SCHOLAR, RESEARCHER AND AUTHOR Sri Arjun Bharadwaj's latest work, The Essential Ramayana is a welcome and much-needed addition to the vast and ever-growing corpus of Ramayana retellings.
To my mind, its specialty is fivefold.
One, it is entirely faithful to Maharshi Valmiki's original epic, a feat few retellings can boast of.
Two, it is rendered in simple and lucid English, which by itself, presents a considerable challenge given the fundamental difficulty in translating Sanskrit literary works to an alien language like English, which in a sense is hostile to the spirit and innate beauty of Sanskrit.
Three, it is accessible to all age groups.
Four, it treads the path of translations pioneered and hallowed by the stalwart, Sri A.R. Krishna Sastri.
Finally, Sri Arjun Bharadwaj's comprehensive introduction and the translated text itself is a much-needed antidote to the mass of distortions introduced and popularised by destructive ideologies that have infected a profound and eternal epic like Srimad Ramayana.
Beginning with this episode, The Dharma Dispatch will publish the full Prologue written by Sri Arjun as a multipart series. In the limited scope of my own studies, this is qualitatively and coverage-wise, one of the best introductions to Maharshi Valmiki’s immortal epic. It encompasses almost all dimensions from which the Ramayana can be grasped and analysed – its plot, Maharshi Valmiki’s vision, its retellings, its aesthetic elements, the huge corpus of Ramayana-inspired art, interpolations and the enormous wealth of Ramayana scholarship. Sri Arjun’s introduction is also noteworthy for its simplicity of presentation without sacrificing scholarly rigour.
Happy reading!
Oh! And to buy The Essential Ramayana, click here.
IT IS SAID THAT NO INDIAN hears the story of the Rāmāyaṇa for the first time; in other words, no true bhāratīya can tell when he first heard the story – the grand epic, its characters, and the values it propounds are inseparable parts of our lives. It feels as though we, the bhāratīyas, have always known Rāma, Sītā, Lakṣmaṇa, Hanūmān, Rāvaṇa, Śabarī, and Ahalyā so well that they have entered our active vocabulary; they have touched people belonging to all strata of the society. The events of the epic are proverbial and the characters are metaphors that reside in every Indian’s heart. We probably first heard the story lying on the laps of our parents or grandparents, but then, it is beyond our active memory.
Though Indians have always been intimately familiar with the epic, and poets and artists across the length and breadth of Akhaṇḍa-bhārata have used their creative liberty in retelling the story through their artistic media, of late, there is a lot of confusion regarding what the ‘true Rāmāyaṇa’ is. It is impertinent and incorrect to jump to conclusions about the epic without thoroughly understanding the original. The current work is an attempt to present the epic in a simple and condensed form in order to enable readers of all age groups and backgrounds to access the original. It can work as the first but the right step to approach the epic. Upon reading the work, I am confident that readers will get a fairly good sense of what the Rāmāyaṇa is and will motivate them to dive deeper into its layers. It may become a doorway for readers to learn the Sanskrit language and to go through the first and the most profound poem of humankind; in fact, reading the Rāmāyaṇa in the original would be the best way to hone one’s skills in using the Sanskrit language – this is a benefit that the epic can provide over and above enriching one’s life with sublime values.
The idea for writing the current work took shape during a conversation with the Prekshaa team. We were discussing how the epic is being misrepresented and misunderstood in today’s world and wondered how we could contribute towards rectifying this problem. It occurred to me that the least we could do was to provide a readable English abridgement of the critically constituted text, ensuring that we do not miss the aesthetic and spiritual nuances of the original. I felt that writing the current book would be the best way to repay the ṛṣi-ṛṇa and ānanda-ṛṇa. When I put forth my idea, Śatāvadhānī Dr. R Ganesh and the Prekshaa family immediately encouraged me and dear friends including Sri Hari Ravikumar came forth to support the project. It was decided that I would follow the grand but challenging path paved by Prof. A R Krishnasastri, a doyen of Kannada and Sanskrit literature and aesthetics. His Vacana-bhārata, a time-tested classic, captures the Mahābhārata in such chiselled and appealing language that it has been hailed as a model of Kannada prose. The process by which he has condensed the epic is an evergreen template for retelling of our epics. Prekshaa Journal published an English rendering of the Vacana-bhārata under the title The Essential Mahābhārata; the work has received appreciation from both the laity and the learned. My current work is an attempt to provide a Rāmāyaṇa companion to the volume on the Mahābhārata.
To be continued
I request the readers to go through this prologue in the backdrop of the Introduction to the Vacana-bhārata by A R Krishnasastri. It has been rendered into English by Hari Ravikumar and me (see The Essential Mahabharata. Bengaluru: Prekshaa Pratishtana, 2021)
As a corollary to this, if a grown-up in India needs to be formally introduced to the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, it is a sorry state of affairs; I hope this situation never arises.
Undivided India—the influence of Indian culture spans the region between Iran in the West and Japan in the East, from Central Asia in the North to Indonesia in the South.
The debt we owe to the seer-poets and the Joy they have blessed us with. The term ‘ānanda-ṛṇa’ is coined by Śatāvadhānī Dr. R Ganesh.
Incidentally, Sri A.R. Krishnasastri is the uncle of my maternal grandparents.
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