Rama For Real

Rama’s avatars have been many. In before-television Kerala,when evenings quietly turned pale purple,children repeated his two-syllabic name easily,innocently by a lit lamp. He was the calendar art of Raja Ravi Varma that got darkened by years of kitchen smoke. He was the made-up Arun Govil in the colour-television euphoria of the late Eighties. He is the man in a green mask looking for a golden fawn amid the cymbal-clanging of Kathakali and the action hero of boisterous Ramlilas. His was also the name inscribed on piles of bricks in Ayodhya on December 6,1992,when a mosque was razed,and that two-syllabic name has not been the easiest to pronounce since.

In Ramayana: Before He Was God,a reinterpretation of the epic in verse,the author Ram Varma,who was chief secretary of Haryana,strips Rama of godliness and the epic of the unreal. Here rakshasas are not supernatural demons,Sita is not the daughter of Earth,Ahalya is not turned into a boulder and Ravana is not a 10-headed demon with a flying chariot (he is just an oversexed Dravidian king with a single head who makes do with ordinary chariots and barges). What’s more,Hanuman does not fly over the ocean to Lanka. He is,instead,a tribal chieftain in a monkey-suit who scampers on the boulders in the causeway,scrambles over cliffs,skips over crevices and swims into the gaps where the path had disappeared. Varma turns the most common motifs of the epic on their head in his effort for a realistic Ramayana and an all too human Rama.

Where it succeeds wonderfully is in the description of the rituals,seemingly without sanitising them. When Kaushalya — and later Sita — slays a stallion for the Aswamedha yajna and spends a night with the dead horse,the image is unconventional,almost noirish. Otherwise,Varma keeps it simple: the love story of a prince and a princess,and the morality tale of a man upholding dharma — without special appearances by deities or demons. This is also Varma writing against the epic’s many revisions and interpolations; it is another matter that for his own realistic reading,characters,incidents and entire sequences have been conveniently invented.

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