DRISHANA KALITA’s subversive imagining of Soorpanakha’s version of the events that befell her, was one of the top 5 entries for June’s ‘Muse of the Month’ on Women’s Web.
I am Soorpanakha. My name is synonymous with Sin for many, encased for eternity in the pages of the epic Ramayana. I am not the role model parents would point their daughters towards. Why is that? You may ask. Because I admitted to lust. My name was pitted against Sita, the embodiment of purity and womanly virtues. She was everything I was not and I was everything she was not.
She was beautiful and so was I. Do not believe those terrible sketches of me with sharp fangs and blood shot eyes. I was a peerless beauty with large fish shaped eyes, for which my mother had named me ‘Minakshi’ at birth. A single woman, independent enough to roam the forests alone. I was free.
My freedom was my sin, as was my open sexuality. I dared to invite a man, the exiled king of Ayodhya, to make love to me.
Read this wonderful retelling here.
And as a bonus, watch Harinarayana Ehat Edneer performing Shoorpanakha in Yakshagana – ‘Main swachhand bhraman karti hoon!” she declares – I wander at my will!
KAFILA - COLLECTIVE EXPLORATIONS SINCE 2006 
How come the Yakshagana is in Hindi, and such shuddh Hindi? I can recognise the Kannada accent of course.
It might be useful to know where it was performed etc.
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These are the details available on the site, Mohan. It is described as ‘Yakshagana in Hindi’:
Published on July 30, 2012
This is how Shoorpanakha Enters. Her Daily Chores.
Yakshagana in Hindi
Owner: Yaksha Manjusha, Mangalore, Vidya Kolyur.
Bhagavata: Puttige Raghuram Holla
Chende: Padyana Shankaranarayana Bhat
Maddale: Padyana Jayarama Bhat
Shoorpanaka Artiste: Hari Narayana Bhat Edneer.
Date of Recording: Nov 2011 at Mangalore
Co-ordination: Saravu Krishna Bhat
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this is misleading piece at best. creative and fictional. The only right authority as an author on Ramayan is Valmiki, and no other, no matter how great a bhakt he is not even tulsidas. ITs the original manuscript we refer to. And its quite obvious that both the authors have not bothered to read it, not even the one that iscurrently available. one thing that no one can blame Valmiki is that the entire ramayan not once he judges, not once he says even impliedly that this is good and this is bad. the entire ramayan is a narration. how you intepret it and how you see it is a reflection of your understanding and character. Atleast one would expect to read before passing any sort of comments.
In the original valmiki ramayan, it is clearly stated that 1) Surpanakha was punished, NOT for proposing the brothers, but out of jealousy, she attacks seeta. 2) she transforms herself into a good looking woman only to woo- nothing wrong here.
3) She does go to two rakshasas who come with their army and get defeated. seeing this she goes to ravana and complains- and what does she say? she praises the physical beauty of seeta, knowing very well what would inspire ravana to take action against rama. she DOESNT say she got hurt, she says that seh was trying to bring seeta to him – ravana, a serial rapist., when rama and lakshmana attack her.
4) Ravan killed surpanakha’s husband. Besides, she wanted to sleep with rama, tand the very next minute she is fine sleeping with lakshamana speaks volumes about her sexual escapdes. iam not passing judgemnt here, but i have a different view and i guess as long as we dont impose views its fine. but DISTorting facts that is an entirely differnt thing.
5) Valmiki was a great sage not a dime a dozen journalist. He wrote every filthy thing ravan said to seeta. even the fact taht how he use to go to seeta every morning and say how sexually deprived he is (afte sleeping with scores of woman in the night) while she is wailing to let her go to her husband.
6) now great munis like the authors can pass judgement on valmiki and say he is partial??!!
7) valmiki even chides hanuman in one incident when hanuman sees mandodari and thinks she is seeta- remember mandodari is a mahaa pativrata and is revered as one of the ‘pancha kanyas’ in sanatana dharma. Valmiki says, that finally he displayed his kapi budhdi “prakrutim kapinam” is the word he uses. Again he is not being judegemental of looks or character here. He makes an observation of how one (hanuman) did not/could not make out who is who- the very purpose of his journey and how soon he was satisfied with the result wihtout actualy analysing if it matches with the purpose. He is not criticizing or judgemental, he is making an observation. infact hanuman thinks he found seeta, jumps around andkisses his tail.
