Classicism to folklorism: Study of cultural transitions and moral tensions in A. K. Ramanujan’s “three hundred Ramayanas”

Folk literature is a form of self reflection involving moral codes associated with transmission of a narrative through generations of people. Subcontinental folk literature is subject to generic interplays and blurring of boundaries between the so-called high and low cultures. This paper is an attempt to analyze A. K. Ramanujan’s seminal essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” as reflecting on a vast collection of different versions of Ramakathas. These Ramakathas, as significant examples of Indian folktales, are categorized by Ramanujan according to their thematic variety. Being a tri-cultural diasporic philologist, Ramanujan juxtaposes tradition and modernity in tracing the journey of the ‘Ramayana’ for over 25002, 500 years, and he focuses on varied styles, details, tombstones, and textures built around a core story. Mainly five kinds of Ramakathas are studied by Ramanujan in the concerned essay, intervening in both classical and folk forms. The essayist finds intertextual connections among a range of literary genres of South and South-East Asia, including epics, kavyas, poetic compositions, mythological stories, puranas, etc. The transitions between written and oral literatures play a key role here, as it is through cultural and linguistic translations that multiple and conflicting ‘meta-Ramayanas’ serve iconic, indexical, and symbolic roles in the interest of a specific historical time and social hierarchy. Each of these metatexts holds specific religious and cultural value systems, and transitions and transmissions among them reflect on the moral tension in the multicultural identity of the subcontinent.