Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

a proud cache of classical texts
cleansed of their ‘absurdities’ and
‘eroticism’ and boast of an official list
of classics and an official concept of
the divine. They want an
unambiguous, manageable and
predictable high culture of religion.
The Indian state’s demand is not
much different. (The religious cultures
of South Asians—and Southeast and
West Asians—are changing.
Previously most believers felt that
their gods and goddesses protected
them; now they feel that they have to
protect their gods and goddesses. Can
it be that deeper doubts and
scepticism underlie their faith in these
godless times? Is their arrogant belief
that they have to protect the divine
from indignities heaped on it by the
nonbelievers a way of protecting
themselves from an awareness of the
cracks in their own beliefs?)
Here there is a difference between
shruti and smarta texts. Nobody dares
to write another Veda or an
Upanishad but the smarta texts are
another matter. People do sometimes
have the ambition of writing another
Ramayana or at least a small, humble
purana. Elsewhere I have told the
story of a Muslim writer in
Hyderabad whose life’s ambition was
to write a new Telugu Ramayana; he
Epic Culture – Ashis Nandy
was killed in a communal riot and the
Ramayana remained incomplete. I
found the story particularly moving
because he was killed at a time when
the Ramayana itself had become a
source of religious violence and
communal tension.
No Fixed Heroes
Like epics elsewhere, Indian epics too
sometimes have one hero, sometimes
more than one. However, to
complicate matters, they can also have
different heroes in different versions.
The storylines, too, can vary over
regions, languages and social divisions,
turning heroes into minor characters
and villains into heroes. Years ago,
when I told literary theorist D.R.
Nagaraj how Karna had emerged as a
hero in late-nineteenth century
Bengal, he immediately told me that in
some older, lesser known
Mahabharatas in south India, Karna
was already the hero. I stuck to my
ground because Karna had emerged a
hero in Bengal mainly because modern
traits were attributed to him and he
was seen as living a besieged life in a
traditional society. He emerged not
through new versions of the epic but
through new readings of the existing
Mahabharatas. And these readings had
something in common.
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