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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