A Hanumanic Leap: Why we must let India's mythological epics evolve beyond religion
Photo: Karan Madhok
With the Ramayan and Mahabharat back on TV, Karan Madhok writes about the importance of celebrating the complex fictions of the myths, rather than accepting them as gospel truth.
Over ten years ago, a friend recommended me Ashok Banker’s Ramayana series. I hadn’t heard of Banker’s work until then, but my friend sold me on the books (written in English) by describing them as a ‘Lord-of-the-Rings-esque’ retelling of one of India’s greatest epics.
Like most Indian kids growing up in the Doordarshan era, I was familiar with the stories of the Ramayan and Mahabharat through those ubiquitous 80s TV series. I had also stood roadside by crowded markets to watch folk re-enactments of episodes from the Ramayan—The Ramlila—which are still performed annually in my ancient hometown of Varanasi. I was familiar with simplified retellings (in Hindi and English) of the both epics in primary school textbooks or the Amar Chitra Katha comic strips.
As I grew older, I expanded my horizons to other mythologies from other cultures. To Homer and his Odyssey and Iliad. To stories of other Greek and Roman gods and goddesses, or tales of the Vikings, and Beowulf, and King Arthur, and to the more modern era fantasies like Star Wars, DC/Marvel superheroes, Hogwarts attendees, and of course, Tolkien’s Middle Earth.
Banker’s series mixed the best of both worlds: a new, accessible adaption of a familiar Indian story. Over the next few years, I read the entire eight-part series. They weren’t written as well as LOTR, of course (Banker is a good writer, but like most of us, he isn’t Tolkien!), but they were still a fun read. Banker repackaged his knowledge of the epics in a refreshing, new way. He dealt with the demigods—Ram, Lakshman, Sita, Hanuman etc.—as what they were: characters with shades of grey, with super-heroic traits as well as flaws, with a human consciousness that made them assess their decisions, feel guilt, love, hate, jealousy, loyalty, and more. In Banker’s telling, they were complex characters whom we could study, analyse, and understand. They were more than just our unimpeachable overlords, with whom we were only supposed to engage with as idols in temples.
In the decade that followed, mythological fiction grew in immense popularity. Banker himself wrote a Krishna series and started one on the Mahabharat. His spiritual contemporaries in this realm—authors like Amish Tripathi, Devdutt Pattanaik, Ashwin Sanghi, and many more—have turned this into the most-profitable genre of fiction writing in the country.
However, religious sensitivity and caution has forced many authors to tip-toe around the ‘human’ characteristics of the heroic characters in these stories, as if any flaw in them would be a blot on the religion itself.
The Ramayan and Mahabharat are two of the greatest epics imagined in any culture in human history, but their literary and cultural value is wasted by religious fervour. Religious sensitivity is hindering literary scholars and artists from reinterpreting these epics and pushing them forward in more creative ways.
The popularity of mythological-fiction can be somewhat attributed to a new generation of English-educated Indians yearning for spiritual meaning, or in reading exciting tales with familiar, household characters. In an interview at the Jaipur Lit Fest in January, Sanghi—one of the highest-selling fiction authors in India—told me why this new readership has been hungry to reconnect with their roots.
“What mythology is doing is helping an entire generation that has never connected with its roots,” said Sanghi. “For example, not just in India but those in the Indian diaspora in USA, Canada, or the UK, when we were growing up, we had grandparents living in joint-family homes, who would narrate us stories from the Ramayan, the Mahabharat, and the Puranas, and so on and so forth. That has completely disappeared because families have become nuclear, and in many cases both parents are always working—they don’t even have time. And even if they did have time, probably they themselves are not aware of many of these stories.”
Growing up in Varanasi, however, I could observe how our mythologies and our religion had a major impact in the day of day lives of people. It was here that I saw India at its peak Indianness; it is one of the oldest continuously-living cities in the world, and the banks of the Ganga here have been inhabited for millennia without interruption. Civilisations around the world have come and perished, new religions and new messiahs have been imagined, global maps have been changed, colonialism has come and gone, and the age of tech has arrived, and yet the city has continued unabated.
It’s in Varanasi’s timelessness that I see a small microcosm of a larger Indian disposition. For us, history has never been the past. It’s always around us, ever-present in the way we eat, travel, pray, and interact with each other.
Because the history has never left us, we have never stopped thinking of our epics—the Ramayan and the Mahabharat—with continued relevance. These epics may have been conceived by oral tradition two to three thousand years ago, but these and other Hindu texts like the Vedas, Upanishads, Puranas, are still spiritually and politically pertinent in India.
I believe that our love for our epics can, sometimes, be a healthy obsession. As an atheist, I read these Hindu epics differently than many others. Even as a nonbeliever, however, I can’t help but marvel at the staying-power and adaptability of this ancient religion, and be fascinated by many of its philosophical interpretations of reality.
The Ramayan and Mahabharat are two of the greatest epics imagined in any culture in human history, but their literary and cultural value is wasted by religious fervour. Religious sensitivity is hindering literary scholars and artists from reinterpreting these epics and pushing them forward in more creative ways.