Ramayana nd mahabharata are the foundation stones for the sanatana dharma. only in sanatanadharma, one can find , a spider, an elephant attaining moksha, revered for hteir bhakti. who was vyaghrapada, how did patanjali look? do we care? dotn we have highest regards for them? why? not because of what they look like who was prahalada? Bali is the next Indra for the next manavantra, why? not because of their looks, but because of their deeds, knowledge. Yes, knowledge, GNANA is placed in the Most Highest regard in Sanatana Dharma. Make no mistake.
I will deal wiht sEeta’s agni pareeksha, Shabari, & Vali’s death later! huf!
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nobuying, I just dont buy your rant! Drishana Kalita’s piece is only as ‘creative and fictional’ as Valmiki’s. Kalita writes in a long tradition of re-tellings and revisionings of the great epics – from the 16th century Molla, a Shudra woman who wrote a perfect classical Ramayana, which the Brahmins did not allow to be read in the royal court; to the 16th century Chandrabati, whose version that told the Ramayana from Sita’s point of view was criticized as a weak and incomplete text by self appointed male arbiters of taste, morality and correct religion – much like yourself. Nabaneeta Deb Sen has written about these many women’s Ramayanas, some of them living traditions still, such as village women in Bengal who sing “Ram, tomar buddhi hoilo nash’. Oh Ram, you have lost your mind.
Have you heard of Iravati Karve’s Yuganta? Read it, may open your mind, though I am not very hopeful.
Who are you, really, to declare that “The only right authority as an author on Ramayan is Valmiki”? There are those who read Kambaramayan (in Tamil) and Ezhuttachan’s version (in Malayalam), among others, who dont give a damn about your decree. Of course, you even deride Tulsi, so it’s quite likely you haven’t even heard of the languages called Malayalam and Tamil.
Please dont bother to come back to “deal with” anything else on this site!
And by the way I am fascinated to find that the link you gave to your name ‘nobuying’ (which I deleted) is to a blog which advertises a variety of products such as handwashes, razors and clothing, from which you presumably make a tidy sum while promoting sanatana dharma!
Delicious.
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And can I add, that rural women in Bihar’s Mithila, supposedly Sita’s parental home, sing ‘God, give us any husband, but whatever you do, never give us a husband like Rama’ – the song laments Rama’s suspicious nature and the great and unbearable pain he gives Sita.
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At least in one very narrow respect I have to agree with “no buying”: it is a bit unfair to criticize the original Sanskrit Ramayana (traditionally attributed to Valmiki) for the content of future “fan fiction” retellings like those of Kamban or Tulsi. Of course, various retellings themselves are now accorded the status of “great works” in the languages they were written in This is quite deservedly so: one might disagree with the judgments they pass on the morals of the various characters, but they still remain invaluable as a mirror to the state of the society which produced them and for their role in the development of literary traditions they were written in.
Nevertheless, it remains true is that Valmiki’s Ramayana is quite different from many future retellings, especially in its “neutral stance”, and lack of emphasis on the divinity or perfection of Ram. Criticizing the “Ramayana” for the portrayal of a character in, say, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmans is rather like laying the blame of the works of Sherlock Holmes pastiche writers at Arthur Conan Doyle’s door.
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“Molla, a Shudra woman who wrote a perfect classical Ramayana, which the Brahmins did not allow to be read in the royal court;”
Thanks for this piece of information. However, I cannot find any citations for the latter claim. The Wikipedia article cites an opposite claim by Varadrajan: that Krishnadeva Raya was a patron of Molla’s works.
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Ahannasmi, your utterances on the ‘orginal’ Ramayana and fan fiction re-tellings are completely unsustainable. The ‘original’ Ramayana is itself a re-telling by Valmiki bringing together elements from various versions of a similar story/stories widely circulating in the region. Five or six lines on from the reference to Molla, you would have seen my reference to Nabaneeta Dev Sen’s work on women’s Ramayanas.
