SOURCE: Rao, Velcheru Narayana. “The Politics of Telugu Ramayanas: Colonialism, Print Culture, and Literary Movements.” In Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition, edited by Paula Richman, pp. 159-85. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

[In the following essay, Rao reviews a variety of political and ideological criticism, rewritings and readings of the Ramayana.]

When the play Śambuka Vadha (Shambuka Murdered) was published in 1920, it caused a considerable stir.¹ The play is based on a story from the Ramayana but was presented in a manner that repelled its readers, who had been used to reading devotional stories of Rama. The author of the play, Tripuraneni Ramasvami Chaudari (1887-1943), whom I will introduce more fully later, depicts the killing of the Dravidian Shambuka as a murder committed by the Aryan Kshatriya king Rama at the behest of his Aryan Brahmin advisers. All traditional readers of the Ramayana in Telugu know that Shambuka is the Shudra who violates the law of hierarchically ordered social classes—Brahmin, Kshatriya, Vaishya, and Shudra—which determines a person's status by birth (varnadharma). Shambuka performs asceticism, a practice reserved for Brahmins, according to the dharma. As a consequence of this violation, a young Brahmin boy dies, and the father brings the corpse to Rama to seek explanation for this unprecedented happening. It is the king's duty to protect the dharma, and when he performs this duty, no misfortune befalls anyone in his kingdom; no one dies young, and certainly no young Brahmin dies. Rama accepts the blame, and goes out to see if a violation of dharma has occurred within his kingdom. He finds Shambuka behaving like a Brahmin and kills him as punishment. When dharma is thus restored, the Brahmin boy comes back to life. However, in Ramasvami Chaudari's version, Shambuka is a Dravidian performing religious austerities in his region. Vasishtha and other Aryan/Brahmin ministers of Rama see his austerities as a threat to their superiority and direct Rama to kill him in order to punish what they interpret as the violation of dharma. In order to make it look like a serious offense against gods and cosmic harmony, Vasishtha conspires with the Ashvins, the divine physicians, to cause the temporary death of the young Brahmin boy. Thus Rama is forced to act and kill an innocent Dravidian.

Conventional Ramayana readers were deeply disturbed at this violently unconventional reading of the Ramayana. Bringing to prominence this troubling story from the later part of the Ramayana, which many would rather overlook, proved disconcerting to many Ramayana devotees.² Even supposing that such a focus were necessary, plenty of traditionally acceptable options for treating the story were available. For example Kalidasa, in his Raghuvamśa, gives the incident a flavor of heroic elegance befitting a ruling king. In this version Rama does kill the erring Shudra, but the culprit goes to heaven—far more easily, because the king punished him, than he would have if he had pursued his path of asceticism.³ Bhavabhuti, the great eighth-century Sanskrit dramatist, presents this story in his Uttararāmacarita (The Later Story of Rama). This playwright highlights Rama's compassion and unwillingness to hand down cruel punishment to a Shudra for his violation of dharma. Bhavabhuti depicts the tragic element in the life of a king who must sacrifice his personal feelings of love and compassion in order to perform the harsh duties of kingship. In Bhavabhuti's version the Shudra attains an immortal form, thanks Rama for traveling a long distance to the forest to see him, and becomes a friend of Rama.⁴

According to Chaudari, however, Shambuka was murdered entirely because of a Brahmin conspiracy. Brahmins, who feared a Dravidian rebellion against their Aryan authority, advise Rama to kill the Dravidian sage. In a skillfully developed plot, Chaudari depicts Shambuka as a social activist who organizes Dravidian opinion in favor of fighting for their religious rights of performing asceticism according to Vedic instructions. Rama initially shows reluctance to punish a gentle ascetic, and determines that his guilt or innocence has to be established before he can be punished. Vasishtha, the royal priest, gets impatient at Rama's vacillation and demands that the sinner be instantly beheaded. Rama invites Shambuka to a debate with the Brahmin priests, but Shambuka refuses this debate unless the king assures him that the standard of judgment will be based on the Veda, the revealed texts, and not smrti, the texts written by Brahmin sages. Rama pays a visit to Shambuka and finds conversation with him very convincing and satisfying. He then returns, wishing Shambuka well, but upon his arrival Vasishtha sternly warns him that weak policies will eventually destroy his empire. He cleverly explains to Rama that the mutually supportive relationship between Brahmins and the Kshatriyas has maintained the state from times immemorial. Dravidians will destabilize the Brahmin-Kshatriya bond and eventually ruin both Brahmins and Kshatriyas. For political expediency Rama must kill Shambuka. Rama is convinced, even though he feels unhappy at having to kill an innocent Dravidian. With tragic resolve, admitting that kingly duty allows no room for personal feeling, he reminds himself of the cruel act he has recently committed in banishing innocent Sita to the forest to fulfill his kingly duty. He then solemnly cuts off Shambuka's head. Shambuka ascends to heaven in the form of a flash of light.

Chaudari's presentation of this story ran counter to the basic trust that the Telugu people had built in the Ramayana narrative. Reading Aryan/Dravidian divisions into this story proved repulsive for many Brahmin readers and traditional scholars condemned Chaudari for concocting a false tale. For almost ten years this unconventional presentation faced stiff resistance. The author persisted, arguing in favor of his position in town after town. Gradually Chaudari's reading gained attention, especially with a large educated readership from the Non-Brahmin castes and a modernist cultural movement that questioned Brahmanism and its religious sanctions.

There were serious discussions in town halls, clubs and restaurants, bar-rooms of district courts, the press, and most importantly within literary gatherings. Did Rama really rule with compassion, as depicted in the images of Ramraj, the kingdom of god? Did he act only to preserve the interests of the Brahmins? Why can't Shambuka perform austerities for his own spiritual liberation? Why should such practices be protected as the exclusive right of Brahmins? Was the Ramayana really a sacred text which was meant to liberate all its readers? Might Brahmins have distorted the text to perpetuate their control over the lower castes? Disturbing questions all—about the truth value of the Ramayana. Educated readers were split into two camps, those that supported the traditional Ramayana interpretations and those that demanded a critical reading.

During the next fifty years Telugu authors rewrote many Ramayana themes, reflecting the new trend of interrogating the conventional Ramayana: they produced plays, poems, essays, books and at least two full-length retellings of the Ramayana. Together these constitute what can be seen as an anti-Ramayana discourse. The general features of this discourse take two directions. Some assume that there was one Rāmāyana, the one written by Valmiki and followed by regional language writers, and that has one uniform ideology of supporting the Brahmins. Others assume that there was an original Ramayana written by Valmiki in which the Brahmins interpolated sections in support of their superiority. In either case, the common core of the anti-Ramayana discourse remains its anti-Brahmanism.

In this essay I present a brief study of this anti-Brahmin discourse which contests the Ramayana's claim to truth by questioning the Valmiki text and by rewriting his version to correct his pro-Brahmanic biases. But first I shall outline the historical and social conditions which led to the production of such a discourse.

