Rāmāyana in the Folk Tradition of India’s Northeast Region

Rāmāyaṇa is a curiously modern book because it deals with Consent, both male and female. Śurpaṇakhā, a ‘demon’ woman, wants to have intimacy with Rāma against his consent, but she is shoved away, unfortunately with resort to violence. Rāvaṇa, Śurpaṇakhā’s brother, wants to have intimacy with Sītā against her consent. A curse prevents him from having his way, so he seeks to compel her consent by abduction and intimidation. In both cases, the consequences of these actions are devastating: the end of Rāma’s conjugal bliss and the destruction of the golden city of Lankā. Thus, the dangers of desire (Buddhist doctrine) and the consequences of actions (karmic doctrine) were presented to the common folk by storytellers and sages.

In modern times, there is a popular trend to see both Śurpaṇakhā and Rāvaṇa in a sympathetic light. This is the result of modern thinking, which always finds fault with traditional thinking. It is also the result of postmodern thinking, which always finds fault with those in power. Since Rāmāyaṇa extols the virtues of Rāma, protector of sages, he is power, and so, the privileged elite, and so, the problem! Ever since Rāma became the mascot of hardline Hindutva’s political ideology, its opponents felt the urge to find faults in Rāma, like lawyers in a courtroom. He has been transformed into everything from an Aryan imperialist to a patron of Brahmin patriarchy. Such is the power of the Rāmāyaṇa, an epic that has shaped Indian culture for two thousand years.

In traditional narratives, however, Rāma was seen differently. For Hindus, he was the avatar of Viṣṇu. He restores dharma on earth by following the rules even at the cost of personal happiness, which earns him the title of Maryada Purushottam. Later, in the Bhakti period, he embodied God, one who is so perfect that even his violence bestows grace. For Buddhists, he was a ‘bodhisattva’, which is why Buddhist monarchs of Myanmar and Thailand retold his tale in their courts. For Jains, he was a ‘Baladeva’, one of the sixty-three great heroes who appear in every age, known for his pacificism and love for his brother, Lakṣmaṇa, the ‘Vasudeva’. The unsavoury or problematic episodes of the Rāmāyaṇa were never denied. They evoked confusion and wonder, not condemnation — a mystery that defied simple explanation.

Like the story of Buddha, the story of Rāma took the idea of dharma to every corner of India and beyond. Buddhist dharma (dhamma) was more monastic. Hindu dharma, embodied in Rāma, was more worldly. Rāma had to function not only as a responsible and accountable householder but also as an emotionally detached hermit.

The oldest manuscripts of the Rāmāyaṇa reveal a very north Indian ecosystem. It stretches from the Ganga River basin to the Sal forests of central India. It does not even cross the Vindhyas. Rāvaṇa’s Lankā is full of Sal trees, found only in Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh and Odisha, where tribes still retain memory of Rāvaṇa. Our popular understanding of Rāmāyaṇa, which locates Kiṣkindhā in the Deccan and Lankā in Sri Lanka, emerged later. This happened as the epic fired the imagination of Chalukyan and Chola kings between the eighth and tenth centuries. Rāmāyaṇa art, carved on temple walls and sponsored by kings, appears only after the fifth century – first north of the Vindhyas, in the Malwa region, and then later in the Deccan regions.

After this period, we find increasingly the retelling of Rāmāyaṇa in local languages — Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Odia, Bengali and Assamese. This gave rise to paintings, puppetry, songs, and theatre based on the epic. This is an indicator of its popularity as well as the desire to make it accessible to all. Simultaneously, pilgrim sites linked to the Rāmāyaṇa began appearing across India. They manifested right from the Himalayan foothills, where Rāma went to atone for the crime of killing a Brahmin (Rāvaṇa), to the city of Mumbai, where Rāma shot an arrow into the earth and created the Banganga tank to quench Sītā’s thirst. Today, while the site of Rāma’s birth is undisputedly located in Ayodhyā, the site of Hanumān’s birth and Jatāyu’s death is heavily contested. Is it in Maharashtra, Karnataka or further south? Matters of faith cannot be resolved rationally — they are enforced through power and violence.

The Hindi Rāmcaritamānas of Tulasīdās was composed in the sixteenth century. This was much later than the southern and eastern regional retellings, yet it dominates the Rāmāyaṇa scene today. This is the result of the highly popular TV series by Ramanand Sagar on Doordarshan in the 1980s and its adoption by Hindutva politicians who know that 50 per cent of India’s vote bank is located in the Hindi belt. Eclipsed, non-Hindi Rāmāyaṇas remain popular only in certain regional pockets. In Gujarat, for example, the Hindi Rāmāyaṇa is more known than the local creation of Giridhara (eighteenth century). In Maharashtra, the lyrical Geeta Rāmāyaṇa (twentieth century) composed at the launch of the All India Radio has much traction. In Tamil Nadu, Kambaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram (tenth century) continues to be popular, as does Kṛttivāsī Rāmāyaṇ in Bengal. In Kerala, for the last four decades, a month has been dedicated to the Malayalam retelling of the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa (seventeenth century).

