Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

Introduction
Anil Menon

A long time ago, the story goes, a young prince, the heir to a great South-Asian kingdom, threaded Siva’s mighty bow and won the heart of a brave princess. The story of what happened next, a story which begins where most love stories end, the story of the
Ramayana,
has been
told and re-told countless times over the centuries. Hold on to a story long enough and it begins to make a people. The long shadow of the
Ramayana
explains why a popular Indian brand of cockroach poison is called
Laxman Rekha Chalk;
why a recent Bollywood superhero movie should have a villain named Ra-One; and why for some Indians the word
Ram-rajya
(Rama’s State) is a political ideal and not
a mythical era. South-Asians have held on to this tale.

However, the twenty-four stories in
Breaking the Bow
are not about holding on to this great and ancient tale. They are about letting go and making ourselves anew. The
Ramayana
is important to this project as an inspiration, a context. To take the road not taken requires a road that has been taken. We are (mostly) interested in the road
not taken.

This is very hard to do with the
Ramayana.
The idea that there is “the”
Ramayana
is one of those South-Asian facts: true wherever it is not false. As A.K. Ramanujan’s wonderful must-read essay
300 Ra-mayanas
shows, there are many Ramayanas. The tradition is to depart from the tradition. There is the Jaina
Ramayana.
The Kashmiri
Ramayana.
There is Brij Narain Chakbast’s Urdu Ramayana.
The Muslim poet Masihi’s Persian Ramayana begins with traditional Islamic invocations. If the great archeologist H.D. Sankalia is right, there is a Lord Rama story in the
Zend-Avesta.
Kamban’s Tamil version,
Kambaramayana,
would surprise fans of Tulsidas’ Ramayana for the respect it accords Lord Ravana. Kamban’s radical influence can be seen in works as recent as Mani Ratnam’s
Raavan
(2010). Even
more radical is the
Chandravati Ramayana.
Composed by a sixteenth-century female poet and bhaktin, it is mostly about Sita; a feminist Ramayana. And this is just the subcontinent proper. There are the Ramayanas from Thailand, Malaysia, Burma and Cambodia. There are many
Ramayana
versions, many departures.

What usually happens in such a situation is that a tradition develops in the method of
departure. The story is re-imagined with shifts in points of view, minority characters are given a voice, value systems are inverted, settings are modernized and/or the story is relocated in space and time. A few stories in this collection also adopt some of these traditional techniques. Despite our suggestion that writers avoid straightforward retellings, some of the Ramayana’s characters were not
so easily silenced. For example, Lord Ravana’s sister Surpanakha—mutilated by Lord Rama and Lakshman for her inappropriate amorous advances was the subject of many sympathetic treatments. It was the quality of these retellings, not their ideologies, that persuaded us to include them.

Still, such retellings are the exception. We are aiming for a different kind of departure. Most of the stories
in this anthology belong to the genre of speculative fiction. Spec-fic includes science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, slipstream, surrealism, neo-modernist and postmodern lit, and many other sub-genres.

What make a story speculative? A simple answer, not entirely accurate, is that a speculative story is a non-realist story. In a realist story, the story’s context—the stuff that needn’t
be told- is this world, the actual world, common-sense world. In a realist story, if two lovers meet in Navi Mumbai, the reader can be reasonably certain they are meeting in Maharashtra, India. But in a non-realist story, there are no such guarantees.
Navi Mumbai
could a video game, the belly of a whale or the renamed capital of Sweden.

Just as topology evolved out Euclidean geometry by relaxing
the set of permitted transformations, speculative fiction evolved out of realist fiction by relaxing various constraints. Stories no longer need to be about human or pseudo-human characters. They don’t need to be set on
this
earth. They don’t need to be located in the past or the present. They don’t need to be written in any known human language. They don’t need to respect science or sense . Their
telling could be as rigorous as a mathematical deduction or as mischievous as the square root of a cheeky orange. Such freedom is challenging, not to mention frightening. To use an old Sanskrit term, it takes a certain chutzpah.

The ancient South-Asians had chutzpah. They imagined our universe as existing for a duration of 311 trillion years (100 Brahma years), about 23, 000 times larger than
the scientific estimate for the current age of the Big Bang universe (~ 13.5 billion years). They imagined multiple universes, frothing in the event-sea of creation and destruction. They imagined space and time as being illusory in the absolute and relative across the sea of universes. They imagined consciousness in all of matter, not just human beings. Divinity didn’t frighten them. The Rig-Veda
ex presses doubt on the omniscience of the creator. The ancients imagined weapons that could flatten mountains, unravel minds, devastate entire armies, destroy worlds and even annihilate the gods themselves.

