Kamba Ramayana

398 Pages·2002·1.45 MB·English

TRANSLATED BY
P.S. SUNDARAM
Kamba Ramayana
Edited by N.S. Jagannathan
PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
About the Author
Preface
Introduction
A Note on Translation
Bala Kandam
Ayodhya Kandam
Aranya Kandam
Kishkinda Kandam
Sundara Kandam
Yuddha Kandam
Notes and References
Glossary
Copyright Page
PENGUIN BOOKS
KAMBA RAMAYANA
P.S. Sundaram, who took his Master’s degree in English Language and
Literature from Madras University (1930) and, later, from Oxford (1934), had a
long and distinguished career as a professor of English at Lahore, Cuttack,
Bareilly and Jaipur. For a short stint in between, he was Member, Public Service
Commission, Orissa. He is the author of two books on R.K. Narayan and has
translated an impressive array of Tamil classics into English. In addition to the
present work, he has translated into English selected poems of Subramania
Bharati, Tiruvalluvar’s Kural, Andal’s Thriuppavai and Nachchiyar Thriumozhi.
N.S. Jagannathan holds a First Class Master’s degree in English Language and
Literature from Madras University. After a few years of college teaching and a
stint in the Civil Service, he became a full-time journalist, working successively
in senior positions in the Hindustan Times, the Statesman, the Financial Express
and the Indian Express. He retired as Chief Editor, the Indian Express, in 1991.
Preface
My acquaintance with Professor P.S. Sundaram (1910–1998) began decades ago
when, just out of the university, I appeared before the Orissa Public Service
Commission for a job in the English department of the Ravenshaw College,
Cuttack. As Professor of English in that college, he was the expert among
members on the Selection Board. He put me through the wringer with a certain
detached cruelty, dictated no doubt by his anxiety to ensure that his future
colleague was not a dud. I got the job and thus began a lifelong friendship that
has been one of the great blessings of my life.
Ravenshaw College was founded in the nineteenth century and is one of the
oldest and among the highly regarded Indian educational institutions. Being the
only government college in Orissa at that time, it has been the alma mater of
innumerable distinguished sons of Orissa and has had some of the finest teachers
of the country. In my time, besides Sundaram, there was in the English
department the genial V.V. John, an irrepressible wit who hid a profoundly
serious mind behind an apparent air of levity and high spirits.
My own stay in Orissa was a brief one, lasting less than sixteen months. But
during this short period, both John and Sundaram exercised a profound influence
on me, not only in the shaping of my literary tastes but also in instilling in me
the ineffable values of a civilized, intellectual freemasonry. They were much
older than me and I, had I lived in Cuttack instead of Madras during my college
years, would have been their student. But in their attitude towards me, there was
no trace of condescension or hierarchical snobbery so familiar in Indian
academia. In the best traditions of Oxford where both were educated, they
treated me, a callow youth though I was, as an equal. To my utter consternation,
Sundaram made me teach postgraduate classes in Elizabethan literature of which
I, then had only the haziest notions. I had to bone up on much dull and wearying
stuff trying to live up to his, if not to my students, expectations.
In the years following, when my own wayward career did not permit me to be
in daily contact with Sundaram, we were in regular touch, writing to each other
and meeting from time to time. Such meetings were more frequent in his later
years when he moved to Madras and always stimulating, our discussions ranging
over a wide area. For example, Sundaram was fiercely Anglophile, the
consequence of the stereotypes implanted in his mind by his deep love of
English literature and the example of some of the great Englishmen that taught
him in India and at Oxford. On the other hand, though I shared with him a love
for English literature, I was bred on a different perception of the benefits of the
Raj. This was one of the perennial themes of our heated exchanges, conducted
on his side with exemplary urbanity and generosity to a much younger man.
Sundaram’s academic credentials were of the highest. A brilliant student of
Presidency College, Madras, he got a first class Master’s degree in English
literature in 1930. As was the almost settled routine of gifted students of the
times with a Tamil Brahmin middle-class background, he went to England to
join Oxford and, simultaneously, sit for the ICS examination. He tried twice to
get into the ICS but on both occasions narrowly missed being chosen to the
service, standing fourth or fifth in the ranking. (Unlike in post-Independence
India, when selections for the services by competitive examination were a case
of mass recruitment in hundreds, those were parsimonious times, with hardly
more than five or six being chosen.) So, Sundaram returned to India in 1934 with
a degree in English literature from Oxford and launched on a distinguished
career as an academician in DAV College, Lahore, in 1934. He joined the
Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, as professor in 1938 when he was barely twenty-
eight, perhaps the youngest head of the English department at that time.
Unlike John and I, Sundaram stayed on in Orissa for over twenty years, giving
the best years of his life to the state, as professor, principal and, from 1953, a
Member of the Orissa Public Service Commission. By one of those quirky
Constitutional provisions, when his term with the service commission ended in
1959, he could not go back to the government in any capacity. Then in his mid-
forties, Sundaram was obliged to seek non-government employment elsewhere.
He left Orissa to become Principal of the Bareilly College, and still later, of the
Maharani’s College, Jaipur, from where he retired in 1974.
