Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

In an epic culture, plurality is built in.
More than a thousand miles away
from Mathura in north India is
Madurai in Tamil Nadu. The
residents of Madurai will not be
thrilled if you call Madurai a copy of
Mathura. To them, Madurai is at least
as sacred as Mathura, if not more.
They can offer elaborate arguments
and a mythic past to support their
position. Likewise, the Ayudhya
(Ayutthaya), which occupies an
especial place in Thai history, certainly
does not look to the Thais like an
inferior version or copy of Ayodhya in
north India. This ‘strange’ plurality,
too, is a vital component of the epic
culture.
I have given you a few clues to the
cultural location of epics in the Indic
civilisation. I now turn to the other
part of my story—to the heroic, unheroic
and anti-heroic heroes in these
epics. Epics are defined by their
heroes, even when the heroines are the
more powerful figures in them and
shape the flow of events and
determine the fate of the heroes. The
Mahabharata is the prime example of
this. Why this is so is a question that
has not been seriously asked.
Psychologically speaking, the character
traits and formative life-experiences of
Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy
the epic heroes tend to be more
universal than the narrative principles
of the epics they populate, which
differ from culture to culture. For
instance, you cannot add to or modify
Homer’s work (though some changes
might have entered in the earlier
centuries) but we have, over the
centuries, added to and subtracted
from the puranas, mostly the former.
Even re-writing epics as epics will be
difficult or impossible in many
cultures, unless one attempts it as a
stylised creative venture. Usually, in
modern societies, you can re-write an
epic only as a novel, opera, play, movie
or other standardised art forms so
that your creation is clearly separated
from the actual epic, which is seen as a
reservoir of cultural values, memories
and subjectivities, and as a doorway to
a people’s cultural self. The latter must
stand apart from you in its pristine
form, almost like a grand mausoleum.
In our part of the world, rewriting the
Mahabharata or Ramayana is an
ongoing process even
today, though it is being
made more difficult as
we modernise. (The
sources of the recent
hostility shown to A.K.
Ramanujan’s essay on the
plurality of the
Ramayana lie here.)
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