In my opinion, our epics—the stories, the characters, the legends—need to be made a part of mainstream global pop-culture like stories from the ancient Greek, Roman, Nordic traditions. For a long time, Ancient Greek was a religion and Zeus was its overlord. But time passed, science explained the attributes of Zeus (sky and thunder) and he graduated into a realm of mythology, rather than religion. This allowed literary and modern cultural interpretations of these Greek gods to exist in today’s world, with everyone understanding their significance, but not treating their stories as gospel.
Ah, that word: gospel. When the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) replaced many pagan ones of the past, they insisted on gospel truths, on strict interpretations of books written by men. Sky and thunder had been explained, so perhaps those gods weren’t needed anymore. But these new gods were here to explain mankind’s other questions that science and philosophy hadn’t yet tackled.
Sometime funny happened over the past two millennia: even after science did tackle and explain a large percentage of our questions (including evolution), a majority of the world refused to stop believing in theistic higher powers. The Abrahamic religions have remained in the mainstream, and their gospels continue to be interpreted in a wide variety of ways by believers and scholars. For example, some of the wildest stories in the Old Testament (six-day creation, Noah’s Ark, Jonah in the big whale, etc.) are understood as allegorical by some, but as fact/literate truth by others. The same can be said for many extreme interpretations of the Quran.
Having a uniform scripture (Bible, Quran, Torah) helped to limit the rules of each religion and thus make it easier for the followers to subscribe. Everything you need to do to be a Muslim is written in the Quran, and nothing more.
But what tenets do Hindus follow? Hinduism is considered as one of the oldest-surviving religious tradition in the world, but it’s closer to the Ancient Greeks in its polytheistic/henotheistic ways than to the newer Abrahamic strains. Putting faces and names to gods was itself a newer way of uncomplicating deeper cosmic ideas. In strict Hindu philosophy, the enlightenment of understanding the Maya (the illusory world) vs. the Atman (the deeper soul itself) is of greater significance than the idols in the temples. The religion isn’t limited by the idols worshipped in temples or tenets passed on by Brahminic Gurus. All the enlightened humans, then—Krishna, Jesus, Mohammed, Buddha, Guru Gobind Singh, etc.—are enlightened with the same knowledge, but they naturally interpreted this enlightenment in different ways by being borne in different circumstances during different places and times in world history. Inadvertently, they created different religions—albeit, all under the same cosmic philosophy.
Even within Hinduism, there is no one ‘truth’, but different cultural interpretations of a wave of similar beliefs. One of the famous examples is of Ramayan’s Raavan, who is considered a villainous demon in some cultures, while he is an enlightened monk in others. Some interpretations view Ram and Raavan as polar opposites; some as two sides of the same coin.
The Hindu scriptures aren’t a monolith: there are different types of Hinduism for mainstream North Indians, people from southern regions, tribes tucked away in Himalayan heights, in Sri Lanka, in Indonesia, and Thailand, and beyond.
For our current generation, the 80s Doordarshan serials (Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan and BR Chopra’s Mahabharat) are much to blame for the epics forcing a strict blueprint upon the national consciousness. Since Hinduism doesn’t have a Bible or a Quran to be the end-all-be-all gospel of its tenets, the epics—and their popular televised adaptations—have instead helped to shape what modern and mostly upper-caste Hindus consider to be the ‘right’ Hindu way. The boundlessness of the religion was constrained to a few limited interpretations.
Last month, when a nationwide lockdown was announced in India to slow the growing threat of the coronavirus, Doordarshan—long discarded in the TV race by private cable channels and OTT streaming apps—made a comeback for the ages. The public-broadcast channel decided to re-air many of its earlier shows from the 80s and 90s, from the days when everyone in India watched DD because there was nothing else for us to watch. The flagship shows of this comeback have been re-airings of the Ramayan and Mahabharat. Within weeks, Doordarshan became the most-watched channel across India, gaining a massive 650 percent growth in one week! Clearly, the myths still have the power to captivate Indian audiences.
For many, the Ramayan and the Mahabharat aren’t just stories—they are continuing frameworks for how to view the country’s present-day spiritual and political life.
Unfortunately, as mainstream Hinduism has leaned too far into the political realm (as has every other religion), there hasn’t been space for a nuanced appreciation of the religion’s complexities. Many right-leaning groups have attempted to generalise a Hindu code to make it easier for the masses, a code like the one that exists for Christians in the Bible or Muslims in the Quran. A version of the Manusmriti for the modern Indian. This code attempts to shackle what is otherwise a freely-interpreted religion into a set of rigid rules; rules that say that Hindus shouldn’t eat beef, that they shouldn’t inter-marry outside of caste or religion, that they should worship Shiva on Monday and Ganesh on Wednesday.
This, however, is not necessarily a new development. After all, this is the same code that Hindus up into different castes pitting the scholars—who wrote the code—on the very top.
