The danger in talking past each other

Tabish Khair in The Hindu






Gossip plays a crucial role in one of our greatest epics. I am talking of the Ramayana, and what Sita has to undergo as a consequence of, yes, gossip after she has been rescued by Rama. Of course, distrust of gossip is also stressed by other religions, including Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Islam goes so far as to consider gossip to be the moral equivalent of sibling cannibalism.

The more things change

But, alas, we seem to have forgotten – and new technical developments have encouraged us to forget. Because if there is something that social media reminds me of most, it is not conversation, not discussion, not even argument; it is gossip.

Conversations, discussions, even arguments are basically reciprocal. You know who is talking and who is listening. You know where the words are coming from, and hence you know what they are intended for, or can at least guess. Being reciprocal, they have limits, both temporal and spatial. But gossip is not reciprocal; it circulates endlessly. It mutates and infects like a virus; it is alive and dead at the same time. In this, again, it resembles social media.

Gossip has no fixed source or end. There are no limits to gossip; the more outrageous it is, the more it tends to spread. In this again, it is like ‘information’ on social media. Actually, given the way in which Twitter and Facebook work, it pays to be outrageous and polemical. The more people you offend, the more visible your posts get — the more your ‘gossip’ circulates. So-called polarisation is inevitable in such a situation. Gossip is also embedded in polarisation of the sort that social media basically enables — because it can be faceless and highly mobile, two essential characteristics of gossip.

There is a convincing argument, which I have made in my column earlier, that digitalised communication makes it easier to evade difference, and to stereotype and ridicule it. In other words, it is easier to avoid facing the other on computers. At its simplest, this can be explained with reference to an ordinary conversation: in a conversation (unlike in gossip), one faces the other, and this face-to-face interaction often modulates both the positions despite differences. Healthy politics depends on such conversations, which include but also absorb arguments. When polarised arguments end the conversation, we move from politics to war: one can argue that countries can exist in this state of war internally too.

Disturbingly, in digitalised interactions one need not engage with the other; one can simply ‘unfriend’ a person one disagrees with (as Donald Trump regularly does) — or only accept Facebook friends one agrees with. Once again, this aids political polarisation, which is not really a serious and respectful engagement with differences but a kind of gossiping about it. More so because one does not really read social media postings much of the time, given the non-contemplative and distracting nature of the medium. Like gossip, one repeats it or ignores it depending on what one already believes.

Lost engagement

If reading was just a mechanical act — which is what it appears to be much of the time on social media — then perhaps political polarisation would be the inevitable state of human communication. But that is not so. Reading involves the kind of personal investment and deep attention that goes beyond the mechanical. It calls for time and effort. It forces the reader to enter other – different – spaces. Hence, Facebook, Twitter and other digital media posts (and responses to them) are not acts of reading: these are incredibly flat activities. They lack depth. They do not enable a conversation. At best, they resemble gossip: talking in a one-sided, flat manner about someone who is not present and, hence, cannot engage you in a discussion.

Real conversation requires depth, consideration and contemplation. It sets out to accomplish an understanding – and hence a change on both (all) sides. That is also what real reading does. Reading on social media — and much of digitalised reading – does not resemble a conversation. It resembles gossip — and is just as superficial, incidental and shallow.

It is true that gossiping is considered to serve at least three crucial purposes. Scholars often define these in terms of social bonding, the creation of cooperative reputation, and indirect reciprocity. But here again, a degree of nuance is necessary. Gossip creates social bonding in terms of innuendo, prejudice, prejudgment (which is etymologically the source of ‘prejudice’), etc. Such ‘social bonding’ is negative – and definitely detrimental to democracy. Something similar can be said of ‘cooperative reputation’ – the words ‘cooperative’ can be replaced by ‘coercive’ in the context of gossiping. And ‘indirect reciprocity’ in the case of gossip is not an engagement with the other; it is a framing and dismissing of the other. Gossip, by its very nature, takes place behind the victim’s back.

In all these respects, much of what exists on social media is not conversation or even argument. It is sheer gossip — in content, context and structure. We ignore this aspect of social media when it fits our prejudices, even though we know that gossip, especially when it is not recognised as gossip, can cause much damage. Or at least we Indians should know this: we have the latter part of the Ramayana.

