In Our Time - The Ramayana

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic which is regarded as one of the greatest works of world literature. Its importance in Indian culture has been compared to that of the Iliad and Odyssey in the West, and it’s still seen as a sacred text by Hindus today. Written in Sanskrit, it tells the story of the legendary prince and princess Rama and Sita, and the many challenges, misfortunes and choices that they face. About 24,000 verses long, the Ramayana is also one of the longest ancient epics. It’s a text that’s been hugely influential and it continues to be popular in India and elsewhere in Asia. With Jessica Frazier Lecturer in the Study of Religion at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu StudiesChakravarthi Ram-Prasad Distinguished Professor of Comparative Religion and Philosophy at Lancaster Universityand Naomi Appleton Senior Lecturer in Asian Religions at the University of EdinburghThe image above shows Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Lakshmana and devotees, from the Shree Jalaram Prarthana Mandal, Leicester. Producer Luke Mulhall

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoyed the program. Hello, the ancient Hindu epic, the Ramayana, is one of the greatest works of world literature. Its importance in Indian culture has been compared to that of the Iliad and Odyssey in the West,

and it's still seen as a sacred text by Hindus today. Written in Sanskrit, it tells the story of the legendary prince and princess, Rama and Sita, and the many challenges, misfortunes and choices they face. About 24,000 verses long, the Ramayana is also one of the longest ancient epics. It's a text that's been hugely influential, and it continues to be popular in India and elsewhere in Asia. We're in many discussed in Ramayana are Jessica Frazier, a lecture in the study religion at the University of Oxford, and a fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hindu Studies.

Chakravati Ram Prasad, distinguished professor of comparative religion and philosophic at Lancastert, and Naomi Appleton, senior lecturer in Asian religions at the University of Edinburgh. Naomi, would you like to start by giving us a brief summary of the plot? Okay, so the story of the Ramayana is the story of Rama. So Ramas Ayana means something like Rama's journey or Rama's adventures. And on a very basic level, it's the story of how a god named Vishnu takes human form as Rama in order to defeat a demon or a rakshasa named Ravana. And he has to do this as a human because Ravanaugh is invulnerable to the gods.

So that's the basic frame of the story, which then plays out on the human realm. And so Rama is a prince. He is the eldest of four sons of the king of Ayodya. So the king of Ayodia named Dasharata has three wives and four sons. Rama is the eldest. And as such, he's going to be consecrated as the king. but one of the younger queens, Kaikeyi, instead manages to manipulate the situation so that her son, Barata, is going to be king instead,

and Rama has to go into exile for 14 years. So Rama goes off into the forest. He's accompanied there by his very beautiful and very virtuous and very loyal wife, Sita, and also by another of his brothers named Lakshmana. And so the three of them have lots of adventures in the forest, but the pivotal moment comes when Sita is abducted by this demon, this Rakhraza named Rava. So Ravana wants Sita for his wife.

He takes her captive on his island kingdom of Lanka. And Rama and Lachmana spend a long time trying to rescue her, essentially. So they make a powerful alliance with a kingdom of monkeys, not ordinary monkeys, I should say, but semi-divine monkeys. They help to find Sita. They build a bridge across to Lanka. And they also constitute the army that then goes to war with these Rakhshazzes. And so after a long battle, Rama finally kills Ravana, which is of course the whole point in terms of the divine frame.

And Sita then is reunited with Rama. And as it happens, the 14-year exile just happens to be over. So they go back to Iodia and Rama rules for many thousands of years. Although the happy ending is tempered somewhat by what happens shortly thereafter. He comes to hear that Sita's reputation is tarnished. And so he decides, in fact, to banish her to the forest. So she ends up in the forest giving birth to their twin sons. So do we know who wrote the Romayana?

Well, we do and we don't. We don't really know much about the question historically, but we do have an author named, who is a Vedic Rishi called Valmiki. But Valmiki, really, more than anything, is a character within the text. So, in fact, if you go back to where I ended the summary of the plot with Sita in the forest

giving birth to twin sons, she's actually taken in, she's given refuge by Valmiki. He allows her to live in his ashram. He raises her sons as his descendants, and more important than anything else, he teaches them the Ramayana that he has composed. And so, in fact, we get this wonderful literary framing where Valmiki, the author, is present at the end of the epic, and he's also present at the beginning where we find out his reasons for composing the epic inspired by the gods.

