Legends of the Ramayana review: Amish Tripathi's docuseries celebrates India’s pluralist cultural heritage

Language: Hindi, English

Amish Tripathi, who has written the Ramchandra series of novels based on the Ramayana, can now be seen in a three-part documentary series called Legends of the Ramayana with Amish on discovery+. It has been co-directed by Sujata Kulshreshtha and Abhimanyu Tewari, and scripted by Kulshrestha and Sibtain Shahidi. The first episode is called The Sacred Journey, the second is The Search for Sita, and the third is The Many Faces of Ravana.

It is an engrossing show that takes viewers on a pilgrimage to various sites associated with the epic in India and  Sri Lanka. Some of these are Ayodhya, Chitrakoot, Dhanushkodi, Hampi, Anegundi, Rameswaram, Sigiriya, Trincomalee, Anuradhapura, and Nuwara Eliya.

However, faith is not the only lens that this series operates with. It uses other frameworks to analyse how the Ramayana circulates in communities – mythology, history, archaeology, gender, religion, caste, land rights, statecraft, technology, and the institution of the family.

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Did Ram, Sita, Lakshman, Hanuman, Ravan, Shabari, Vibhishan, and others in the Ramayana really exist, or are they merely figments of a collective imagination?

This series is not for those who like to take everything literally. It is for those who delight in symbol and metaphor, and are willing to be struck by wonder even as they exercise their critical faculties.

The series cashes in on the enduring popularity of the Ramayana, which is evident from the fact that storytellers continue to revisit and retell. Tripathi, who is the host and narrator, does not privilege one telling of the Ramayana over another. He encourages viewers to examine multiple truth claims, and decide for themselves. He models how this is to be done. Instead of projecting himself as an expert, he goes to these places as a curious listener, eager to learn.

When Tripathi travels from one place to another, he meets people from various walks of life – a paleoseismologist, a member of a temple trust, an author, an Indologist, a speleologist, an aviation expert – who have devoted themselves to uncovering different aspects of the Ramayana. These inputs enrich the narrative, and offer something new to viewers like myself whose understanding of the Ramayana has been shaped primarily by Ramanand Sagar.

Amrita Singh, Sania Syed and Saumya Bhatt have done the research for this series. Kavita Kane, Yatindra Mishra, Shashi Dhanatunge, TG Mahesh Priyadarshana, K Surekha, Arjun Bhat, CP Rajendran, Sunila Jayawardene, Dr Ritesh Arya and Dr Ram Autar and Krishnadevaraya are some of the people that Tripathi encounters and interviews.

The best part of this series is its emphasis on how faith and questioning can coexist. Tripathi does not force viewers into believing that, if Ram is a hero, Ravan is necessarily a villain. He shows that people relate to Ravan differently across cultures and regions, based on the stories that they hear. This approach opens up the text. It invites viewers to resist the dogmatic insistence on a single, uncontested and inflexible truth that must be defended at all costs.

Tripathi, however, is not the first one to draw attention to the existence of multiple Ramayanas. This work has been done by many scholars before, most notably by AK Ramanujan who wrote the essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation”. In this, he remarks, “The number of Ramayanas and the range of their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past 2500 years or more are astonishing.” Ramayanas exist in numerous languages including Prakrit, Sanskrit, Bengali, Santhali, Kashmiri, Chinese, Marathi, Gujarati, Javanese, Tamil, Telugu, Thai and Tibetan.

This series prods viewers to see characters in all their complexity instead of classifying them neatly as either heroes or villains. Should Surpanakha be seen as a vamp or a victim? Should Vibhishan be seen as a traitor or a righteous man? The vantage point determines how we see.

As Ramanujan writes in the essay mentioned earlier, “The story may be the same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different. Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the style, details, tone, and texture – and therefore the import – may be vastly different.” While Legends of the Ramayana with Amish does not acknowledge Ramanujan’s research, it does a good job of celebrating India’s pluralist cultural heritage.

Legends of the Ramayana with Amish is available on Discovery+

Chintan Girish Modi is a writer, journalist, commentator, and book reviewer.

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