Who’s afraid of 300 Ramayanas?

What is so offensive about AK Ramanujan’s essay ‘Three Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translations’? Is it offensive because Ramanujan refers to Kamban’s Iramavataram where Indra is “covered with a hundred vaginas”, or the Jaina version, Pampa Ramayana, where Sita is Ravana’s unwanted daughter?

If this is the case, then Hindu fundamentalist groups like the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) should have been rabble-rousing against these centuries-old texts instead of an academic essay that simply and accurately describes them. But the ABVP chose to vandalise the history department of Delhi University (DU), and the latter ended up taking it off their reading list.

“There are 300 versions of the Ramayana, but AK Ramanujan chooses to quote five examples that are bound to hurt our sentiments. They want students to learn about those five,” ABVP state secretary Rohit Chahal had said in righteous indignation in 2008. His words provide a clue as to what the issue is really about. Business Standard columnist AK Bhattacharya wrote of the Ramanujan essay, “He (Ramanujan) argues that it will be wrong to assume that there was one original ramayana, presumably written in Sanskrit by Valmiki, and all other ramayanas ...were translations or versions of the original ramayana in Sanskrit. He argues that there is a “relational structure” that claims the name of the ramayana for all the different “tellings”, but that they are not similar to each other.”

No apex Ramayan
So Ramanujan in his essay was suggesting that there was no apex Ramayan that can be held sacrosanct. This is a problem for the Hindutva brigade, according to Mridula Mukherjee, a professor in the Centre for Historical Studies at JNU. “If people believe that there is no one original Ramayan, then how can they say that Ram was a historical figure, born on such and such date in this particular place? And if they can’t say that, then it undermines the Hindutva brigade’s agenda for the last 20 years,” she says, clearly alluding to the idea of Ram Janmabhoomi. And recent reports that the ABVP objected to the essay because it was referred to the reading list by the prime minister’s daughter adds a more craven political dimension to this whole saga.

But what concerns Mukherjee more is not so much the shenanigans of the Hindutva brigade as the manner in which Delhi University (DU) capitulated in the face of those shenanigans. “The decision of the academic council had no basis. Institutions that are supposed to stand up for freedom of expression and freedom of reading are kowtowing to fundamentalists.” she says.

And it’s not just DU that kow-towed to right wing bullying. In 2008, another right wing group, Shiksha Bachao Andolan Samiti, also sent a letter to Oxford University Press (OUP) India, asking them to stop printing the essay. In a stunning but not unprecedented capitulation, OUP India complied. They wrote back an abject letter in which they actually thanked them! “We feel deeply concerned to learn that Ramanujan’s essay has the potential to hurt Hindu religious sentiments and we thank you for pointing this out. ...we very much regret that the essay has inadvertently caused you distress and concern. We also wish to inform you that neither are we selling the book nor are there plans to re-issue it.”

Subsequently, books containing the essay disappeared from all major bookstores. This led to a backlash from academics and students. Noted academics, among them Indologists Wendy Doniger and David Shulman, and historians Muzaffar Alam and Dipesh Chakrabarty, as well as a group of students at Oxford University wrote to OUP’s international office asking them for an explanation of this act of censorship.

Thank you for bullying us
OUP CEO Nigel Portwood immediately issued a statement, saying, “The book was out of stock from 2008 but we continued to collect a small number of back orders on our internal systems.” OUP India also claimed there was no censorship on their part: “The Collected Essays Of AK Ramanujan ... is listed as available on the OUP India website. OUP does not apologise and never has apologised for publishing the essay.”

Noted author Ramachandra Guha, in a panel discussion at Oxford University last week said, “I met the CEO of OUP today and essentially we disagreed on the interpretation of the apology, also disagreed on whether the book has been withdrawn.”
He also asserted that the best way for OUP to silence its critics would be to “immediately print the essay which would be a vindication of your respect for Ramanujan, vindication of the principle of free speech, and vindication of your bottom line too.”

Interestingly, when DNA tried to purchase the book from the OUP website, it was unable to do so despite several attempts. A member of the Oxford University student’s group that is protesting against OUP’s alleged removal of the book, Anup Surendranath, told DNA that when they contacted OUP India’s office in late November, they were specifically told that the book would not be available. “Noone knows how many orders it will take to finally get a re-print of the book. But the point is not even the availability of the book; the point is that OUP, a pre-eminent academic publishing house, didn’t once defend the work of an author it has widely published. It didn’t issue a single statement of support,” says Surendranath.

Giving in to fascism
This apparent case of throwing the author under the bus is not a new practice for OUP India, according to literary critic Nilanjana S Roy. “James Laine’s book, Shivaji: Hindu King In Islamic India, was taken off the shelves by OUP India after some political groups protested. The book wasn’t factually incorrect, it only referred to some “bazaar gossip” that Shivaji’s father might have been a Brahmin,” she says. “It is the obligation of a publishing house to stand up and support the authors, the right of the readers, and defend their own publishing decisions. OUP India has clearly not done this. There is a larger trend of appeasement from institutions that are supposed to protect the freedom of expression and that is because they are listening to an argument that is predicated on violence.”

As Rukun Advani, a former editor at OUP India, wrote in The Telegraph, “If a publisher with enormous resources sidles apologetically out of court, it will be interpreted as having said: “Let fascism rule, we haven’t the stomach to fight it.”

Mukherjee is very clear that institutions like the OUP and DU do not possess the fortitude to fight this sort of ‘fascism’. “The tendency is for these institutions to take the easy way out through appeasement because they are scared of controversies. Administrators try to please political parties because they are scared of reprisals. The rule of law, and court decisions seem to have no value.”

It is a truism that freedom of expression is a basic requirement for any democracy. If our educational and publishing institutions do not stand up to groups beholden to extremist ideologies, then their only contribution — apart from those made to their own bottom line — will be to an erosion of democratic values and consequent impoverishment of public discourse and culture.