic Council. And
from what I can gather, there was no indication given that this issue
would be discussed and therefore people went there unprepared and
suddenly had to decide on this one way or the other. And what this
initial action and the reaction of the university raise is the
question whether courses and syllabi can be changed by groups beating
up faculty and vandalising departments. And I think this is a very
fundamental question which academia has to face and answer and take a
position on.
Q: Ramanujan discusses
several versions, including the Valmiki
Ramayana and the Kampan Ramayana,
both of which seem to have problematic elements for Hindu fanatics.
Which version are they supporting?
A: Well, I think that probably none of them has
even read the whole of the Valmiki Ramayana... Half of them
haven’t even heard of the Kampan Ramayana.
What are they supporting? Their notion from hearsay of
what the Valmiki Ramayana perhaps expresses. And you know, one
is angered by the fact that there are people who don’t take the
trouble to read and to study and to understand what the issue is
before they just stand up and start shouting and screaming and wanting
the dismissal of it.
What people don’t recognise is that the story of Rama,
what we call the Ramakatha, extends over a huge historical
period. There’s a distance of almost a thousand years between the
first composition of the Valmiki Ramayana and Kampan’s. There
are also gradually regional studies… So inevitably, there will be
variants. The moment somebody sets out to write a new version of the
story, however dependent that person may be on a particular version,
there will be additions as indeed there were even to the original
Ramayana. And this is the inevitable structure of an epic. When an
epic captures public attention, bits and pieces are always added on
and bits and pieces are subtracted. It’s a growing kind of rolling
stone, gathering and dropping as it goes along.
Q: So given that that is the
structure of an epic, is there a danger in establishing a particular
version in the minds of the mainstream as the definitive version? You
once spoke of that danger regarding Doordarshan’s
Ramayana serial…
A: Absolutely. You have to emphasise the fact that
there were variants or people tend to assume that there was only one
version of the story or that that was the definitive version.
Now, at the time when the Valmiki Ramayana was
written, there were two other versions current which were, in one
case, entirely different and in another case, very substantially
different.
There were the Buddhist Jataka, the Dasaratha
Jataka as it is called, where Rama and Sita are brother and
sister… and rule as consorts. Now, this is very much within the
Buddhist tradition of origin myths and is really making a statement
about the superior status of Rama and Sita, which has been completely
misinterpreted by the uneducated who go around screaming and shouting
at all of us who mention this version because it talks about Rama and
Sita ruling as consorts.
The Jain variant, which Ramanujan also speaks of, is
extremely interesting because the author, Vimalasuri, begins by saying
that “The versions of the Ramakatha that you have heard so far
are totally false and incorrect, written by foolish men. I will tell
you the true story.” And he goes on to locate it in the court of the
historical King Srenika… and says that it is nonsense to depict the
rakshasa as demons, that they were perfectly normal human beings.
In other words, the version of Vimalasuri is trying to rationalise the
fantasy of Valmiki and therefore it is fascinating to see the two
versions together.
Q: So how is it that the
Valmiki Ramayana has become
the mainstream of Hindu culture?
A: It comes partly out of the tradition of giving
greater precedence to Sanskrit literature because it was in fact the
main cultural tradition over a long period but it’s also partly that
this was reinforced by colonial scholarship mentioning these as
definitive texts.
Q: In the post-colonial era,
as academia has been questioning that concept, has there been any
similar move to change perceptions in wider society?
A: No, there hasn’t been and for this I blame
particularly the visual media because they have fostered the notion of
there being definitive versions of every single major text in our
cultural heritage and they have totally underplayed the fact that
there have been variants.
But you see, it starts with academia. What is very
disturbing in this whole story is that you have an Academic Council in
one of the leading universities in this country, which debates the
issue for over two hours and the vote is 90 against Ramanujan and 10
for. And one sits there and thinks, of the 90, how many actually took
the trouble to read this essay when they were condemning it? [Many]
people in the Academic Council had no idea of what the contents of
this book were except that they were going on hearsay once again.
Somebody gets up and condemns it and then a group
turns around and says: “Oh well, if that is the case then, of course,
we must condemn it.” So in a sense… what we lose out in this country
is the habit of reading. We don’t go back to reading texts. We either
see them on television or we see them in Amar Chitra Katha…
I don’t know what the politics of the vice-chancellor
of Delhi University may be or, for that matter, even the politics of
the 90 members who voted to remove Ramanujan’s essay. But there is
obviously a political element in this. There’s a political element
that a) says this is what my party doesn’t object to and would quite
like my supporting it, or b) that this is really not my concern, it’s
a political issue, let the Academic Council take a decision, which is
why I gather there were quite a few abstentions as well, or c) don’t
take a positive role in this because tomorrow you may be in the dock
and no one will support you.
Maybe the Academic Council should be reminded that
every scholar is required to question existing knowledge because that
is the only way in which knowledge grows.