Thank you. Jessica Frazier. So we've talked about what it is about. When did it come into currency? Well, I mean, dates are unclear, but probably sometime around 500 BC. And that is what people sometimes call the axial age. It's the time when all around the world there are city states, there are states, there are kingdoms and kingships arising all over the place. And this is changing the face of the globe from a kind of a tribal multicultural into something more invested into the ideology of state. This is happening in India and it's happening just above the Ganges, if you like, across. the Ghanjetic plane from modern Punjab all the way to Nepal and beyond. The rise of those kingdoms makes a huge difference.

And we get both the blessings and the curses of a kingdom-shaped society. So on the one hand, the blessings include wealth and technology. The descriptions of Rama's kingdom in the text talk about roads. Roads are important. People can travel and engage and meet each other. It talks about fortresses, their safety, their gardens, parks, there's theatre and entertainment, there are markets with goods, arts with artisans. Importantly, there are also philosophers and there's poetry happening in a sense for the first

time on a large scale. So there's a wonderful kind of rise of civilisation. But on the other hand, I mean, this is written round about the time of the Odyssey and Iliad in the West and we have the, we have the Ramayana and the Mahavarata, which is a companion piece loosely speaking. frown, but still, I think it'll will just about pass muster. It's wonderfully curious that these two things are happening at about the same town.

Could you give it a go? Because it is obscure to me. It's a really good question because it's happening everywhere, right? Confucius in China, we've got sort of Plato and Socrates in Greece, that the whole sort of pre-Socratic philosopher thing is happening over there. Again and again we see

cities create spaces where people can come together and have serious conversations, and they're not busy simply trying to till the land, they're not busy trying to merely survive. Something about an urban setup allows people to develop new ideas. And I think with that comes the notion that if you've got kings, you need kingship ideologies, right? A king is just a big chieftain,

but one who doesn't know his people because they're too far spread. So you need big-scale ideology to start to create something that's coherent for everyone. But I think these cities in some ways what's really important about them is they're large enough to have really significant institutions. So some of the Buddhist cities have universities. They've got palaces. They've got city planning. And it's things like that. They've got rice stores, right, that everyone can come to to be fed.

And it makes a huge difference. It's really investing yourself, really worth investing yourself in these centres. Because even if you're in the country now, they can help you through a famine. It's worth caring about the king. in a new way, or at least that's what the kings want you to believe. You're portraying something perilously like a golden age. Well, you stopped before I got to the curses of an urban situation. Well, where you go, then.

Yeah, exactly. Curse number one is that immediately you've got a monarchy, you've got challenges in succession. And that's one of the central themes, actually, not only of the Ramayana, but the other epic. You've also got problems of corruption. So the bad demon king, Ravanaugh, who steals Rama's wife, is depicted as opulent, greedy,

bullying. He's hedonistic. He's everything that you don't want a king to be. And you've got challenges of public confidence. So towards the end of the story, when Rama has to give up his beloved wife, who he's spent his whole time trying to save, that's because there's a loss of public confidence. He has to do what's right, even if he doesn't want to. So there's a lot of danger there. It really shows you the difficulties of an urban world. As well as this world where the kingdoms are arising, what's important about the Ramayana is, unlike the other epic, it wants to be a lot of wants to go beyond the walls of the kingdom and remember that outside of this new world arising in northern India, there's still many tribes, many peoples, many different indigenous groups cultures.

And what's really interesting about this epic is that the king leaves behind his nice, civilized, safe world and goes to explore what is a wilder, more mysterious, larger, actually kind of multicultural world. So whereas the other epics can be quite focused on kingship, Rama's almost also a kind of a multicultural cultural text. It wants to bring in the other cultures that are around these kingdoms in this early period. Thank you very much. Chagrebā Rang Prasad.

What's interesting about the language in which this is composed? Around this time, probably the 4th century BCE, something quite dramatic and radical happens to Sanskrit. A mysterious, otherwise mysterious

figure called Panini, systematises the grammatical rules of a language that has been sort of attested been shifting over the previous thousand years, what is normally called Vedic Sanskrit or ancient Sanskrit. Thereafter, extraordinarily from, say, the second first century BC onwards, apart from a few notable exceptions, all compositions in Sanskrit follow this grammar. So to this day, what is now called classical Sanskrit

follows these rules and makes for a remarkable homogeneity and grammatical consistency so that even a thousand years apart philosophers can debate with texts from the past or there can be intertextuality in poetry and so forth. And you say this is the first time that's happened? As far as we know, no other language has this systematization which makes it into a particular kind of

cosmopolitan language. We see how Greek, for example, the shift from Homeric Greek to classical Greek leads thereafter to vulgar Greek and the falling away of what was thought as classical Greek. Same thing happens with Latin. We find that shift with classical Chinese from about the 6th or 7th century onwards

