RETELLING THE RAMAYANA: Voices from Kerala By C.N. Sreekanta Nair and Sarah Joseph, Oxford, $19.95

Down the centuries, there have been many versions of the Ramayana, not only in India but in other south-east Asian countries as well. More than any other sacred text, the Ramayana has been regarded as the blueprint for righteous human action. The Ramayana is definitely the story of Ram, the evergreen hero and young prince who gave up his claim to the throne and went to the forest to fulfil the promise his father had made to his second wife. Ram is also portrayed as a great lover, who stood steadfast by his wife, and a devoted brother. In essence, Ram is the ideal man.

But refashioning and retelling Valmiki?s tale have become a way of literary dissent, especially in south India where writers, poets and playwrights have refused to accept the patriarchal perspective from which the older Ramayanas were written. Two such litterateurs from Kerala are featured in this volume. The first section of this volume comprises Kerala?s famous playwright, C.N. Sreekanta Nair?s play, Kanchana Sita, the first of a dramatic trilogy based on the Ramayana.

Kanchana Sita deconstructs the myth of Ram by articulating several contradictions. Valmiki?s perspective is presented as a profoundly sagacious view of life and nature where instincts, emotions and human bonding gain pre-eminence over soulless statecraft. Sita, earth?s daughter, is nature itself in its many seasons of flowering and fall ? the embodiment of purity and motherhood.

Vasistha is the very opposite of all that is symbolized by Valmiki and Sita. He is cunning and conniving, and his heartless stratagems pose a grave threat to the natural world. His is a realm of practical intellect divorced from nature and the higher instincts. To him, political machinations and racial bigotry are paramount.

Ram serves as the figurehead of Aryan conquest of the non-Aryan. The persona of Ram can only be sustained by the creation of the ?other? (represented by Sambooka, Bali and Ravan, and the ?barbarian? races) and by violence against it.

The play is a condemnation of cold-blooded statecraft and the degeneration of democracy into mobocracy. It makes us take a hard look at the myth of Aryan supremacy and the role of the Brahmins from an egalitarian, anti-hierarchical vantage point. It explores the essential conflict between living in harmony with nature and the bid to forcibly submit it to human will.

The play is contemporary in a profound sense as it delves into the grey areas of politics and ethics ? becoming immensely relevant in our times of terror and anxiety, of communal conflict and distortion of history.

The second part of this extraordinary compilation comprises five tales of Sarah Joseph, titled the Ramayana Stories. Joseph chooses not to treat the Ramayana as a continuous story but selects different episodes from the epic, thus diffusing the focus on Ram as the central character and casting the spotlight on characters, especially women, who had been originally marginalized.

Joseph presents the stories in the form of monologues delivered by the female protagonists. But it is as much the protagonist?s story as Joseph?s. The dialectics between the victor and the vanquished, the man and the woman, the tribal and the urban-dweller, the Aryan and the Dravidian, give the stories their political temper. Feminine angst is brought out sharply, the victims being woman in each case.

The play and the stories make a searing scrutiny of the patriarchal myth of Ram and the Ram rajya. These works are not merely subversions of the Ramayana but a renewed look at the epic from a woman?s perspective, from the vantage point of the marginalized.