Daevan Mangalmurti
After by Vivek Narayanan, New York Review of Books, 624 pp., $25
The foundational act of translation in the Ramayana is the passage of the word from sorrow into verse. Bathing in a river, the sage Valmiki is captivated by the union of two cranes flying over the bank. A hunter’s arrow pierces the breast of the male crane, casting it to the ground. In anger and in grief, the sage makes a fateful utterance: mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhā tvamagamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ yat krauñcamithunādekam avadhīḥ kāmamohitam!
“Oh fowler! Since thou hast slain one of a pair of Kraunchas [cranes], thou shalt never attain prosperity!” [translated by M.N. Dutt, 1894].
Shoka, in Sanskrit, means sorrow. Shloka, a letter away, is the Sanskrit word for verse. Valmiki’s curse is recorded by Hindu tradition as the first of these 32-syllable shlokas, the foundational stanzas of Hindu epic poetry. As a result, Valmiki is remembered not just as a sage but as the Adi Kavi, the first poet. Pleased with Valmiki’s invention, the creator god Brahma charged him with the responsibility of telling the story of Rama, an incarnation of the god Vishnu, and the rescue of Rama’s wife, Sita, from the clutches of the evil Ravana. The result was the Ramayana, “Rama’s journey,” one of South Asia’s great epics.
Valmiki’s Ramayana is divided into seven kandas, or books. Valmiki begins with Rama’s childhood and lineage. He then describes Rama’s exile by deceit from the city of Ayodhya. In exile, Sita is kidnapped by Ravana, the Lord of Lanka (modern Sri Lanka) and a rakshasa (a malevolent demigod). Rama and his brother Lakshmana ally with vanaras (monkey-like forest dwellers) to win her back. The feats of one vanara, Hanuman, in his search for Sita, are the focus of the fifth book. Rama and Ravana fight a war for Sita. The saga ends with the aftermath of the war, Rama and Sita’s return to Ayodhya, and their deaths.
Valmiki’s is the first Ramayana, but every culture and language to encounter it has retold it. The Ramakien is Thailand’s national epic. The Khmer Reamker—a Ramayana with Buddhist influences and mermaids—plays the same role in Cambodia. In modern India, the telling most familiar to readers is Tulsidas’ Ramcharitmanas, a medieval devotional masterpiece in Awadhi, a dialect of Hindi, that transformed Valmiki’s Ramayana into a vernacular, accessible text. Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Assamese, Odia, Marathi, Bengali, Gujarati, Farsi, Gondi: every major Indian language has its own analogue to Valmiki, its own Rama’s journey. Some stories place greater weight on Lakshmana, Hanumana, or Sita. Buddhists, Jains, Muslims, and warring Hindu sects have retold the saga to suit their moral, religious, and social purposes, recasting gods as mortals and demons as saints. Sometimes, as in Pulavar Kuzhanthai’s Ravana Kaviyam, Ravana is the hero. The Ramayana exists in a state of constant interpretation and reinterpretation. It is as much a process of continual translation as it is a polished work.
But what is poetry in the Ramayana has historically been translated into English as prose, obscuring something essential about Valmiki’s work. The Ramayana sprang from an oral tradition: it was heard before it was written. Like the Qur’an, it is a work that should be recited, not just read. Too often, in English prose translations, the rich sonic possibilities of being heard are lost.
Vivek Narayanan’s After, a collection of poems, art, and song inspired by the Ramayana, is not, at least not in the modern sense, a translation of the older work. But After cannot be read without thinking of it through the lens of translation. The work is an attempt to do for English what Tulsidas did for Hindi: to “reanimate the Ramayana,” Narayanan writes, “as poetry.” Reanimation is the ideal world to describe what Narayanan does to Valmiki’s words in After. In keeping with Indian tradition, he speaks as a present-day Valmiki. By speaking, he again breathes life into an epic that demands retelling.
After spans millennia, from the battlefields of Valmiki’s Lanka to so-called “encounters” between militants and security forces in the forests of twenty-first-century central India. Key to the spirit of its retelling is the classical concept of translatio, a transfer of material from the source language to the receiving language. Living in our age, the Ramayana must be accountable to us: answer our questions, speak to our needs, recognize the bounds of our perspectives. To craft his retelling, Narayanan, a poet and professor, draws on the innovations and innovators—Ezra Pound, Mughal art, Livy—of the human experience since Valmiki. After exists in an India that has been shaped by the first Ramayana. In his personal journeys, some of which are incorporated into After, Narayanan visits a temple where Rama might have killed a transgressing ascetic, a river where Sita might have been abandoned after the war on Lanka was won, the city where Rama might have reigned. But After is firmly tied to the present. Narayanan makes brilliant use of primary sources—Maoist magazines, for instance, and accounts of torture in Kashmir—to link the war that the Indian state has, for 75 years, waged on its own citizens with the crusade Rama waged against Lanka.
