52 "Presenting" the Past
ground even after the death of his son and another loyal brother. Inevita-
bly Rama and Ravana came face to face in the war, and after a long and
arduous struggle, Rama killed Ravana.
Sita was overjoyed by this great victory, but Rama was not willing to
accept Sita again, as she had lived in a stranger's household all alone for
a long time. Accepting the situation with deep sorrow, Sita asked Laksh-
mana to raise a fire and jumped into it. There arose the god of fire, who
presented the innocent Sita to Rama with blessings. Having proved his
wife's integrity to the world, Rama took Sita into his arms. In the mean-
time, the period of exile had been completed, and the trio returned home,
where Bharatha was anxiously waiting. Rama was crowned as the king
who had Sita on his side, Lakshmana at his back, and Hanuman at his feet.
And the fabled Ramarajya began in Kosala.
Preferring the term tellings to versions or variants, for the latter terms
give rise to an assumption that there is indeed an invariant, an original
or urtext, A. K. Ramanujan points out the existence of hundreds of Rama-
yanas. The list of languages that have various tellings of the Ram story is
not only long but traverses such a large territory of South and Southeast
Asia, ranging from Guajarati to Cambodian, Tibetan to Tamil, Sinhalese
to Chinese, and Kashmiri to Balinese. Sanskrit alone has some 25 tellings
that belong to various narrative genres such as epics, kavyas (poetic com-
positions), puranas (mythological stories), and so forth. If dance-dramas
and other such performances in both the classical and folk traditions are
added, the number of Ramayanas grows even larger. When sculpture and
bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays, and shadow plays in various South
and Southeast Asian cultures are added to that, the number of Ramayanas
reaches almost 300.^19
If we add to this list the various recitals and performances, then it
becomes true that "Ram incarnates in countless ways and there are tens
of millions of Ramayans."^20 Every single one of these recitals or perfor-
mances is a different Ramayana, for they have minutely different nuances,
emphases, contemporary references, philosophical and religious interpre-
tations, personal touches of the storytellers, collective feelings of the listen-
ers, and so forth. The Ramayana has ever since gone high-tech. There have
been several popular movies made on parts of the epic; the Doordarshan
(Indian TV) made waves in India by serializing the Ramayana (to which
we will turn later), and there has even been an animation production, The
Legend of Prince Ram, made in Japan.
The traditional distinction between katha (story) and kavya (poem) is
similar to the distinction between story and discourse, or a sentence and
a speech act. The various texts by Valmiki, Kampan (Iramavataram—The
Incarnation of Rama), Tulsi Das (Ramcaritmanas—The Lake of the Acts of
Rama), Krttivasa Ramayana in Bengali, or the Thai Ramakien (The Story of
Rama) stand distinguished from one another by their different discourses.