The South-Asians were also fascinated with language. As the linguist Frits Staal remarked, what geometry was to the Greeks, language was to the ancient South-Asians. This fascination,
combined with their speculative imagination, led to stories that pushed the boundaries of what was possible with language: self-reflective stories, meta-fiction, fractal stories, frame stories stacked eight or nine levels deep, stories in which reality and fiction merged seamlessly, stories that encoded other stories, stories which questioned embodiment, gender and identity…

Of course, as in
all feudal societies, the storytellers were not to disturb the sleep of the privileged few. Predictably, the stories suffered. They could not explore moral, political or social issues with much honesty. The truth was fixed in advance. The stories were afraid to question anything directly. Imagination had to hide in women’s tales, live in kitchens, speak in regional tongues, sink underground. In
time, there was no need to worry about offending anybody; when have the mute offended the deaf?

In this context, A. K. Ramanujan’s comment that no Indian— at least, no Hindu- hears the epics for the first time acquires an ironic flavor. The Ramayana with its fantasy tropes should arouse the
adbhut
rasa—the savor of wonder—but it cannot, because in India the pleasure of a first contact with
the epics is not possible. Or more accurately, the savoring of the epics as a novel experience is not possible. The epics come in many diverse versions, but diversity is not novelty. We need the novum for wonder, and that is precisely what tradition cannot offer.

But speculative fiction can. This was brought home to us by Pervin Saket’s
Test of Fire,
written at a fiction workshop Vandana, Suchitra
Mathur and I had conducted at IIT-Kanpur in 2009. I wasn’t excited to discover that the story had Sita as its protagonist. I had read quite a few stories centered around Sita. In fact, just before coming to Kanpur I had read Namitha Gokhale’s anthology on Sita. Pervin’s interpretation of Sita didn’t
break any taboos. In its disappointment at Sita’s treatment, it wasn’t particularly radical. Yet
Pervin’s Sita felt new. It soon became clear that the other participants also sensed a difference. Pervin, with a clever choice of setting, had moved an ancient tale virtually forward in time. The result was a taste of the
adbhut rasa,
the quintessential taste of science fiction.

Pervin’s story reminded us that we once again had a literature un afraid of the imagination. We began to wonder
about the sort of departures that speculative fiction—not just science-fiction—could make possible. Consider Arthur C. Clarke’s use of the
Odyssey
in his novel 2001. Superficially, there is little in Clarke’s novel that reminds one of the
Odyssey.
Yet unlike many retellings, Clarke’s Bowman recaptures the existential loneliness of Odysseus. Perhaps that’s because our horizons are now pinned to
outer space, and as we stand with Clarke’s Bow man we become Odysseus gazing outwards at the glittering infinite sea.

Clarke’s telling was as elegant as his setting was essential. We wondered if something similar would be possible with our own great epic.

I am glad to report our authors rose to the challenge. This is an inter national effort. We have authors from India, Sri Lanka, United
States, Britain, France, Holland and Dubai. Some like Manjula Padmanabhan, Tabish Khair, Priya Sarukkai Chabria and Abha Dawesar are very well known, but we also have many new voices. The result is a one-of-a-kind anthology. Delicate fantasies such as Shweta Narayan’s
Falling
or Aishwarya Subramaniyan’s
Making
sit next to K. Srilata’s philosophical
Game of Asylum Seekers,
Pratap Reddy’s murder
mystery
Vaidehi
and Sucharita Dutta-Asane’s magic realist
From Sita to Vaidehi.
Sometimes, like the long-lost twins in the Hindi movie
Ram Aur Shyam,
stories mirror each other because they are so different. Priya Sarukkai Chabria’s poetic
Fragments From The Book of Beauty
is city-twin to Molshree Ambastha’s amusing
Why Me?
Molshree’s
story, written in the heart felt, irony-free style characteristic
of Ram-leelas, perhaps has the best last line of all the stories.

We found other mirrors. Kuzhali Manickavel’s
The Ramayana As An American Reality Show
is in its way as hallucinogenic as Tori Truslow’s
Machanu Visits The Underworld.
Similarly, Neelanjana Banerjee’s
Exile
parallels Lavie Tidhar’s cyberpunk
This, Other World.
The desolate alternate history of Abirami Velliangiri’s
Great Disobedience
meets the grim archeology of Swapna Kishore’s
Regressions.
You will find many voices, many novums, many
rasas.
Bring a large spoon.

Acknowledgements: All editors should be so lucky as I was to have a co-editor with the sensibility and judgment of my friend Vandana Singh. Our anthology also exists because of the investment and imagination of the people behind Zubaan Books, especially Urvashi
Butalia and Anita Roy. This independent press has the stoutest heart in all of Indian publishing. A heartfelt namasthe to Shweta Tewari for shepherding us through the process; our many bleats and excuses must have been in credibly annoying. And finally, Saras, for making my orbits around the sun such fun.