Maharani’s College, Jaipur, from where he retired in 1974.
It was only then that he could return to his first love—classical Tamil
literature, which he had perforce put on the back-burner because of his teaching
and administrative duties. A lifelong engagement with English literature had
given him a profound understanding of all aspects of literary imagination. This
enabled him to bring to the study of Tamil literary classics a mind uncluttered by
the hang-up of traditional Tamil scholarship. As a result, he was able to apply to
these works the categories of a wider and universal aesthetics and poetics.
His total command of both the Tamil and English idiom enabled him to
embark on a translation enterprise, that, in the retrospect of his actual
accomplishment, seems formidable, almost, rash, in its ambition. Obviously, it is
a case of one thing leading to another, rather than a premeditated project.
Starting with the modern poet, Subramania Bharati, Sundaram took on,
successively, Tirukural of Tiruvalluvar and then the mystical poems of Andal
and other Aazhwars in the Vaishnavite Bhakti tradition (the last two have been
published by Penguin). The last years of his life were taken up with the
translation into English verse of the whole corpus of some 12,000-odd verses of
the renowned Tamil classic Kamba Ramayana. In itself an awesome feat,
considering the hazards of the enterprise, it was, to use the language of the
Ramayana, the crest-jewel of his brilliant career in translation.
N.S. Jagannathan
Introduction
I
THE GENE POOL1 OF THE RAMAYANA MYTH
‘Perhaps no work of world literature, secular in origin, has ever produced so
profound an influence on the life and thought of a people as the Ramayana,’
wrote A.A. Macdonell in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. The
unbroken continuity of the Ramayana myth to this day is indeed unique. There is
no comparable visible or aural evidence of the presence of the Hellenic heritage
in the daily lives of Europeans. Of the other, Hebraic, strand of their cultural
inheritance, except among those highly educated in the humanities stream, it
would be difficult to find anyone who remembers the details of the Old
Testament. This is in stark contrast to the way the story of Rama has been burnt
into the memory of every Hindu child, and the invisible presence of the myth in
the daily lives of the people.
To choose a trivial example, unlike in the West where names may or may not
have meanings, children in India, specially in the south, are named directly after
Rama or Krishna. The latest issue of the Chennai telephone directory contains
over 21,000 entries of Rama and its variants like Ramswami and this does not
include Raghava and its variants like Viraraghava. In addition, you have
Lakshmana and Bharata in legion, and less frequently, Satrughna. Likewise, Sita
and its variants are a favourite name, at least until recently, for the girl child. It is
an indication of total and ultimate assimilation that these names are uttered
without a consciousness of the epic story.
(This practice has an interesting reason. There is a famous story of Ajamila, a
brahmin turned profligate, who had forgotten his piety and lived a dissolute life.
On his deathbed, he called out ‘Narayana’, his favourite youngest son, for a last
embrace, with no thought of the Primal God of that name. And yet, because he
uttered the lord’s name with his last breath, all his sins were cancelled and the
uttered the lord’s name with his last breath, all his sins were cancelled and the
messengers of Yama couldn’t claim him for hell.)
Thus has the Rama story become part of the texture of the collective
unconscious, half remembered, if at all, but within easy recall of the Indian
people. And there is no lack of other reminders of the myths. There is, for
example, the pervasive presence of temples in south India, some of which were
built as early as the ninth century. Their titular deities are specifically named
after Rama and worship is carried out in the prescribed manner to this day. The
famous Ramaswami temple at Kumbakonam in the Thanjavur district of Tamil
Nadu is one example among many. These towering temples dominating the
locale are a constant reminder of Rama, even if you did not visit them. Temple-
associated sacred art has produced magnificent paintings of the Rama story (as
on the walls of the Ramaswami temple, already mentioned) and bronze
sculptures such as the ‘Panaiyur Rama’ (in the Chennai museum) and others in
actual worship at Vaduvur and Tillaivalakam in the Thanjavur district.
Historically, the temple culture grew as part of the Bhakti cult of the
personalized God that had its origins in south India and spread northwards in the
post-upanishadic period of Hinduism. Vaishnavaite and Saivaite mystics in the
centuries after Christ were precursors of the formalized Bhakti element in
Hinduism. Vishnu and Siva, until then minor gods in the vedic pantheon,
overshadowed other gods like Indra and Agni and attained, gradually, the status
of members of the primordial Trinity of Brahma, Vishnu and Siva. Of the three,
Brahma was in course of time subsumed by Vishnu and became marginalized.
(There are only a few temples for him, one in Ajmer in Rajasthan, and a minor
shrine in Tamil Nadu.) It is true that latter-day popular religion had myriad gods
and goddesses, but they are not the vedic ones and they derive their authority
from their association, one way or another, with Vishnu and Siva.
The emergence of the Bhakti cult, of a mystical personal love of incarnate
God, decisively transformed the Hindu faith. It not only demoted the earlier
pluralistic pantheon of gods but also radically modified the late vedic,
upanishadic philosophic abstraction of the Brahman or the formless Primal God.
This was facilitated by the emergence of the concept of the avatar (‘coming
down’), memorably and authoritatively expressed in the fourth chapter of the