A Play that Plays With Language

In a place that has multiple languages and multiple uses and names for language, one Pune-based group by the name of OQ Works has decided to translate a well-known Marathi play, Vijay Tendulkar's Kamala (1981), into English. Does this signify how a regional issue is still relevant to what is debated and discussed among the educated, internationally connected audience of Pune's English media?

Tendulkar wrote prolifically in Marathi since the 1950s, often reaching issues that were taboo and off the chart at his time, such as women's rights and domestic conflicts. In Kamala, the journalist Jaisingh Jadhav bought Kamala a tribal woman from a market in a remote village in Bihar for 250 rupees and held a press conference for her in Delhi, thus attracting massive controversies that eventually compromised his career. Kamala, nonetheless, is not entirely about the public sphere. Jaisingh's wife, Sarita, discovered that her life mirrors that of Kamala, unable to voice her own opinion and is confined to the realms of her house as a housewife...

Even now many upper-class, educated mothers in both developed and developing countries are sacrificing their professional ambitions to raise a family, and the fact that such thoughts are spoken in English reminds us that it is not only a question relevant for those in the local, Marathi-speaking sphere. In many places, perhaps, mothers are waiting for their husbands and sons to return from far-flung travels, while waiting for chances to engage the world outside of their own house and neighborhood themselves.

Maybe, to provide an alternative ending or even at least to provide a lens into unforeseen disaster, Sarita should have held a press conference about her confined life instead as she had once aspired in a dialogue with her uncle....

Ramayana and ramaya.na

If you have a Google Chrome browser and are willing to read Indonesian, ramaya.na gives you Valmiki's retelling of the epic through what seems like a programmer who chose a new career as a dalang, a shadow-puppet master. Through chat windows and 3D backgrounds, Rama, a king with divine virtues, fights the ten-headed demon Ravana to rescue his wife, Sita, from captivity.

Whether this is an entertaining story for kids or a chance to perform a darshan ("seeing") with the divine depends on the reader, but this is an opportunity to revisit a cross-cultural and cross-religious epic that refuses to settle in any single medium. After TV series and comic books, what else could be more fitting than an animated, multi-directional web narrative? Despite of its trimmings, its reductions, and the stiff, linear GoogleChat dialogues, Google's Indonesian Ramayana is an accessible collection of stories to visit and revisit, with each chapter providing a colorful diversion on its own, especially for those who have known the story before.

Here is a serendipitous beginning for my journey in listening to the epics in their many incarnations, and as A.K. Ramanujan once said, "No one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time." I will write to you all again soon, most likely from the heart of the Deccan highlands in Pune, or perhaps just a couple of hundred meters away from 15-minute internet station here at the Singapore Airport.