One of Narayanan’s most powerful pieces, “Poem Without End,” combines three threads: the war between Rama and Ravana; modern India’s long-running Maoist insurgency, relayed to the reader through documentary material taken from articles in the Maoist magazine People’s March; and the simmering conflict in Kashmir, a story told through descriptions of torture and intimidation. The poem disquiets the reader’s psyche by forcing on our consciousness the casual, bureaucratic brutality India inflicts on its people in pursuit of peace and democracy. “Smoothed by congealed blood / With black tributaries / —like the red Palash flowers that cover / The mountain in spring”—,” Narayanan’s description of the battlefield in Lanka is only a few pages away from disturbing modern accounts of banal terror carried out by police functionaries. In this excerpt, Narayanan narrates a disturbing scene of quotidian sexual abuse:
“A few days after his arrest the DCP brought / The sweeper M. into the police station / To sodomize him M. was a 55-year-old man / To humiliate him further they / Brought another person S. / A clean shaved person who / Was running a tea stall outside / The police station and forced / His private part into U.’s mouth.
The officer offered him a cigarette / And ordered for a cup of tea.”
As a boy, my father wrote an essay with the premise that “Rama is a cad,” based on the hero’s treatment of Sita. The essay horrified his parents, who, like most Hindus, saw Rama as a virtuous god. Their feelings are easy to understand: to most of its readers, the Ramayana is a simple moral story that emphasizes the importance of duty. Rama does his duty, even if it hurts—and so, the Ramayana suggests, should every king or statesman. After is not so straightforward. Narayanan’s Rama is complicated: he burns with world-consuming fury, he gives his rescued wife the coldest of cold shoulders. Ravana is wrong, but sensuous and perhaps sympathetic: a ten-headed demon, he has ten faces. If After has an antagonist, it is the state and its ruthless but indistinct functionaries: “Touch / even one paisa [cent] and / they are ready to kill.” That choice reflects how far Narayan’s readers have moved from the age of Valmiki. Could a writer of such vividly rendered kings and demons have imagined such a faceless villain? The bureaucratic apparatus wielded by the state turns suffering into statistics and government reports. Could Valmiki have understood the resulting violence, fast and slow, that such a state can so easily inflict? Neither Rama nor Ravana, at their most awesome and most armed, can compare to the machinery of the modern state, away from Delhi and Mumbai, grinding Indians into the ground. That the state exists at all in this retelling of the Ramayana—that After is conscious of the concerns that preoccupy us the way dharma preoccupied Valmiki’s first readers—is an example of successful translatio.
One of modern India’s formative memories is the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid, a mosque in Ayodhya, the city from which Rama was exiled. Animated by the belief that the mosque stood atop Rama’s birthplace, a Hindu nationalist mob razed it brick by brick in a single day. In “Ayodhya,” Narayanan visits the city. In After’s retelling, Ayodhya is a holy city only insofar as as surveillance is held sacred:
“The galvanizing mosque-raid 1992 / sucked the life out of this city / and established the Site. So I walked in it and into it / and true to form noticed virtually nothing / but the monitored cage / in which I moved its endless maze-like twists and turns.”
There is nothing vibrant about a city constantly on edge, not with nervous violence but almost with ennui. Narayanan’s Ayodhya exists in a subtle malaise, best represented by the slow crumbling of its physical form years after the rapid destruction of its spiritual vitality.
“You could see how the grand / mansions of Ayodhya were falling apart / not just the paint but often the cement / or plaster come off to show like / a spreading crystal the raw brick / below.”
In 1992, the mob that destroyed Babri Masjid was not the state. Today, it functionally is. The Bharatiya Janata Party, which organized the rally that led to the mosque’s destruction, now dominates India’s central government. That government has adopted anti-Muslim policies, suppressed the press, intimidated civil society, and battered the pillars of democracy by weakening courts, the opposition, and human rights. It commands the imprisonment of civilians whose genitals are electrically shocked every day until they confess to crimes pre-established by the state. Its soldiers conduct a war in the name of the people, part real and part staged, against village women and university students promised undelivered rights by the same state that covets the bauxite under their land. This was true before the present moment, when other parties ruled India, and it will likely continue to be true after, even if another party rules. That does not detract from the horrifying parallels between the violence of the war between Rama and Ravana and the countless wars the Indian government, seeing itself as Rama’s successor, wages against modern Ravanas, real and imagined. In the Vedic rituals common in Rama’s story, fire is a purifier. After her rescue from Ravana, Sita is made to step into a fire to prove her chastity. When she walks out unscathed, Rama takes her back. After follows the trauma and the strange wonder of a country whose fire and blood has not left it cleansed, but smelling of charred, burnt flesh.