THE RAMAYANA TRADITION AND VALMIKI

When we talk of the Ramayana, we begin with the version attributed to Valmiki. Well known to Western Indologists, this version has received academic attention for more than a century. The recent Ramayana translation project, which includes a team of eminent Sanskritists headed by Robert Goldman, has brought the Valmiki text once again to the center. The Ramayana received more compelling attention when Ramanand Sagar's television version made news with its unprecedented mass appeal; the violent destruction of the Babri mosque by Hindu fundamentalists followed soon after. Decades of Western scholarly attention as well as the Indian television event strengthened a homogeneous Ramayana discourse. However, with the burgeoning studies of oral epics and other folk-narrative genres in India, culminating in the publication of Many Rāmāyanas (1991), scholarly understanding of the Ramayana tradition has been radically diversified. Yet the perception remains that the Ramayana originates with Valmiki. As Sheldon Pollock puts it:

One may readily concur that the Ramayana can interestingly be viewed not as a fixed text but as a “multivoiced entity, encompassing tellings of Rama story that vary according to historical period, regional literary tradition, religious affiliation, genre, and political context (Richman 1991:16). But these tellings are always retellings of a text everyone knows. … In short, the foundational version, the version everyone knows in ad 1000-1400 and for the whole millennium preceding this period, is that of Vālmīki and his epigones. …

(Emphasis in the original)⁵

The position that traces the origin of the Ramayana narrative to Valmiki stands at the very center of the Ramayana problematic. Both traditional Ramayana readers and the leaders of the anti-Ramayana discourse see Valmiki as the author of the Rāmāyana. Yet there is a difference: the leaders of the anti-Ramayana discourse state this in a factual mode; they base their arguments on nineteenth-century Western textual scholarship and assume that the Valmiki version is empirically verifiable. For traditional readers and listeners, however, Valmiki's authorship is ideological; they do not base their statement on empirical textual evidence. They believe that Valmiki wrote the Ramayana, any Ramayana, and every Ramayana. Given all this, the question of Valmiki's association with the Ramayana narrative needs to be restated with some conceptual clarity.

For one thing, there is no version of the Ramayana that follows the Valmiki narrative in any significant detail. But then there is rarely a Ramayana author who does not state that he/she is retelling the narrative as Valmiki told it. Valmiki's name and authorship are venerated, even if his narrative is not followed. We can resolve this apparent contradiction when we separate the legendary author from his narrative. Perhaps because we have locked ourselves into a position that claims for every narrative an author who precedes it, we seem unable to dissociate Valmiki from the narrative named after him. And because we believe that every narrative begins as a single original version, to which every other telling can be traced as its retelling, we authorize the Valmiki version as the primary narrative.

We would arrive at a better understanding if we conceive of a situation where a number of Ramayana narratives are composed, based on a story popular in oral tradition, and one specific version becomes linked with the name of Valmiki. Such an association functions to construct an ideological coherence and a status for the narrative. The story of Valmiki and the killing of the krauñca birds, included in the Sanskrit text, serves to elevate Valmiki to the position of the first poet, one who has access to Narada, Brahma and other celestial beings. Associating such a venerated poet with a text, in turn, elevates the narrative. I thus see Valmiki as a signifier of the status of the narrative rather than as the producer of a particular text.

This view could also explain why there are several Valmikis. First we have Valmiki the sage who felt compassion towards the krauñca bird hunted down by a Nishada hunter, and who uttered the first verse, thus inventing poetry. This is the Valmiki we know in the epic text. Tradition also tells of another Valmiki, the bandit who turned devotee by chanting Rama's name. Brahmins gave him the syllables rāma inverted as marā because he was ineligible to receive this gift directly; he repeats it as a mantra, and via a process of repetition it turns into the sacred name of Rama. The bandit turns into a sage, around whom an anthill, valmīka, grows as he meditates in total devotion; he emerges from this shell when Rama himself comes to see him and asks him to compose his (Rama's) story. Born out of a valmīka, he is known as Valmiki. This is the Valmiki of the bhakti Ramayanas.⁶ In women's Ramayanas we find Valmiki as the biased biographer of Rama, the author who denied Sita her legitimate place in the epic. During the course of this essay I shall also meet Valmiki, the composer of a smaller, original Ramayana, which was later tampered with by Brahmins, and yet another Valmiki who served the interests of male upper-caste feudal masters to enslave the masses. Finally, there is no author called Valmiki: he simply appears, in non-literary Ramayanas, as a character in the narrative. Each Ramayana narrative thus constructed a Valmiki suitable to its needs of authorship—or left him out if no author was needed.

The Ramayana tradition allows for considerable flexibility. Some Ramayanas have earned recognition as superior works of literature, especially those written by great poets such as Kamban or Tulsidas; others, such as those produced by Telugu poets from the thirteenth to nineteenth centuries, have not acquired such acclaim; yet other Ramayanas remain authorless although they are accepted as Ramayanas all the same. This multiplicity suggests that the basic Rama story itself is treated as a kind of a text-field out of which poets, including the authors responsible for the Valmiki version, constructed a Ramayana suitable to the needs of their time and their community of listeners. Elsewhere, I have likened the Ramayana to a language, a language which enables the user to say many very different things.⁷

THE EPIC RAMAYANA AND BHAKTI TELLINGS

The Ramayana text named after Valmiki is a literary epic, an itihāsa. By an epic I mean a text perceived as history that is ideologically influential, in forming a set of new values, its institutions, and new ideals of good behavior. In the introduction to his translation of Ayodhyākānḍa, Pollock identifies the new values Valmiki's epic has established for the society of its time. According to Pollock the Ramayana's integral problem is kingship itself and its attendant problems: the acquisition, maintenance, and execution of royal power, the legitimacy of succession, the predicament of transferring hereditary power within a royal dynasty. We are naturally led to wonder why this acquisition should assume such importance for the Indian epic. One explanation may be that the problem of kingship addressed so insistently by the epic texts were new ones and, in their very nature, urgent.⁸

Regional-language Ramayanas are not epics, however—at least not the kind the Valmiki text represents. They differ in the quality of the narration and they function as bhakti texts rather than epics. I use this term bhakti to indicate that their authors composed them in the spirit of devotion to Rama as God.

The central issue of the bhakti Ramayanas is neither kingship nor the maintenance of dynastic power, but a personal relationship of the reader-listener with the deity. Rama reigns as the supreme lord, and the reader-listener enjoys every telling and retelling of his story for the sheer ecstasy of participating in the experience. The intent of the bhakti Ramayanas is not so much to tell a story but to allow the listener to experience Rama one more time in a slightly different way. The listeners already know the story. They have heard it many times, but they want the opportunity to savor their participation in the play of God. Elsewhere I have called this transformation a movement from communication to communion.⁹

However, the transition from communication to communion occurred gradually and unevenly. Many medieval Ramayanas continued to focus on the epic quality of the Ramayana narrative, so they could formulate a new social and political meaning, and a new ideology, through their text. Over the centuries the Rama story has served as a vehicle for many meanings—social, political, theological, familial and personal. Telugu poets of the Ramayana theme, as well as poets in other regional languages, present an infinite variety of modes in speaking about Rama and an endless playfulness in depicting his story. The number of Telugu literary Ramayanas alone is enormous. No theme in Telugu was retold as many times, and in as many ways, as the Ramayana theme.

For over five hundred years, from about the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Telugu poets from Brahmin families composed literary texts which they dedicated to the heads of upwardly mobile peasant-warrior clans, to traders, and to local rulers. Such dedications helped elevate the patrons to the varna status of Kshatriyas. Elevating the patron families to a varna status raised these Brahmin poets in turn to a varna status of what one might call a high-status Brahmin. Thus we find a symbiotic relationship between ordinary Brahmin families and peasant leaders, aspiring together to fill the Sanskritic slots of Brahmin and Kshatriya as approved by the dharmaśāstras texts.

