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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
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.
Incidentally, on a more humble scale,
we are also producing, editing or
discarding jatipuranas to keep pace
with the changing socioeconomic
status and political fate of
communities.
Not only have we been writing new
versions of the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata but we have also been
relocating them in new cultural spaces,
according to the needs of
communities, castes, sects, religions
and language groups. Over the
centuries, even Vyasa’s Mahabharata
has changed in many recognisable and
unrecognisable ways. Visibly, it has
expanded to something like ten times
its original size. Let us
not forget that part of the
story either. On the other
hand, it is fairly certain
that the sacred status of
the Mahabharata of the
Meos of Rajasthan, about
which Shail Mayaram
has written so elegantly,
will attenuate. The
community has been the victim of a
number of major anti-Muslim riots
and is learning, some Meos say, not to
ride two boats at the same time. Many
of the odd controversies we confront
today are partly a result of the
freedoms that we Indians and many
non-Indians have taken for granted.
We should not nurture the illusion
that those who seek to censor such use
of our epics are fanatics, irrational and
antediluvian, trying to defend the
‘purity’ of sacred texts. These
censorship-mongers are usually direct
products of European colonial
concepts of a ‘proper’ religion and their
goal is nothing less than ‘protecting’
India’s epics, and the gods and
goddesses figuring in them, from
insults from modern readers. They
are, therefore, particularly hard on
interpolations of the fantastic or
supernatural kind or anything that
looks even vaguely erotic. For these
have been the stigmata of our gods
and goddesses since colonial times.
Many of them are keen to end up with