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ArtConnect: The IFA Magazine, Volume 6, Number 1
freedom to take sides on behalf of the
persons, families and communities
that feature in the epic. For centuries
this right was not challenged. Even as
late as in the nineteenth century, when
the first serious modern
reinterpretation took place in the
Meghnad Badh Kavya, it was fully
acceptable to contemporary pundits
and ordinary readers, including the
orthodox Hindus. The work was
called a mahakavya and none dubbed
it as a sacrilege that hurt the
sentiments of the Hindus, even
though the writer was a Christian.
Hermeneutic rights in such cases have
been very nearly absolute because
epics in this part of the world are not
just meant to be read, recited, painted
or performed. Epics are also tools for
thinking, self-reflection, therapeutic
intervention, and debates on ethics.
Bijoyketu Bose once published a book
on how psychoanalytic use can be
made of the Mahabharata, a
possibility with which his uncle, the
first non-western psychoanalyst
Girindrasekhar Bose, had also toyed.
In everyday life, too, one learns to
think through an epic and that
personal reading of the epic and that
ability to use the epic to navigate one’s
inner life become a means of selfexpression,
a part of one’s identity.
Epics, unlike many of their
contemporary admirers, can also
sometimes maintain an ironic
distance from themselves. U.R.
Ananthamurthy, using A.K.
Ramanujan, told me a lovely story
from a Kannada Ramayana in which
Rama, as in other Ramayanas, tries to
dissuade Sita from accompanying
him to the forest when he is exiled,
and Sita resists. After exhausting all
her standard arguments, Sita deploys
a clinching argument—if in all other
Ramayanas Sita goes to the forest
with Rama, how could he leave her
behind in the Kannada Ramayana?
One suspects that this Brechtian
distance allows us to link up with the
multiple constructions of the past in
which epics play a key role. One can
even reconstruct the past for one’s
own autonomous use by re-entering
an epic creatively and locating oneself
within it. Girindrasekhar Bose
believed that the epics were our
history. Frankly, we do not have to
call them history; they are sufficient
in themselves by being another way
of constructing our past outside
history. Like folktales, legends and
shared public memories transmitted
from one generation to another, our
epics too keep the past open.
Gulammohammed Sheikh’s majestic