A few examples will illustrate this process. Tikkana (thirteenth century) dedicated his Uttara Rāmāyana (The Later Story of Rama) to Manumasiddhi, a small ruler of Nelluru (Nellore in southern Andhra). Errapregada (fourteenth century) dedicated his Ramayana to Prolaya Vema Reddi of the Reddi dynasty. Hulakki Bhaskara (fourteenth century) dedicated his Ramayana to Sahini Mara, a head of cavalry. Ayyalaraju Ramabhadrudu (mid-sixteenth century) composed the Rāmābhyudayamu in the kāvya mode, with erotic descriptions of the love between Rama and Sita, and offered it to Gobburi Narasaraju, nephew of the famous Aliya Ramaraya; here the choice of text, and hero, resonates with the name of Ramaraya, the king and founder of the new Aravidu dynasty.

Sometimes rulers from Non-Brahmin families sought to enhance their status by composing a Ramayana themselves. They hoped, by producing a devotional text on Rama, to win respect from their people as good kings. In a way this process bypasses Brahmin intervention to acquire status, though it does not reject Brahmin values. For example, we have the case of a son who composes a Ramayana and dedicates it to his father, whom he describes as a man of great religious merit, a gentle and pious ruler. This text, popularly known as Ranganātha Rāmāyanamu, was composed in the non-Sanskritic dvipada meter by the non-Brahmin poet, Gona Buddharaju (fourteenth century?). Raghunathanayaka, a Balija who ruled Tanjavur during the early seventeenth century, also wrote a Ramayana. Yet another was composed, again in Tanjavur, by Katta Varada Raju (circa 1630), another Balija who claims descent from Karikala Chola. The Maharastra king of Tanjavur, Ekoji (late seventeenth century), wrote an Ekōjī-Rāmāyana in dvipada and, following the custom of the Nayaka kings who preceded him, dedicated it to his father. In fact, the Ramayana seems to be the favorite narrative of ambitious Non-Brahmin kings. However, no evidence exists of any anti-Brahmanic impulse in any Ramayana composition before the nineteenth century.¹⁰

Thus a huge Ramayana literature in Telugu came into existence in the pre-modern centuries as the creation of Brahmin poets, Non-Brahmin warriors and rulers, and also other devotees—including a famous poetess, Molla (sixteenth century?), from the Potters' caste (Kummari). All of these texts reflect the contexts that generated them and the major patterns of social mobility, from medieval through Nayaka and post-Nayaka times—until the entry of the colonial power into the scene. But the politics and aesthetics of using the Ramayana theme have significantly changed since the later decades of the nineteenth century. I wish to explore the reasons for this dramatic shift; to do so, we need to examine the changing social dynamics of this period.

The most important shift may be traced to the rupture of political ideology at the hands of a foreign power. The British, who controlled political power, in effect took over the Kshatriya position. However, their position was anomalous since they did not need the varna status of a Kshatriya to maintain themselves in power, nor the active role of a Brahmin to legitimize them in that position. This anomaly brutally disturbed the ideological order. Brahmins lost their usual roles as kingmakers, advisers, ministers. Occasionally, they tried to accord the British the status of Kshatriya in the hope of regaining their earlier Brahmin status, but this strategy was not very successful. The British did not need Brahmins to elevate them to a varna status. However, they needed indigenous support in maintaining their administration, and the Brahmins were their best choice. In other words, the British told the Brahmins that they needed them as servants, not as superiors. In this context there were three choices left for Brahmins. Those families that desired to keep the old ways of chanting Vedic texts, learning Sanskrit śāstras, and fostering traditional Sanskrit or Telugu poetry, sought the patronage of the remaining small kings, the zamindars—who, while they had no real political power, still needed the trappings of Kshatriyahood and therefore actively patronized the varnahood of Brahmins. A history of late-eighteenth/early-nineteenth-century Andhra would reveal that the zamindars strongly supported Vedic and Sanskrit scholars. On the other hand, people who desired to pursue English education and move away from the lifestyle of the varna Brahmin went to live in modern towns and cities such as Madras. A third choice was to keep working in the old scholarly modes, maintaining traditional values while living in a modern city. Scholars who chose the third option often worked for private publishers, or, if they were enterprising enough, started printing presses. Brahmins of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries practised all these options in varying degrees. But changes in political ideology, and the consequent change in their condition, have been powerful enough to transform their imagination of their past and mythology.

BHAKTI-IZATION AND ICONIZATION OF RAMA'S STORY

The Ramayanas of the nineteenth and twentieth century reflect these changes. I would like to present these practices as representing two modes: Bhakti-ization and Iconization. The Bhakti-ization of Ramayanas is not new to Telugu. We have already observed the transition in the use of Ramayana themes from a complex narrative focusing on the inner world of its characters—as kings and queens, fathers and mothers, husbands and wives—to a song celebrating the experience of a devotee towards God. What is new during this period in Andhra is the intensity of the Bhakti-ization of Ramayanas, which now begin to depict a heightened state of surrender to God. This move requires reducing the complexity of the Ramayana narrative to a relatively straightforward, unproblematic story, where Rama becomes the absolute, flawless, all-powerful God. Even the enemy, Ravana, is depicted in some of these bhakti Ramayanas as Rama's devotee in disguise, too impatient to reach him by the slower route of service; instead, he chose the shorter route of conflict—vairabhakti, devotion through enmity. In the larger frame of the Ramayana performance, the performer and the listeners now all become merged into one category, that of dāsas, servants.

As an example, I cite a mid-twentieth-century Ramayana, Sripada Krishnamurti Sastri's Śrī Krṣna Rāmāyanamu. Perhaps the most bowdlerized of all Telugu bhakti Ramayanas, it was written in full acceptance of Non-Brahmin criticism from reformers like Tripuraneni Ramaswami Chaudari. Sripada told Rama's story in a way that sanitized all the major problematic incidents: Ahalya, in this Ramayana, is a chaste woman; her association with Indra was nothing more than a handshake. Kaikeyi has no idea why she asked to send Rama off to the forest; she does so under the influence of Brahma, who possesses her at that time. Later, she wonders why Rama had to go away and weeps at his departure to the forest. Most striking of all, Rama refuses to abandon Sita in the forest. He does hear from his spies that a certain washerman scandalized the name of Sita. But on inquiry he finds that the washerman is insane and ignores his words. Finally, Shambuka is not killed; he is only asked to refrain from his ascetic practices.¹¹

A simplistic reductionist narrative of this kind, devoid of the drama and conflicting motivations of an epic, is bound to be boring. But popular bhakti Ramayana narratives compensate for the loss of complexity of meaning by musical and verbal power. Music of the congregational bhajan, as well as the refined musical compositions of composers like Tyagaraja and Ramadasu (Kancarla Gopanna), elevate the fragmented individual consciousness beyond thinking to a realm of oneness, a state of highly satisfying integrity. A popular form of Ramayana performance during this period was the singing, to melodious instrumental music, of a set of songs from the Adhyātma Rāmāyana—incidentally the text which informs Tulsi's Rāmacaritmānas narrative. Composed by the fine lyricist Munipalle Subrahmanya Kavi (c. 1760-1820), these songs were performed with interspersed prose commentaries by competent performers, engrossing hundreds of people.

A widespread public performance tradition of harikathā, invented and popularized by the great singer Ajjada Adibhatla Narayandasu (1864-1945), was another mode through which bhakti Ramayana narratives spread across the Telugu area. Each year almost every town and village in Andhra celebrated the nine-day festival of Ramanavami, culminating on the ninth day of the lunar month of Caitra, which was believed to be Rama's birthday as well as his wedding anniversary. Rama temples and bands singing Rama chants proliferated in the countryside. During this period there was a veritable explosion of devotional expressions for Rama. Songs, rhymes, street plays, chants, and poems, that occupied the public and private space of Telugu life, make a huge inventory. It became a convention for people to write Rama's name first on the page, before writing anything else at all, even a laundry list!

