The Ramayana Revisited.

• Author: Rocher, Ludo
• Position: Book review

The Ramayana Revisited. Edited by MANDAKRANTA BOSE. Oxford: Oxford UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. Pp. xii + 378, illus.

Mandakranta Bose may be best known for her work on Indian dance and, more recently, on women's studies. However, the Ramayana, which "was for me a part of life I took for granted with no expenditure of conscious effort," has more recently become an object of a critical engagement as "a foundational text of South and Southeast Asian Societies" (p. vii). Her edition of the papers of a 1999 conference at the University of British Columbia, A Varied Optic: Contemporary Studies in the Ramayana (2000), appeared in a revised second edition, The Ramayana Culture: Text, Performance and Iconography (New Delhi; D. K. Printworld, 2003).

In the fast-growing scholarly Ramayana literature, "[t]he present book originated in the conviction that critical approaches to the Ramayana must look beyond its literary and religious identity to its capacity to serve as the meeting ground of many arts and social practices" (p. 6). After the editor's introduction, the first two articles, one by Robert Goldman and one by Sally Sutherland Goldman, deal with the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana. The next three articles are devoted to regional versions of the epic: William Smith reviews the Ramayana versions of eastern India (Assam, Bengal, and Orissa) since medieval times; Mandakranta Bose more narrowly examines how the feminine is represented in Rama stories in Bengal; and Paula Richman concentrates on south Indian responses to Rama's beheading of the low-caste ascetic Sambuka in three twentieth-century Telugu, Tamil, and Kannada plays. I note that, after her introductory comments on these three essays on regional Ramayana versions, the editor warns against "entwining location and theme"; she urges caution, because "not enough work has yet been done in historicizing regional Ramayanas to warrant a ready answer, and there are indeed crossovers in...