Take a Laser Bow: Ramayana as Modern Literary Fiction

My original intention was to write a text on how Indian fantasy and science fiction authors present their country – its history, its culture, and its society – in their work. Covering such a topic in a single article would have been an extremely challenging task, so I will instead split this tremendous river into an estuary of several separate subjects. This piece will focus on just one of them: How the Indian epic Ramayana functions as inspiration for speculative fiction.

The Ramayana is indeed one of the many instances of how astoundingly complex and diverse Indian culture is. The New Testament has four canonical gospels, but the differences between them are not that extreme, and in the case of Catholicism there is a centralized institution, the Church, that watches over acceptable interpretations. This is not the case with the Ramayana: Hinduism is not a centralized religion, and this has allowed for more variants of the story of the god Rama to flourish. For instance, while Ramayana is beyond doubt a Hindu holy text, there is a Jain version of the epic as well (Jainists are one of the minority religion groups in India). 

The main story uniformly revolves around Rama’s life in exile, the abduction of his wife, Sita, by demon lord Ravana, the war to free Sita, and Rama’s final return to his royal seat in Ayodhya. And yet even when it comes to this core tale, not everything is cast in stone and black and white. For instance, despite being a clear antagonist in the story, Ravana is traditionally remembered as a learned priest, and is even surrounded by a cult in some quarters.

An essay titled “The Hundred Ramayanas” by A.K. Ramanujan is one of the better-known texts about this diversity. Academics such as Philip Lutgendorf or Danuta Stasik have researched the diversity of Ramayanas and their living traditions. And yet parts of the Ramayana functions outside religious beliefs, even though they remain the beating heart of the epic. To give an instance from the exactly other side of the spectrum than the one occupied by Hindu orthodox interpretations of the tale: In 2008 an American animator, Nina Paley, made a movie titled “Sita Sings the Blues.” The story combines the filmmaker’s own experience of an unhappy marriage with elements borrowed from the Ramayana – but told from the perspective of Sita, and in a way that criticized Sita’s husband, Rama.

Such attempts have often irked more staunch believers, including Hindu nationalists and conservatives, who perceive the text as holy, not a collection of literary tropes to be modified in any way. But it must be added that Indian authors also use the Ramayana as a spring of inspiration. A 2011 Bollywood movie, “Ra.One,” is such an example. Another case, and one I will use as the basis of my deliberations here, is “Breaking the Bow,” a collection of epic-inspired short speculative fiction stories edited by Anil Menon and Vandana Singh. In it, the fabric of the epic is interwoven with future technology, space exploration, virtual reality, contacts with alien civilizations, and much more.

I liked the stories of the volume that set the epic in an science fiction setting less, and I found some of them to be somehow simpler and more mundane (or sometimes even a bit vulgar). I have come to realize, however, that this is more a matter of taste. It can be argued that what matters most in an epic are its core elements, ideas, and morals – the ones that live on and find resonance across centuries. If they can be adapted even to an science fiction background, does it not actually prove the universality of the epic?

A  science fiction story does not have to be any simpler or more mundane, or vulgar, than a fantasy one. Both genres can picture universal truths, and thus they can represent the universal truths of an ancient epic as well. 

Let me just pick one example from the volume: “Sita’s Descent” by Indrapramit Das. In it, some of the Ramayana’s protagonists, such as Rama and Sita, become the names of high-tech space projects undertaken by the advanced Republic of India. Having acquired an identity on its own, and thinking of itself as a woman, the machine mind of the project Sita decides that it must leave the solar system on a self-imposed exile. What led Sita-the-program to this conclusion is that women are always made to atone for no fault of their own, just as it happened to Sita of the Ramayana. The latter Sita was accused of having intercourse with Ravana even though she was held by him against her will, and even then the accusation was untrue – and even her husband Rama decreed she had to stand trial for this. 

This particular instance is, of course, not a retelling of the epic. Rather, the story deals with an eternal truth about the social roles and images that women are pushed into by men. The text uses the Ramayana as a reference. Sita’s story from the Ramayana is used here as an example of an eternal truth – one the author of the story believes, not one upheld by the epic.

I would argue that this still shows how the epic lives on, and how it can be reincarnated through countless variants. However, it must be stressed that in this case the story refers to the epic precisely to reject one of its core ideas. It can be assumed that through Sita’s image, the author of the original Sanskrit epic wanted to declare that women should be obedient and that their image should be spotless. The same can be said about many other stories in the volume, and probably many other heterodox references to the Ramayana, such as literary fiction or movies. They are not retellings, but interpretations that change, or even counter, some of the core ideas of the original. 

At least two stories from “Breaking the Bow” offer a certain role reversal. It is assumed that the demons that appear in ancient Sanskrit epics could have been the distorted images of more primitive tribes. Those likely would have been tribes with which the people who composed those works often clashed. And so two stories in the volume – “Day of the Deer” by Lavanya Karthik and “Great Disobedience” by Abirami Velliangiri – present the demonized tribes as the protagonists, and the demonization as a narrative ploy. In a similar vein, many stories in the volume are about women, and their various interactions with the male-dominated society. Sita’s life, but also some among the female demons from Ramayana lore, are taken here as metaphors; springboards from which authors jump into a debate on the position of women in society.

Thus, while the Ramayana lives on and flourishes in myriad versions, the epic is often also taken out of its boundaries as a sacred text. Once these lines are crossed, religious and social prescriptions no longer rule the narrative. A religious myth can then be rewritten as speculative fiction, but, more significantly, such references to a myth can then become discussions with the original text.