Most noteworthy of all was the tradition of copying Rama's name ten million times, rāmakoṭi, as a means of liberation. These performances and practices reinforced Rama's position as the supreme deity and encouraged devotion and surrender. Rama is called the favorite god of the Telugu people (Telugu-vārī āradhya-daivamu). So pervasive was this wave of devotionalism for Rama that even a traditionalist poet like the great Viswanatha Satyanarayana sensed its shallowness and parodied it in the following verse:

Everyone is jumping around like crazy,
yelling, “Telugu, Telugu!”
The whole nation is confused. And you
are part of it, our Telugu god.
So let me praise you in Telugu,
until I have let it all out,
all night long, until darkness ends,
O Rama, lord of Bhadradri Hill.(12)

To the extent that Brahmins saw their loss of political power as total, their submission to their god became total. Loss of power now becomes a source of power over the God who is imagined as the most powerful of all. In a very paradoxical way, that very God is powerless to disobey the wishes of his devotees, because their devotion to him is greater than he himself. This theme is best illustrated in a newly popular play, Rāmāñjanēya Yuddham, “the Battle of Rama and Hanuman,” which depicts Hanuman as stronger than Rama—because Hanuman is armed with unfailing devotion to Rama!¹³

By the end of the nineteenth century, bhakti Ramayanas occupied the public space in Andhra so completely that they excluded other versions of the story. The change is striking when we compare the use of the Ramayana themes by pre-modern poets with the usage of the new bhakti poets. Pre-modern poets in Telugu used Ramayana themes in nearly all genres of Telugu literature. More importantly, they allowed their texts to breathe. They joked with Rama and even ridiculed him. Here is a verse from Kasula Purushottama Kavi (eighteenth century), referring to Rama's departure for the forest, dressed as an ascetic, renouncing his kingdom:

You gave up the kingdom because your father said so,
but have you ever given up power?
You took off your ornaments because you wanted to,
but you always kept your bow.
You rejected royal robes, of course,
but you have the muscles of a warrior.
We know you denied wealth;
but you never let go of your pride.
All this is a game you played to kill
your enemies. Would anyone believe you were a sage?(14)

Parallel to bhakti-ization of the Ramayana is what I call iconization. Earlier I stated that while Valmiki was revered as a great poet, the Sanskrit version of the Ramayana attributed to Valmiki was not well known. Except for a few scholars who knew Sanskrit, most of whom were Brahmins who possessed a manuscript copy of the text, the Valmiki version was not even widely available. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century Valmiki's text achieved unprecedented prominence. This was due to a complex set of reasons. While the Ramayana became the holiest of all themes, no Telugu literary Ramayana stands out as a sacred text. No author of Telugu Ramayanas was viewed as a saint. There were poets from the past who attained such respect—Potanna, for instance, the author of the Bhāgavata Purāna—but alas, no one of this class wrote a Ramayana.

To make up for this lack, verbatim translations of Valmiki's text began to appear. In fact, such a project was first completed under the patronage of the Zamindar of Gadvala in the later part of the seventeenth century.¹⁵ The most prominent of such projects was the Ramayana completed by Vavilikolanu Subbarao (1863-1939), appropriately called the Valmiki of Andhra. After his retirement as Telugu pandit at Presidency College, Madras, Subbarao lived the pious life of a devotee, translating Valmiki's text into Telugu, verse by verse. Like the Gadvala version, he thinks of his text as a yathā-vālmīka-rāmāyanamu—a Ramayana strictly according to Valmiki. In keeping with the belief that Valmiki's text has powerful mantric syllables embedded in it, Subbarao attempted to bring similar syllables into his Telugu text. He supplemented his translation with an elaborate multi-volume commentary. However, this was not quite enough for people who looked up to Valmiki's text as essentially untranslatable. This view is best illustrated by a late-eighteenth-century text, the Tattva-sangraha-rāmāyana, which says:

That idiot
who rejects the Sanskrit text
and reads the Rama story in another language
desires to drink water
from a mirage.(16)

Religious leaders began to claim that the Sanskrit Ramayana has the powerful syllables of the gāyatrī mantra embedded in it; therefore its power does not carry over into a translation. Devotees were encouraged to keep on reciting the Sanskrit Ramayana for the efficacy of the sound, an activity which was called pārāyana. The Sundarakānḍa was identified as especially powerful, and devotees were told to chant it to overcome troubles in life and to achieve success. Publishers released the Sundarakānḍa in separate volumes with special instructions for chanting. Such books carried specific directions as to what particular section of the Sundarakānḍa one should chant for such common personal problems as finding a good job, a promotion, a good husband/wife, success in examinations, and so on.¹⁷

The second reason for the new interest in Valmiki was the popularity of the printing press. If earlier even educated people had depended on a public oral performance of the Ramayana by a pandit performer (paurānika), now more and more people could buy a copy of their own for private use. In the absence of a highly revered Telugu literary rendering, Valmiki's Sanskrit text became the holy book. It was even available with a verbatim Telugu prose paraphrase printed under each stanza of the original Sanskrit. However, this did not necessarily mean that readers were ready to explore the Sanskrit version to compare the differences between the epic and the bhakti versions. There were two reasons for this. One was the indoctrination of the bhakti Ramayanas, which had generated a general acceptance of Ramayana as a holy text; the very printed book was worshiped as an icon. The second was the role of publishing houses in the production of classical works. Major publishing houses which produced classical Telugu and Sanskrit books were controlled by Brahmin pandits. Vavilla Ramasvami Sastrulu, an enterprising Brahmin scholar, founded what soon grew to be the foremost publishing house of literary and scholarly works in Telugu and Sanskrit. The influence of this publishing house in the production of the Ramayana may be best illustrated by an incident which reportedly happened when the Valmiki text was printed by Vavilla press in Madras in 1856. The Brahmin managers of the press were not willing to have the text typeset by Non-Brahmin compositors—who usually did all the typesetting jobs in the press. (These were the days of the letter press, where lead type was set by hand.) So, they trained Brahmin boys in typesetting specially to typeset the Ramayana. The text was too sacred to be touched by Non-Brahmins even during the printing process!

CHANGE IN THE STATUS OF NON-BRAHMINS

Meanwhile the role of the peasant castes of Andhra had been changing too. In pre-modern Andhra, as stated earlier, the Shudra king acquired Kshatriya status, legitimized by the Brahmin poet. When the British occupied the role of the king, the Non-Brahmin castes were left with no hope of becoming Kshatriyas. In parallel with the ideology of the bhakti Ramayanas, they progressively became the servants of Brahmins.

However, the younger generation of landed castes—Kammas, Reddis, and Kapus—went to western schools, as the Brahmins had done, receiving an education suitable for jobs in the colonial administration. The new jobs these Non-Brahmin young men were seeking placed them in competition with the Brahmins, their erstwhile gurus, and their former collaborators and legitimizers in the pursuit of Kshatriyahood. For the first time in the history of Andhra culture, upwardly mobile Non-Brahmin castes saw Brahmins as their enemies. Among the newly educated Non-Brahmin young men, Tripuraneni Ramasvami Chaudari from the Kamma caste (already mentioned) and Cattamanci Ramalinga Reddi (1880-1951) from the Reddi caste, stand out. Ramasvami Chaudari, trained as a barrister in Ireland, founded a center for his followers in Tenali, a small town in Krishna district, which he called Suta-asramam, after the Non-Brahmin bard of the Mahabharata epic. Ramasvami Chaudari undertook an active campaign of rewriting the Puranas, criticizing the existing texts as Brahmin constructions to enslave Shudras. His most important contribution to the anti-Ramayana discourse, however, is his play, Śambuka Vadha, which I mentioned earlier.