On Ramayana and Mahabharata - India’s epic dilemma

Peter Ronald deSouza in The Hindu



 Our stories are richest when they are read as ethical texts, not ideological guides


Some days ago, during a discussion on the many ways to interpret episodes in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, the issue came up of whether these are ethical texts or merely ideological ones. Should one regard them as repositories of moral conundrums, on the human condition, that needed to be decoded and debated by every age for itself, or whether their messages, about the nature of the dharmic order to which all must conform, were clear and without ambiguity. What gave rise to this debate were two stories that were being discussed: the case of Eklavya who willingly offered his thumb to Drona on the Guru’s request, thereby assuring an anxious Arjun of his supremacy as an archer, and that of Ram beheading Shambuka for falling out of dharmic line. I wondered if one were a feminist, a Dalit scholar, a passionate nationalist of the current variety found among Ministers of State, or even a European Marxist, would one find morally grey areas in such episodes or would one see them as containing clear messages of how power and social relationships in a ‘just’ society should be ordered?

At this point let me step back a bit and carefully probe the distinction between an ethical and an ideological text. An ethical text is one which presents episodes as forks in the road where each path offered is attractive because it contains desirable goals. Choosing one path presents one with a quandary because the benefits offered by the other path would now have to be willingly foregone. Each path at the fork leads to the same destination. One only needs to decide what gains and losses one wished to forego.

For example, path A would offer to cut a journey short by four hours. But it would mean travelling on a bad road full of potholes and perhaps risking a bad back and a breakdown. Path B, in contrast, is longer and would get the traveller home past midnight. But it would be a smooth ride on a freshly metalled road that went through a forest. Travelling at night would risk a dacoit hold-up. An ethical text does not give a clear moral message. It compels one to weigh options before making a choice.

The ideological text, in contrast, is like a road within the National Highway system. Clearly numbered exits are given to one’s destination. You know where and when to leave the highway. Here there are no moral conundrums. There are just clear signposts prepared by a highways authority which tell you where to stop, at what speed to travel, which lane to follow, and where to exit. The highways authority offers a distinct route map for the whole society. It does so with the certainty of one who knows.

Civilisational abundance

So are the epics ethical texts or ideological ones? I believe they are the former. I believe each episode is a site for debate, an opportunity for each moral position in society to be heard and to solicit adherents. An Irawati Karve can see in Bhishma an egoistical, old man who, never having fought a war, still accepts the generalship of an army at a ripe age extending into the eighties, a measure of his narcissism. The Jain Ramayana has Laxman, instead of Ram, killing Ravan because that was the only way for them to reconcile the central Jain doctrine of Ahimsa and still valorise the Maryada Purusha. It is only an ethical text which allows for an A.K. Ramanujan’s 300 Ramayanas, suggesting that the story is alive in the country as people and places interpolate into the text their own aspirations and values. Individuals and social groups, of all ages, have drawn from the epics to fight their moral and political battles. This is what makes the epics so relevant to contemporary India. Today we need new interpretations to fight our political battles. The epics today need to be contemporanised.

An ethical text is the organic fertiliser of a society. Being fully open-ended, it delights, beckons, and recaptures the deracinated Indian from the lure of the ideological camp. While it generates passion, it also respects diversity of interpretation. It represents life but, in contrast to life’s chaos, also offers options. An ethical text is a living text. India is fortunate to be the land of several epics such as Silappatikaram in Tamil or Palnati Virula katha in Telugu and so on.

I am not saying something very new here but only presenting, in a binary way, the contrast between an ethical and an ideological text so that we can fight our current politics. Because the Indian tradition has always seen the epics as ethical texts, in contrast to the political trend today, we have great commentaries such as that of V.S. Sukthankar. The sophisticated elaboration by Mehendale on the rules of war and the consequences in terms of punishment of their violation, in his wonderfully slim book Reflections on the Mahabharata war, is another illustration of the Indian tradition of diverse interpretations. Critical commentaries, dissent, alternative readings are merely different forks in the road as we explore our national cultural heritage. Unfortunately today, with the rise of cultural vigilantes, these great epics are being converted into ideological texts. Because they receive tacit support from the powers that control the state, they attempt to push everyone onto the highway and away from the byways of Indian society.

