The Ramayana

creature who had done him no harm, not even seen him.³

Rama’s cruelty to Sita at the end of his battle with Ravana is one of the strangest episodes in The Ramayana—one which directly challenges Rama’s image as an exemplary moral being. In fact, the Tamil poet Kamban, Narayan’s literary inspiration, makes Rama say some unsettlingly harsh things to Sita.

You stayed content in that sinner’s city, enjoying your food and drink. Your good name was gone but you refused to die. How dared you think I’d be glad to have you back? ⁴

But Narayan drops Kamban’s account at this crucial moment in the book and chooses to bring in Valmiki’s much more moderate version of Rama’s decidedly odd behavior. It is as though he cannot fully acknowledge Rama’s lapse into cruelty, although such an omission may also be due to Narayan’s aversion to scenes of overt violence, verbal or physical—an aversion that his fiction with its careful avoidance of extremity makes clear.

Happily, Narayan doesn’t linger much over battle scenes, where his prose seems to be weighed down by untranslatable archaisms. The realistic fiction writer in him is more at ease with the detail of everyday life. Here is a description of the great crowd walking to attend Rama’s wedding.

Another young man could not take his eyes off the lightly covered breast of a girl in a chariot; he tried to keep ahead of it, constantly looking back over his shoulder, unaware of what was in front, and bumping the hindquarters of the elephants on the march.⁵

Many of Narayan’s virtues familiar to us from his fiction are present in this retelling of The Ramayana—particularly an English prose so lucid and lightly inflected that it loses its foreign associations and seems the perfect medium of swift and action-packed storytelling. Indeed, The Ramayana contains some of Narayan’s finest prose set-pieces. Here is how he describes the end of the monsoons:

Peacocks came out into the sun shaking off clogging droplets of water and fanning out their tails brilliantly. Rivers which had roared and overflowed now retraced their modest courses and tamely ended in the sea. Areca palms ripened their fruits in golden bunches; crocodiles emerged from the depths crawling over rocks to bask in the sun; snails vanished under slush, and crabs slipped back under ground; that rare creeper known as vanji suddenly burst into bloom with chattering parrots perched on its slender branches.⁶

And so instinctively scrupulous and fair-minded is Narayan as a writer that not only Rama but also Ravana emerges as a fully rounded, even somewhat sympathetic, character. Though a dedicated sensualist, Ravana does not seem intrinsically bad or evil. Narayan shows clearly how he is led astray by greed, and then succumbs to the particular illusion of power: the dream of perpetual dominance. As his younger brother, who defects to Rama’s side, tells him,

“You have acquired extraordinary powers through your own spiritual performances but you have misused your powers and attacked the very gods that gave you the power, and now you pursue evil ways. Is there anyone who has conquered the gods and lived continuously in that victory?”⁷

How often in Narayan’s fiction does one come across a similar pragmatic realism, a gentle refusal to regard good and evil as unmixed, and a melancholy sense of the real limitations of life? It is this ethical and spiritual outlook that attracted countless people to The Ramayana for more than a millennium. In Narayan— the sage of Malgudi who always knew how to connect our hectic and fraught present to a barely remembered past—this ancient tale found its perfect modern chronicler.

NOTES

1 A. K. Ramanujan, Paula Richman, ed., “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” Many Ramayanas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.

2 R. K. Narayan, The Indian Epics Retold: The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, Gods, Demons, and Others (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000), xi.

3 R. K. Narayan, The Ramayana (New York: Penguin, 2006),90.

4 P. S. Sundaram, trans., N. S. Jagannathan, ed., The Kamba Ramayana (New Delhi: Penguin, 2002), 387.

5 Narayan, The Ramayana, 29.

6 Ibid., 109.

7 Ibid., 126.

Books by R. K. Narayan

NOVELS

Swami and Friends (1935)

The Bachelor of Arts (1937)

The Dark Room (1938)

The English Teacher (1945)

Mr. Sampath—The Printer of Malgudi (1949)

The Financial Expert (1952)

Waiting for the Mahatma (1955)

The Guide (1958)

The Man-Eater of Malgudi (1961)

The Vendor of Sweets (1967)

The Painter of Signs (1976)

A Tiger for Malgudi (1983)

Talkative Man (1986)

The World of Nagaraj (1990)

SHORT FICTION

*Dodu and Other Stories (1943)

*Cyclone and Other Stories (1945)

An Astrologer’s Day and Other Stories (1947)

*Lawley Road and Other Stories (1956)

A Horse and Two Goats (1970)

Malgudi Days (1982)

Under the Banyan Tree and Other Stories (1985)

The Grandmother’s Tale and Selected Stories (1993)

* Published in India only

RETOLD LEGENDS

Gods, Demons, and Others (1964)

The Ramayana (1972)

The Mahabharata (1978)

MEMOIR

My Days: A Memoir (1974)

NONFICTION

*Mysore (1939)

*Next Sunday: Sketches and Essays (1960)

*My Dateless Diary: An American Journey (1964)

*Reluctant Guru (1974)

*The Emerald Route (1977)