But what about northeast India?

Most Indians know little about northeast India. It lies upon the eastern edge of the Magadhan zone, a mountainous region watered by the Brahmaputra. It is full of fiercely independent autonomous tribes, who speak Tibeto-Burmese and Austro-Asiatic tongues. The Indo-Aryan influence is relatively less. Here, the penetration of Hinduism was limited. Brahmin culture has traditionally favoured agricultural zones in river valleys, while Buddhists preferred trade routes. So, we find Buddhist lands on the other side of major trade routes in Tibet and Myanmar. Islam reached the eastern coasts via Arab traders from the tenth century onwards. From the fifteenth century onwards, the Ganga delta was populated by newly emerging Muslim frontier farming communities. They were led by enterprising Sufis exploiting newly revealed cultivable land. Considering this, the presence of Rāmāyaṇa in this region has been largely ignored. So, this book is fulfilling an overlooked area of scholarship.

How did these stories reach the mountains and valleys of northeast India? When? Why? Who retold them? Was it motivated by royal ambition, devotional doctrines or just people who love a great story? In what form was it kept alive — text, art, song, puppetry, theatre? What were the creative liberties taken? How did the people make Rāmāyaṇa their own — how was it anchored to their local geography and history? All these questions need unravelling. And this book answers many of them.

—Devdutt Pattanaik

Rāmāyaṇa is not merely a story but a living tradition. In India and various parts of South Asia, Rāmāyaṇa has deep roots inside the cultural fabric of the regions. Even though the earliest versions of the epic date back thousands of years, the contemporaneity of the story cannot be overlooked. A few decades back, when the internet, mobile phones, tablets, and gaming had not yet taken our world by storm, reading was the most favourite pastime and encouraged as a hobby. Children of that ‘internet-free’ era cherished their collection of books. There was hardly an Indian child growing up at that time who had not read the Amar Chitra Katha series. This extremely popular medium introduced the Rāmāyaṇa story to the creative imagination of young minds. The graphic narrative mode suited the requirement of its captive readers, the children, and aptly juxtaposed two essential elements of the Rāmāyaṇa story — its oral tradition and the mythological characteristics. While older children read picture books and absorbed the story, younger ones (uninitiated to reading) heard it from family members. The storytelling tradition was alive and vibrant in most extended families and larger communities in the villages and small towns. Various performing arts, such as natak/jatra (theatre), kīrtana (a musical form of narration or devotional singing), putul/putalā nāch (puppetry), dances, song cycles, etc., played a significant role in building a strong foundation of the Rāmāyaṇa story in the minds of children and adults alike. When, in the 1980s, the wonder world of colour television came into the lives of Indians, Ramananda Sagar’s Ramayan series on Doordarshan was bound to be a hit. Even though not every house could afford a television then, it did not deter people from watching the episodes every Sunday. People flocked to their neighbours’ houses happily to watch the show, and community gatherings made the experience even better. The essence of purity and sacredness related to the epic was still intact, and no one would imagine in their wildest dream to change the storyline even a bit from what was commonly perceived as the Vālmīki version. Rāmāyaṇa was the story of Rāma’s exploits, his bravery, and his reign as a model king, and the other characters in the story served the purpose of taking the story forward. The divinity of Rāma remained unquestioned as much as his actions in the narrative, and the epic was like a morality play signifying the victory of good over evil. Interestingly, various other versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, quite different from Vālmīki’s narrative, had already been told/written, but many people were not familiar with those stories.

The multiplicity of the Rāmāyaṇa story is undoubtedly its most interesting aspect. This diversity in the narrative tradition of the epic can be seen not only in India, but throughout South Asia. The various tellings of the epic in India itself are varied and conflicting, even though certain versions have gained dominance with time, such as the ones by Vālmīki and Tulasīdās. Each version is intricately woven with the culture and tradition of the people and the region, and therefore, the epic takes on a newer dimension with every reading vis-à-vis the context. India’s northeast region is replete with various versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, with almost every state contributing to one or more tellings of the epic. One of the earliest versions of the Rāmāyaṇa came from Assam through Mādhav Kandali’s telling. The region is rich with various other versions — the Mizo Rāmāyaṇa, the Karbi Rāmāyaṇa, the Manipuri Rāmāyaṇa, the Tripuri Rāmāyaṇa, the Rāmāyaṇa in the Khamti language (Likchaw Lamang/Lik Chao Lamang) and so on.