It bears repeating here that the National Highway is good for the movement of goods and traffic, for practical and efficiency purposes, but not for cultural journeys for which it is the byways that matter. They nurture the richness of our cultural life. It is through the byways that we will discover the cultural ecosystems that local communities have created through complex negotiations with each other.

Isn’t this anti-national?

The smell of the mahua tree, for example, means a great deal in central India but has little significance in coastal India where the smell of fish is more exciting. Unless of course the rishi Parashar aroused by Satyavati replaced her fish smell of matsyagandha with the heavenly smell of yojanagandha, making coastal people like me to think this to be a parochial tale. Such playful stories can only be told when the epic is an ethical text. The cultural vigilantes have created a climate of anxiety which the people in control of the state have done little to diminish, for it pays them political dividends. Do they not realise that while they may gain the country, they will lose a civilisation? Do they not realise how anti-national this is?

Awaiting India’s Corbyn moment

Jawed Naqvi in The Dawn

LIBERAL politicians in India could speak like Jeremy Corbyn once, and, like him, believe in what they said. Take his speech at the refugees’ rally in London moments after the brilliant win as Labour Party chief. He spoke with conviction about a man-made human plight because he could feel like an ordinary, caring person, a man of reason with a hundred selfless concerns. What he said, in fact, was so straightforward and untangled in its simplicity that he made one wonder why today’s liberal leaders in India can’t be like that.

Refugees are not illegal people, Corbyn said. They are men, women and children rendered homeless, searching for the dignity and warmth which we took away from them. Does it take too much to say it that way? Refugees are made by wars we wage, he said. Indian leaders have said all this, and with conviction too, but much of that is in the past.

A disturbing moment that failed to evince a sound response from Indian liberals came when Prime Minister Modi churlishly welcomed non-Muslim refugees from Pakistan and Bangladesh. He was in violation of the constitution, but his opponents were busy not heeding. A Corbyn moment would have found someone speaking up: ‘Every community in India’s neighbourhood, regardless of their faith, in need of refuge from oppressive regimes, or who face threats to their lives from vigilante groups or other terrorists, are welcome in India.’ Indira Gandhi did open the doors to Gen Zia’s Pakistani victims.

Did the Indian left turn a Nelson’s eye to the communally fraught Modi musings because of its own past problems in West Bengal? Did the influx of Muslims from Bangladesh into West Bengal during its 30 years in office influence the left’s silence?  

The religious revival we are witnessing worldwide, riding on the upsurge in right-wing politics, has seen upright thinkers and liberal groups wilt under the blow. This luxury could not be allowed to the communists. For years, Indian followers of the dominant Marxist party were led to believe that the annual Durga Puja festival religiously staged by the comrades in West Bengal was a cultural rather than a religious event. Perhaps it was the same cultural quest that saw the comrades in Kerala this time celebrating ‘Krishna Lila’.

Reports say last week’s act of unprecedented public devotion was necessitated by the need to prevent families of communist comrades from joining similar celebrations to Lord Krishna organised by Hindutva groups who are hoping to ease out the left from its oldest bastion in Kerala. With close to half the West Bengal cadre having defected to the Bharatiya Janata Party in Bengal since the recent poll debacles, the left, it seems, has yet to learn the lessons of mixing religion (in the garb of culture) with politics.

How would a Corbyn-like approach pitch the mosque versus temple politics that has dominated much of liberal Indian politics in recent decades? Indian rationalists, including Marxists, have scurried to look for ideological compromises so as not to offend the majority Hindus nor unduly rile the Muslim groups. In playing it safe, India’s liberals are hiding away what would have been their attraction. The much-maligned Indian state offered to rescue the enlightened politicians out of the horrible mess, but they continued to wallow in it.

What did the Indian state do, which was so out of character with its known political inclination, for it to deserve kudos? In the midst of a political controversy over a mythical bridge three years ago, the Manmohan Singh government plainly told the Supreme Court that there was no historical evidence to establish the existence of Lord Ram or the other characters in Ramayana.
In an affidavit filed before the apex court, the Archaeological Survey of India rejected the claim of the existence of the Ram Sethu bridge. It was a bold rejection of Hindutva’s claims.