At this time the protocols of reading were undergoing a revolutionary change as well. Texts that were orally recited and commented upon in a public performance appeared in print, available for silent reading. Bringing palm-leaf texts into print was not an innocent act of making multiple copies available to readers. Before the advent of the printed text, the manuscript served as the recorded text, from which the performer/interpreter created a new text for his/her audience. This was the received text, which actually lived in the minds of the listeners. Reading the recorded text was a specialist's job and required a certain training in using it. Printing the recorded text, and making it available to readers untrained in using the text, generated new and unprecedented modes of reading. Western education prepared the minds of young scholars to receive the printed text as a univalent artifact, with every page and every word consciously produced by a single putative author.

Assumptions of textual integrity led to complementary propositions such as interpolations and textual corruption. Western textual theories such as Jacobi's claim that the first and last books of the Ramayana were later additions to an original Ramayana became influential among English-educated Telugu intellectuals. Taking advantage of the easy availability of Valmiki's text in verbatim translation, modern scholars began to focus on other deviations from Valmiki in regional-language Ramayana texts. These scholars subjected Valmiki's text to a new type of reading—never practiced before the advent of the printing press. In this new reading, a number of internal inconsistencies and problematic repetitions began to emerge. These were viewed as serious flaws by their author, or irresponsible interpolations by mischievous outsiders.

While the modern Ramayana scholars of this time began to question Valmiki's text, which was now perceived as the authoritative text of the narrative, some of these very same people adopted the freedom available to the Ramayana poets all through the centuries to tell the story in any manner they chose. But they invariably wrote a preface to their literary work questioning the textual authenticity of the Valmiki version as it had been handed down to the present generation. Nearly every writer accepted the textual critical studies of Western scholars. They attempted to find an “ur-Ramayana,” written by Valmiki, and to treat all unacceptable and contradictory parts of his text as Brahmanic forgeries, or condemn Valmiki himself for his Brahminic bias.

Ramasvami Chaudari did this with a new confidence by using the race theories of colonial anthropologists who claimed to have identified Aryan and Dravidian races in the Indian subcontinent. For Ramasvami Chaudari, all Brahmins were Aryan intruders; regional landed castes like Kammas and Reddis were Dravidians. In his major work Sūta Purānamu (1924) Ramasvami Chaudari wrote the Rama story as he wanted it to happen. According to him Ravana is born in the Dravidian tribe of Koyas,¹⁸ when he ascends the throne, he rules as a peace-loving king who prohibits animal sacrifice in his kingdom. He is also a great scholar of the Vedas, a great grammarian, physically handsome, and a noble ruler.

Then the Brahmins of the north come down south and begin their fire rituals which include killing cows, a practice prohibited in Ravana's kingdom. When Brahmin sage Vishvamitra announces a fire sacrifice, Ravana sends Tataka to gently persuade the sage to refrain from killing cows, as it breaks the law of the land. The sage does not listen and Tataka's assistants release the cows from their bonds and put out the fires as a punishment. The Brahmin sage regrets that his attempts to convert the Dravidians have not succeeded. He says:

I tried my best, but it did not work.
They just refuse to eat beef,
nor would they taste liquor.
That's the cause of all this trouble.(19)

So he goes to the Saketa king Dasharatha and gets his sons Rama and Lakshmana to kill Tataka.

In Chaudari's retelling, Ravana's sister Surpanakha is an old woman; instigated by Brahmin sages, Lakshmana kills her son Jambukumara. Grieving about the loss of her son, she goes to Rama to find out why her son was killed. Angered by his irresponsible reply that her son was an enemy of sages, she attacks Rama with her knife. Rama overreacts, holds the old woman down and orders Lakshmana to cut her nose and ears off. Ravana decides to capture Sita only to teach Rama a lesson; he treats Sita with honor and—most significant of all—entertains no erotic feeling for her.

With his Sūta Purānamu, Ramasvami Chaudari set the agenda for the anti-Ramayana discourse, and for anti-purana discourse in general. He characterized the Brahmin texts as obscene, immoral, cruel and—of course—Aryan. He had no doubt that all the Sanskrit puranas, and especially the Ramayana, were written to subjugate the independent and highly civilized Dravidians. Sanskrit, Brahmins, and Northern India represented Aryan civilization, and Southern India, South Indian languages and the Non-Brahmins represented Dravidian civilization. In this scheme of things, Brahmins were perceived as colonizers of the south and all Sanskrit texts, especially the Ramayana, were seen as imperialist. Rama acted as the chief agent of Brahmanic imperialism of Northern India, whereas Ravana reigned as a noble king of the Dravidian south.

All this will sound very familiar to South India scholars. E. V. Ramasami's reading of the Ramayana, analysed in detail by Paula Richman, bears close resemblance to Ramasvami Chaudari's reading.²⁰ There is, however, an important difference, in addition to the fact that Chaudari's reading appeared several years earlier than E. V. Ramasami's work.²¹ Unlike E. V. Ramasami, Chaudari presents a fully worked out Dravidian anthropology. According to him the classification of different castes and their occupations in South India before the Aryan occupation conformed to the following hierarchical order:

1. Land-owning castes like Kammas, Reddi, Velamas: warriors/kings, analogous to the Kshatriyas of Aryan society.

2. Golla, Palli, Kummari and such other castes: priests analogous to Brahmins of Aryan society.

3. Balijas, Komati, Sali and such other castes: trading castes analogous to Vaishyas of Aryan society.

4. Kasa, Boya, Cakali and other similar service castes: servants analogous to Shudras of Aryan Society.²²

This is a sophisticated scheme indeed. In this classification, the Brahmin occupation ranks below that of the Kshatriya. Chaudari's observation that lower castes conduct priestly activities in village-goddess temples in Andhra is accurate. According to Chaudari the Aryan invasion of the south placed Sanskritic Brahmin priests over and above the kings, while simultaneously downgrading castes like Kammas and Reddis, who enjoyed the status of kings, as Shudras.

Chaudari built his anti-Ramayana argument on a larger anti-Aryan argument. For him, the Aryans, wherever they went, suppressed the other races and their civilizations. He extends his anti-Aryan position to the white race of the United States where they suppressed Blacks. Dravidians are faultless, showing love for their family and neighbors. He even suggests that Vibhishana betrayed his brother Ravana not because he was evil, but because Vibhishana's wife Sarama, who is part Aryan (Gandharva), influenced his thinking in favor of Rama. Their daughter Trijata, who has Aryan blood in her, turns out to be a betrayer, too; she supports Sita and hates Ravana.

As may be seen from the later anti-Ramayana works, Chaudari's general agenda of denouncing the puranas as Brahmanic, obscene, immoral and superstitious found an enthusiastic following, whereas his racial theme—dividing Telugu people into Aryan versus Dravidian—was quietly rejected. Despite general acceptance among university linguistics departments of the existence of the Dravidian family of languages, among which Telugu is included, literary scholars did evince interest in discussing Telugu literature in terms of Dravidian versus Aryan cultures.

While Ramasvami Chaudari was openly anti-Aryan and pro-Dravidian, Ramalinga Reddi was a “modernist,” advocating a “progressive” culture in an industrialized, egalitarian, capitalist society. Educated in Cambridge, where he read economics, his main interest was Telugu literature. From the time he returned from England, he devoted his energies to modernizing Telugu literary history and criticism. As regards the Ramayana, Ramalinga Reddi conducted a somewhat subtler form of resistance than Chaudari. As vice-chancellor of Andhra University, he sponsored a critical edition of Ranganātha Rāmāyana (mentioned above). He conducted a well-documented polemic arguing that, contrary to current belief, the Non-Brahmin Buddha Reddi was its real author. He coupled his rejection of the Brahmanic culture with a call for modernism, which soon drew a large number of secularized Brahmin young men into its fold.

