Ramacharitam- Seminar Paper

Sanskrit Epic Tradition II. The avâtara Accounts of Räma It has been a matter of common knowledge since the time of Weber and Jacobi that the Mahabharata contains various borrowings from and allusions to the subject matter of the other epic, the Ramayana. It has also, I think, been fairly generally agreed that such passages belong to the later stages in the growth of the Mahabharata, although this has been questioned in the case of the largest and best known of them, the Ramopdkhyana. The interrelationship of the Ramayana and the Ramopdkhyana formed the subject of a paper which I read at the last conference in Paris; I wish now to focus on four other passages which allude to Rama Dasarathi. These in some ways form two pairs since two of them treat him as an avatara of Visnu (Hv. 31.110-142 and Mbh. 2 App. 21.492-582), including him among brief accounts of all the avataras, and two include him among the sixteen kings of old (Mbh. 12.29.46-55 and Mbh. 7 App. 8.437-482). Professor Raghavan has included these four passages along with many others in his study of the Ramayana in the Mahabharata A He has commented pertinently on their subject matter, on which I do not intend to enlarge, and to a somewhat lesser extent on their textual history. I wish to develop this particular aspect of textual criticism since, as Raghavan already remarked, there are a number of points of interest and significance. At first sight, the relationships within each of the pairs of passages seem clear enough, and conclusions have already been drawn. P. L. Vaidya, in his introduction to the Critical Edition of the Harivamsa, concluded that the Sabhd passage (Mbh. 2 App. 21) was taken from a text of the Harivamki similar to his constituted text. 2 Sukthankar had earlier indicated that the Drona form of the ¡}odasarajakiya was later than the Santi account, since the sixteenth ruler of the Santi list, Sagara son of Iksvaku, is replaced in the Drona account by the incongruous Rama Jamadagnya, who is neither king nor even ksatriya. 3 These judgements are accurate so far as they go, but reveal nothing about the relationship of the two pairs. Significantly there is no overlap at all between these four passages and the 1 V. Raghavan, The Greater Ram&yana, Varanasi 1973, 2-33. A valuable earlier treatment of the topic is contained in E. W. Hopkins, The Great Epic of India, New York 1901, chapter 2. 2 HarivamSa, Critical Edition vol. 1 (Poona 1969) pp. xlviii-xlix. I do not intend here to explore the interrelationship of Harivamsa 31 and Brahma Purana 213. Adalbert Gail discusses the chronology of the section on Rama Jamadagnya in this pradurbhava list in his ParaSurama, Brahmane und Krieger, Wiesbaden 1977, 46-47. 3 V. S. Sukthankar, Epic Studies VI, The Bhrgus and the Bharata, in: ABORI 18 [1936-1937], 1-76, esp. 40-42. Additionally Paurava is substituted for Brhadratha of Anga. The passage is lacking in the NW recension.

Rivista Degli Studi Orientali 1-2, 2019

The Indo-Aryans of ancient south Asia: language, …, 1995

2020

The figure of Rāma and his story constitute a privileged topic to analyse the dynamics of the adaptation of Sanskrit classical models into the Braj Bhāṣā literary tradition flourishing in the sixteenth-century North India. They are traditionally acknowledged as authoritative subjects that legitimize the language in which they are narrated as a suitable literary means. With such a purpose, we will analyse how they are variously interpreted in the works of the poet Keśavdās (1555– 1617), who mainly retells the story of Rāma in his Rāmcandracandrikā (Moonlight of Rāmcandra,1601) and Vijñāngītā (Praise of Knowledge, 1610). In the first case, he describes Vālmīki appearing in a dream and empowering him to retell such divine story in the vernacular (bhāṣā), reshaping the content in a new form made of rhetorical figures and a sophisticated literary style. In the second work, the story of Rāma is taken from the Yogavāsiṣṭha and reinterpreted from a philosophical perspective, still open to b...

Situated at the disciplinary intersection of literature, history, and ethics, this dissertation is a comparative analysis of three Digambara Jain versions of the story of the epic prince Rāma:

The Indo-Aryans of Ancient South Asia: Language, …, 1995

Orientalistische Literaturzeitung, 2022

Studies in History, 2021

This essay explores the dialectic of form, content and social life in the new poetry of the medieval Sanskrit anthologies. Did the seeming anarchy of content evinced in unfamiliar tables of contents produce genuine newness of aesthetic effect or affect, new possibilities for social value judgement—a critical and self-critical perspective—in response to changing sociopolitical conditions and the rise of the vernacular? Or else did this poetry simply do what it always did best: to be everything for everyone at the royal court, everywhere and nowhere? This article argues that the anthology may have spawned a contradictory dynamic: crafting a new sociological immediacy for the form, and yet reconciling the courtly kāvya tradition to a future in which it no longer figured so centrally. Finally, in a methodological annex, the aforementioned case study spawns higher-order reflections on the mutual determination of art and social life in early medieval South Asia, and the materialist analysis of premodern cultural form. Thinking through premodern sociocultural change from the point of view of capitalist modernity fundamentally challenges the historical imagination, revealing self-reflexivity as both its first and last resort.