Whose Ramayana? A sacred story remade ‘for everyone’

Résumé détaillé

The Ramayana endures because it has been retold, argued over and subverted for millennia — newcomers will become a Ramayana audience when they know the story well enough to welcome its bolder retellings.

This year on Diwali, in a Canberra cinema, someone in the audience called out “Jai Shri Ram!” (“Victory to Lord Rama!”) as the Hindu god Rama made his first appearance on screen, nearly forty minutes into the film. A few people could also be heard giggling or responding in kind with their own tentative “Jai Siya Ram” (“Victory to Sita and Rama”).

The call was sincere and the giggles were not unkind. What I heard in them was a room that had not quite agreed on what kind of occasion this was. Was it a chance to see God come to a shopping-centre cinema in Canberra, and to respond in devotion? Was it a chance to express cultural pride and celebrate Rama and Sita’s return to their home of Ayodhya at Diwali? Or was it a blockbuster spectacle, to be enjoyed alongside Godzilla Minus Zero, which opened the same weekend?

I had come with eight friends and a notebook. Some of us had grown up with this story in South or Southeast Asia, and some were meeting it for the first time; some were academics, and some were not. I have taught The Rāmāyaṇa to university students in the United States and Australia for more than a decade, and I spent the evening trying not to turn my friends into my students. By the time we left, the nine of us had seen what sounded like nine different films: too fast, too slow, deeply moving, thrilling, exhausting.

The film was Ramayana: Part 1 – The Rise of a Legend, directed by Nitesh Tiwari, which opened in Australian cinemas on 5 November, three days before Diwali.

Billed by its producers as the most expensive Indian film ever made (a reported ₹40 billion, or about $600 million, for both parts), this film pairs a millennia-old tradition of telling and retelling The Rāmāyaṇa with an ambition for new global audiences.

The comparison with another ancient epic is instructive. Nobody asks whether Homer can be understood outside contemporary Greece, and Nolan’s The Odyssey treated the Bronze Age epic as a universal tale, belonging to everyone.

The makers of the…

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