It is this same code that has deified Ram and Lakshman, and the Pandavs and Krishna, instead of letting them exist in the mythological realm. The Hindu equivalent of Zeus for sky and thunder—Indra—isn’t yet a ‘character’, but still a god. The fanaticism of some beliefs has led many right-wing Hindutva groups to place unreasonable sentiment on fiction, such as the Ram Janmabhoomi in Ayodhya and the Ram Setu bridge connecting to Sri Lanka. Every religion has its imagined sacred entities, but increasingly, these entities are being exploited for political needs. Today, more people are sensitive about what a translated interpretation of Ram means, rather than being interested in the actual (fictional) character of Ram himself.
This way of thinking, however, ignores the complexities that truly make these characters timeless. The legends and their chief heroes/heroines have to be special to last the test of time, to be known and celebrated by billions for millennia. I believe is the very thing that the sanitisation of the characters attempts to erase: their flaws. Ram was supposed to be a great King but ended up being a terrible, suspicious husband. Karna—the abandoned elder brother of the Pandavs—insulted Draupadi for being unchaste and fought and killed the Mahabharat’s ‘good guys’, but he was also known as the most-generous man in the world who steadfastly remained on the quest for his personal dharma. Krishna was the god among men in the Mahabharat, the perfect being; and yet he often coaxed the Pandavs to bend the rules of war for dharma and victory.
Even if [Ram] indeed was one of the avatars of god Vishnu, a supreme Being, a warrior with heavenly skills, would he really require regular 21st-century men to fight his battles for him? Would his legacy, enlightened beyond the realm of our illusory Earth, be so fragile as to be hurt by mere land-disputes in Ayodhya? Would he, a symbol of compassion, ever approve of his so-called followers to taint his name with violence in his “honour”?
The immortality of these characters isn’t due to their perfection; it is due to their quest for perfection. They often stray away from their path to dharma; but the lesson here is the path itself.
There have been many unfortunate consequences of religious sensitivity in India and beyond. One of those consequences is that interpretations in other forms—modern literature, film, art, theatre, music—have shied away from adapting or remixing the epics to create something new and exciting, to further the conversation started by the lessons of dharma and Ram-Rajya. A few years ago, violence and protests broke out around the country following the film adaption of the epic poem Padmavaat. One of Bollywood’s biggest actors, Aamir Khan, mentioned that he was now reconsidering his idea of a Mahabharat film because of the possible repercussions it could face in a country that has become more intolerant over the past few years.
It’s a good thing nobody threatened Tulsidas when he wrote the Ramcharitmanas four hundred years ago. This was a radical adaptation of Ram’s story for its time, a text that opened up Ram’s story to a new audience, beyond its scholarly gatekeepers, and has since been celebrated as one of the greatest-ever works of Awadhi/Hindi literature.
Ram probably didn’t exist. But even if he did, even if he indeed was one of the avatars of god Vishnu, a supreme Being, a warrior with heavenly skills, would he really require regular 21st-century men to fight his battles for him? Would his legacy, enlightened beyond the realm of our illusory Earth, be so fragile as to be hurt by mere land-disputes in Ayodhya? Would he, a symbol of compassion, ever approve of his so-called followers to taint his name with needless violence in his “honour”?
The questions above can be asked of any religion and the deity in whose name its followers lose their grasp of basic human goodness. In Ram’s case specifically, the fervour over religion is actually harming the character’s story.
The heroes, villains, and everyone-in-between in the Ramayan and Mahabharat are truly some of the greatest characters ever envisioned. It might take a leap across hundreds of yojanas like the monkey-god Hanuman, but for the sake of preserving the authentic characteristics or our epics, it’s imperative that we see their complexities, that we resist the urge to limit them as one-dimensional idols or reflections of bhakti TV serials. I believe that by fully admitting their place in the realm of mythology, allegory, and imagination, they can become even ‘realer’ for the future generations.
Mythological fiction already lines up the front windows and bestsellers shelves of every bookstore in India. What we need are more versions of India’s mythological tales that fit the storytelling medium of our time, just like Tulsidas translated the Ramayan from Sanskrit to make it more accessible to a changing audience in the seventeenth century. Ram and Raavan and the Pandavs and Kauravs could be so much more than their one-dimensional mainstream interpretations. They could be heroes and antiheroes of complex new novels and cult characters of a desi Game of Thrones. Their stories could be seen as metaphors, with limitless depth, instead of being exalted as gospel truths. The epics could comment on the nature of kings and queens, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, war and peace, exile and kingdoms, good, evil, and dharma.
French-Algerian writer and philosopher Albert Camus, once said that, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.” By interpreting mythology as religion, we take the fiction to be true and refuse to see beyond it; instead of accepting the ‘lie’ to find the greater truth.
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Karan Madhok is a writer, journalist, and editor of The Chakkar, whose fiction, translation, and poetry have appeared in Gargoyle, The Literary Review, F(r)iction, and more. He is the founder of the Indian basketball blog Hoopistani and has contributed to NBA India, SLAM Magazine, FirstPost, and more. Karan is currently working on his first novel. Twitter: @karanmadhok1