during the Tang. Whereas with Sanskrit, while the languages of society continue to change what are called Prachrits, the common languages, which become the ancestors of today's languages in India, Sanskrit almost sort of hives off and becomes this formal tongue. Now, the Ramayana exemplifies this shift. It's still showing a few pre-Paninian traces,

but it starts following this kind of grammatical and literary rules. Consequently, Valmiki, the supposed poet of the composer of the Ramayna, is normally called the first poet, so that all other poetry in Sanskrit thereafter literally for the next two and a half thousand years

come to be seen as successors to his composition. So a wonderful poetic image about how poetry began is discovered. He's in the woods. A crane gets killed. The shriek is nearly the same wood as a poem and off we go. That's right. The word that Valmiki uses, wants to use,

is the word for grief, Shoka, instead of which he mispronounces it and it becomes Shloka, which is a particular metre, which is the most dominant or the most popular, the simplest, the most transparent way of composing in Sanskrit. So again, the highly formalised notion of the formation of poetry coincides with a kind of immersion in the depth of human feelings, of emotion, which sets the Rameina again as the exemplar for the exploration of human being,

as emotional being, in the subsequent millennia. That's fascinating. Is this an elitist language, or is it spread abroad? So the Rameh itself, as far as our historical analysis goes, tend to think was composed by wandering bards and not a single person who sat and wrote, or indeed as a frame story, has it. But if they did, they must nevertheless have been adhering to certain recognized and elite grammatical rules. However, by the time the text is redacted in its final form, probably in the first two or three centuries of the common era,

it has certainly moved away from what we think of as these bardic roots, almost like Homer, and become very much a court poem. That's fascinating. Naomi, can you take that on? Were people reaching out for it? Were they pleased to have it? Would they enjoy being a Sanskrit society? I think there's so much evidence throughout history of the reception of the Ramayana in a positive way.

And that's not to say that it was always this particular test. But I think the poetry, the courtly life that builds up as a result of what Jessica was saying earlier, this urbanisation, the emergence of these great cities and these great institutions. Yeah, I think it was a high culture, but it was a culture that was certainly valued. And once it got a group, it kept the group, Sanskrit. It did and it didn't. So there are also great literary cultures from other languages of India and indeed great works of retelling the story of Rama in other languages too.

There's a great 12th century Tamil reminder, for example, and a great 16th century Hindi one. So this didn't soar above everything else and obscure everything else by its flight? No, it remained an important cultural force and remains so today, but not to the exclusion of all others. A theme of this great poem, Jessica, is virtue.

How is that presented? One of the things that's changing the face of Indian society this time. And would do so permanently in about 500 BC is that a radical new spiritual movement is arising. And the spiritual movement is kind of basically a shift towards what we think of as ascetic culture. Holy men and holy women are leaving home all over the country, leaving behind the templates that society gives, devoting themselves to spiritual goals and really taking up life in the forest, in the wilderness, far away, fasting, meditating.

And the cultures understands them as achieving great spiritual wisdom and also great spiritual power. The Ramayana is filled with beautiful descriptions of the world of the forest. It's almost like a kind of a cottage core pastoral fantasy of spiritual life in these ashrams, these hermitages. And there are flowers, there are ponds filled with lotuses, there are beautiful forests of fruit, there are monkeys, there are deer. It's a wonderful place. So probably the reality was more complicated. but I think it is the case that it offers a way to completely renounce social temptations and completely focus.

And yoga is a huge part of this, that the great spiritual technique that arises in India is about a kind of a self-introspection, a self-reflective, often solitary focus on the spirit. And this is a huge influence. Was it come from? We don't really know. It's a mystery that the rise of kind of yogic traditions in India, which some of the early text are controversial, but at least in the Upanishad. So you see something about 400,500 BC.

The rise of Buddhism is part of this. It's a technique that's perhaps more focused on inward introspection than almost anything we see around the word. It's a big claim. I'm going to get in trouble for that. But it's a really unusual thing. And it creates a notion of virtue as a kind of self-control, a noble restraint, a high... What are they controlling themselves against?

I think it's the same as if you look at Plato and the Greeks. There's a concern about the passions. And indeed, the Romina is full of stories of characters who are taken away by their passions of jealousy or greed or lust or fear. So moderation in all things, is it? Moderation and all things. And there's a sense in this, all these characters who turn up, men and women, which is really interesting,

almost more female holy figures in the Romina than any text I've come across, who have completely devoted themselves to these skills. They're completely self-controlled. and they have a profound spiritual power that comes with that. Rama represents that. It's like taking the ideal king and making him also an ideal yogi. Before Rama, the great image of a divine king was Indra, who's a bit like Zeus.

