[Reader-list] Assault upon the Delhi University History

[TaraPrakash]

Now, let me remind the discussion here was about Delhi University. It was in 
Delhi University that ABVP goons (sorry for using a redundant word) So as I 
was saying, it was in Delhi University where ABVP raised a nonissue after 
losing the DUSU elections consistently to NSUI.
Please enlighten us about a DU where "they (SFI and AISA) raise a non-issue 
so that the normal life in campus comes to stand still." I am, of course, 
more interested in the campus being brought to stand still part of the 
sentence.

Also kindly explain what yardsticks can be used to measure originality of a 
work of art. May be you can suggest which of the "two original ramayanas" 
should be respected more? As somebody who has read both, and many others 
which according to you are not original, I am intrigued by Tulsidas version 
where Sita has been depicted as a submissive woman, unlike Valmiki's Sita 
who is more capable of challenging her husband on certain issues (or 
non-issues, depending on which side of the divide you are).


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Aditya Raj Kaul" <kauladityaraj at gmail.com>
To: <reader-list at sarai.net>
Sent: Sunday, March 02, 2008 2:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Reader-list] Assault upon the Delhi University History


> As I've been in DU for past many years; I'm witness to many political ups
> and downs. The left oriented parties have miserebly failed to gain support
> and lead any campaign. The SFI and AISA in particular and this goons who
> keep screaminf Inqulab and Lal Salam don't have anything to do so they 
> raise
> a non-issue so that the normal life in campus comes to stand still.
>
> It is quite evident in this particular case that some left oriented 
> faculty
> members are playing mischief with hostory and distorting it. I mean,
> everybody is entitled to his or her opinion; but we are here talking about 
> a
> Text Book. Kindly note this; its not just another book.
>
> We were well know that originally there are only two Ramayan's that we
> recognise; one by Tulsidas and another by Valmiki. There maybe a few 
> hundred
> more stories based on poetry from various places etc. But, lets for a 
> change
> concentrate on the original source while studying history in an 
> institution
> rather then secondary and modern opinions, translations etc etc.
>
> In Delhi University, Communists are not looked with respect. These
> Jhoolawaalahs hence this time have found an opportunity to create hype out
> of this and get cheap publicity.
>
> They have ofcourse failed. One cannot easily play around with the 
> religious
> sentiments of a particular community and then be rewarded. What ABVP did 
> was
> still peaceful. If it would have been something against Prophet Mohhamad
> then riots would have been initiated by the same Leftists and the so 
> called
> intellectuals at SARAI would have jumped in too. The entire state is sad. 
> I
> dodn't understand why these days a certain section finds it cool to be 
> with
> communists. Maybe just because of easy publicity, money, fame. etc...
>
> God help these directionless problimatic identiless creatures.
>
> P.S. - Mr. Inder Ticku "Salim" thanks for your elaborate email.
>
> Regards
> Aditya Raj Kaul
>
>
> On 3/1/08, inder salim <indersalim at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Two Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on
>> Translation
>> A. K. Ramanujan
>> How many Ramayanas ? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some
>> Ramayanas , a question is sometimes asked: How many Ramayanas have
>> there been? And there are stories that answer the question. Here is
>> one.
>> One day when Rama was sitting on his throne, his ring fell off. When
>> it touched the earth, it made a hole in the ground and disappeared
>> into it. It was gone. His trusty henchman, Hanuman, was at his feet.
>> Rama said to Hanuman, "Look, my ring is lost. Find it for me."
>> Now Hanuman can enter any hole, no matter how tiny. He had the power
>> to become the smallest of the small and larger than the largest thing.
>> So he took on a tiny form and went down the hole.
>> He went and went and went and suddenly fell into the netherworld.
>> There were women down there. "Look, a tiny monkey! It's fallen from
>> above? Then they caught him and placed him on a platter (thali ). The
>> King of Spirits (bhut ), who lives in the netherworld, likes to eat
>> animals. So Hanuman was sent to him as part of his dinner, along with
>> his vegetables. Hanuman sat on the platter, wondering what to do.