Referring to the Ramayana, the Indian government’s affidavit said there is no “historical record” to incontrovertibly prove the existence of the character, or the occurrences of the events, depicted therein. This should ideally have been the position of Indian Marxists, not in their closed study circles, but on public platforms. What harm could have befallen the left had they played it straight, instead of deflecting the argument to perhaps woo certain constituencies? They would have lost the polls, perhaps. Did they win by being less than forthright?

India-Pakistan ties were a major issue on which the left and liberal voices counted for much. In recent days, other than an uncharacteristic nationalistic statement about terrorism that came from the Communist Party of India, there was little by way of a nudge much less an argument for peace from the left. They were busy dethroning the foreign minister, unsuccessfully eventually, when they were needed on the streets to stop the consolidation of fascism. They could have put their foot down on the hounding of Teesta Setalvad, the freeing of the accused in Gujarat pogrom cases, the gagging of NGOs.

Now we are watching the left — all five or six communist parties — hurtling into a potentially disastrous election mode in Bihar. They claim they are jointly fighting (which they should have done in Jawaharlal Nehru University) on all the assembly seats to challenge Narendra Modi’s quest to conquer Bihar. In reality, they will be cutting into the votes of Modi’s secular opponents. What would Corbyn have reasoned? ‘Granted that the secular alliance is tainted with corruption and deep-seated anti-Dalit prejudices. This needs to be corrected at the earliest. However, first we have to remove the fascist threat. Else we are all doomed.’

Sreesanth - Another modern day Valmiki?

by Girish Menon

Sage Valmiki's life has been emulated by many robber barons of the world and it provides a prototype for Sreesanth to emulate in order to rehabilitate himself in the eyes of the Indian public.

Valmiki, the writer of the Indian epic on ideal behaviour The Ramayana, was a low caste robber who preyed on victims in order to feed his family. In latter life, probably after accumulating wealth, he turned into a philosopher and his diktats on ideal behaviour for an individual are still recognised as the right way for a Hindu.

Valmiki's transformation is a theme, recognised by David Mandelbaum in his treatise 'Society in India', that shows dynamism and upward mobility in what was once considered a stratified and calcified Indian caste system. Mandelbaum's thesis has been that contrary to prevalent mythology the Indian caste system provides an opportunity for mobility in two major steps. Firstly, the individual has to attain secular wealth and this should be followed by copying the social mores of the prevalent elites.

Mandelbaum talks about the Kayastha caste, scribes by trade, who were very low in the Hindu hierarchy before the period of Muslim rulers in Indian history. The Kayastha's writing and translation skills came into demand during the Muslim rule, and this helped them acquire secular wealth and power in the courts. Thus over time and after learning the mores of their social superiors they ascended to a status that is high even today in modern India.

The Ambani family's history has parallels to Valmiki too. Dhirubhai Ambani fell foul of the law on many occasions during his wealth accumulation period. Today, the Ambani empire resembles the Mughal empire in its heydays. And all the celebrities and wannabes look to them for patronage. One of the Ambani scions even owns a cricket team, the Mumbai Indians, which has some of the greatest cricketers on its payroll.

Mohd. Azharuddin, former Indian cricket team captain, is another Indian Valmiki. Today, he is a Member of Parliament from the ruling Congress party. There may also be many other Valmikis who have not been publicly found out, but who having amassed secular wealth find it imperative to advise others on the ideal behaviour in life.

So all is not lost for Sreesanth. He could take a leaf from Suresh Kalmadi's book and stay away from the public eye for some time in a protected environment like Tihar jail. When released he could don some saffron robes, get a BJP endorsement and end up as a Member of Parliament. Given that the lotus is its election symbol, image consultants and spin doctors will find it easy to draw a parallel between the flower's development and the transformation of Sreesanth.

This writer plays for CamKerala CC in the Cambs league.