He probably is linked historically to Zeus or Yahweh. He's a king of the gods who wields a thunderbolt. He's a big strong warrior. Yawah being the god of the Israelites. Yeah, possibly that we don't really know there may be an ancient Near Eastern route for all of these characters. is the sort of king of the gods patriarchal warrior figure, whereas Rama arises in this period as a slightly a new figure, if you like, of ideal divine kingship.

He's a warrior, a lover, a husband, and also a holy man, also a wise man. He's the ultimate philosopher king. In many ways, I think of him as like King Arthur. In the same way that Arthur represents humble kingship for the good of the people. But King Arthur's story is always going to be a little bit of a tragic one, and often around love being in conflict with the public confidence of the people. So he does well, but it's a complicated role.

Ram, can you tell us about the concept of Dharma? So virtue is one of the possible translations of this many-sided word. It means everything from cosmic and social order through to personal duty and virtue. And both in the Mahabharata and in the Ramayana, and thereafter in many different genres of texts, from sort of philosophical writings to law codes to religious texts, you have this word explored in its different dimensions. So Rama is called the Dharma Purusha,

the man who is of dharmic virtue. Now, what's going on there are two or three different things as this text over time, seeks to coalesce different, often contradictory impulses that are being generated and debated in that society. As Jessica has been talking, saying, Rama is the king and a king hierarchizes, preserve social order,

meets out punishment for those who step out. And some of the most heart-rending examples in the Ramayna are when Rama has to, punish or even kill somebody who steps out of their role in society. At the same time, he's also having to exemplify what it means to be a good son. He leaves for the forest gladly, although his own brother, Bartha, who would otherwise be the beneficiary of his mother's request, begs him not to. He is, of course, the ideal husband.

but what we mean by the ideal husband is something that is debated through the subsequent centuries both within Valmiki's Ramayna and in other compositions because what does it mean to be a virtuous man? What does it mean to be a virtuous husband or father? We might be able to give different interpretations of it.

So in some ways, Rama is a virtuous husband because he loves his wife and treks across an entire continent to save her, to rescue her. But at the same time, because people might have thought that she was robbed of her virtue in the time she was held captive by Ravana, he asks her to go through a fire to prove her purity. Because she'd been in somebody else's house, it doesn't accuse her of being unfaithful in any sexual way, but being in the other person's house was enough for him to make her take this test. Yes, exactly.

The text makes it very clear. Rama does not personally doubt Sita. He says, what will people think? She answers back in a very fiery way and says, why, as she says, why are you talking to me like a vulgar man would to a vulgar woman? How are you even bringing out these connotations? Then she ups and says, I will go into the fire, see what happens. And at that point, when she steps into the fire,

the gods convert, make the fire into garlands, and they remind Rama, you are God on earth. Have you forgotten? He said, I just thought of myself as a lot. a man, he says. Now, that episode has been endlessly interpreted and questioned exactly because every sort of generation has recognized that what we mean by virtue cannot always be held unchanging. The context changes and therefore our judgment of what drama might be changes. In fact, even by the sixth century, there's a very famous play which rewriters.

this last episode of Rama's life, in which Ram is almost a wretched creature. He's always castigating himself for having dared doubter, and his wrongness is exalted. Whereas a thousand years later, the Hindi epic that was written by Thulsi Das in the 16th and 17th century, of the retelling of the Ramayna, absolutely makes Rama unquestioning,

about the rightness of his directive to Sita to step into the fire. So it's not just that there is a clear trajectory from some kind of deeply conservative hierarchizing mode to a kind of a liberal understanding of how dare Rama behave in this unvirtuous way. It's rather that each context has thrown over the centuries different readings of what it means for Rama to be virtuous and therefore judges' actions differently in different compositions. That's excellent. Thank you very much. Naomi. When I was rereading the epic recently, the Valmiki version that we're talking about primarily today,