The full paper is available in JStor: Rewriting the Ramayana: Chandrabati and Molla
However, you need access to JStor to read the full article, or you can read it in India International Centre Quarterly. The reference is on that page.
A shorter version is here:
Lady Sings the Blues. When Women retell the Ramayana
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Citation needed. All versions of the Ramayana I am aware of (including the ones in Buddhist and Jain tales) are supposed to trace back to the Sanskrit original (which as I pointed out, is only “traditionally” attributed to Valmiki, it is highly unlikely that the whole epic was written by one person). In any case, all the retellings that you and “nobuying” discussed are from at least 1500 years after the inferred dates of the Sanskrit original (and far closer than that interval to each other), so it is a bit, shall I say, disingenuous, to put any accretion process of the original at the same level as that of the much newer retellings, and to label my comment “unsustainable” on those grounds.
As for the Sen paper, I am a bit confused. On the topic of Molla’s poem never being read in court, Sen does not cite any references (so we have two uncited claims against each other, a classic case where it is perhaps best to hold judgement). She however does concede that there are “endless references” to her work, that she was well known enough in her lifetime to be able to earn her living as a poet, and that she was likely patronized by a court. That hardly paints the picture of a poet ignored due to her gender or caste. On Chandrabati, she seems to concede that the reason her Ramayana is not so well known might have to do with it not measuring up to “the language and the style” of her other ballads, and yet feels inclined to assign ulterior motives to her critics who include her other work in college syllabi!
One other minor point about the paper that I found a bit funny was the extrapolation based on one (yes, exactly one) sentence by one (again, exactly one) translator that “male translators” were obsessed with the “virginity” of female poets but not with that of male poets. Leaving the apparent gross over-generalization aside, I must assume that Sen has never heard of the endless legends surrounding the marital life of another well known sixteenth century reteller of the Ramayana, who also, like Molla, went for a retelling in a local rustic tongue rather than “literary” Sanskrit, but who, unlike Molla, happened to be male: Goswami Tulsidas.
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Ramayana and Mahabharata are Epics (Stories) and there re-telling of various episodes in these stories. Randamoozham by M. T. Vasudevan Nair and Yayati by V. S. Khandekar are considered master-pieces in their own right. Nobody had issued any Fatwa against them. Ezhuttachan’s version (Kili-pattu) or Tulsi’s Avadhi narrative are different from Valmiki’s Sanskrit narrative.
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I have read Bhimsen by Prem Panicker which I understand is based on Randamoozham or translated from Randamoozham. Could be wrong. Just got my hands on Mrityunjaya – The Death Conquerer, written from the viewpoint of Karna. Yayati next.
Are Kili-Pattu or Tulsi’s narration available in Hindi?
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Ahannasmi, you demand citation for my statement that the ‘original’ Ramayana attributed to Valmiki is itself a retelling – interesting, when the only citation you offer is Wikipedia, which you place on par with a scholarly peer-reviewed article, the reference to which I offered.
(You might want to check out these two posts on Wikipedia on Kafila, before you repose such unquestioning trust in Wikipedia entries:
Wikipedia, Bhanwari Devi and the need for an alert feminist public by Urvashi Sarkar
How Wikipedia Works by Bishakha Datta)
So – I’m afraid you will have to read books and papers written by Ramayana scholars, all of which if the Hindutvavaadis and Dinanath Batra had their way, would be banned, burnt, pulped, etc.
There are two volumes edited by Paula Richman, Questioning Ramayanas. A South Asian Tradition and Many Ramayanas. The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, which I find fascinating. From the papers in these volumes, I gather that various versions of the story have been told in India and Sri Lanka for thousands of years, elements from which fed into Valmiki’s version, that some scholars argue that the Buddhist Dasharatha Jataka may have preceded Valmiki’s Ramayana chronologically, and yet others, that the kernel of the Rama story is contained in the Mahabharata, predating Valmiki’s telling. The idea that Valmiki’s Ramayana is the original Ramayana and all others are re-tellings is at the very least, debatable.
