Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana Read online

  ZUBAAN

  is an imprint of Kali for Women

  Zubaan

  128B Shahpur Jat

  1st floor

  New Delhi 110 049

  www.zubaanbooks.com

  First published by Zubaan, 2012

  Copyright © Anil Menon and Vandana Singh, 2012

  Copyright © individual essays with the authors

  All rights reserved

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  eBook ISBN: 9789383074174

  Print source ISBN: 9789381017043

  This eBook is DRM-free.

  Zubaan is an independent feminist publishing house based in New Delhi, India, with a strong academic and general list. It was set up as an imprint of the well known feminist house Kali for Women and carries forward Kali’s tradition publishing world quality books to high editorial and production standards. ‘Zubaan’ means tongue, voice, language, speech in Hindustani. Zubaan is a non-profit publisher, working in the areas of the humanities social sciences, as well as in fiction, general non-fiction, and books for young adults that celebrate difference, diversity and equality, especially for and about the children of India and South Asia under its imprint Young Zubaan.

  Typeset by Jojy Philip, New Delhi 110 015

  Printed at Raj Press, R-3 Inderpuri, New Delhi 110 012

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction

  Anil Menon

  Introduction

  Vandana Singh

  The Ramayana as an American Reality Television Show: Internet Activity Following the Mutilation of Surpanakha

  Kuzhali Manickavel

  Exile

  Neelanjana Banerjee

  Making

  Aishwarya Subramanian

  The Good King

  Abha Dawesar

  The Mango Grove

  Julie Rosenthal

  Game of Asylum Seekers

  K. Srilata

  Day of the Deer

  Lavanya Karthik

  Weak Heart

  Tabish Khair

  Sita’s Descent

  Indrapramit Das

  Great Disobedience

  Abirami Velliangiri

  Test of Fire

  Pervin Saket

  The Other Woman

  Manjula Padmanabhan

  This, Other World

  Lavie Tidhar

  Fragments from the Book of Beauty

  Priya Sarukkai Chabria

  Kalyug Amended

  Molshree Ambastha

  Sita to Vaidehi—Another Journey

  Sucharita Dutta-Asane

  Petrichor

  Sharanya Manivannan

  The Princess in the Forest

  Mary Anne Mohanraj

  Sarama

  Deepak Unnikrishnan

  Regressions

  Swapna Kishore

  Machanu Visits the Underworld

  Victoria Truslow

  Oblivion: A Journey

  Vandana Singh

  Vaidehi and Her Earth Mother

  Pratap Reddy

  Falling into the Earth

  Shweta Narayan

  Contributing Authors

  About the Editors

  Introduction

  Anil Menon

  A long time ago, the story goes, a young prince, the heir to a great South-Asian kingdom, threaded Siva’s mighty bow and won the heart of a brave princess. The story of what happened next, a story which begins where most love stories end, the story of the Ramayana, has been told and re-told countless times over the centuries. Hold on to a story long enough and it begins to make a people. The long shadow of the Ramayana explains why a popular Indian brand of cockroach poison is called Laxman Rekha Chalk; why a recent Bollywood superhero movie should have a villain named Ra-One; and why for some Indians the word Ram-rajya (Rama’s State) is a political ideal and not a mythical era. South-Asians have held on to this tale.

  However, the twenty-four stories in Breaking the Bow are not about holding on to this great and ancient tale. They are about letting go and making ourselves anew. The Ramayana is important to this project as an inspiration, a context. To take the road not taken requires a road that has been taken. We are (mostly) interested in the road not taken.

  This is very hard to do with the Ramayana. The idea that there is “the” Ramayana is one of those South-Asian facts: true wherever it is not false. As A.K. Ramanujan’s wonderful must-read essay 300 Ra-mayanas shows, there are many Ramayanas. The tradition is to depart from the tradition. There is the Jaina Ramayana. The Kashmiri Ramayana. There is Brij Narain Chakbast’s Urdu Ramayana. The Muslim poet Masihi’s Persian Ramayana begins with traditional Islamic invocations. If the great archeologist H.D. Sankalia is right, there is a Lord Rama story in the Zend-Avesta. Kamban’s Tamil version, Kambaramayana, would surprise fans of Tulsidas’ Ramayana for the respect it accords Lord Ravana. Kamban’s radical influence can be seen in works as recent as Mani Ratnam’s Raavan (2010). Even more radical is the Chandravati Ramayana. Composed by a sixteenth-century female poet and bhaktin, it is mostly about Sita; a feminist Ramayana. And this is just the subcontinent proper. There are the Ramayanas from Thailand, Malaysia, Burma and Cambodia. There are many Ramayana versions, many departures.