I was struck by how painful the chapters are that lead up to Rama, accusing Cedar of being impure. And it's really interesting each time you come back to this as a great work of literature. I think you see something different. But my reading this time, I was very conscious of that shift in tone from a very kind of excited war, success, hooray, to this terribly dark tone. own. And actually, I think the text leaves it quite ambiguous as to whether Ram really doubts Sita or not. It leaves it open. He says afterwards, oh, well, I was just testing

you because I was worried about what the public might think. But at the point to which it happens, as an audience member, you can really worry. You can really get involved in that emotion. And I think that is, going back to what Ram was saying earlier about poetry being born out of emotion. That is what is at the heart of this epic's power for me is you enter the emotion of the story with the characters. Jessica, could you tell us how CETA's portrayed? CETA's really fascinating character and in a way if this epic is partly about compassion, she's one of the centres of that compassion because she goes through so much. In some ways, just as Rahma's the ideal man, CET is the ideal woman. And that comes out in two contrasting ways,

which I think are really fascinating. On the one hand, she's the perfect wife. And that's brought out again and again. She's the first part of the story. She's the ultimate beautiful princess who's won over by the handsome prince. And she's described as being beautiful. She's a voluptuous beauty.

She's also seen as being very brave, however. So that when she's kidnapped by Ravana, the demon, she goes through this kind of, you know, he tries to put her through a Stockholm syndrome situation where he constantly tempts her, Rama, your husband is poor, which is true at that point. He has no kingdom. It's true at that point. You may never see him again. Totally true at that point. So why don't you accept me, he says. And then when she says, no, he threatens her, I'll eat you. Pretty serious stuff. And she, you know, oh gosh, she says no again. And at some point very cleverly, he says, look at my wealth and know that your youth is fleeting. If you do not take this off now, you may lose the chance later to find yourself a husband who will take care of you. So accept me now.

stays true through all of this. And when Rama comes to her again indeed, I think it's really clear that he loves her, whether he doubts her or not, he loves her deeply, he says again and again, my dark darling with lotus petal eyes, you are my life's companion, I cannot live without you. He loses it. He completely is distraught. He faints at one point. He really makes you feel he doesn't want to live without her. So she's the perfect wife and she commits to that all the way through. But on the other hand, there's this kind of almost darker, mysterious side of CETA, which is about a woman asserting her independence. So that all the way through, there's a sense that women have power in the text. There are all these kind of independent, holy women living in their ashrums, achieving spiritual greatness.

There's a certain degree of solidarity between CETA and the other women in the text. So even Ravana's wives help her. And when the war is won and her husband wants to punish these wives of his enemy, she says, no, it wasn't their fault. So that at the very end of the text, when it really matters, and Rama has accused Sita and Sita at the very end who has been sent into exile,

ironically, she said to him the day before, I wish we could go back and live in the forest. It was so beautiful there. We could devote ourselves to spiritual things. The next day, Rama hears that the people have been gossiping that Rama's the kind of man will take back his wife from another man's bed. And he gulps, he takes it on, and he says,

honey, you can go visit the forest and doesn't tell her that she won't be able to come back. But she accepts it. She's pregnant at this stage. She lives in the forest as a holy woman, as a single mother raising two sons in an impoverished situation in the wild. And when he finally comes back, there's this wonderful scene where you think it's going to be the ultimate happy endings, the very end of the epic. And the people have repented, oh, we were wrong, Cita is virtuous. The great sage says, Cita, I know from my spiritual power, she's completely pure. Rama says, I was a fool. I love Cedar, you know, bring her back. The gods come and watch from the clouds to see the reunion. The animals come and cheer. And Rama goes to her and she comes out of this hermitage in the wild, clad in her yellow robes of a holy woman. And she says, I will undertake the test. But what she does this time is totally different and unexpected. She calls to the earth, take me in again. And a golden throne rises from out of the ground, covered in jewels, on the head. carried on the heads of spiritual beings.

She serenely goes and sits in the throne and the throne withdraws her back into the earth again, never to be seen. And there's silence and amazement from everyone. It says they're kind of in a state of awe, this absolute stillness, except the gods cry out, well done, CETA.

So she represents a kind of independence of women that you completely commit to your family, but you don't take anything. And when it's needed, there should be a refuge you go to, that is your own center of strength. That was terrific. Ram, we entered the sphere of divinity in that answer. Can you pursue it?

Yes. Again, from the historian's perspective, the text clearly has layers of composition. It took several centuries before it took its final form. In fact, there are slight variations in different actions in the north and the south. So you could go through as a philologist and say, ah, well, what's going on here?

