Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia.

• Author: Goldman, Robert P.

Scholarly activity in the Indological world in recent years has given evidence of a renewed interest in the study of the Ramayana in many of its numerous versions. Publication of works such as the ongoing translation of the critical edition of the Valmiki Ramayana, Hart's and Heifetz' translation of the Aranya Kanda of Kampan's Iramavataram, Lutgendorf's The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsi Das, van der Veer's Gods on Earth, Smith's Ramayana Traditions in Eastern India, Brockington's Righteous Rama, etc., give ample testimony to this trend. At the same time events in India, starting with the broadcasting of Ramanand Sagar's enormously popular television serialization, and culminating in the recent destruction of the Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and its inevitable tragic aftermath, have given reason to believe that serious scholarship on the Ramayana tradition neither is of merely antiquarian interest nor is it restricted to any narrow scholarly discipline.

Further evidence for both of these phenomena is to be seen in the form of two recently edited volumes of Ramayana studies, both of which touch upon the aesthetic, religious, performative, regional, social, and political dimensions of this most central document of Indian culture. These collections are entitled, respectively, Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (henceforth MR) and Ramayana and Ramayanas (henceforth RR). The first has been edited by Professor Paula Richman, of Oberlin College, and the second by Professor Monika Thiel-Horstmann, of the Institut fur Indologie at the University of Cologne.

Before turning to the substance of the two collections I should say a few words about the principles upon which they appear to be organized. I should also make clear that, since the two volumes together contain twenty-five papers plus an introduction by each editor, it will not be possible for me, within the constraints of this review, to discuss or even mention all of the contributions. Instead I shall confine myself to some general comments about the collections per se and to brief discussions of only those individual papers that strongly impressed me either by their virtues or their deficiencies.

To a certain extent the two volumes partake of a kind of continuity. Some themes naturally overlap between the two, while two authors, Stuart Blackburn and Philip Lutgendorf, have papers in each collection. The books are more or less contemporary with one another and, in her preface, Thiel-Horstmann alludes to Richman's collection as being under preparation.

Despite their similarities the two anthologies do exhibit a certain structural difference. Whereas RR represents "the majority of the papers read at the Conference on Contemporary Ramayana Traditions, which was held in September 1987 in Sankt Augustin, Germany," and thus organizes itself, like its underlying conference, around the theme of contemporaneity, MR, a collection of solicited papers, revolves around - or rather attempts to mirror - the theme of diversity, ordering its papers under three headings: "Larger Patterns," "Tellings as Refashioning an Opposition," and "Tellings as Commentary and Programs for Action."

Both anthologies, like virtually all such collections of scholarly papers, exhibit a certain - perhaps unavoidable - inconsistency of quality. This is somewhat more noticeable in the case of RR. No doubt Thiel-Horstmann, like all editors of conference volumes, struggled with the conflicting demands of scholarly quality and the desire not to offend one's contributors. Her preface indicates that some of the papers read at the conference were not published in the volume but, nevertheless, there is a considerable difference in quality between the best and the worst contributions in the book. Indeed, some should perhaps not have been included as they tend to diminish one's sense of the book's value and the significance of its contribution to Romayana scholarship.

Thiel-Horstmann begins her introduction by trying to isolate some of the specific perspectives that, she says, the Ramayana invites us to bring to bear upon it. First and "prominent" among these, she argues, is that of "an epic on the ethical conflicts of man and on how man tries to solve them" (p. 1). This is an important, if obvious, statement and one that raises our hopes of seeing some scholarship that brings new theoretical insights to bear on the numerous ethical problems posed by the Ramayana, especially in the conflicted and complex contemporary world the book has taken for its specific focus.

These hopes, alas, are not fulfilled. In fact the volume's two opening papers, the ones singled out by the editor as focusing on the ethical dimension of the Ramayana (p. 2), Harry Buck's "Dharmic Choice and the Figure of...