Review of The Living Legend by Vayu Naidu
The Living Legend by the British-Indian writer Vayu Naidu is yet another book on the Ramayana. It is not a retelling in the sense of adding a hitherto unexplored interpretation of a character's supposed motives or responses. But it is a 're-telling' in the sense of telling the same story again. It draws from several versions of this epic as it travelled orally across geographies and it uses the format of the seven kandas, without labelling them.
The introduction to this book expresses the author's intent. It is an attempt to foreground 'not just the internal drama of the characters… but the dependence and interrelations between animal forces and plant forces'. It also speaks of the principles that sustain both individuals and societies and it elaborates on the multiple levels of interpretive possibilities of this epic. The Dandaka forest is a metaphoric space and the story is an unfolding of the truth of consciousness. To Dasaratha, Rama is his 16-year-old son but to the sages Vashistha and Vishwamitra, Rama shows the way to dispel the darkness of ignorance.
What, however, propels one to turn the pages of this book is neither the theme of cosmic interconnectedness nor the metaphoric interpretations but the sheer power of the 'internal drama' of the original story. No matter how many times one has heard the story, one is hooked to Rama's encounter with Ahalya, his breaking of Shiva's bow to claim Sita's hand in marriage, his exile into the forest, the abduction of Sita by Ravana, Hanuman in Lanka, and the whole tragedy of the two lovers, Rama and Sita.
Contemporary contexts
This leads one to wonder why people 'write' or 'tell' the same stories again? If the plot is a well-known one, then there should be something special about the 'style' of presenting the story. The genius of the writer's voice must shine through — like Tulsidas' Ramayana or that of Kambar. Just as a pastoral poem or an elegy has its poetic convention, our epic poems too — principally the Ramayana and the Mahabharata — function within the framework of the timeless principles of dharma, artha, kama and moksha.
Dharma or ethical principles and moksha or salvation are the outer guiding boundaries within which the play of artha and kama (wealth and pleasure) are acted out. If these boundaries are taken away in the retelling, we are left with only the flippant beggary of a 'romantasy'.
The attempt in this book is also to make the story accessible to the millennial reader by using contemporary contexts. 'Lakshmi had just returned from a timeshare on the ocean-of-consciousness holiday'; 'Ayodhya would continue to host the best Performing Arts festival'; 'Rama was cool'; many courtiers saw the Rama-Sita alliance as 'the dawning of a new era in economic expansion, military security through diplomatic negotiation, and tourism…' These and several other such examples are creative and interesting but the judicious young reader can decide if these enhance the contemporaneity of the story.
While Naidu acknowledges her gratitude to the publishers 'for insightful editing', several bloopers dot the novel. Errors are understandable but is it pardonable to write Ishvaku for Ikshvaku? Is it appropriate to mis-write 'mahavakyas' as 'mahakavyas'? Where is the hurry to bring out a book? This story is not running away from anyone — let's give it the regard due to it.
The reviewer is a Sahitya Akademi translation award winner.
The Living Legend Vayu Naidu Penguin Ebury Press ₹399
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