Layout 3 - India Foundation for the Arts - IFA

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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
underscored. He becomes a greater
hero by battling and transcending his
weaknesses, not by sidestepping
them. In this sense, an exile is never
only a physical challenge; it is also a
psychological one, for it sharpens
one’s awareness and mobilises one’s
potentialities. Neither challenge is
easy; both push one to learn to go
into exile within oneself. Small events
and simple questions acquire
significance from the way they trigger
deeper self-confrontations. Rama has
to look within when Sita asks him, in
Valmiki’s Ramayana, why, when going
into exile, he has to carry his
weapons. “The forest dwellers have
done us no harm,” she says. As a citydweller
and a Kshatriya, Rama has
presumably been socialised to avoid
going unarmed into a forest and its
unknown dangers. Sita, the
Ramayana tells us, comes from the
earth and, perhaps predictably, makes
an earthy point. Does Rama’s exile
begin with a self- confrontation right
in the city of Ayodhya? Does the
question carry other associations and
become relevant to the contemporary
reader? Does an epic’s continuous
relevance rest on such oscillations
between text and life? Could the
yaksha’s philosophical questions to
Yudhishtira have taken place outside
the context of an exile and a journey?
It is doubtful. Exile and journey in
our epics are the appropriate
moments at which one can ponder
the fundamental questions of life.
The answers have to come from the
self when it is temporarily at some
distance from the normal and the
mundane.
Notice that I have not spoken of the
heroines in the epics till now, except
tangentially. Not because I did not
want to but because, unlike in the
case of the heroes, the women in
Indian epics have more distinctive
cultural features and deserve a longer
and separate discussion. Briefly, the
most conspicuous of these features is
the central role that women play in
shaping the course of events in the
epics and the way the fate of the
heroes depends frequently on the
women. In the Mahabharata, the
women are obviously more powerful
than the men. The epic can be read
as a celebration of femininity,
including the feminine capacity to
preside over the fate of the heroes,
and as a reaffirmation of the close
symbolic links of women with power,
activism and the principle of
reproduction in nature and society.
(It is a principle of sustainability
that, I believe, negates the principle
of unbridled productivity).