"Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation" is an essay written by Indian writer

A. K. Ramanujan Attipate Krishnaswami Ramanujan (16 March 1929 – 13 July 1993) was an Indian poet and scholar of Indian literature and Linguistics. Ramanujan was also a professor of Linguistics at University of Chicago. Ramanujan was a poet, scholar, ...

for a Conference on Comparison of Civilizations at the

University of Pittsburgh The University of Pittsburgh (Pitt) is a public state-related research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The university is composed of 17 undergraduate and graduate schools and colleges at its urban Pittsburgh campus, home to the univers ...

, February 1987. The essay was a required reading on

Delhi University Delhi University (DU), formally the University of Delhi, is a collegiate central university located in New Delhi, India. It was founded in 1922 by an Act of the Central Legislative Assembly and is recognized as an Institute of Eminence (IoE) ...

's syllabus for history undergraduates from 2006–7 onward. On October 9, 2011, the Academic Council of the University decided to remove the essay from the BA curriculum for its next academic cycle. This action of the Academic Council attracted a lot of attention and several people viewed this as an act of unwarranted censorship.

Ramanujan's thesis

''Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas'' is a scholarly essay that summarizes the history of the

Rāmāyaṇa The ''Rāmāyana'' (; sa, रामायणम्, ) is a Sanskrit epic composed over a period of nearly a millennium, with scholars' estimates for the earliest stage of the text ranging from the 8th to 4th centuries BCE, and later stages ...

and its spread across India and Asia over a period of 2,500 years or more. It seeks to demonstrate factually how the story of Rama has undergone numerous variations while being transmitted across different languages, societies, geographical regions, religions, and historical periods. It does not seek to document all the recorded tellings and re-tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa. Instead, it focuses on only five specific tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa from different languages, regions, cultures, and periods, which serve purely as indicators of a much larger range of actual variations. The count of 300 Ramayanas in the title of the essay is based on a work of Camille Bulcke and it has been pointed out that it is an underestimate of the actual count. However, Ramanujan considers only five tellings of Ramayana, namely, the tellings by

Valmiki Valmiki (; Sanskrit: वाल्मीकि, ) is celebrated as the harbinger-poet in Sanskrit literature. The epic ''Ramayana'', dated variously from the 5th century BCE to first century BCE, is attributed to him, based on the attributio ...

, Kamban, the Jain telling, the Thai

Ramakien The ( th, รามเกียรติ์, , ; ; sometimes also spelled ) is one of Thailand's national epics, derived from the Buddhist Dasaratha Jataka. Fundamentally, it is a Thai version of the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramakien is an importa ...

and the South Indian folk tellings. Ramanujan specifically prefers the term "tellings" to the usual terms "versions" and "variants" because the latter terms can and do imply the existence of an invariant original text. One of Ramanujan's main observations in the essay is that there is no such original Ramayana and that Valmiki's Ramayana telling is only one among many Ramayana tellings.

Publication history

# A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, in ''Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia'', ed. by Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 22–48. . Available at http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3j49n8h7/. # A. K. Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, in ''The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan'' (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 131–60, availabl
here

References

{{Reflist

External links

Ramanujan's Three Hundred Ramayanas
–

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Works based on the Ramayana Essays about literature Essays about culture 1987 essays Indian essay collections Works about Hinduism

Ramanujan's thesis

Publication history

Further reading

References

External links