And the point of this whole exercise as far as I am concerned, is that living epics will continue to be re-told, just as Valmiki did, and they will be told and understood from different perspectives. The insistence on Valmiki’s Ramayana being the only authentic one, is a political assertion, not a religious one.
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find your comments about Wikipedia unwarranted, but since they are not central to the discussion, I respond to them at the end of the post.
The part about Batra and associates is completely irrelevant to the point being discussed. While I disagree with Batra, I must point out that he was completely within his legal rights to sue Penguin, and did not resort to violence. That rich publication houses like Penguin (and later Orient Blackswan) fail to stand for the legal rights of their authors makes them party to the miscarriage of justice that took place.
Coming back to the Ramayana, you claim that the legend had been around for “thousands of years” before the Valmiki version. Before I take issue with that, I will again iterate that I never said that this version was written by one person and in fact pointed out what seems to be a consensus opinion it evolved over a few hundred years. However, I am sceptical of your claim that the legend was around for “thousands of years” already in 200BC (a reasonable date for Valmiki’s version). Even the oldest known Sanskrit legends contained in the Rigveda would be only a thousand years old at that point, and the Ramayana legend certainly dates from much later (based on linguistic and textual evidence). Suvira Jaiswal says in Historical Evolution of the Ram Legend (DOI: 10.2307/3517633) says that the earliest known version is the Dasharatha Jataka, which would be at most a few hundred years before Valmiki’s. She also points out that Valmiki’s version was the one that “played a role in stereotyping the framework of the Ram narrative” and recounts instances of how later version often stayed true to that version.
I would certainly be interested in learning more on the subject (for example, I did not know that the Dashratha Jataka possibly predates the Sanskrit original). However, I would hope that what I learn from are well-argued papers like the one by Jaiswal, and not those like the the one by Sen you cited earlier. The latter, though very well written, appears to me to be an exercise in discounting all the evidence that does not fit the author’s pre-defined conclusions.
As for your last point:
Well, I for one am not the one insisting that it is the “only” authentic one. What I am insisting on is that the available evidence suggests that retellings of Molla and Tulsi, and possibly even Chandrabati, are retellings of Valmiki’s version, and not of any older kernel. Further, they often differ significantly from Valmiki’s version in their moral content, so criticizing the original version for their “faults” is certainly “unfair”. The latter points constitute a matter of neither politics nor religion, but one of linguistic and literary history.
As for your comments on Wikipedia:
Please do not misrepresent me. I said “Wikipedia cites such and such claim to source A”, and not that “Wikipedia claims such and such”. As a scholar, you certainly know the difference between the two. In any case, as I pointed out, neither Wikipedia nor Sen’s paper provide adequate citations in support of their claims, and at least in the field I work in, this is considered a textbook case for withholding judgement until further evidence is available. Bringing up other inaccurate Wikipedia articles pertaining to a completely different subject in this context is completely irrelevant (For what it is worth, Wikipedia articles on certain subjects can be amazingly good, and as balanced and accurate as the very best academic articles).
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Ahannasmi, it is clear that you are just going to keep coming back reiterating your opinions and common sense as if they have the same status as scholarship in the actual field. You pick and read one essay by Suvira Jaiswal on the basis of which you then claim greater scholarship than Nabaneeta Dev Sen whose argument you find uncomfortable. Your comments are peppered with ‘to my knowledge’ and what ‘I am aware of’, uttered with great confidence, and eventually you concede the argument I have made – that this is a case for ‘withholding judgement until further evidence is available.’
If so, you could have spared yourself all these combative assertions based on little knowledge and great confidence.
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I also understand that you do not wish to continue so I would like to formally conclude the debate. Here is how I see it (and you hopefully agree)
1) On the question of whether Molla’s epics were read in court, we both agree that there isn’t enough evidence either way. However, we also agree that Molla did receive royal patronage, and was a popular poet in her own time and remained so later.
2) We also agree that while the version attributed to Valmiki probably came (at most a few centuries and not millennia) after the Dashratha Jathaka, it still predated all the other retellings we discussed earlier came more than a thousand years after the Sanskrit version, and came at a time when Valmiki’s version had established itself as the “stereotype” of the Ramayana narrative.
