Ramayana in the North-East India : Proceedings of the National Seminar Organised by Bharatiya Itihas Sankalan Samiti, Silchar

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The Book Ramayana in the North-East India is a collection of papers presented at a National Seminar, the first of its kind in this part of the country on "Ramayana in North-East" held at Silchar organised by the Bharatiya Itihasa Sankalana Samiti to examine and discuss various aspects of Ramakatha tradition in the North-East India. The papers have been contributed by well known scholars from Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram and Tripura and are highly illuminating in exploring the Ramakatha tradition in North-East India.

It is hoped that the book will be well received by enlightened readers, and our efforts in the direction of rediscovering Ramakatha tradition in the North-East India will be most fruitful.

Dr. Sujit k. Ghosh is Principal, Janata College, Silchar. He teaches History and has more than two decades of research experience on the history of North-East India. He has published widely and attended seminars and workshops on history in India and abroad. He visited Thailand and Indonesia and other South-East Asian countries in connection with his research work. Presently, he is working on a major UGC research project on "Ram Katha Traditions in North-East India." This project is a pioneering work in the direction of using oral literature as resource for serious historical research.

Since the publication of Gaudiya version of Valmiki Ramayana by the Italian Sanskritist Gaspare Gorresio in mid nineteenth century, considerable research work has been done on the genesis and diffusion of the Rama legend in India and abroad. A number of international Ramayana seminars have been held during the last three decades. But unfortunately the state of Ramayana Studies in North-East India remains obscure both to the general readers and researchers.

The present volume offers for the first time a collection of important papers by eminent scholars discussing various aspects of the Ramayana studies in North-East India. I am delighted to note that Dr. Sujit K. Ghosh has carefully edited this volume, projecting major issues of diffusion, naturalization and acculturation of the theme in North-East India.

The whole idea that North-East India was peripheral to Indian civilization and culture in the early centuries of Christian era is based on inadequate data and unfounded suppositions. Very little has been done so far to explore the North-East Indian land route through which elements of Indian civilization were exported to the mainland South-East Asia. The Tra-Kieu inscription of King Prakashdharma of Champa (A.D. 653-679) mentions the erection of an image of Valmiki in the southern part of the present-day Vietnam. That the Indians, travelling from the north-eastern land route, carried the eastern version of the epic story to the countries of Indochina is a hypothesis which cannot be dismissed altogether.

In the preface to his play Raktakarabi, Tagore teasingly accuses Adi Kavi Valmiki for stealing his story. He maintains that the Adi Kavi stole his story beforehand by means of his intuitive imagination, for there are thousands of evidences to suggest that Swarnalanka is a thing precisely of our times. Making a contemporary claim to Ramakatha, Tagore discovers his creative affinity with Valmiki in recreating Ramakatha appropriate to our times. For him, Ramayana is not a story of the conflict between good and evil, but between materialism and its opposite. Sīta is portrayed in the play as Bhumikanya, a daughter of the earth who challenges Ravana and his materialism. The conflict gets resolved in the triumph of the values of an agrarian civilization over an industrial one through Sita's integrity and moral protest. Rämakatha over the centuries, has been rendered in different ways in order to highlight different aspects of our moral, social and cultural values. In E.V. Ramaswami's rerendering of Rämakatha, one understands the politicisation of the Aryan and Dravidian cultural conflict. In his interpretation, Ravana is seen as a paragon of Dravidian values. Besides these renderings, Ramakatha has been part of popular culture and represented through puppet dances of Kerala, Ramlilas of Varanasi and Balinese dance-dramas. To cap it all we have recently Ramananda Sagar's television version of the Ramayana. All these different presentations of Ramayana prove the fact that the Ramayana has been part of a diversity that has been part of a living tradition.

**Contents and Sample Pages**