By Ila Ananya
If we are left with the sense that Sattar writes Ramayana in a way that is accessible to children, her conversation with Samhita Arni, the author of The Mahabharata – A Child’s View, and Sita’s Ramayana this afternoon at the Times Bengaluru Litfest, presented by ACT Fibernet, gave us a glimpse into the characters of the story, what it means to retell the Ramayana for children today, and the importance of retelling epics.
While Arni read a section of Sattar’s book with two enthusiastic children in the audience, we also learnt that children today love Hanuman and Lakshmana, and wondered about Sita and Urmila, with surprisingly little to say about Rama.
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We present a roundup of the session.
Why is it important to retell epics today?
Arni’s question is greeted by a smiling audience. “It is part of our culture,” Sattar begins to say. “It remains important to express ourselves in these complicated ways.” In today’s India it is even more important to do so, we are told, because we are being asked to homogenise. When as always, Sattar is asked what ‘message’ she is trying to give children, next to me a little girl sits up a bit straighter, nodding vigorously when Sattar laughs and says, “There is no message. I think it’s important to understand that children, like adults, read for pleasure too, and get and make their own messages from books”.
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Who is the favourite character, and who do we hate?
At this point, the children in the audience are excited. Hanuman, we learn, has always been Sattar’s favourite character for being the most energetic, loving and funny. This was until she was older, and began to be drawn to darker characters, and more intrigued by Lakshmana, and what he did.
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A little girl says happily that she likes Lakshmana because he is “brave and supports his brother,” and hates Ravana because he is always ferocious (“I’d only want to be ferocious sometimes,” she says) and a four-year-old boy prefers Hanuman (while his mother wonders aloud when he has read the Ramayana), because he is “strong and saves all the gods.” At this point we begin to hear about more characters — an older woman stands up to ask why we never talk about Urmila and her resilience.
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On whom the Ramayana belongs to
“The Ramayana doesn’t belong only to Indian Hinduism as we are taught,” Sattar says insistently, “We forget that it belong to other countries as well, and to Buddhism. Reading the Ramayana under a Buddhist lens would change how we look at it.” Arni nods — she remembers the Indonesian version of the Ramayana from when she was two years old and lived in Indonesia.
Is it mythology or is it history?
Sattar has been asked this question time and again in her classes, and she has a definite answer. “Of course it is true,” she tells us, “but it’s true in the way that literature is true, not in the way that history or mythology is true.” Interestingly, Sattar goes on to say that the Ramayana is an example of ways of telling stories of flying monkeys and ten-headed monsters —“It is a celebration of the act of imagination. Isn’t it lovely that we are able to imagine this, rather than simply say it is something ‘real’?” she asks.
On the women in Ramayana
Do we view Kaikeyi or Surpanaka as demons? Why do we tend to demonise them? “Culturally, patriarchy has convinced us that they are bad,” Sattar tells us, before she goes on to ask what would happen if we only saw Kaikeyi as someone who wanted to save her son. Then she laughs when she goes on to look at Sita who has been constructed as the adarsh bharatiya naari — “She is, but she only is because when she realises she can’t live with her husband, she leaves.” It is up to us to choose to read the Ramayana in different ways.
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