April 7, 2022 43Hearing the ‘Ramayana’ Again
Wendy DonigerThe RƗmƗyaa of VƗlmƯki :
The Complete English Translation
translated from the Sanskrit by
Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland
Goldman, Rosalind Lefeber, Sheldon
I. Pollock, and Barend A. van Nooten;
and revised and edited by
Robert P. Goldman and Sally
J. Sutherland Goldman.
Princeton University Press,
943 pp., $27.50 (paper)In 2007 the Indian government planned
to dig a deepwater channel through the
thirty- mile stretch of sea that separates
the southern tip of the country from Sri
Lanka, which is too shallow for cargo
ships to navigate, forcing them to go
around the island. The shipping chan-
nel would have reduced the journey by
some 250 miles and saved a great deal
of time, fuel, and money.
But a group of hard- line Hindu ac-
tivists protested that the digging would
disturb a shelf of shells and shoals,
once visible but now submerged, which
they believed to be the remains of an
ancient causeway or bridge. Accord-
ing to the great poem called the Ra-
mayana, a prince named Rama, an
incarnation of the god Vishnu, was ex-
iled to the forest through the machina-
tions of the mother of one of his three
half- brothers. There, the demon Ra-
vana carried Rama’s wife, Sita, off to
his island kingdom of Lanka. A simian
army built a bridge between the main-
land and Lanka so that Rama could
cross the channel. With the help of an-
other brother, Lakshmana, and a mag-
ical monkey named Hanuman, Rama
killed Ravana and rescued Sita.
After widespread, disruptive demon-
strations by Hindu groups on September
12, 2007, the government abandoned the
channel project. To this day, the ship-
ping lanes continue to wind all the way
around Sri Lanka.
No one was harmed in the channel
protest, but that was not the case in the
notorious storming and illegal demoli-tion of the Babri Masjid (the sixteenth-
century mosque of Emperor Babur) on
December 6, 1992, in the city of Ayod-
hya, in northern India. The Ramayana
says that Rama was born in Ayod-
hya, and many devout Hindus believe
the Babri Masjid once was the site of a
Hindu temple. More than two thousand
people, mostly Muslims, were killed in
the riots that followed the demolition
of the mosque and in related riots else-
where in India. In the summer of 2021
Prime Minister Narendra Modi ritually
laid an eighty- eight- pound silver brick
for the construction of a Rama temple on
the site of the devastated Babri Masjid.
Such is the power of the Ramayana, a
story whose many retellings constitute
an entire literature. The oldest surviv-
ing version is a 25,000- verse Sanskrit
poem that the poet Valmiki composed
in India sometime in the first millen-
nium BCE. No one in India ever hears
the Ramayana for the first time, as the
poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan re-
marked. If they don’t know Valmiki’s
Ramayana, they may know one of the
numerous other retellings and trans-
lations in Sanskrit or in other Indian
languages, such as Tulsidas’s popular
sixteenth- century Early Hindi Ram-
charitmanas or Kampan’s beautiful
twelfth- century Tamil poem.
Among the many reimagined Ra-
mayanas in our day, there was the series
of Amar Chitra Katha comic books de-
voted to Ramayana characters, begin-
ning in 1967; the televised Ramayana
(1987–1988), which added fuel to the
fanaticism that brought down the Babri
Masjid; and Sita Sings the Blues (2008),
an award- winning film by an American
director, Nina Paley, who came, pre-
dictably, under heavy fire from conser-
vative Hindus for portraying Rama as
both brutal and cowardly. Even within
the seven books of Valmiki’s Sanskrit
text (of which there are numerous edi-
tions), there are revisions: book 6 has a
happy ending in which Rama and Sita
are triumphally reunited; in book 7 Sitaleaves Rama, who rules in lonely isola-
tion ever after.The centrality and vitality of the Ra-
mayana in Indian culture today, its
enormous historical importance and
continued use in mythological histori-
cizing, can be only roughly approxi-
mated in Europe and America by the
Bible. As Robert Goldman and Sally
Sutherland Goldman remark in their
introduction to the new edition of their
translation of Valmiki’s Ramayana,
“Reading the RƗmƗya۬a... as history
is much like reading the Old Testament
as a history of the Jewish people in an-
tiquity.” Hindu kings throughout In-
dian history commissioned inscriptions
bragging that they had destroyed their
enemies just as Rama killed Ravana
and that they had made their lands a
Hindu paradise like Rama’s kingdom,
“Ram- raj.”