>> While this was going on in the netherworld, Rama sat on his throne on
>> the earth above. The sage Vasistha and the god Brahma came to see him.
>> They said to Rama, "We want to talk privately with you. We don't want
>> anyone to hear what we say or interrupt it. Do we agree?"
>> "All right," said Rama, "we'll talk."
>> Then they said, "Lay down a rule. If anyone comes in as we are
>> talking, his head should be cut off."
>> "It will be done," said Rama.
>> Who would be the most trustworthy person to guard the door? Hanuman
>> had gone down to fetch the ring. Rama trusted no one more than
>> Laksmana,
>> ________________________________________
>> ― 23 ―
>> so he asked Laksmana to stand by the door. "Don't allow anyone to
>> enter," he ordered.
>> Laksmana was standing at the door when the sage Visvamitra appeared
>> and said, "I need to see Rama at once. It's urgent. Tell me, where is
>> Rama?"
>> Laksmana said, "Don't go in now. He is talking to some people. It's
>> important."
>> "What is there that Rama would hide from me?" said Visvamitra. "I must
>> go in, right now."
>> Laksmana said, "I'11 have to ask his permission before I can let you in."
>> "Go in and ask then."
>> "I can't go in till Rama comes out. You'll have to wait."
>> "If you don't go in and announce my presence, I'll burn the entire
>> kingdom of Ayodhya with a curse," said Visvamitra.
>> Laksmana thought, "If I go in now, I'll die. But if I don't go, this
>> hotheaded man will burn down the kingdom. All the subjects, all things
>> living in it, will die. It's better that I alone should die."
>> So he went right in.
>> Rama asked him, "What's the matter?"
>> "Visvamitra is here."
>> "Send him in."
>> So Visvamitra went in. The private talk had already come to an end.
>> Brahma and Vasistha had come to see Rama and say to him, "Your work in
>> the world of human beings is over. Your incarnation as Rama must now
>> he given up. Leave this body, come up, and rejoin the gods." That's
>> all they wanted to say.
>> Laksmana said to Rama, "Brother, you should cut off my head."
>> Rama said, "Why? We had nothing more to say. Nothing was left. So why
>> should I cut off your head?"
>> Laksmana said, "You can't do that. You can't let me off because I'm
>> your brother. There'll be a blot on Rama's name. You didn't spare your
>> wife. You sent her to the jungle. I must be punished. I will leave."
>> Laksmana was an avatar of Sesa, the serpent on whom Visnu sleeps. His
>> time was up too. He went directly to the river Sarayu and disappeared
>> in the flowing waters.
>> When Laksmana relinquished his body, Rama summoned all his followers,
>> Vibhisana, Sugriva, and others, and arranged for the coronation of his
>> twin sons, Lava and Kusa. Then Rama too entered the river Sarayu.
>> All this while, Hanuman was in the netherworld. When he was finally
>> taken to the King of Spirits, he kept repeating the name of Rama.
>> "Rama Rama Rama . . ."
>> Then the King of Spirits asked, "Who are you?"
>> "Hanuman."
>> "Hanuman? Why have you come here?"
>> ________________________________________
>> ― 24 ―
>> "Rama's ring fell into a hole. I've come to fetch it."
>> The king looked around and showed him a platter. On it were thousands
>> of rings. They were all Rama's rings. The king brought the platter to
>> Hanuman, set it down, and said, "Pick out your Rama's ring and take
>> it."
>> They were all exactly the same. "I don't know which one it is," said
>> Hanuman, shaking his head.
>> The King of Spirits said, "There have been as many Ramas as there are
>> rings on this platter. When you return to earth, you will not find
>> Rama. This incarnation of Rama is now over. Whenever an incarnation of
>> Rama is about to be over, his ring falls down. I collect them and keep
>> them. Now you can go."
>> So Hanuman left.
