The Hindu, November 3, 2011
When a Department let the University down
by Shahid Amin
The pre-history of the Ramanujan Ramayana essay in India.
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” wrote A.K. Ramanujan in 1968. “I have heard bits and pieces of it [in Kannada and Tamil] in a tailor's shop where a pundit used to regale us with Mahabharata stories; from an older boy who loved to keep us spellbound with it after cricket …; from a somewhat bored algebra teacher who switched from the binomial theorem to the problem of Draupadi and her five husbands.”
It was such an acclaimed linguist, folklorist and translator of all things Indian, forever opening doors to the interplay between the epic and everyday experience, who was recently shunned as an “untouchable” by the academic caste panchayat of Delhi University. This has invited a humungous uproar among academics and civil society in India and abroad. The now famous Expert D, whose minority view justified the excision of Ramanajun's classic essay on 300 Ramayans from the University syllabus, feared that non-Hindu teachers will have difficulty putting across its excesses to believing students. By that token this article should get killed right here, for my name might end up betraying my thoughts — a sad reflection that communities in India cannot communicate!
In any case, the role played by the Oxford University Press (OUP) in the three-year long saga ending with the burial of Ramanujan's Ramayana piece illustrates how the world out there has come to unthinkingly push artefacts of the mind out of public spaces. This is cause for grave concern.
FULL TEXT AT: http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/lead/article2595429.ece?homepage=true
|