  What usually happens in such a situation is that a tradition develops in the method of departure. The story is re-imagined with shifts in points of view, minority characters are given a voice, value systems are inverted, settings are modernized and/or the story is relocated in space and time. A few stories in this collection also adopt some of these traditional techniques. Despite our suggestion that writers avoid straightforward retellings, some of the Ramayana’s characters were not so easily silenced. For example, Lord Ravana’s sister Surpanakha—mutilated by Lord Rama and Lakshman for her inappropriate amorous advances was the subject of many sympathetic treatments. It was the quality of these retellings, not their ideologies, that persuaded us to include them.

  Still, such retellings are the exception. We are aiming for a different kind of departure. Most of the stories in this anthology belong to the genre of speculative fiction. Spec-fic includes science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, slipstream, surrealism, neo-modernist and postmodern lit, and many other sub-genres.

  What make a story speculative? A simple answer, not entirely accurate, is that a speculative story is a non-realist story. In a realist story, the story’s context—the stuff that needn’t be told- is this world, the actual world, common-sense world. In a realist story, if two lovers meet in Navi Mumbai, the reader can be reasonably certain they are meeting in Maharashtra, India. But in a non-realist story, there are no such guarantees. Navi Mumbai could a video game, the belly of a whale or the renamed capital of Sweden.

  Just as topology evolved out Euclidean geometry by relaxing the set of permitted transformations, speculative fiction evolved out of realist fiction by relaxing various constraints. Stories no longer need to be about human or pseudo-human characters. They don’t need to be set on this earth. They don’t need to be located in the past or the present. They don’t need to be written in any known human language. They don’t need to respect science or sense . Their telling could be as rigorous as a mathematical deduction or as mischievous as the square root of a cheeky orange. Such freedom is challenging
, not to mention frightening. To use an old Sanskrit term, it takes a certain chutzpah.

  The ancient South-Asians had chutzpah. They imagined our universe as existing for a duration of 311 trillion years (100 Brahma years), about 23, 000 times larger than the scientific estimate for the current age of the Big Bang universe (~ 13.5 billion years). They imagined multiple universes, frothing in the event-sea of creation and destruction. They imagined space and time as being illusory in the absolute and relative across the sea of universes. They imagined consciousness in all of matter, not just human beings. Divinity didn’t frighten them. The Rig-Veda ex presses doubt on the omniscience of the creator. The ancients imagined weapons that could flatten mountains, unravel minds, devastate entire armies, destroy worlds and even annihilate the gods themselves.

  The South-Asians were also fascinated with language. As the linguist Frits Staal remarked, what geometry was to the Greeks, language was to the ancient South-Asians. This fascination, combined with their speculative imagination, led to stories that pushed the boundaries of what was possible with language: self-reflective stories, meta-fiction, fractal stories, frame stories stacked eight or nine levels deep, stories in which reality and fiction merged seamlessly, stories that encoded other stories, stories which questioned embodiment, gender and identity…

  Of course, as in all feudal societies, the storytellers were not to disturb the sleep of the privileged few. Predictably, the stories suffered. They could not explore moral, political or social issues with much honesty. The truth was fixed in advance. The stories were afraid to question anything directly. Imagination had to hide in women’s tales, live in kitchens, speak in regional tongues, sink underground. In time, there was no need to worry about offending anybody; when have the mute offended the deaf?

  In this context, A. K. Ramanujan’s comment that no Indian— at least, no Hindu- hears the epics for the first time acquires an ironic flavor. The Ramayana with its fantasy tropes should arouse the adbhut rasa—the savor of wonder—but it cannot, because in India the pleasure of a first contact with the epics is not possible. Or more accurately, the savoring of the epics as a novel experience is not possible. The epics come in many diverse versions, but diversity is not novelty. We need the novum for wonder, and that is precisely what tradition cannot offer.

