Last week, there was a talk about the popularity
of Hanuman* across India, and an academic, who hails from a major
American university, shows the audience a slideshow of pictures of
the monkey-god in full-color, all leaping and mid-motion as he
reaches towards the sky. In most stories, Hanuman jumped to grab the
sun when he was a baby, and, later, he jumped across the sea to reach
Lanka, where the abducted Sita is kept in captivity. The academic,
who hails from a background of study in Hindi literature, has written
a book that argues against dismissing the worship of Hanuman as a
minor cult, due to the lack of canonical texts dedicated to him, and
tries to show that the meaning of Hanuman as a “liminal” deity
plays a major role in his popularity, shown by the number of shrines
and temples dedicated to him throughout the nation. The hall, a
slowly crumbling structure from the 1970s located in the old Pune
neighborhood of Sadhasiv Peth, normally hosts Indian classical music
concerts and official functions for a heavily Marathi-speaking local
audience.
The event, hold in English and attended by a very
multilingual group consisting of Pune's cosmopolitan, young student
population, and the “intellectual” clique, was a slight anomaly
in the space. These audience members, proceeded to ask
questions, but these questions were not about about how Hanuman became popular, but rather about how storytelling about Hanuman's supernatural feats
are facing severe competition from “Western superheroes” in mass
publications. The academic jokingly replied, “That's why. I'm here
to tell you about the great stories about the Ramayana and the
Mahabharata!”
The irony, however, is that the Indian
audience already knew about the epics.** A young man, however, said
that, “it's not a talk for an Indian audience. We already knew all
that.” During a cigarette break outside of the building he mentions
that the talk “was more for a Western audience.”
Telling the
epics as an artistic genre, therefore, in spite of assuming certain common elements that enables an Indian audience to recognize a Ramayana or a Mahabharata
in them, requires a certain newness in
it order to capture the mind of an Indian audience. As Romila Thapar
suggests, the epics are not attached to “any singular historical
moment.” In other words, the epics are not timeless. Most likely, a copy
of the Ramayana or the
Mahabharata is not ontologically possible, it is always a retelling.
Each reproduction of the epic narrative carries the vernacularities
of its own time and space.
* Hanuman is a simian god who, in most Ramayana stories, performed miraculous feats in order to help Rama, the "protagonist," defeat the demon-king Ravana.
**Note: by no means I am arguing against the merits of the said academic's work. It is, in my opinion, a wonderful piece of scholarship. These are simply my thoughts on the audience's response after the talk.