MODERNISM AND ITS RESPONDENTS

Meanwhile, English schools and colleges included in their syllabus powerful new kinds of learning: history and geography, as well as the natural and physical sciences. Students trained in the new schools were asking difficult questions such as: Where was Lanka in relation to the Dandaka forest? How wide was the ocean that Hanuman was supposed to have crossed? How could monkeys have a civilization complex enough to have a society, a kingdom, and a king, and if so, why describe them as animals? In this social and political context Non-Brahmin poets and intellectuals, and later modernist writers including Brahmins, turned against the conventional Ramayanas and began rewriting Rama's story. Invariably these anti-Ramayanas focused on problem areas of the Valmiki narrative, showing that Rama was not as great as he was depicted to be, and that his image was exaggerated to serve Brahmanic, feudal, or patriarchal interests.

Modernism in Andhra expressed itself primarily as a literary movement, which came to be known as Bhava-kavitvam, somewhat similar to the Romantic movement in English poetry. Rejection of the Brahmin past proved easier under the new ideology of modernism and the younger generation of poets and writers undertook the task of questioning the authenticity of the Ramayana narrative as given in the Valmiki telling.

While Ramasvami Chaudari contended with Brahmin scholars, he also used their style and idiom in his endeavors. Although ideologically opposed to them in literary style, he wrote his Śambuka Vadha, as well as his other works, in a classical style of Telugu, strictly in accordance with the regulations of prescriptive grammars followed by past Brahmanic poets. He took care to follow Brahmanic literary style, meters, and conventions with considerable skill. Hence, he received the acceptance and praise of his Brahmin contemporaries, who called him the King of Poets (Kavirāju), in admiration. In contrast, the modern literary movement of Bhava-kavitvam, which began in opposition to the classical world view, adopted literary conventions that encouraged poets to write in defiance of pandit-made rules. Protest-Ramayana themes adopted by Bhava-kavitvam poets now appeared in a modern literary idiom.

One such play is Muddu Krishna's Aśokam (1930), which presents Rama, Sita and Ravana speaking conversational Telugu, looking like your next-door neighbors. Tradition so far had dictated that all mythological characters speak a dialect removed from modern speech, filled with Sanskritic and archaic forms of Telugu. This strategy elevated the characters above the human level and provided them with an aura of distance and divinity. Even demons spoke such a dialect, if they were high-caste characters like Ravana. This convention underwent a radical transformation in the works of Chalam (see below), who made gods speak like ordinary people in his works and whose lead Muddu Krishna followed.

The theme of Aśokam is briefly this: Ravana stops by at Sita's house to express his love for her, even before her wedding to Rama. Sita listens to his declaration of love but answers that she has chosen to leave the final decision of marriage to fate and to her father. Then Rama arrives and declares his love to Sita. Sita gives the same answer, but feels attracted to Rama and falls in love with him. Rama meets Ravana and realizes that Ravana too is in love with Sita but, instead of being jealous, he nobly admits that Ravana's love for Sita could be as “pure” as his, so he decides to let Sita choose between them.

Next we meet Sita in the forest. Rama regrets experiencing such hardship in the forest but feels grateful to her for choosing to accompany him there. Then Ravana shows up and invites both of them to his palace in Lanka. He offers to relinquish Lanka for Sita and her husband, and depart to a faraway place. His love for Sita is so great that he offers to sacrifice his empire for her. Next, we meet Sita in the Ashoka grove in Lanka, reprimanding Ravana for being so rash as to bring her there. Ravana admits that he had been wrong, but says he could not resist his love for her; he worships her and could not live without seeing her. Sita tells him how much she understands his feelings for her, but explains that she cannot give herself to him. We finally see Rama telling Sita how deeply Ravana had loved her, and how he spoke of her even at the time of his death. Sita understands, and Rama does too, that Ravana had a pure heart. He was a noble lover. But Sita still goes through the fire ordeal, to satisfy the fears of the people!

Retold in this form, the story may look sentimental and silly. Yet in the atmosphere of the Bhava-kavitvam movement of the 1930s, Telugu literature was raging with poems on platonic love; in keeping with the trend of the times, writers wrote about men who fell in love with women only to sacrifice their lives for women's love, never even thinking of a physical relationship. This play depicts Ravana professing his “pure love,” pavitra prema, to Sita. The writer makes no effort to depict Rama in a poor light, but then he is not the center of the play either.

Muddu Krishna did not stand out as one of the major writers of the period. Remembered mostly for his anthology of Bhava-kavitvam poems, he is one of the few Non-Brahmin poets of this modern poetry movement. However, the new ideology of modernism seemed to defy the claims of caste hierarchies, at least in poetry, and a number of Brahmin writers themselves wrote anti-Brahmanic poems.

With Gudipati Venkata Chalam (1894-1979), one of those rebel Brahmins, the “Women's reform” anti-Ramayana narratives begin. Chalam believed that women should be freed from the sexual bondage of marriage; he wrote of sexual liberation of women in his novels and short stories. Although they might look mild by present-day standards, such works were revolutionary in Chalam's time. A writer who handled Telugu prose with masterly subtlety and power, he wrote with a sensitive understanding of female sexuality and a passionate desire to affirm female sexual pleasure as the celebration of human life. Sharply critical of Brahmanic moral standards, Chalam relished shocking the conservative minds of his time. In one novel (Maidānam), he relentlessly describes the sexual adventures, with two Muslim lovers, of a married Brahmin woman from a conservative family. He wrote a number of plays reinterpreting puranic themes from his rebellious point of view. Among them, the one that concerns us here is Sīta Agnipravēśam (Sita Enters Fire, 1935?). Despite his unconventional interest in depicting uninhibited sexuality, Chalam shares the romantic attitudes of love prevalent in the literature of his time.

In his Agnipravēśam, Chalam rewrites the well-known Ramayana incident where Sita has to walk through fire to prove her fidelity to Rama. The play begins after the war with Ravana ends, with Sita inviting Rama, with words of great longing and love, to embrace her. But soon she finds out that Rama has doubts about her because she has lived in the enemy's house for an extended time. Ravana had loved her. “Is it my fault?” asks Sita. But realizing that Rama sees her only as an object to be possessed as long as it gives him pride, which he is willing to abandon the moment he sees it might be polluted, she declares:

Let me speak. Ravana loved me. Even your sharp arrows could not kill his love for me. Your love, it was gone the moment you suspected that another man might have loved me. … Did I love him in return? That's what you fear, don't you? If I had loved him, I would have covered his body with mine as a shield against your arrows. Did he molest me? No, he was too noble a person for that. He loved me, even when he knew I would never love him in return. … I feel sorry I did not return his love. I shall pay a price for it now. I shall purify my body, which was soiled when I uttered your wretched name, by the flames of fire which touched his blood-stained limbs. You, Rama, rejected me because you fear that my body was defiled by his touch, though you know my heart was pure. This anti-god wanted my heart, even though he knew my body was taken by you. Some day, intelligent people will know who was a nobler lover.²³

And, even before she finishes her sentence, Sita jumps into Ravana's funeral pyre, performing a sort of suttee for him!

