In his famous essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” (1987) AK Ramanujan ascertains the plurality of the Rama katha. While Valmiki, the sovereignty of the “original” Sanskrit text, created in Rama the epitome of “dharma,” regional trans-creations of the epic have seen him less ideal. Such a transcreation is the Assamese variation, Saptakanda Ramayana, ascribed to the 14th-century scholar, Madhav Kandali. Interestingly, Ramanujan’s essay merely hints at the presence of an Assamese variation but provides no further details. Despite predating Tulsidas’ translation Ramcharitmanas, little scholarly attention has been paid to the text. It is this lacuna in the scholarship of the Assamese text that Tilottoma Misra tries to fill with her book Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Rāmāyaṇa: Selected Verses from the Rāmāyaṇa of Mādhava Kandalī and the Uttarakāṇḍa of Śaṅkaradeva. However, she is quick to realise the enormity of the task and instead of rendering the entire text into English, tinkers only with the representation of Sita in the Assamese translation.
While the Assamese Ramayana is titled Saptakanda – a collation of seven cantos – only five kandas were written by Madhav Kandali. The Uttara and the Adi kandas were added by the two stalwarts, Sankaradeva and Madhabdeva respectively. Before beginning her translation, Misra elaborates on the causalities which led to the creation of the Assamese Ramayana. In choosing Sita’s verses for translation, Misra’s goal has been to project the ways in which societal as well as cultural modalities of Assamese society moulded concepts of religion and gender roles. By becoming a repertoire of the Assamese idiom, Saptakanda Ramayana no longer remains confined within the edifice of translation but clines to become a transcreation. In Misra’s opinion, this distinct and somewhat subversive retelling of the epic manifests itself most strongly in the portrayal of Sita, whose character, “differs in significant ways from the way the character has been depicted in the Valmiki text.”
The “Introduction” to the selected translation testifies Misra’s research and scholarship where she elaborates on the process of translation and conceptualises her “selections” into one coherent whole. In the Assamese imagination, Rama is not deified like Krishna. Of course, he is considered an incarnation of the “supreme lord,” however, sources to support his indomitableness as compared to Lord Krishna are scanty, especially archaeologically. Thus, at the very outset, the Assamese Ramayana is different from the Hindi version of the text, popular and revered religiously in the Hindi-speaking Northern belt of the subcontinent.
The ontological problem of translating classical literature
There is no denying that the Assamese Ramayana became an important addendum to the Bhakti movement in Assam at the hands of the Assamese translators. The text also came to bear upon itself the poets’ understanding of the contemporary local context. Misra here also discusses the ontological problems that a text written in old Assamese possesses. In fact, Sanskrit made several detours before finally reaching Assam, filtering through the languages – Maithili and Prakrit. As a result, it acquired a certain “tadbhav” – meaning lexicon derived from but not necessarily similar to Sanskrit. Misra infers the futility of trying to rectify and retrieve the “original” Sanskrit spellings as that would wash off the regional colourings such as pronunciation, which has been consistently maintained, despite its peculiarities.
In the hands of Madhav Kandali and later Sankaradeva and Madhabdeva, the Ramayana gained an organicity of its own. By the time Sankaradeva was working on the text, the language itself had reached a certain maturity. Misra states that Sankaradeva handled the language rather carefully, critically examining Rama’s personality despite all the praises levied upon him. This maturing of the language worked in tandem with the emergence of bilingual poets during the fourteenth century Assam who tried to democratise as well as elevate local culture, especially since the patronage they received to carry out their work was given by indigenous rulers, most notably the Kachari Kings. Thus, while the Saptakanda Ramayana was written in conjunction with oral and written variations of the language, political considerations also played a significant role.
Women patrons and an Assamese Sita
Tilottoma Misra has chosen only Sita’s verses for translation, harping on the character’s portrayal as distinct from her northern counterpart. This difference has, according to Misra, to do with the presence of women readers and patrons in Assam. Several influential women in the Koch kingdom patronised the translations and preservation of Sanskrit texts into the local language. Sita’s portrayal depended on accommodating this awareness of women’s presence. Despite flowing from the patriarchal pens of the poets, her voice acquires a ferocity that volubly resists the oppressive patriarchal values embedded in the textual structure of Valmiki’s Ramayana.
In the present translation, Misra has retained Sita’s dialogues during her exchanges with several characters from Madhav Kandali’s cantos as well as entire dialogues from the Uttarakanda. From the very first time that she speaks, Sita rejects and responds convincingly. She has her own set of values, even though these values ultimately uphold the very patriarchy she is a part of. She rejects Rama’s definitions of stree dharma and creates her own meaning so much so that Rama eventually caves to her arguments. Her carnal attractiveness is matched by her intellectual candour. She does not shy away from hurling accusations at Lakshman when the latter refuses to leave her and help her husband alleging that Lakshman harbours illicit desires towards her and would love to have Rama dead, opposes Ravana’s advances throughout her ordeal after being kidnapped and even chides Hanumana for torturing the rakshaha women instated by Ravana to guard her pointing out their lack of agency.
Misra accentuates that in Sankaradeva’s Uttarakanda, Sita goes so far as to call her husband “Yamkal” or death himself. Even though she is quick to fall back on her guilt, that she can point fingers at her husband for branding her unchaste shows her agency. Besides, unlike Valmiki’s Sita whose physical gestures and movements are demure and non-aggressive, the Sita in Saptakanda Ramayana makes a huge display of her physical prowess- she cries beating her chest, breaks her hair when she suffers and points fingers while raging in anger.
The need for translation
Despite every attempt to render in English this often-forgotten but significant piece of literature, Misra is the first to accept her limitations. One of the challenges, she admits, has been to render into English a text written in the Assamese script from a time that is starkly different from the language spoken and written today. While translating, she is conscious of the huge cultural distance between the source language and the target language. Such distances, she believes, are disheartening at times as they are difficult to navigate. Even the two stalwarts who trans-created the Ramayana into Assamese had earlier noted their limitations and charged in with poetic liberties by claiming that they would only “fly as far as the wings would permit.” Misra therefore, uses elevated but non-archaic syntax to further the case, working around the translation quite carefully.
As a foray into the murky waters of translating classical literature from the subcontinent’s margin, Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Ramayana proves necessary, especially at a time when extreme political forces are constantly trying to homogenise the rich, diverse, subversive, and heterogenous realities of the country. One may ask, rather irritably, the reason behind creating an academic discourse centring around the Indian epics even after hundreds of years since they were first written. But mythical history handed over to a select few only runs the risk of being mangled. In a country where religion rules supreme, the existence of parallel and alternate narratives are crucial indicator of tolerance and unity.
Anannya Nath is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Pandit Deendayal Upadhyaya Adarsha Mahavidyalaya-Behali.
Sita’s Voice in the Assamese Rāmāyaṇa: Selected Verses from the Rāmāyaṇa of Mādhava Kandalī and the Uttarakāṇḍa of Śaṅkaradeva, translated and edited by Tilottoma Misra, Zubaan Academic.