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MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING - Why the IPL’s critics are mean and wrong

Mukul Kesavan

The uproar about the IPL following the ‘revelations’ about S. Sreesanth and his erring teammates threatens to become farcical. Sting-meister Aniruddha Bahal of Cobrapost suggested on a television show that franchises ought to be punished for the misdemeanours of contracted players. Bahal reached for and found a precedent for his prescription from a different game in a foreign country: the relegation of the Italian football club, Juventus, to a lower league because some of its players had transgressed. Are we seriously citing Silvio Berlusconi’s country as a model of corporate governance? Please. We can do without Serie A as a moral exemplar. Punishing companies for the criminality of their employees… what will these hacks dream up next? The other storm in this teacup is the suggestion that an isolated instance of spot-fixing is symptomatic of a more general shadiness in the IPL. Instead of celebrating the league as the beating heart of cricketing livelihood and hailing the BCCI as the gruff but golden-hearted uncle who bankrolls the global game, you have jealous (foreign) cricket boards and their Test-loving lackeys in the (white-and-Western) press, trying to characterize Sreesanth’s misdemeanour as ‘systemic’. In this bilious narrative, the IPL is a sinful Oriental honeypot where corruption is inevitable. This isn’t reportage, this is racism. These Anglo dead-enders and their self-hating henchmen in the Indian media have a favourite word: ‘opaque’. So the IPL is evil because its ownership structure is opaque. Throw in dark mutterings about ‘benami’ or anonymous shares in the principal franchises and you can dress up unsourced speculation as investigative journalism. Is there any sporting league in the world where it’s clearer who the owners are? Shilpa Shetty, Preity Zinta, Shahrukh Khan, Nita Ambani, and so on, are on television rooting for the players they own every night of the week. Instead of the corporate anonymity typical of business, with the IPL you can literally put a face to the franchise. Unable to fault the cricket, the IPL’s critics have targeted the cheerleaders on the field and, especially, in the studio. The easy badinage that makes Extraaa Innings so deliciously different from the po-faced pre-shows that just talk cricket is condemned as male lasciviousness by killjoy critics. The best answer to this pious accusation is to ask, in what world would professionals like Navjyot Singh Sidhu and Ravi Shastri and Harsha Bhogle and Kapil Dev, role models all, with reputations to lose, use women’s bodies as cues for double entendre and innuendo? The answer is obvious: they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t even allow themselves to be complicit in someone else’s demeaning banter: they would just get up and leave. So if they aren’t doing that, it’s not happening. N. Srinivasan, the BCCI president, is a special target for dead-ender venom. Everything he does is designated nefarious. The fact that he is in charge of the BCCI and the owner of an IPL franchise is deemed a wicked conflict of interest. When Srikkanth wore two hats, one as the chief selector of the national team and the other as brand ambassador for the Chennai Super Kings, the franchise owned by Srinivasan, journalists sang the conflict-of-interest ditty like a theme song. Srinivasan’s decision to make Dhoni a vice-president of India Cements Ltd, a company he happens to own, apparently compounds this conflict-of-interest problem. This carping has got to the stage where not even a man’s business is his own business, if you see what I mean. If men are known by the company they keep, Mr Srinivasan is in very good company; Anil Kumble has had exactly the same problem with sanctimonious critics. India’s greatest bowler, its most pugnacious captain, a man who has a traffic landmark in Bangalore named after him, had his integrity called into question merely because he started up a player management company at the same time as he became president of the Karnataka State Cricket Association. He couldn’t understand the objections to this double role and the reason he couldn’t is that ‘conflict of interest’ is an arcane Western notion born of an alien business culture where everything is premised on contract, unlike India where a man’s word is his bond. Cricket is Kumble’s dharma; it’s inevitable that he will seek to involve himself in every aspect of the game. He has to be judged by what he actually does, not by some theoretical constraint upon his judgment, glibly labelled a ‘conflict of interest’. And the same courtesy must be extended to N. Srinivasan, distinguished cricket administrator, successful businessman, paterfamilias and pillar of Chennai society. ‘Conflict of interest’ as an insinuation has been used to tar the reputations of Indian cricket’s greatest commentators. Men like Ravi Shastri and Sunil Gavaskar, who have been saying the same things in unchanged sentences with iron consistency for years, are now being criticized for tailoring their views to the BCCI’s prejudices, of being the BCCI’s paid publicists. Why should pundits lucky enough to sign a contract to be the BCCI’s in-house commentators be stigmatized in this way? Why can’t we accept their explanation that the reason they agree with the BCCI on nearly everything is a coincidence rather than a sign of being compromised? Harsha Bhogle couldn’t even tweet the distinction between spot-fixing and match-fixing without following up immediately with another tweet anxiously clarifying that he saw both forms of fixing as equally culpable and bad, in case some swivel-eyed loon online thought he was carrying water for the IPL. This intemperate talk of embedded journalists and gelded commentators destroys the sacred bond between fans and broadcasters so essential to the health of the game. Can’t the critics see that it is their reflexive, corrosive suspicion that is destroying Indian cricket, not the alleged excesses of the proprietors, players and publicists of the IPL? The answer to this rhetorical question is, no, they can’t, because modern hacks hold nothing sacred, not even the cardinal principle in law that a man is innocent till proven guilty. Cowardly articles have made references to Ajay Jadeja without naming him. Jadeja has been a regular on the IPL pre-show and the self-appointed guardians of cricketing morality have insinuated that the BCCI’s willingness to accept, on its authorized telecasts, a former cricketer accused of match fixing in an earlier era is symbolic of the IPL’s fudging of past wrongdoing, its less-than-zero tolerance for corruption. The problem with this argument is that Jadeja wasn’t found guilty of match-fixing by any court in India. Ergo, by the principles of natural justice and our republic’s laws, not having been charged and convicted, he is innocent. As Sunil Gavaskar sagely said on television after the Sreesanth story broke, there should be no rush to judgment. These are wise words: if the past and precedent (and the ability of the Indian police to secure a conviction) are a guide, it isn’t just possible, it is likely that Sunnybhai might find himself some years from now sharing a commentary box with a shiny, new, exonerated Sreesanth. The IPL is a golden Ganga in spate; it gilds everything that it touches.

