Ramayana: Historicizing Myth and Mythologizing History 55of them, Kaikeyi, perfidiously persuaded him to send his eldest son into
exile. As Indians had always been meek by nature, the son submitted to
his father and did not fight for his rights. Rama took his young wife with
him, but she fell in love with Ravana and ran away with him. Lakshmana
never thought of himself and was loafing in the company of Rama. Like-
wise, Bharatha renounced the kingdom he had acquired. Thus the whole
story of the Ramayana was a history of some unenterprising people. The
non-Aryan Vanaras took pity on Rama's poor condition, killed Ravana
along with his family, and brought Sita back to Rama. Living true to the
cruel character of his barbarous race, Rama tried to burn her alive, but she
was saved by an act of providence. After some time, when her character
was questioned by someone, Rama drove her out of his house and later
buried her alive. Such tragedies are quite frequent among the barbarous
races.^27
Adopting the interpretation of the Ramayana as a chronicle of the Aryan
conquest of the Dravidian kingdoms of south India, Periyar E. V Ramas-
wami used the Ramayana to radicalize the Tamils in southern India against
Brahminical supremacy and the domination of North Indian Sanskritic
culture. For him, Rama, Sita, and all the rest of them were northerners
without "an iota of Tamil culture," but Ravana, the king of Lanka or south-
ern Tamil Nadu, was a Tamil. Ravana snatched Sita away because his own
sister was maimed and deformed by Rama. Aiming at running down the
Tamils, the story derided the men and women of Tamil Nadu as monkeys
and monsters. For that reason, the veneration of the Ramayana in Tamil
Nadu was "injurious and ignominious to the self-respect of the commu-
nity and of the country."^28 Advocating setting fire to the Ramayana in 1922,
Periyar actually countered the North Indian ritual of Ravana burning by
burning Rama's pictures in August 1956. His interpretation of the Rama-
yana even came to be enacted as a drama under the mocking and nonsensi-
cal title of Keemayana throughout Tamil Nadu. It is quite true that Periyar's
critique of the Ramayana must be taken into account to understand some
of the highly charged conflicts in Tamil Nadu public discourse.^29
Anti-Ramayana literature is equally prodigious and powerful all over
India. In Tamil Nadu alone quite a few scholars, such as Sami Vedachalam,
P. V Manicka Nayagar, P. Chidambaram Pillai, V P. Subramania Mudaliar,
M.S. Poornalingam Pillai, Chandrasekara Pavalar, and C.N. Annadurai,
have written popular works against the Ramayana. Taking the side of the
victims of the wanton heroisms of the protagonists of the Ramayana, a
North Indian author comments, "Rama discarded his own wife, the most
virtuous woman of all time, and exiled her to a forest to end her life there.
This he did after making her pregnant. If a king could be so cruel to his own
wife, how could we be expected to believe that he was the milk of kindness
to his subjects?" (italics in original).^30 Another original and lively work of
great merit this anti-Ramayana approach has produced is the Meghnadbadh