What's going on there? There are two basic modern views of the role of divinity in the Ramayana. One says that primarily this was a heroic text. Rama was exactly as Jessica was saying earlier. The figure who represented the emergence of a new form of rulership, i.e. a king. And gradually that heroism was reinterpreted to make the text more appealing to an emerging form of theism that was happening across the subcontinent. And in this transition phase, there were later layers of composition by which this earlier hero was transformed into a god

and finally by about the 9th or 10th century several centuries after the text had taken its final form the role of this god Vishnu as Rama on earth was in turn further integrated into a particular kind of theology in which Rama and Sita came to represent the totality of ultimate divinity of God himself and herself, because Sita comes to be seen as the grace, the prosperity, the benedictory power of God. So if you see it in that way, There's this long historical development, perhaps over 1,500 years, from which an early poem, heroic poem in the true epic mold compared to other Indo-European compositions slowly becomes a retelling of God on Earth.

The other way of looking at it, the way most Hindus have looked at it through all this time, is that from the beginning, Rama was exactly both man and God. a concept in a very different context, not unknown in the West. So in that telling, right from the beginning, the idea that Rama came down, that Vishnu came down to Earth as Rama as a human being, because Ravana, as Naomi said, was invulnerable to the other gods

and could only therefore be killed by a human being, was there from the very beginning. But even the most devout Hindus, I think, if they read the text, cannot deny that there is at least a layering of more sophisticated notions of theology as you go through the text. So that this idea of a God on earth subtly becomes God on earth. It becomes the manifestation of divine will in which, Sita and Rama come together. Another character, I don't think we've touched on yet, is Hanuman, Jessica. Hanuman's one of the most beloved characters in fiction, one of my favorites.

Hannibal is really the character who brings the colour and the joy in some ways to a lot of the story. Essentially he's a monkey character and he's part of this world that Rama enters into when he's exiled. he goes into the wilderness with his brother and sister, into a world of forests, of demons, of spirits, of animals. When seat has taken away, he needs help from the monkey kingdom. And when he goes to them for help, they say, the person who can help you most is Hanuman, our greatest general. He's magical. He's a monkey. He's magical.

He's the son of the wind god Vyu. He's also, in some version said to be a incarnation of Shiva. And that means he has all kinds of powers that really enliven the whole story. When he goes to give comfort to CETA in her captivity, he's captured by the demons and they set fire to his tail. But that's okay because he has the power of growing incredibly large and stomping around the island and setting fire to everything there or growing incredibly small like a mouse and creeping away from any captivity.

He sets fire to everything and flies back home again. Later when Lakshman Rama's brother needs a magical healing herb from the Himalayas, He leaps up, he says, don't worry, I'll go to the Himalayas. I'll fly there in the middle of the battle, flies over, gets to the mountain, can't find the herb. What am I going to do? No problem. He picks up the whole mountain, balances it on his hand, flies back across the ocean, says, here's the herb. Not sure which one, but here they all are, in fact.

So he's full of these wonderful stories that add kind of the magic and the energy to the story. And I think on top of that, he has two important meanings. One is that he represents absolute affectionate strength of heart, where Rama's emotions have to be muted sometimes because he's this ascetic king. Hanuman's emotions are full-hearted. He's there for everyone. And in a lot of modern Indian sort of Hindu images of Hanuman,

you see him pulling open his chest to show his heart, which is full of Rama and Sita. He's about a kind of affectionate love that is, absolutely affirmed and actually central to why he's worshipped as divine in many cases. Interestingly, Hanaman is a god who's associated with kind of male friendship, with strong men. Sometimes he's a god of bodybuilders. But he doesn't mean masculinity and strength as a kind of stoic, angry, brutish thing. It means education.

It means an articulate expression of your affection and an absolute love that is not a shame that is in fact part of your strength. Naomi, can you summarize what are the ethical messages and ideas in this work? So on one level, the ethical framing of the Ramayana is quite straightforward. It seems to be saying that good must triumph over evil, the gods must triumph over the raqqis, the demons, Dharma, virtue or righteousness must triumph over a-dharma. And so this is quite a straightforward ethical reading of what's going on. But one of the things I love about the Ramayana is that it's never really that clear-cut. So not only does Rama do some things and other heroes, particularly Lakshmana perhaps, do some things that we find a bit troubling, but Ravana isn't entirely bad.

And indeed, there's another demon, another Rakshsa, Ravana's brother, who's really very good and ends up being crowned as the new king of Lanka. So there's lots of different ambiguities, lots of different layers of explanation. And one of the ways I like to think about this is because the epic is never, you're never reading the Ramayana to find out what happens. Everybody already knows what happens. Even a modern reader knows what happens before they read the text because the very first chapter of the very first book is essentially a summary of the story. So you're not reading the reminder to find out what happens.

