Paper On The Ramayana
“You have acquired extraordinary powers through your own spiritual performances but you have misused your powers and attacked the very gods that gave you the power, and now you pursue evil ways. Is there anyone who has conquered the gods and lived continuously in that victory?”
How often in Narayan’s fiction does one come across a similar pragmatic realism, a gentle refusal to regard good and evil as unmixed, and a melancholy sense of the real limitations of life? It is this ethical and spiritual outlook that attracted countless people to The Ramayana for more than a millennium. In Narayan—the sage of Malgudi who always knew how to connect our hectic and fraught present to a barely remembered past—this ancient tale found its perfect modern chronicler.
NOTES
1 A. K. Ramanujan, Paula Richman, ed., “Three Hundred Ramayanas,” Many Ramayanas (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1992), 46.
2 R. K. Narayan, The Indian Epics Retold: The Ramayana, The Mahabharata, Gods, Demons, and Others (New Delhi: Penguin, 2000), xi.
