'Ramayana' is a story with eternal and universal questions, says Arshia Sattar

You could call Arshia Sattar a Ramayana specialist. She is the translator of a very popular edition of the epic, continuously in print since it first came out in 1986, has written two more books that take off from Ramayana and is now out with Ramayana for Children (Juggernaut, Rs.499) stunningly illustrated by Sonali Zohra. Another, a translation of Uttara Kanda, is out later this year. Ramayana, she tells Gargi Gupta in this email interview, is a "story with eternal and universal questions: how to be good, what to do when you are confronted with evil, what are the limits of love". Excerpts from an email interview:

You've translated Ramayana and written several books that take off from the epic. What is it about the story still touches you?

It's a great story – and it has so many layers, you can read it at any age, in any frame of mind. Each time, you'll respond to it differently. What moves me are the relationships between fathers and sons, husbands and wives, brothers and brothers. What excites me is the magic – flying monkeys, 10-headed demons, bridges built on a restless ocean.

At what age and how did you first encounter the Ramayana?

I think everyone in India encounters Ramayana as a child. As AK Ramanujan said, "No one in India encounters the Ramayana and Mahabharata for the first time. They are there always, already." I was told the story by my ayah when I was about four.

Do you think, with Harry Potter, the Narnia books etc., children are reading Ramayana?

Of course, children will read Ramayana. Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Maurice Sendak, Pippi Longstocking, Momotaro, Greek myths and legends, African folk tales – they're all part of a fantasy world that children need to enrich their imagination, so that they grow up to believe that the boundaries of the 'real world' are not fixed.

Is Ramayana relevant today? The moral structure, one would think, is completely out of date.

It depends on how you understand the 'moral structure' of Ramayana. It's very easy for me, as an older feminist, to read the story as being about a woman who leaves a marriage that she no longer finds tenable, that the gentle prince of the forest has turned into a king who places public duty over his love as a husband. A 10-year old boy told me that the one thing he would change in the story is Sita's banishment – he didn't want her to be sent into the forest. I think his moral universe, even as a child, is completely contemporary.

There are so many versions of the Ramayana - did that complicate your task as translator?

No. The translator knows from experience that there are many Ramayanas. All the Ramayanas may not speak to everyone, but every person will find or make a Ramayana that speaks to them. Children, too, will find more than one Ramayana and decide which one works for them. When you write for children, you write from the heart, you tell them the Rama story that you love best.

Have you changed or updated the text since the 1986 translation?

It's hard to 'update' a text that's 2,500 years old. I think the story speaks to you wherever you and whoever you are. It's a story with eternal and universal questions: how to be good, what to do when you are confronted with evil, what are the limits of love.

Ramayana for Children

Arshia Sattar
Juggernaut
240 pages
Rs339