Tuesday, April 25, 2006

A slightly different Ramayana





This is the result of extensive research done for a short film… the film is not about all of this. Something interesting emerged about the Ramayan because of the digging and sifting through various versions. A lot of it is connect-the-dots and just because of its controversial nature, I’ll also refer to it as blatant speculation.



However, this version of the Ramayana makes more geographic and historical sense.



Aboriginal-Indian tribals co-existed with the Dravidians and Aryans before the races intermingled. It is necessary to give a brief physical description of each of these races.



Aryans: Tall, fair, thick-haired. High cheekbones and slim noses.



Dravidians: Tall, slim and dark. Facial features where not pronounced, and these guys were pretty much like the dark-skinned Aryans.



Aboriginal-Indians: Short and thin, with flattened noses and sparse hair. Referred to as the Monkeys and Bears when they came to aid the Raman camp.



Lankan Dravidians: Fat, round faced people with large protruding eyeballs, huge limbs and torsos.



The Aryans used to raid the other races for resources and women. Sita, was the daughter of a Lankan general, Ravana and she was captured and taken away in one such raid. (Will used parenthesis instead of footnotes, many versions of the Ramayana do state that sita was of Lankan descent, and some even claim that she was Ravana’s daughter. The legend goes that as soon as Sita was born, Ravana’s courtiers predicted her to be the death of him, so she had her buried in a foreign land. That’s why Sita is also known as Bhumi-putri – daughter of the earth,) Now Rama, the son of the Ayodhya King, fell in love with Sita, and married her. His family didn’t approve of his marriage to a woman of a lower caste, and banished him from the family and kingdom. Rama left, with an army of his supporters and friends, to set up his own camp independent of his father’s kingdom.



Ravana, with the aid of Lankan spies, and a small army, raided this camp and recovered their women and went back to Lanka, fleeing the following Raman army. Rama’s army grew stronger with the aid of Aboriginal-Indian tribals (monkeys and bears).



Basically the Ramayana was a fight between two factions – the Ramans and the Lankans over females. Important figures like Rama, Ravana and Sita were reduced to motifs in the telling and retelling of this story. The Lankans reached home, secure with the knowledge that Rama would not follow because of a strong superstition against making sea voyages (this superstition still exists, one of the reasons for the Sepoy Mutiny, the Indian soldiers were forced to make sea voyages under the British Raj). The Ramans followed, with perhaps the engineering feat of their age, a stone bridge across the palk strait, evidences of which NASA satellites recently picked up. The Lankan camp was burned down, the Lankans vanquished, and the country demonized.



History is written by the winners.

2 comments:

PerfumesReviewer said...

Ma... Plz don't tell it to any1 else..
I love Diwali

ruhey said...

interesting
but not convincing...
i'd like to stick to the version i know of...
cheers.