3) I am not quite sure what exactly what it is on which we disagree (except possibly on how combative the various debaters have been or whether it is Jaiswal or Sen who makes a more evidenced argument).
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Interesting that Kafila chose to not post my comment which pointed out the misrepresentations of my comments in Nivedita Menon’s last comment. I am inclined to believe this was just due to accident, and not by design (God forbid, if it is the latter, I think it reflects very badly on the standards of scholarship and the respect of truth shown by Kafila moderators). So, here is that comment again, reproduced in its entirety.
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I thought that the debate was about the history of the Ramayana narrative, and not about who is more combative or knowledgeable. I will note that your last comment does not make a single argument for or against Jaiswal’s points.
I find it interesting also that you claim that it was your idea that we “[withhold] judgment until further evidence is available”. A cursory look at the comments above will show that it was me who first said that since neither Sen nor Wikipedia provided adequate citations, there was not enough evidence offered to decide whether or not Molla was offered a chance to read her epic at the court (which was, by the way, a central tenet of your arguments, not mine). Interesting that you are arguing now that I am “conceding” to an argument I made, and that it was me who was making assertions without evidence.
Secondly, I do not find Sen’s arguments “uncomfortable”. I find them lacking in evidence, and I listed a couple of very basic and specific problems I saw in that paper. You have not offered any tangible evidence in support of those two assertions made by Sen, but have only resorted to appeals to authority and belittling comments (“little knowledge and great confidence” indeed), while accusing me of being “combative”. (For what it is worth, my comments happen to be peppered with “thanks” to you for various references, and I would leave it to outside observers to decide who is being “combative” here). At least in the academic field I work in, this is not how debates are supposed to be made.
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Hi Dr. Menon,
Oddly enough, I interacted with you over this same thing in your Doniger post! I’d like to clarify my views, if possible, by engaging with the current retelling and would be very grateful if you could clarify your views or the authors as well.
I am absolutely fine with the retelling of myths. Such retellings are often quite moving, as is the one in which Kunti is confronted by the daughter-in-law of a tribal woman whose family the Pandavas murdered during their escape from the wax house. None of the authors of the Sanskrit Mahabharata seem to have been bothered by it.
Indeed, retellings are commonplace even within the Sanskrit or brahminical tradition. In the Ramayana itself, for example, Manthara is made into a sympathetic pawn of fate, or the villain Ravana is remade into a scholar with a tragic flaw.
Reading the comments about the present story, however, what troubles me is what the author thinks that the original story was. To be frank, tt’s a fiction crafted by some bard, as a way to get the confrontation with Ravana moving. Yet the commentators of the story hark on about how history is “written by the victors,” as if the Ramayana were a history. And even if it were, how do we know the rewritten myth at hand the “correct” history?
My concern is because such rewritings have dangerous antecedents. Periyar and Phule, for example, took these stories quite literally and turned the rakshasas and asuras of the Ramayana into the ancestors of Dravidians and Shudras respectively. There is, of course, little reason to believe this to be the case. That the asuras were anti-gods and not people is well attested in the Vedas and the Avesta, and there is no reason to try and “historicize” such readings.
Of course, the most popular rendering of “Puranas Are History” and “Asuras are Dalits/Dravidians/Shudras” is Kancha Ilaiah’s famous “Why I am Not a Hindu,” which is extremely popular with the Indian Left.
Your own retired colleague in the history department, Romila Thapar, has criticized these retellings of myths when they are put forward as history. Yet noone else on the Left seems to share these misgivings, which causes me concern that neither the Left nor the Right in India understand the difference between myth and history. What is your view on what I’ve written?
Regards,
Karan
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I am no scholar or historian. Nor am I a believer, but I do wonder if Jesus Christ and Moses and all their miracles are considered history or myths or story tales?
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As far as I know, most serious historians that there was a real person living around the firs few decades CE around him the Jesus legends are based, but they also agree that all the miracles (and the story of Moses) are just myths.
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