You're reading the reminder to find out how it happens or why it happens. And for me, that's part of the power of the text as an ethical text because everybody's having to engage actively with the how and the why. And they're thinking through the different layers of explanation for everything. Is this fate? Is this character's acting correctly? Is there something going on that maybe means that they're not quite acting correctly? And all of these questions help you to engage actively with the text. Jessica, to take this through, speaking of a tremendous impact this has had on people,

can you develop that a bit? The Romayana becomes in many ways the great myth of most of Asia, and we see versions of it all the way across through Southeast Asia, into China and to Mongolia. It's a divine kingship story. It's an ideal society story, and that means it's going to be picked up again and again, and it has every possible element within it. So that actually over the years, there are so many retellings.

It must be one of the world's most retold tales. Within India, we see versions in Tamil and in Tibet, in the deep south and the deep north of India. And that's different versions that do different things. There's one that Hanuman Chalisa is all about Hanuman as a divine object of reverence, or the Rama-Chered Manus of Tulsi Das is hugely influential on Hindu worship. You get a version called the Yoga Vishitshah that's all about Rama as a philosopher, trying to understand the nature of reality. So you can do all kinds of things with the text within Indian culture,

but it spreads further than that. So that actually, as it goes into, for instance, Southeast Asia, we see versions in China, we see versions all the way down in Indonesia where even a Muslim retelling can be found. Rama becomes something more like the great Sufi, the Muslim mystic king, and the magical world is a bit like the Arabian Knights, the 1,0001 knights. So it fits into that culture and it fits perfectly into Buddhist cultures where Rama is kind of like the Buddha if he decided to stay a king

but to continue to keep up this kind of great spiritual integrity. So we see versions in Thailand, the Ramakien. And actually, interestingly, Thai monarchy, I think the current line of the Thai monarchy, took on the name Rama to signal that they are in fact virtuous kings and possibly divine kings. If you go to Bangkok today, the most striking bridge on the skyline is the Rama bridge. So that this story takes on new forms again and again,

wherever you need an ideal king, whenever you need a camelot, if you like, an ideal society, you come to the Ramayana and you make it yours. Ram, to come back to you, can we develop the idea of its influence on politics, sir? There is a relatively recent development, although some people argue that the rise of Rama as this particular kind of valiant warrior goes back perhaps a thousand years. So I think there is a certain scholarly contestation over this. What seems to be the case is that taken out of that complex context that we've been talking about, Rama is undoubtedly, of course, a heroic figure. He is a warrior always seen with his great

battling bow, whose mark never misses. As such, he has become a potent symbol of what it is to be, a male Hindu, a warrior-like being who will not put up with perceived slights or threats. seen in that way, two or three steps of interpretation make Rama then become the model for the reconceptualization of Hindu society and of India itself as a Hindu society, in which strength this kind of masculinity, this kind of commitment to hierarchy, all those aspects of Rama's personality can become almost a model for what Hindu India can be.

Finally, Naomi, how would you tell listeners of the influence it's having now on readers now? Well, I hope by virtue of this programme it may spawn some new readers. There's a great translation by Goldman and Goldman that is available, that retells it in English in a wonderfully accessible form. and certainly it's never stopped having popularity in Asia. And I don't think it ever will because, as Jessica says, it's capturing something really fundamental about how we want to think about society. I would perhaps just add also it's a love story.

And it's a love story with a slightly tragic ending. And we always love those in human society, do we not? So all of these different tellings, all of these different incarnations, including television, film, comic books, They're all trying to engage with this as a living tradition and put different slants on things, see things from different perspectives. And so yes, as well as being a wonderfully interesting work of ancient literature,

the Remainer is a living tradition and will no doubt carry on being so for as long as there are humans. Well, thank you very much. Thank you, Naomi Appleton. Talk about you, Ram Prasad, and Jessica Fraser to our studio engineer Andrew Garrett. Next week, McCantilism, the economic theory that dominated Europe

between the 15th and the 17th centuries. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What do you think we missed out? Oh, that's a... What most grieves you that you didn't say, Jessica?