Narayanan’s epic, then, is like its precursor: generated by sorrow and turned into beauty. Naturally, it lives in verse. And the verse is wonderful. Something pulses, like a heartbeat, in Narayanan’s description of Ravana’s harem in “Ravana’s Rooms (Take One)”: “And the wives’ fermented breath / tickled Him in his sleeps / While pretending they were each Ravana / they kissed each other once more once more.” On the page, visual art is formed out of arrangements of language. Sound and movement emerge through the deliberate placement of words. Aural and visual art reciprocate by feeding into the feelings the words we read give us. Sometimes Narayanan offers actual sketches and paintings instead of words. Other times he gives us the text of the Sanskrit original instead of English. The complexity of form in After and its mixture of rawness and polish push back against the refinement of the original epic. Narayanan understands that despite our immense material progress since the age of Valmiki, the world often feels like it is in flux, wobbling on a precipice. In its intentionally unfinished complexity, After suits our world better than Valmiki’s Ramayana can.
One of the most impressive demonstrations of Narayanan’s ambition is “Kumbhakarna Sound System.” The legendary slumber of the giant rakshasa Kumbhakarna, Ravana’s brother, is enwrapped in a 13-minute composition by saxophonist Maarten Visser, stretching over ten pages in Sanskrit, English, and scratchy pitches, using both text and sound to tell a story. The visual component of the score, as in other places in After where Narayanan incorporates paintings, drawings, and word art, crosses the boundary from literary to visual art. The multi-media composition could risk a degree of clarity: I am more than unsure of how to approach parts of the “Kumbhakarna Sound System.” The poem has gone through a process of transmutation that moves it beyond the familiar culture reference points I can turn to while reading other poems of Narayanan’s. Yet the process of transmutation may be so singular as to justify its use. Narayanan’s innovative use of sound and distinctive way of representing it are a testament to his creative ability.
The translator Gregory Rabassa (whose translation of One Hundred Years of Solitude Gabriel García Marqúez considered finer than the original) wrote in one of his essays that “Ear is important in translation because it really lies at the base of all good writing. Writing is not truly a substitute for thought, it is a substitute for sound… The translator with a tin ear is as deadly as a tone-deaf musician.” And Narayanan’s ear may be golden. After, unlike any prose translation or adaptation of the Ramayana, has the flow of poetry: it is beautiful and it is jarring, it is angry and it grieves, and sometimes, like a waterfall, it crashes down in eddies on the ears and the mind of the reader who listens.
In a short poem called “Sentences Toward Another Manifesto of Translation Practice,” Narayanan writes, “All poetry is translation. / All translation is not poetry.” Translation is riddled with pitfalls and traps for the overambitious. There is an eternal risk of bringing too much of the source language into the receiving language. There is a corresponding risk of bringing too little. And that’s before we even get to the key material elements of rhythm, words, and sound, the way it feels to your ears and mouth when you utter the word “ichor-smeared,” śoṇitaraktadehau. All of this exists within one dimension of translation: the craft of turning sound and meaning in one language into alike sound and meaning in another language.
There is a second dimension to translation: the process of reviving a work in a new context, in an age unlike the age it came out of, in a culture that has moved in scary, exciting directions. It is all too easy for a work to lose some of its vital power in translation or retelling. To bring Rama, Sita, and Ravana into the world of the Babri Masjid and flawed democracy, Narayanan experiments in both form and content. He creates in After an epic that confronts in turn the power of the Indian state; the suffering inherent in the conflict between obligation and personal desires; and the beautiful, horrifying legacy of a myth that has tangible effects in a country ruled by men and women who believe it is real. Valmiki’s Ramayana is a text of enduring beauty containing moral instruction for princes and statesmen. It is intended for rulers. After is beautiful and instructive, but Narayanan’s aesthetic and moral decisions are both more nuanced and more on the side of resistance to violence, chauvinism, and the ruthless exercise of power. After counters the process of cultural and political domination that is sweeping India in its own idiosyncratic way. The challenges inherent in such an ambitious project are legion, but for the most part, Narayanan overcomes them. At its finest, After is exactly what it should be: a great retelling of the first retelling, a work of both poetry and translatio.