>> This story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rama there
>> is a Ramayana .[1] The number of Ramayanas and the range of their
>> influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five
>> hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of languages in
>> which the Rama story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese,
>> Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri,
>> Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit,
>> Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Tibetan―to say nothing of
>> Western languages. Through the centuries, some of these languages have
>> hosted more than one telling of the Rama story. Sanskrit alone
>> contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various
>> narrative genres (epics, kavyas or ornate poetic compositions, puranas
>> or old mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays,
>> dance-dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk
>> traditions, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. To these must
>> be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays and
>> shadow plays, in all the many South and Southeast Asian cultures.[2]
>> Camille Bulcke, a student of the Ramayana , counted three hundred
>> tellings.[3] It's no wonder that even as long ago as the fourteenth
>> century, Kumaravyasa, a Kannada poet, chose to write a Mahabharata ,
>> because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning
>> under the burden of Ramayana poets ( tinikidanu phaniraya ramayanada
>> kavigala bharadali ). In this paper, indebted for its data to numerous
>> previous translators and scholars, I would like to sort out for
>> myself, and I hope for others, how these hundreds of tellings of a
>> story in different cultures, languages, and religious traditions
>> relate to each other: what gets translated, transplanted, transposed.
>> Valmiki and Kampan: Two Ahalyas
>> Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. I have
>> come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or
>> variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that
>> there is an invariant, an original or
>> ________________________________________
>> ― 25 ―
>> Ur -text―usually Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana , the earliest and most
>> prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always
>> Valmiki's narrative that is carried from one language to another.
>> It would be useful to make some distinctions before we begin. The
>> tradition itself distinguishes between the Rama story (ramakatha ) and
>> texts composed by a specific person―Valmiki, Kampan, or Krttivasa, for
>> example. Though many of the latter are popularly called Ramayanas
>> (like Kamparamayanam ), few texts actually bear the title Ramayana ;
>> they are given titles like Iramavataram (The Incarnation of Rama),
>> Ramcaritmanas (The Lake of the Acts of Rama), Ramakien (The Story of
>> Rama), and so on. Their relations to the Rama story as told by Valmiki
>> also vary. This traditional distinction between katha (story) and
>> kavya (poem) parallels the French one between sujet and recit , or the
>> English one between story and discourse.[4] It is also analogous to
>> the distinction between a sentence and a speech act. The story may be
>> the same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different.
>> Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the
>> style, details, tone, and texture―and therefore the import―may be
>> vastly different.
>> Here are two tellings of the "same" episode, which occur at the same
>> point in the sequence of the narrative. The first is from the first
>> book (Balakanda ) of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana ; the second from the
>> first canto (Palakantam ) of Kampan's Iramavataram in Tamil. Both
>> narrate the story of Ahalya.
>> The Ahalya Episode: Valmiki
>> To read more , please click:
>>
>>
>> http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft3j49n8h7&chunk.id=d0e1254&toc.depth=1&toc.id=d0e1254&brand=eschol
>>
>>
>> On Sat, Mar 1, 2008 at 7:21 PM, Ravikant <ravikant at sarai.net> wrote:
>> > This post of mine was rejected by the reader list as it had images of
>> the
>> >  violence in DU.
>> >
>> >  Says Lawrence, incidentally for those interested, the entire book Many
>> >  Ramayanas is available online for free and a delightful read, and also
>> the
>> >  follow up book, Questioning Ramayanas
>> >
>> >  http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3j49n8h7/
>> >
>> >  On many Ramayanas: (posted on 27 Feb, 2008)
>> >  by RAVIKANT
>> >
>> >  http://www.kafila.org/2008/02/27/on-many-ramayanas/
>> >
>> >  You may have seen the edit in today's HT condemning the act of
>> vandalism and
>> >  the news of the arrest of three ABVP activists. You must have also 
>> > seen
>> >  reports in today's newspapers about the demonstration yesterday in
>> Delhi
>> >  University of students and teachers demanding punishment to the guilty
>> and
>> >  reiterating the pledge that the text should not be expunged just
>> because
>> >  ABVP/BJP finds it objectionable. For those who want to look up, the
>> text in
>> >  question is A K Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and
>> Three
>> >  Thoughts on Translation, also available in a volume edited by Paula
>> Richman:
>> >  Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia
>> (OUP;
>> >  1991.)
