From Rama to the Ramayana, from the Ramayana to Bengali Literature Myth, Humanism and Cultural Reconstruction: A Contemporary Rereading

Dipak Paramanik

From Rama to the Ramayana, from the Ramayana to Bengali Literature Myth, Humanism and Cultural Reconstruction: A Contemporary Rereading

Author(s)	Dr. Dipak Paramanik
Country	India
Abstract	In the long tradition of Indian culture, Rama and the Ramayana are not merely a religious narrative; they form a many-layered repository of ethical thought, family values, political ideas, folk memory and artistic forms. In Valmiki’s Sanskrit epic, Rama is an ideal yet conflicted and sorrow-stricken human being; in the hands of Krittibas Ojha in the fifteenth century, the same Rama becomes steeped in the domestic emotions and devotional sensibility of Bengal. In the sixteenth century Chandrabati placed Sita at the centre of the narrative, and in the nineteenth century Michael Madhusudan Dutt, by constructing the tragedy of Ravana’s side in Meghnadbadh Kabya, called into question the conventional division between hero and antagonist. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s theory of myth, A. K. Ramanujan’s idea of “many Ramayanas” and Linda Hutcheon’s theory of adaptation, this paper analyses the transformation of the Rama story from Valmiki through Krittibas, Chandrabati, Vidyasagar, Madhusudan and Tagore to folk culture and the digital media of the twenty-first century. Through a discussion of the humanisation of Rama, the voice of Sita, the reinterpretation of Ravana, Ramayana-derived proverbs in the Bengali language, and the contemporary political and cultural context, the paper shows that the Ramayana is not a fixed text but an ongoing cultural dialogue rewritten anew in every age.
Keywords	Rama, Ramayana, Krittibasi Ramayana, Chandrabati, Meghnadbadh Kabya, myth, adaptation, many Ramayanas, feminist rereading, folk culture, Indian Knowledge Systems, digital culture.
Published In	Volume 12, Issue 1, January-June 2021
Published On	2021-06-04

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From Rama to the Ramayana, from the Ramayana to Bengali Literature Myth, Humanism and Cultural Reconstruction: A Contemporary Rereading

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