Q: The single expert on the
committee who said it would not be appropriate for undergraduate
education felt that the teacher would not be able to sufficiently
explain the background. So at what point do we draw the line on when
it would be appropriate?
A: Well, that’s precisely my point. If you go on
saying that the teacher can’t explain it, why have you appointed that
teacher? And why have you trained that teacher to be somebody who
cannot explain a simple thing like the variants of a text?
Q: Was it an issue for the
Academic Council at all or should it have been left to the history
department alone?
A: It should have been left to the history
department but I guess the Academic Council got cold feet because it
had gone to court.
Q: It has been pointed out
that Ramanujan himself is not a historian but a poet and folklorist.
When it was suggested instead that they replace his essay with yours
and RS Sharma’s, it was pointed out that both of you are historians
and that there was a value to having an interdisciplinary view.
A: This is a really very creative essay. We’ve all
written on this subject… but what was nice about Ramanujan’s essay was
that you got a different perspective on this and that is what is so
valuable for the student. In a course like that, where you’re dealing
broadly with culture, you need to have a different perspective every
now and again.
Q: So as a broader issue,
isn’t the interdisciplinary approach a good thing? Getting
perspectives from those outside the field of history?
A: There’s nothing to stop a physics professor
from reading that essay and asking questions or coming to different
conclusions. But in the same way as a history professor would not
intervene in the physics syllabus, one doesn’t expect the physics
professor to intervene in the history syllabus…
The interesting thing about this whole argument about
interdisciplinarity is that the social sciences are always attacked.
But the sciences are never attacked because people are scared of
making a fool of themselves by saying that this is not something
worthy of teaching. So nobody questions the sciences. But with the
social sciences, the world and his wife are there to comment, in some
cases, without any kind of background knowledge of the subject.
There’s a feeling that you don’t need to be an expert; this is all
common sense.
Q: For many Indians, this is
not just ancient mythology for an academic discussion but also their
own current religious beliefs. Do you think there needs to be any kind
of leeway given because of that?
A: You’re quite right that it’s not just mythology
but also religion; and it was made that. Let me just go back a little
bit into history and say that initially, many scholars believe, the
Ramayana and the Mahabharata were just epic stories about
heroes and that’s the way they continued to be for quite a while. And
then they were converted into sacred literature, by making Rama and
Krishna avatars of Vishnu. And there’s a superb analysis of
this by VS Sukthankar in Pune who talked about the Bhrigu Brahmins
converting these epics into Bhagavata literature, that is, converting
the heroes into incarnations of Vishnu. And then it becomes sacred
literature. Now today, yes, it’s considered sacred literature but that
is really not its roots.
Secondly, even if it is sacred literature, it is based
substantially on mythology. I mean, this is very different from
Buddhism and Jainism where the stories… there are mythologies, very
many mythologies, but at the same time there is the hard core of the
historical evidence of a historical founder and what that founder is
supposed to have taught. This is a different story altogether.
Q: It’s again different from
Islam or Christianity where you have the People of the Book who
believe that the Book is the truth. Most Hindus don’t believe that.
A: No, and one of the crises in the colonial
period was when they set up the law courts and they said, according to
European law, you swear an oath on the Bible. So they went running
around asking which is the sacred book of the Hindus. And so you got
the Bhagavad Gita, you got the Ramayana, you got the Vedas, you
got all kinds of answers because there isn’t a single sacred book,
there’s a multiplicity of sacred books. And there again the question
of variation comes in. Who accepts which book as the primary sacred
book?
Q: Are we seeing, over the
last few decades, a change similar to that described by Sukthankar, of
a group of people deliberately trying to create these definitive
versions of Hindu sacred literature?
A: Yes, in fact, there’s this move to make Hindu
belief and worship very much based on the idea of the sacred texts.
Q: Ramanujan also discusses
some international variants…
A: South-east Asia, for example, where the
Ramayana is an absolutely fundamental text of culture but it’s
their own versions, not the Valmiki Ramayana. It is a
fundamental part of the story in many versions in South-east Asia that
Sita is the daughter of Ravana and Ravana doesn’t know this because
she was secreted away. So what do you do? I mean, are these people
going to go bash up the universities in Jakarta and all those places
because they’re teaching these versions?
Q: And this in a time when we
want to spread and globalise Indian culture.
A: I find it ironic that you have this incident
taking place in Delhi the same week as the minister of HRD is sitting
in the United States trying to persuade the top universities to set up
campuses in India. Ramanujan was one of the most respected faculty
members of the University of Chicago and the ministry of HRD would
give its left hand to have the University of Chicago set up campus in
India. Now, if Ramanujan had been alive and the university had a
campus in Delhi and this had happened, as is perfectly feasible, what
would have been the reaction? The whole thing is bizarre.
(This article was published on thehindu.com on October
28, 2011.)
Courtesy: The Hindu; www.thehindu.com
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