Okay, so what I really wanted to... I find it interesting that the story is so engaged with Indigenous groups and a perceived sense of many different tribes This is a big issue because it's written in a culture that's kind of an elite Sanskrit culture creating these kingdoms. But Rama spends most of his time with animals, with people from different tribal groups,

cultures which are sort of competing with his, but which have amazing cities and wisdom of their own, including in a sense Ravana's culture, the monkey's culture. And I think the idea that Hanuman and all these characters represent Rama reaching out to the outside world to some extent. I feel like there's a message in the Romayana about a multicultural India that isn't always taken out of the text, but it's there ready to be taken. It's funny because I've always thought of the monkeys and the demons as being more about

telling us something about humanity. So the city of the monkey kingdom and the city of the demon kingdom, they're a bit like human cities, but there's something a bit different about them. And obviously we've said Ravan is terribly passionate, proud, he's arrogant, he's lustful, he's all the things we wouldn't want from a king. And the monkey king also is a little bit too, prone to extremes of emotion and so I think they're telling us something about good kingship in that respect too perhaps the other thing I was a little

sad we didn't mention because she never gets mentioned is Shrapanika. So this is Ravana's sister who is the reason that Ravana finds out about Sita's great beauty and goes and abducts her because Shopanika wants Rama falls in love with Rama and Rama and Lachshmana are a bit mean to her to be frank and the scene ends with Lachshmna chopping her ears

and nose off and sending her packing and she goes and cries to her brother Ravan and says, you know, please come and defeat Rama. And he's not interested. Until she says, oh, by the way, Ramah's got this really, really stunning wife. I think she'd make a brilliant wife for you. And then all of a sudden, Ravana is interested.

And Portia Paniqa, she plays such an important role in the story. She gets almost no airtime following that scene. But she plays this, you know, really important scene to get Ravana and abduct Cedar. Ram? I would like to put in a word for the retellings of the Ramayna in the south. In fact, practically, I think, most modern Indian languages

have as their first recognised composition, a retelling of the Ramayna. And the earliest and most influential of this, I think Jessica briefly mentioned it, was Kumbun's Tamil Ramayna, which is composed in the 11th, 12th century. And in it, Rama is wholly divine. He's always aware of his division.

And yet, when he does these dark deeds like killing Valin, the monkey king, dying, Valen transforms his conversation with Rama into a kind of a disquisition on the mystery of a God who encompasses good and evil. So it becomes a very powerful way of asking questions about what God means. and that line of critically deconstructing itself becomes a very important part of Tamil culture. As a child, I remember how when the lower caste political movements in Tamil challenged, in the Tamil country, challenged the perception of the domination of society

by the upper caste Brahmins and their commitment to the Ramayna as a sense. sacred text. They made Ravana the true southern king. They said Rama was a northern invader because Ayodhya is supposed to be on what is now northernmost India. So they say that actually the Ramehina is the telling of a northern invasion of southern culture and Ravana represents the true victim of this story by the victors. And at the same time, of course, it also becomes a potent retelling of the Ramayna as a fable of atheism. Because if Rama, who's supposed to be God, is then the villain, then you're questioning the very idea of God himself.

And one of the exponents of it was a famous Tamil scriptwriter, became a very famous political figure. So the Ramayna's lives, just in Tamil culture, as we said about in other parts of the world, and other languages and other religions, it continues to provide energy for political, cultural, literary reimaginings that continue to this day. Yeah, absolutely.

I think it's kind of a wonderful thing that you get these interesting, subversive, alternatively positioned Ramayana's. And one of them is, that's the Tamil one, there's a wonderful Bengali one. Bengal is often seen, or it sees itself as a culture that has particularly strong women, particular sense of kind of, you know, in a sense of feminist culture.

And Mandakranta both found a text by a woman who calls herself chandravity, which seems to be authored by a woman and tells the story from CETA's perspective. And that's really fascinating that you feel kind of what people felt in franchise to go ahead and tell it and bring out other culture, other, other perspective, sorry, than Ramas. So that Cita kind of brings out that she has a really hard time and you get a totally different perspective on it. It has this flexibility. I mean, we could talk for days about the different versions, but if we're going to do that,

then we must mention also, I think, the giant versions because these are fascinating, because they suddenly integrate these huge numbers of past life stories. So everything that happens in the epic then becomes the result of past life, karmic entanglements between characters. And if I may, I also want to put in a word for a great work of Buddhist literature,

the Vesantra Ajatica, which is one of the most important stories of the Buddha's past lives in the Buddhist world. And it's very clearly riffing off the same structures and characters and themes as the Ramayana. So even in texts that are not versions of the Ramayana,

we still see the power of this text across Indian literature. I think the producers bursting to get in. Hello. I'm Paris Lees. Welcome to the flipside from BBC Radio 4. In each episode,

I'll tell two stories from Ophabwe. opposite sides of the coin, and use science to ask questions about elements of the human experience that we sometimes take for granted. Turns out that this person that I settled my apartment to, he was a scammer. I feel like now I am the person that I was when I was on the internet at 13. It's lies and it's covered with lipstick and glitter. Subscribe to the flip side with me, Paris Lees. on BBC Sounds.