Lord Ram’s Story: Many Tellings

By Ram Puniyani

04 November, 2011
Countercurrents.org

Recently Delhi University Academic Council (Oct 2011) decided to drop the scholarly essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” of A.K.Ramanujan, on different telling of Ram’s story from the syllabus of ‘Culture in India’ for BA Honors students. Of the four experts on the committee, one of them, whose opinion was finally accepted, said that undergraduate students will not be able to tolerate the portrayal of divine characters in the different versions given in the essay. In response to the ban while Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad, which is an affiliate of RSS, and company celebrated, the staff and many students protested against this ban. Just to recall earlier in 2008 ABVP activists had protested against the introduction of this essay, and indulged in vandalism on the issue.

This essay by the much acclaimed scholar, A.K.Ramanujan is part of his "The Collected Essays of A.K.Ramanujan (Oxford 1999). Earlier in the aftermath of Babri demolition, a Sahmat exhibition on different versions of Ramayana was attacked by RSS combine's goons in Pune in 1993. This was done on the pretext that one of the panels based on Jataka (Buddhist version) showed Ram and Sita as brother and sister, and it is an insult to their faith. Ramanujan's essay talks of different versions and presents five of them as an example.

It is known that there are hundreds of versions of Ramayana, Buddhist, Jain, Valmiki etc. Paula Richman in her book Many Ramayana's (Oxford) describes several of these. And again there are different interpretations of the prevalent Valmiki Ramayana, many of which are not to the liking of those who are indulging in politics in the name of their faith. Surprisingly all this intolerance is shown by those who assert that Hinduism is tolerant and other religions are intolerant.

It is a fascinating exercise to go through various tellings and interpretations of Ramayana. Even the other renderings acceptable to this intolerant but currently dominant political force are not uniform. Valmiki, Tulsidas and later the one adopted by Ramanand Sagar for his serial Ramayana have their own subtle nuances, which are very different from each other.

Ramayana has been rendered in many languages of Asia in particular. Ramanujan points out that the tellings of Ram story has been part of Balinese, Bengali, Kashmiri, Thai, Sinhala, Santhali Tamil, Tibetan and Pali amongst others. There are innumerable versions in Western languages also. The narrative in these is not matching. Those opposing this essay take Valmiki as the standard and others as diversions which are not acceptable to them for political reasons. The version of Ramayana, the communalists want to impose has the caste and gender equations of pre-modern times so it is hung up upon only that version as the only one acceptable to it.