  But speculative fiction can. This was brought home to us by Pervin Saket’s Test of Fire, written at a fiction workshop Vandana, Suchitra Mathur and I had conducted at IIT-Kanpur in 2009. I wasn’t excited to discover that the story had Sita as its protagonist. I had read quite a few stories centered around Sita. In fact, just before coming to Kanpur I had read Namitha Gokhale’s anthology on Sita. Pervin’s interpretation of Sita didn’t break any taboos. In its disappointment at Sita’s treatment, it wasn’t particularly radical. Yet Pervin’s Sita felt new. It soon became clear that the other participants also sensed a difference. Pervin, with a clever choice of setting, had moved an ancient tale virtually forward in time. The result was a taste of the adbhut rasa, the quintessential taste of science fiction.

  Pervin’s story reminded us that we once again had a literature un afraid of the imagination. We began to wonder about the sort of departures that speculative fiction—not just science-fiction—could make possible. Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s use of the Odyssey in his novel 2001. Superficially, there is little in Clarke’s novel that reminds one of the Odyssey. Yet unlike many retellings, Clarke’s Bowman recaptures the existential loneliness of Odysseus. Perhaps that’s because our horizons are now pinned to outer space, and as we stand with Clarke’s Bow man we become Odysseus gazing outwards at the glittering infinite sea.

  Clarke’s telling was as elegant as his setting was essential. We wondered if something similar would be possible with our own great epic.

  I am glad to report our authors rose to the challenge. This is an inter national effort. We have authors from India, Sri Lanka, United States, Britain, France, Holland and Dubai. Some like Manjula Padmanabhan, Tabish Khair, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Abha Dawesar are very well known, but we also have many new voices. The result is a one-of-a-kind anthology. Delicate fantasies such as Shweta Narayan’s Falling or Aishwarya Subramaniyan’s Making sit next to K. Srilata’s philosophical Game of Asylum Seekers, Pratap Reddy’s murder mystery Vaidehi and Sucharita Dutta-Asane’s magic realist From Sita to Vaidehi. Sometimes, like the long-lost twins in the Hindi movie Ram Aur Shyam, stories mirror each other because they are so different. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s poetic Fragments From The Book of Beauty is city-twin to Molshree Ambastha’s amusing Why Me? Molshree’s story, written in the heart felt, irony-free style characteristic of Ram-leelas, perhaps has the best last line of all the stories.

  We found other mirrors. Kuzhali Manickavel’s The Ramayana As An American Reality Show is in its way as hallucinogenic as Tori Truslow’s Machanu Visits The Underworld. Similarly, Neelanjana Banerjee’s Exile parallels Lavie Tidhar’s cyberpunk This, Other World. The desolate alternate history of Abirami Velliangiri’s Great Disobedience meets the grim archeology of Swapna Kishore’s Regressions. You will find many voices, many novums, many rasas. Bring a large spoon.

  Acknowledgements: All editors should be so lucky as I was to have a co-editor with the sensibility and judgment of my friend Vandana Singh. Our anthology also exists because of the investment and imagination of the people behind Zubaan Books, especially Urvashi Butalia and Anita Roy. This independent press has the stoutest heart in all of Indian publishing. A heartfelt namasthe to Shweta Tewari for shepherding us through the process; our many bleats and excuses must have been in credibly annoying. And finally, Saras, for making my orbits around the sun such fun.

  Introduction

  Vandana Singh

  I first heard the Ramayana when I was very little. From time immemorial, the epic has been carried down through the generations as an oral tradition. I heard it from my mother and my paternal grandmother; the Amar Chitra Katha comic books came much later. My grandmother was particularly fond of the Bal Kand in the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsi das, which describes in beautiful verse the childhood antics of the young hero, Ram, and to this day I can sing or recite parts of it.

  It was my grandfather—a man of great intelligence, sensitivity and integrity, who first gave me a hint that there were multiple Ramayanas. He loved many aspects of the ancient texts, particularly the Upanishads, and was the first person to inculcate in me an appreciation of the sounds of poems in Sanskrit, especially the Geet Govind. Yet he did not hesitate to criticize when he had good reason to do so. (One of the great freedoms of Hinduism is surely the lack of a Big-Brother-style religious police to prevent you from having your say). I remember him raging about some sections of the Manu-smriti, or pointing out an absurdity in the Vishnu Purana. Once he told me that there were many versions of the Ramayana, and that some versions contained interpolations that were clearly anachronistic, containing references that belonged to times later than that of the original story. I didn’t think much about it then, being in my pre-teen years and distracted by cricket and climbing trees, but I remembered this later when I came across references to Ramayanas from the point of view of the villain, Ravana, and from Sita’s vantage point as well. Now I think of the Ramayana as a kind of palimpsest, a tapestry in multiple layers, a creation of many voices through the ages, an entity always in the making, and thus always alive.

