Epics,Retold

Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt,Ravana cries out to the universe,seeking redemption for his deeds.

Dressed in jeans and a T-shirt,Ravana cries out to the universe,seeking redemption for his deeds. An applause breaks his monologue. For 35-year-old IT professional Rakesh Sethi,portraying Ravana in his weakest moment was a way of seeing the epic in a new light. He was one of the participants in a story-telling workshop on ‘Other Voices : Exploring the Rakshas in the Ramayana Epic’,conducted recently in the city by the Chennai-based Vayu Naidu Company.

At the workshop,each participant was asked to pick a character from the Ramayana and deliver an incident or a thought relating to it. When I chose Ravana,I wanted to understand how he would react if he had repented his deeds. I wrote those lines somewhere remembering all the times I had felt guilty about something, says Sethi. As the workshop progressed,several characters from the epic were relived. Manthara danced to her grief,Urmila gave a mute presentation and Hanuman delivered a long impassioned speech. For story-teller Craig Jenkins,who was playing the sutradhar ,this was a way of looking at the characters in the epic through a very personal perspective.

Writer Arshia Sattars last workshop in the city,Mahabharata- The Heroes Within,talked about the epic in a contemporary light,using films as a medium. Through movies like Prakash Jha’s Rajneeti,Shyam Benegal’s Kalyug,Dharamvir Bharati’s Andha Yug,Bhasa’s play The Shattered Thigh,and Peter Brook’s Mahabharata,Sattar too tried to looked at the epic as a personal journey.

For many artists,both the epics are banks of stories that one can learn from. Sattar,who has translated the Ramayana into English,says,The Ramayana is a part of our cultural vocabulary,as is the Mahabharata. We continue to talk about these stories and characters precisely because all of us,common or uncommon,men and women and children,find that they still speak to us. The texts may not say the same thing to each of us,but they are obviously saying something that we want to hear.

Last November,Open Space launched the ‘Kiski Kahaani’ project as an attempt to look at the innumerable versions of the epic Ramayana and present stories using mediums like art,theatre and dance. Imran Ali Khan from Open Space,says,”The entire project of Kiski Kahani has been fueled by the need to interpret the stories that make it more contemporary. Cultural relevances of the epics have changed over the years and that is what still attracts people to them.”

Film-maker Anuj Vaidya was also in the city to deliver a Japanese neo-benshi performance through his upcoming film,Forest Tales. It uses texts and images to present a spin on Ramayana,wherein an individual provides the voices for all the characters in a silent film.

Perhaps the need to tell stories from the epics in a different light stems from the fact that there is no one version of the texts. The Ramayana alone has several versions in South Asia – Annamese (from Vietnam),Balinese,Bengali,Cambodian,Chinese,Gujarati,Javanese,Marathi,Oriya,Prakrit,Sanskrit,Santhali,Sinhalese,Tamil and Tibetan,to name a few. The Sanskrit language alone has more than 20 different narratives of the epic.

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