Interestingly one can see the correlation between the class-caste aspirations of the narration-interpretation. In Buddhist Dasharath Jataka, Sita is projected both as sister and wife of Ram. As per this version Dashrath is King not of Ayodhya but of Varanasi. The marriage of sister and brother is part of the tradition of glorious Kshtriya clans who wanted to maintain their caste and clan purity. This Jataka tale shows Ram to be the follower of Buddha. Similarly Jain versions of Ramayana project Ram as the propagator of Jain values, especially as a follower of non-violence. What do both Buddhist and Jain versions have in common is that in these Ravan is not shown as a villain but a great spiritual soul dedicated to quest of knowledge, endowed with majestic commands over passions, a sage and a responsible ruler. Popular and prevalent "Women's Ramayana Songs" of Telugu Brahmin Women, put together by Rangnayakamma, keep the women's concern as the central theme. These songs present Sita as finally victorious over Ram and in these, Surpanakha succeeds in taking revenge over Ram.

In Thai Ramkirti, or Ramkin (Ram's story), there is a twist in the tale and Shurpanakh's daughter decides to take revenge attributing her mother’s mutilation primarily because of Sita. More interestingly here the focus is on Hanuman, who in this telling is neither devout nor celibate but quite a ladies’ man, looking into the bedrooms of Lanka. In Valmiki, Kampan and Tamil tellings Hanuman regards seeing another man’s sleeping wife as a sin, but not in this Thai version. Incidentally he is a very popular Thai hero even today. Also like Jain Ramayana this Thai telling focuses on genealogy and adventures of Ravana and not of Ram.

In recent times Jotiba Phule who stood more with the interests of Dalits and women, was amongst the first to interpret this mythological tale from the perspective of those subjugated by caste-varna-gender hierarchy. Phule points out that upper castes were descendents of conquering Indo-Europeans who overturned the original egalitarian society and forbade the conquered from studying texts. His mythology is woven around King Bali, who could invoke the image of peasant community. Needless to say his murder by Lord Ram from behind is condemned and is seen as an act of subjugation of lower castes by the upper castes. And Ram is seen as an avatar of Vishnu out to conquer the land from the Rakshasas (those protecting their crops) for establishing the hegemony of upper caste values of caste and gender hierarchy.

Dr. Ambedkar and Periyar's commentaries are more an alternative reading of the Valmiki's text rather than a separate version. There is a good deal of overlap in the interpretation of both. Dr. Ambedkar focuses his attention on the issues pertaining to Ram's killing of Shambuk for violating the prevalent norm where a low caste has no right to do penance, tapasya. Like Phule he also castigates Lord Ram for murdering the popular folk king Bali. He questions Ram's act of taking Sita's agnipariksha, trial by fire, and his patriarchal attitude towards her. After defeating Ravan he tells Sita that he had done all this battle not to get her released for her own sake but to restore his honor, and his banishing her in response to the rumors about her chastity when she was pregnant comes for severest criticism from Ambedkar.

Periyar is basically taking the same line but in his interpretation the North Indian upper caste onslaught-South Indian resistance becomes the central theme. Periyar the initiator of ‘Self Respect Movement’ was the pioneer of caste and gender equality in Tamilnadu. In one of the movements, which is very less known, on the lines of Dr. Ambedkar burning Manusmriti, he planned to burn the photo of Ram, as for him Ram symbolized the imposition of upper caste norms in South India. This was a part of his campaign against caste Hinduism. Periyar also upheld Tamil identity. According to him the Ramayana story was a thinly disguised historical account of how caste ridden, Sanskritic, Upper caste North Indians led by Ram subjugated South Indians. He identifies Ravan as the monarch of ancient Dravidians, who abducted Sita, primarily to take revenge against the mutilation and insult of his sister Surpanakha. In his interpretation Ravana is practitioner of Bhakti, and is a virtuous man.

It seems the dropping of the essay from syllabus is under indirect political pressure of communal forces. RSS and affiliates who have reaped rich benefit from the campaign around Lord Ram are also giving the political message of caste and gender hierarchy, through the version upheld by them, the one of Valmiki and presented in current times by Ramanand Sagar’s tele serial Ramayana. And the politics claiming to be tolerant is intolerant about scholarly renderings of ‘Many Rams: Many Ramayanas’ prevalent World over!