In this forceful piece, Devdutt Pattanaik calls out Indian society’s tendency to reframe history to suit modern prejudices and convenience. Mr Pattanaik uses specific episodes from the Ramayana to make his case.
“When Sita is banished to the forest while pregnant, on the basis of nothing more than public gossip, modern readers recoil. Many quickly reach for a comforting explanation: this episode, they say, is a ‘later addition’, an interpolation, not really part of the original Ramayana.”
Mr Pattanaik goes on to explain that this ‘later addition’ explanation does not hold water. He says that “The portions of the epic we choose to reject as ‘later additions’ are very often the portions we find morally inconvenient, while equally late portions that please us are quietly retained.”
Mr Pattanaik says that we do the opposite when it comes to pulling stories which are peripheral to the Ramayana into the main narrative: “The story of Lava and Kusha is taught to children as if it were the heart of the epic. But Sita’s banishment and Shambuka’s death are frequently waved away as ‘interpolations’, ‘Brahminical additions’, or ‘not really part of the original Valmiki’. The Bala Kanda receives the same selective treatment: Vishvamitra’s adventures, Ahalya’s curse and liberation, and the entire account of Rama’s divine birth as an avatar of Vishnu are cherished, even though this whole book is considered a late addition…”
So why do behave like this when it comes to assessing uncomfortable episodes from the epics which have defined our formative years? Mr Pattanaik says it is because of the values which we think we represent; we reinterpret the past to fit nicely in the context of our values. He writes: “The criterion is rarely linguistic; it is psychological. We are not weighing manuscripts; we are protecting our preferred image of Rama, of dharma, and of ourselves as inheritors of a tradition we wish to see as untainted.”
Mr Pattanaik concludes by chiding us for our convenient reinterpretation of the past: “A mature engagement with the Ramayana means reading the inconvenient passages with the same seriousness we give to the beloved ones. The epic is not weakened by its difficulties; it is made human by them. To edit the past to suit the present is not devotion, and it is not scholarship. It is forgetting.”
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