Meditations on the flood

Marina Warner at The London Review of Books:

Versions of the Flood from around the world record memories of different disasters, not one single universal deluge – this is accepted now even by Biblical scholars. But the different accounts share several dramatic elements: the figure of the one man who is chosen to survive, the extraordinary hope placed in the building of a boat, its measurements and vast size, and the processes of caulking and stocking it. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the ark is a six-decker vessel; in the Bible, the specs seem so exact they inspired many believers to attempt to make models. Atrahasis is the name of the hero who is spared and wins eternal life in the poem that Ipiq-Aya, Junior Scribe, pressed into the wet clay with his reed pen. In Gilgamesh, the survivor is called Uta-napishti, and Gilgamesh meets him when he is travelling to the underworld in order to bring back from the dead Enkidu,the wild man whom he loves. But the half-divine hero fails, and although he is told how to pick a magic coral-like plant from the seabed, which will guarantee his immortality, he loses it when he is bathing in a pool: a snake comes by and takes it.

The Babylonian Noah tells Gilgamesh how he survived the rains; in Atrahasis he sees in a dream that he must build an ark; in the later Gilgamesh, the counsellor god Enlil whispers the warning in secret:

     Load the seed of every living thing into your ark,
     The boat that you will build.

(John Gardner’s version, 1984.) 

The animals do enter two by two in some versions, but here the ark is a sperm bank, a granary. 

A Singapore Ramayana

The new Yale-NUS college in Singapore has "decided to teach the Indian epic known as the Rāmāyaṇa as the inaugural text in our Literature Humanities core curriculum . . .  the Rāmāyaṇa, one of the most important texts of premodern India, is missing from general education curriculums in Indian institutions of higher education. Even when the text is taught, it is largely as an expression of Hindu values rather than as a contribution to world literature. . . . Instead of being taught as a literary text, the epic is made to serve agendas promoting violence. . . .  national discomfort with the Rāmāyaṇa as a literary text erupted in 2011, when Delhi University’s academic council voted to remove A. K. Ramanujan’s essay, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas” (1991), from its undergraduate history curriculum. . . .  those who advocated for its removal were really objecting to what Vinay Dharwadker has called “the actual history of the story of Rama in the world.” The academic council’s vote exposed a nationalist discomfort with the many retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa story in Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujarati, Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malaysian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, and Tibetan, each of which represents Ram differently, and less reverently, than in the modern Hindu imagination. The Rāmāyaṇa’s tumultuous life in contemporary India is a case study in how an epic that has inspired more retellings in more languages than any other work in world literature can be domesticated for narrowly nationalist and sectarian ends, and how institutions of higher education can be complicit in that process."

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