Who’s afraid of 300 Ramayanas?

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Rito Paul December 4,

2011

What is so offensive about AK Ramanujan’s essay ‘Three Ramayanas: Five Examples and
Three Thoughts on Translations’? Is it offensive because Ramanujan refers to Kamban’s
Iramavataram where Indra is “covered with a hundred vaginas”, or the Jaina version,
Pampa Ramayana, where Sita is Ravana’s unwanted daughter?

If this is the case, then Hindu fundamentalist groups like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi
Parishad (ABVP) should have been rabble-rousing against these centuries-old texts
instead of an academic essay that simply and accurately describes them. But the ABVP
chose to vandalise the history department of Delhi University (DU), and the latter ended
up taking it off their reading list.

“There are 300 versions of the Ramayana, but AK Ramanujan chooses to quote five
examples that are bound to hurt our sentiments. They want students to learn about
those five,” ABVP state secretary Rohit Chahal had said in righteous indignation in 2008.
His words provide a clue as to what the issue is really about. Business Standard
columnist AK Bhattacharya wrote of the Ramanujan essay, “He (Ramanujan) argues that
it will be wrong to assume that there was one original ramayana, presumably written in
Sanskrit by Valmiki, and all other ramayanas ...were translations or versions of the
original ramayana in Sanskrit. He argues that there is a “relational structure” that claims
the name of the ramayana for all the different “tellings”, but that they are not similar to
each other.”

No apex RamayanSo Ramanujan in his essay was suggesting that there was no apex
Ramayan that can be held sacrosanct. This is a problem for the Hindutva brigade,
according to Mridula Mukherjee, a professor in the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU.
“If people believe that there is no one original Ramayan, then how can they say that Ram
was a historical figure, born on such and such date in this particular place? And if they
can’t say that, then it undermines the Hindutva brigade’s agenda for the last 20 years,”
she says, clearly alluding to the idea of Ram Janmabhoomi. And recent reports that the
ABVP objected to the essay because it was referred to the reading list by the prime
minister’s daughter adds a more craven political dimension to this whole saga.

But what concerns Mukherjee more is not so much the shenanigans of the Hindutva
brigade as the manner in which Delhi University (DU) capitulated in the face of those
shenanigans. “The decision of the academic council had no basis. Institutions that are
supposed to stand up for freedom of expression and freedom of reading are kowtowing
to fundamentalists.” she says.

And it’s not just DU that kow-towed to right wing bullying. In 2008, another right wing
group, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, also sent a letter to Oxford University Press
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(OUP) India, asking them to stop printing the essay. In a stunning but not unprecedented
capitulation, OUP India complied. They wrote back an abject letter in which they actually
thanked them! “We feel deeply concerned to learn that Ramanujan’s essay has the
potential to hurt Hindu religious sentiments and we thank you for pointing this out. ...we
very much regret that the essay has inadvertently caused you distress and concern. We
also wish to inform you that neither are we selling the book nor are there plans to re-
issue it.”

Subsequently, books containing the essay disappeared from all major bookstores. This
led to a backlash from academics and students. Noted academics, among them
Indologists Wendy Doniger and David Shulman, and historians Muzaffar Alam and
Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a group of students at Oxford University wrote to OUP’s
international office asking them for an explanation of this act of censorship.

Thank you for bullying usOUP CEO Nigel Portwood immediately issued a statement,
saying, “The book was out of stock from 2008 but we continued to collect a small number
of back orders on our internal systems.” OUP India also claimed there was no censorship
on their part: “The Collected Essays Of AK Ramanujan ... is listed as available on the OUP
India website. OUP does not apologise and never has apologised for publishing the
essay.”

Noted author Ramachandra Guha, in a panel discussion at Oxford University last week
said, “I met the CEO of OUP today and essentially we disagreed on the interpretation of
the apology, also disagreed on whether the book has been withdrawn.” He also asserted
that the best way for OUP to silence its critics would be to “immediately print the essay
which would be a vindication of your respect for Ramanujan, vindication of the principle
of free speech, and vindication of your bottom line too.”

Interestingly, when DNA tried to purchase the book from the OUP website, it was unable
to do so despite several attempts. A member of the Oxford University student’s group
that is protesting against OUP’s alleged removal of the book, Anup Surendranath, told
DNA that when they contacted OUP India’s office in late November, they were specifically
told that the book would not be available. “Noone knows how many orders it will take to
finally get a re-print of the book. But the point is not even the availability of the book; the
point is that OUP, a pre-eminent academic publishing house, didn’t once defend the
work of an author it has widely published. It didn’t issue a single statement of support,”
says Surendranath.

Giving in to fascismThis apparent case of throwing the author under the bus is not a
new practice for OUP India, according to literary critic Nilanjana S Roy. “James Laine’s
book, Shivaji: Hindu King In Islamic India, was taken off the shelves by OUP India after
some political groups protested. The book wasn’t factually incorrect, it only referred to
some “bazaar gossip” that Shivaji’s father might have been a Brahmin,” she says. “It is the
obligation of a publishing house to stand up and support the authors, the right of the
readers, and defend their own publishing decisions. OUP India has clearly not done this.

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There is a larger trend of appeasement from institutions that are supposed to protect
the freedom of expression and that is because they are listening to an argument that is
predicated on violence.”

As Rukun Advani, a former editor at OUP India, wrote in The Telegraph, “If a publisher
with enormous resources sidles apologetically out of court, it will be interpreted as
having said: “Let fascism rule, we haven’t the stomach to fight it.”

Mukherjee is very clear that institutions like the OUP and DU do not possess the
fortitude to fight this sort of ‘fascism’. “The tendency is for these institutions to take the
easy way out through appeasement because they are scared of controversies.
Administrators try to please political parties because they are scared of reprisals. The
rule of law, and court decisions seem to have no value.”

It is a truism that freedom of expression is a basic requirement for any democracy. If our
educational and publishing institutions do not stand up to groups beholden to extremist
ideologies, then their only contribution — apart from those made to their own bottom
line — will be to an erosion of democratic values and consequent impoverishment of
public discourse and culture.

Education
Books
Delhi University
Oxford University Press
Sita
Valmiki
Wendy Doniger
Ram Janmabhoomi
Ramachandra Guha
Anup Surendranath
Indra
Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad
Business Standard
Noone
Islamic India
Hindu King
Rohit Chahal
Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti
Mridula Mukherjee
Nilanjana S Roy

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