While an influential anti-Brahmanic discourse was spreading through the middle class, especially after the modernist trend beginning with the Bhava-kavitvam movement during the early decades of the twentieth century, a totally unprecedented Ramayana took the literary world by storm: Viswanatha Satyanarayana's Rāmāyana Kalpavrkṣamu (Ramayana, the Giving Tree). As soon as the first volume of this remarkable book was published, the literary world realized its power and beauty.²⁴ However, there was a problem. Satyanarayana took a vehemently conservative position and spoke unapologetically in support of Brahmins. It was trendy among the educated middle class during those days to be anti-traditional, which also meant being anti-Brahmin. Even Brahmins adopted a vigorous anti-traditional position. The modern English-educated person agreed that Vedas, Puranas and similar old texts kept the country in ignorance; they agreed that caste system, child marriages, proscription of widow remarriage, and all the Hindu practices relating to purity were features of backwardness. India had to change, and nearly everything traditional should be abandoned for a modern, western model. In this context, Satyanarayana came out in support of traditional customs and values, including the caste system and child marriages. He advocated a society based on the rules of Mānavadharmaśāstra.

It would probably have mattered little had Satyanarayana not been a powerful poet; there were plenty of old pandits who argued like him. They were all eventually marginalized as outdated and fossilized minds (chāndasulu), with nothing intelligent to say, even if they controlled the knowledge from some old books, for which skill they sometimes needed to be consulted. But Satyanarayana was different. Breathtakingly brilliant, well-educated in English, he was on top of all this, a dazzling poet. When he read his Ramayana verses in public, hundreds of people listened in rapture. Satyanarayana's literary presence and his energetic scholarly and poetic personality made his audience pay renewed attention to the Ramayana. While his Ramayana was admittedly devotional, his depiction of character and his narration of the story were anything but flat. To an audience tired of reading insipid retellings of the Rama story just because Rama was God, Satyanarayana offered a lively and exciting option.

He pre-empted questions about his choice of theme in the opening verses of his six-volume magnum opus:

If you ask, “Why yet another Ramayana?”
my answer is: In this world,
everyone eats the same rice every day,
but the taste of your life is your own.
People make love, over and over, but only you
know how it feels. I write about the same Rama
everyone else has known, but my feelings of love
are mine. Ninety per cent of what makes a poem
is the genius of the poet. Poets in India know
that the way you tell the tale
weighs a thousand times more
than some facile, novel theme.(25)

Such a renewal of the Ramayana with a strong Brahmanic message quickly elicited an equally strong Non-Brahmin reaction. Modernists, secularists and Marxists, all ideologically anti-Brahmin, found Satyanarayana a threat. They felt repelled by Satyanarayana's conservative arguments, which, to them, sounded like a call to turn their backs on a century of progress toward Enlightenment, rational thinking and scientific understanding. Public criticism against Satyanarayana was vehement and relentless. He was attacked as a blind revivalist, a bad writer, a difficult writer to understand. (He used archaic Sanskrit words and compounds testing even the most learned scholar's control of Sanskrit.) Satyanaryana himself took a vehement anti-colonial stand, advocating that the evil of English education had destroyed the dharmic genius of Indian culture and enslaved Indian minds to a foreign ideology. In addition to his Rāmāyana Kalpavrkṣamu, his other publications, too, fueled the anti-Ramayana discourse of the past five decades. Among the leaders of this new anti-Ramayana discourse two writers stand out: Narla Venkateswara Rao (1908-85) and Muppala Ranganayakamma.

Narla Venkateswara Rao, a younger contemporary of the major modernist writers in Telugu, has earned a greater reputation for his leadership role in Telugu journalism than as a writer. But he wrote two Ramayana plays, Jābāli (1974) and Sīta Jōsyam (Sita's Prophesy, 1979). As the editor of the most widely circulated Telugu daily newspaper, Andhra Prabha, he played an influential role in molding public opinion. He stood up for freedom of the press and fearlessly advocated liberal ideas. He wrote his editorials in a vigorous style and they remained the talk of the town day after day. For Venkateswara Rao, Sanskrit and Brahmanic ideas represented a dead past which only blocked the path to progress. He looked to western scholarship for wisdom; ideas of Enlightenment served as his guide to the future. In his Jābāli, Venkateswara Rao depicts an atheist character who appears in the Ayodhyākānḍa of Valmiki's Rāmāyana. Jabali, in Venkateswara Rao's play, is a weak character, too scared to face the powerful Vasishtha, the Brahmin minister. After trying in vain to dissuade Rama from going to the forest, by giving him his atheist advice, Jabali sees Vasishtha approaching and escapes with the excuse that he was only testing Rama's resolve. Jabali's conversation with Rama reveals the intrigues, jealousies and pettiness of the Brahmin sages at the court.

The second play, Sīta Jōsyam, is more interesting, and also more skillfully written. In a long introduction to this play, Venkateswara Rao says:

The Ramayana, the Mahabharata, the eighteen puranas—the major aim of all these texts is to protect the caste system; the feudal order. If they continue to be propagated in the way they are now, progress towards a new social order will remain an empty slogan. For about fifteen hundred years, these texts have stood as severe obstacles to our intellectual development and social progress. If we do not remove these obstacles even now, we cannot enter the modern age, nor can we move forward on a progressive path.²⁶

In this play Venkateswara Rao depicts the conflict between sages and demons in the Dandaka forest as a conflict between food gatherers and food producers. Rama, depicted as a vain character, kills the demons when the sages flatter him as the greatest warrior of the Raghu clan. Sita, on the other hand, understands that the demons are innocent food gatherers whose livelihood is being destroyed by sages who burn their forests to clear land for their cultivation. The demons fight back. Sita wants Rama to leave them alone. The sages, she advises, are seeking expansion into the south to occupy more and more land, but Rama refuses to listen. He has vowed to protect the Brahmins, whatever the price. The play ends with Sita prophesying that one day he will leave her, to please the Brahmins!

One of the most recent, most complete and also highly controversial of the anti-Ramayanas is Muppala Ranganayakamma's Rāmāyana Viṣavrkṣam (Ramayana, The Poison Tree). By the 1960s the novel had become the major mode of Telugu literature. For about a decade women writers dominated prose fiction and their novels sold in larger quantities than any other works. Serialized in weekly magazines, novels written by women significantly increased magazine circulation. Ranganayakamma is one of the new group of women writers who came into the literary world through her novels. Sometime in the early 1970s Ranganayakamma discovered Marxism, and since then she has stopped writing novels and begun writing Marxist works.

Fiercely polemical in its style, The Poison Tree vehemently rejects all Brahmanic as well as Non-Brahmanic interpretations of the Ramayana and proposes that Valmiki's text was written with the sole intention of keeping all low castes and women in feudal bondage. Partly a critical commentary on Valmiki's text and partly a retelling of the story as Ranganayakamma thought it had happened, The Poison Tree is a rambling text in a style that spares neither innuendo nor invective against feudalism and Brahmins. Ranganayakamma's belief in Marxism gives her enormous confidence in rejecting Valmiki as an unskilled poet who was writing at a stage in civilization when the art of telling stories and composing books was still in its infancy. Her Marxist knowledge has an answer for everything; there are no uncertainties or questions in her mind about the absolute accuracy of her theory that human civilization progresses in clearly defined stages based on the means of production, and that the Ramayana reflects the feudal stage. She rewrites the story to unmask the mystique which kept the true intention of the narrative hidden from readers. Summarizing her three-volume retelling of the Ramayana, Ranganayakamma declares: “The Ramayana favors men; favors the rich, favors the upper castes, and the ruling class. It supports exploitation; it was never a progressive text, not even at the time it was written.”²⁷

CONCLUSION

What is the impact of these anti-Ramayanas on the Telugu public? None of them achieved recognition as outstanding works of literature, except perhaps Sīta Jōsyam, which received the Sahitya Akademi award in 1981. Each one of them remained controversial for a time. Educated readers argued about them. Ranganayakamma's The Poison Tree even sold well. It generated violent disagreements; some responded to it as a liberating reading, and others genuinely hated it. Ranganayakamma, a writer not particularly gentle in her responses to criticism, added fire to the acrimonious nature of the debate. The official position of the Marxist parties themselves was somewhat lukewarm: they did not oppose the book but they did not enthusiastically embrace it either. With all the excitement the anti-Ramayana authors generated, they missed out on something that makes a literary text literary. They uniformly failed to understand that literary consciousness of Telugu culture was deeply embedded in myth, a valorized narrative from a rooted past. They failed to create anything even remotely satisfying to sustain a counter-myth. However, author after author wrote a lengthy polemical essay as a preface to their literary work. Their ideas were intellectually provocative, even if their artistic skill was not satisfying. Literary scholars wrote books discussing the value of Ramayana in the light of new knowledge of anthropology, history and science.²⁸ The essays and books led to serious discussions, charges and counter charges.