In 1975 a group of distinguished In-
dian scholars at the Oriental Institute
of Baroda produced for the first time
a full critical edition of Valmiki’s Ra-
mayana. Subsequently, an English
translation of that edition was made by
a group of scholars under the direction
of Goldman and Sutherland Goldman
(professor and senior lecturer, respec-
tively, at the University of California at
Berkeley). Goldman translated volume
1; Goldman and Sutherland Goldman
together translated volumes 5 and 7,
and, with Barend A. van Nooten, vol-
ume 6; Sheldon Pollock translated vol-
umes 2 and 3; and Rosalind Lefeber
volume 4. Princeton University Press
published the individual volumes be-
tween 1984 and 2016. (The first five
volumes of this translation were also
republished in 2009 by the Clay San-
skrit Library, through New York Uni-
versity Press, in handy small volumes,
with only the glossary remaining from
the original appendices but with the
useful addition of the Sanskrit text in
Roman transliteration on the facingpage, in the style of the Loeb Classical
Library.)
The seven- volume Princeton trans-
lation is a masterpiece of scholarship,
one of the great landmarks of Indol-
ogy of the past generation. The trans-
lations are painstakingly accurate and
thoroughly annotated, incorporating
the extensive scholarship in the field.
The long introduction to each volume
provides a synopsis, an analysis of that
volume’s characters, and an overview
of its structure, while the many notes
and several appendices furnish all the
information any reader could want to
clarify every aspect of the text.
This publication, with its enormous
technical apparatus, was intended for
academic specialists or, as the editors
put it, “a scholarly audience with some
degree of competence in Sanskrit.” It
is an essential part of the working li-
brary of any serious English- speaking
Sanskritist—or, perhaps, a well- heeled
amateur, for the full set is pricey. (Vol-
ume 7 alone is listed at $180.) Even
those who read the Ramayana in San-
skrit (the Baroda critical edition is now
conveniently available online) find the
full Princeton translation invaluable
for its illuminating notes and insightful
interpretations.But how many people do read Val-
miki’s Ramayana in Sanskrit? More
than you might think. Sanskrit has a
bad rap outside of India. Walt Kelly’s
Pogo used the word “Sam- skrimps”
to describe highfalutin double- talk or
manipulative twaddle. Marcel Proust
(near the start of the fourth volume
of À la recherche du temps perdu) re-
ferred sneeringly to “those people who,
at the Collège de France, in the room in
which the Professor of Sanskrit lectures
without an audience, attend his course
only for the sake of keeping warm.”
But many people in India do know
Sanskrit. Narendra Modi’s water re-
sources minister, Uma Bharti, recently
proposed that Sanskrit should replace
English as a “link language” in the coun-
try, since “in every village of India, you
will find two or three people who are ex-
tremely knowledgeable about Sanskrit.
The same cannot be said of English.”
Moreover, an impressive number of peo-
ple outside India read Sanskrit. (It can
even run in families. Robert Goldman
is my cousin: his father’s sister Minnie
married my father’s brother Jack.) And
one might argue that anyone who is se-
rious about the Ramayana really ought
to learn Sanskrit.
Still, many people in India and
abroad want to read Valmiki’s Ra-
mayana without all the bother of learn-
ing Sanskrit. I noted in passing just two
of the many retellings in other Indian
languages. And in addition to the var-
ious partial English translations and
summaries and retellings in Sanskrit
and other languages, there have been
several serious attempts to render Val-
miki’s entire Sanskrit text in English,
of which one of the earliest was by
William Carey and Joshua Marshman,
in 1806–1810, and the most readable
(though abridged) by Arshia Sattar in
1996.
The remarkable condensation of
the Princeton scholarly edition (theRama and Lakshmana searching for Sita; illustration from the Ramayana, Mewar, Rajasthan, India, circa 1680 –1690Metropolitan Museum of ArtDoniger 43 48 .indd 43 3 / 10 / 22 4 : 15 PM