  Even as a child, I had, in a sense, encountered many Ramayanas already, because my mother’s version and my grandmother’s version, although both derived from the one written by Tulsidas in the late sixteenth century, were embroidered by their own interpolations and interpretations. During the Ramlila festivities in Delhi we would watch the great effigies being erected, and the young Ram, much painted and made-up, draw his great bow to let loose a flaming arrow. Straight to the navel of Ravana it would go, and the firecrackers inside the giant would burst into a great and noisy conflagration. Then there would be enactments in neighborhoods, and
Ramayana ballets on TV. The characters in each were transformed, made alive, each in a different way. I still recall the great death-dance of Jatayu, felled in battle with Ravana when Jatayu attempted to prevent the kidnapping of princess Sita.

  It was my grandfather who told me that the Ramayana is not simply a story of the victory of good over evil, but like that other great text, the Bhagavad Gita, it is also a metaphor for the battle in the soul. This stayed with me, as did my grandmother’s unexpected radicalism. She loved the Ramayana, and as a young woman she left home during the freedom movement to join the Salt Satyagraha, something quite unexpected for a girl from a good family in the India of the day. She loved the Ramayana and she hated the caste system. It was only later that I understood that the vanquishing of evil takes place as much in the soul as in the battleground.

  There are many retellings of the Ramayana but where this book de parts is that the stories are not retellings. They are distributaries of the great network of rivers, that is the Ramayana tradition; they are modern additions to the Kathasaritsagara— the ocean of streams of stories—of the Ramayana. They are unique in that, as befits the imaginative scope of the ancient storytellers, the setting is not limited to earth but might be the cosmos itself, and the actors and tellers are as varied as a single mother in present-day India and a time-traveler from the far future. Speculative fiction, I believe, comes naturally to us Indians, since we have a tendency to embroider and prevaricate, to let the imagination run riot, and to argue incessantly. To me speculative fiction has a great revolutionary potential—merely by asking the question “what if?” we might overturn the established order, the conventional point of view; thrones may tremble and the mighty fall. Thus speculative fiction allows the alien (sometimes indistinguishable from the female, or a member of the other race) to tell its story. And in doing so, speculative fiction, as a new form of fiction, is completely consistent with a very old way of looking at things. Let me explain by telling a story from the ancient Upanishadic traditions. The divine principle, the story goes, was once undifferentiated. Nothing else existed but itself. In order to know itself the divine entity divided itself up into planets, rocks, stars, trees, humans, birds, all that now is. The great dramas of existence, including the war between good and evil, are all part of the attempt of the divine to know itself. The Sanskrit word ‘leela,’ which means “play” in both the serious and the playful sense, refers to this cosmic drama. This idea is a wonderful metaphor for writers, who create worlds in order to know the world. In that sense, then, these stories that take inspiration from the Ramayana tradition both depart from it and are part of it. They are attempts at “play” in the sense of “leela,” with the cosmos itself as the grand stage. Through characters as complicated, intriguing, layered and flawed as those in the original streams of story that form the great Ramayana tradition, they explore what it means to be human in this universe. They are testament to the enduring power of the great epics. When Anil Menon first broached the idea of the anthology to me, as it emerged from the unforgettable first SF workshop at IIT-Kanpur in 2009,I was immediately enthusiastic. Anil did a great deal of the work in making this project a reality, including soliciting and screening stories. It was a great pleasure collaborating with him on the editing of the final stories; his instinct for fine storytelling, his acuity as an editor and his good sense and friendship are things I cherish. I should mention also that Anil insisted on a previously published Ramayana story from me, to which, after multiple hesitations, I agreed. Equally I am grateful to the intrepid team at Zubaan for their enthusiasm, creativity and courage, and for putting up with the vagaries of my schedule with unrivalled patience. And I am grateful to the authors whose stories I had the privilege to read and edit—they taught me a lot about writing. Since many of them are newcomers, I am both ecstatic and humbled by the great store of story-telling talent so evident in the India of today—another way in which an old tradition remains alive.