As a result of the long and sustained discourse of the anti-Ramayanas, a level of cultural openness was achieved, at least among intellectuals. The religious impact of the bhakti Ramayanas on the public mind was not greatly diminished, but educated middle-class readers became familiar with critical discourse on what is believed to be a sacred text. If in the earlier times, premodern literary Ramayanas and folk Ramayanas kept the multivocality of the Ramayana alive, the modernist anti-Ramayanas have played a major role in keeping the diverse interpretations alive in the face of the homogenization and production of what, one sometimes fears, could become a fascist Ramayana discourse.

Notes

1. Tripurāneni Rāmasvāmi Chaudari, Śambuka Vadha, 1920, rept. in vol. 2 of Kavirāju Sāhitya Sarvasvam (Complete Works of Ramasvami Chaudari) 2 vols. (Gunturu: Kaviraju Sahiti Samiti, 1996), 1-79. Each text in these volumes is independently numbered.

2. For the Valmiki telling, see 7.73-5 and 76. 1-16, Rāmāyana of Vālmīki, ed. Katti Srinivāsa-shāstri (Delhi: Parimal Publications, 1983).

3. Raghuvamśa, 15. 42-53, especially verse 53,

4. Uttararāmacarita, 2.10-13, ed. S. K. Belvalkar (Poona: Oriental Book Supplying Agency, 1921).

5. Sheldon Pollock, “Rāmāyana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52. 2 (May 1993): 263.

6. This is the story told by King Raghunāthanāyaka of Tanjore in his Vālmīki Caritramu.

7. Narayana Rao, “A Rāmāyana of One's Own: Women's Oral Tradition in Telugu” in Many Rāmāyanas: The Diversity of Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman, (Berkeley: University of California Press, and Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991), 114-36.

8. Sheldon I. Pollock, The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 2, Ayodhyākānḍa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 10.

9. Velcheru Naryana Rao, unpublished remarks for panel on “Audiences and Indian Literature,” presented at the Association for Asian Studies, 1982.

10. There was, however, no lack of Ramayanas that presented events from the perspective of Sita. For example, a number of women's songs and tales did so.

11. Rāvūri Dorasāmi Śarma, Telugu Sāhityamu: Rāma-kathā (Machilipatnam: Triveni Publishers, 1972), 71-6.

12. From Visvanātha Madhyākkaralu, cited by Śarma, Telugu Sāhityamu, 247. Bhadradri, or Bhadracalam, is a famous Rama shrine in West Godavari District.

13. Tānḍra Subrahmanyam, Śrī Rāmāñjanēya Yuddham (Tenali: Śrī Venkaṭaramana Book Depot, 1979). This play, which does not have a source in any purana, has been performed widely in Andhra Pradesh and was also produced for radio. A phonograph album of this play sold well; a movie was also made.

14. Kāsula Puruṣottamakavi, Āndhranāyaka-śatakamu, ed. Yārlagaḍḍa Bālagāngādhara Rāvu (Visakhapatnam: Nirmala Publications, 1975), verse 88.

15. Professor Ravvā Śrīhari says Kāmasamudram Appalācāryulu led a five-scholar team for this project, including Kānādam Peddana Sōmayāji, a great Sanskrit scholar of his time, preface to Kānādam Peddana Sōmayāji, Mukundavilāsamu (Hyderabad: Telugu Vijñāna Pītham, 1985), 9-10.

16. samskrtam rāmacaritam parityajya narādhamah
    paṭhan bhāṣāntara-krṭam mrgatrṣnā jalam pibet

17. Two such books, for instance, are: Sakala-kārya-siddiki Śrīmadrāmāyana-pārāyanamu (Reading Ramayana for success in all efforts) (Madras: Little Flower Company, 1967), reprinted several times, and Sundara-hanumad-vaibhavamu (Sundara-kanda with rules for reading) by Śiṣṭlā Candramouli Śāstri (Pedapadu, Andhra Pradesh: Author, N.D).

18. Chaudari presents “linguistic evidence” to suggest that Ravana's name was derived from the Koya language. See Sūta Purānamu, 2 vols. (Gunturu: Kaviraju Sahiti Samiti, 1996), vol. 1, 224-5.

19. Sūta Purānamu, 3.210, 210.

20. Richman, “E. V. Ramasami's Reading of the Rāmāyana,” 175-201.

21. Chaudari clearly anticipates E. V. Ramasami of Tamil Nadu. The chronology of their ideas has not received attention since Ramasvami Chaudari is not as well known as E. V. Ramasami in the West. Ramasvami Chaudari wrote Śambuka Vadha during 1914-17; however, he published it, along with a long preface, only in 1920. His Sūta Purānamu, with several detailed prefatory essays for each of its chapters, was published in 1924, whereas E. V. Ramasami's anti-Ramayana pamphlet Irāmāyanappāttirankal made its first appearance in 1930, a full decade after Chaudari's Śambuka Vadha. Their ideas bear very close resemblance, yet significant differences as well. No work has yet been done to determine whether there were any contacts between the two leaders.

22. Introduction to Śambuka Vadha, 17-18.

23. Guḍipāṭi Venkaṭa Calam, Sīta Agnipravēśam (Vijayawada: Aruna Publishing House, 3rd edn., 1976), 45.

24. Satyanarayana began writing the first volume of his six-volume Śrīmad Rāmāyana Kalpavrkṣamu, popularly known as Rāmāyana Kalpavrkṣamu, in 1934 and concluded the sixth volume in 1962. The first volume was not published until 1944. The other volumes were published during the following years, ending with the sixth volume in 1963. Satyanarayana gave readings from his book long before the first volume was published. The six volumes have been reprinted several times.

25. Viśvanātha Satyanarayana, Rāmāyana Kalpavrkṣamu (Vijayawada: Viśvanātha Publications, 1992; 1st edn, 1944), 1.5. Translation in collaboration with David Shulman.

26. Nārla Venkateśvara Rao, Sīta Jōsyam (Vijayawada: Navodaya Publishers, 1979), 131.

27. Muppāla Ranganāyakamma. Rāmāyanaviṣavrkṣam, 3 vols. (Hyderabad: Sweet Home Publications, 1974-6). The title parodies Rāmayana Kalpavrkṣamu (Ramayana, The Giving Tree), written a few years earlier by Viśvanātha Satyanārāyana (see n. 24).

28. Two such books are Suravaram Pratāpa Reḍḍi, Rāmāyana Viśeṣamulu (Hyderabad: Āndhra Racayitala Sangham, 1957), and Kotta Satyanarayana Chaudati, Rāmāyana Rahasyālu (Nidubrola: Bhasāpōşa Kagranthamanḍali, 1968).