>> >  You see the ABVP has been sitting on a dharna/hunger strike in DU over
>> this
>> >  for something like three months. They have been trying to put pressure
>> on the
>> >  department which is currently headed by Prof. SZH Jafry, quite clearly
>> a soft
>> >  target. Dr. Upinder Singh's name was also dragged into the controversy
>> to
>> >  kill two birds with one stone: The ABVP thought it would be able to
>> embarass
>> >  the Prime Minister as well, as Dr. Singh happens to be his daughter.
>> The PMO
>> >  was quick to deny having got anything to do with the DU controversy.
>> >  But beyond these bare facts, the most interesting story is that of
>> media
>> >  involvement in the incident. After several rounds of meetings with the
>> >  delegates, the department was not convinced to withdraw the syllabus
>> which
>> >  was duly passed by the academic bodies in charge of the syllabus
>> making, etc.
>> >  So the ABVP decided to do something dramatic. About 10 days ago, Rajat
>> Sharma
>> >  of India TV shame ― which I think lacks both resources and ideas and
>> yet
>> >  wants to stay up in the ratings ― roped in Vinay Katiyar and others to
>> debate
>> >  the issue on Prime Time. It was obvious that Katiyar Saheb had not 
>> > read
>> the
>> >  text and looked rather unwilling to comment. But Rajat Sharma kept
>> >  highlighting the text out of context and goading him to do something
>> about
>> >  it. On which he assured that he would look into the matter. It is not 
>> > a
>> >  surprise therefore that the ABVP activists insisted on waiting for the
>> camera
>> >  crew to arrive before they staged action the day before and even less
>> >  surprising was the fact that once again it was India TV that played 
>> > the
>> >  footage big time. By yesterday of course other TV channels swung into
>> action
>> >  and now a diversity of voices seems to be emerging.
>> >  I want to end this with a personal anecdote. I used to be always
>> intrigued by
>> >  my grandfather quoting or paraphrasing some reference or the other
>> uttered by
>> >  some Gosain ji. He read, rather sang, Ramcharitmanas everyday after
>> bath but
>> >  I could not imagine it is Goswami Tulsidas he meant each time he
>> referred to
>> >  Gosain ji. My confusion also flowed from the fact that our village had
>> a
>> >  small but respectable population of the Gosain sub-caste of Brahmins,
>> who
>> >  earned their living by practising Ayurvedic medicine and assisting the
>> >  Brahmin priests at rituals. I also remember that Akhand Kirtan was 
>> > held
>> every
>> >  now and then in the village temple and groups took turns singing 'hare
>> ram
>> >  hare ram ram ram ram hare hare, hare krishna hare krishna krishna
>> krishna
>> >  hare hare' so that recital chain remained unbroken for a few days. The
>> >  important thing to note is that the upper caste group had a rather
>> classy and
>> >  genteel style of singing, but when the other caste people got into the
>> >  Mandap, it came alive with robust enthusiasm: bhakti seemed to have
>> been
>> >  transformed into a certain charismatic euphoria. However, I do not 
>> > have
>> any
>> >  memories of upper castes either questioning, tutoring or forbidding 
>> > the
>> >  non-upper castes to sing the way they did. All these memories came
>> alive to
>> >  me recently when I listened to Chhannulal Mishra's recital of
>> Sundarkand: the
>> >  classically trained Banaras artist rendered the Manas in 5 different
>> ways
>> >  some of which was clearly regional and folksy. He also freely remixed
>> the
>> >  Manas with local take-offs on the same theme. I wonder what the ABVP
>> would
>> >  want to do to these obviously pre-Hindutva practices. I am sure they
>> will go
>> >  mad if they read something like Maithili writer Harimohan Jha's 
>> > Khattar
>> Kaka.
>> >  Even if I want them to, I am in a way glad they don't read as much as
>> they
>> >  should!
>> >
>> >
>> > _________________________________________
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>>
>>
>> --
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