My Epic India

Rohan

11 April 2007, 23:01

When I was a year and a half old, my family moved from Mumbai, the city I was born in, to a tiny town, Doha, in one of ‘those desert sheikdoms’ in the Middle East, Qatar. Growing up as an Indian in the Middle East isn’t quite the same as growing up in Europe, the States or Australia. You’re still at home, in a sense. You fly back to ‘your native place’ every year and sometimes twice a year, you go to an Indian school, have Indian friends, never have to learn the local language, and never really have to meet a non-Indian. The only difference is probably that you aren’t taught to cultivate a deep sense of suspicion against other religious communities. That, and your sense of Indian history is a little warped.

So, far away from doting grandparents who would pass down the age-old oral traditions, my father found a simple way to introduce us to the Great Indian Epics: Bedtime stories. For years, my favorite book was the Bala Ramayana, that simply written and simply illustrated portal to my dreams. I was entranced by Rama’s world and my favorite character soon became Hanuman, especially when he was described as the son of Pavan who jumped up to bite the sun because he thought it was a big apple. It was the ultimate story, there was nothing compared to the adventures of this gang, nothing could come close. Nothing, of course, except the Bala Bhagwatam, which still had too many people, doing too many things for me to enjoy as much.

I soon moved on, beyond bedtime stories, and beyond the Bala series, and started reading Enid Blyton’s and Roald Dahl’s, and just when I had sufficiently moved past the Bala Epics, we started getting Zee TV at home. The classic Ramayan TV series was being shown all over again, and oh, was I hooked. I learnt later that this used to be the most watched TV show ever to play on Indian Television, even during reruns, and I wasn’t surprised, this was great stuff. Meanwhile, every morning, before going to school my parents would sing (indeed, sing w more than recite) the Hanuman Chalisa, and luckily for me, I was forced to learn it from a book that had English translations. It also had an introduction about Tulsidas, which made a lot more sense once I read the Amar Chitra Katha series that told us about his life. Quietly, more and more information about the Great Epics was trickling into my head.

The Amar Chitra Katha books, of which my uncle had a huge collection (along with Tinkle digests), would get passed down to Doha in short spurts every time we came back from Mumbai, and soon I had learnt a lot more about the Mahabaratha , about the Gods, about the Mythology in general, such that I had a fairly comprehensive idea of the whole story. In fact, those versions of the stories are much more clear to me than any of the other depictions I’ve read since. And of course, once Zee TV was done with Ramayan, the Mahabharat show had to follow. My bias towards the Ramayan continued, and I only enjoyed watching Mahabarat once that conch shell went off, and we got to see medieval battles better than the best CGI-rendered Spartan army could ever hope to provide.

It’s not as if these were the only things we watched or read; I was getting deep into the Famous Five and Secret Seven, and even borrowing a few Hardy Boys books off my cousins, and the weekly TV show that the whole family had to watch wasn’t one of the Epics but The Cosby Show, one of the greatest family sitcoms of all time. But, I used to think that living in far-off Qatar, we grew up completely different to our cousins from Bombay, but in fact that Indian past was all around us. Now, it’s true, in many ways, Gulf Kids are extremely different to those who grew up in India, but we still knew a lot more about the country than say, the average first-genABCD. And for me in particular, I knew intricate details about the epics long before my firang cousins had even heard of them (even though we were actually sort of, but not quite firang cousins too).

I can still remember the day we got this new Ramayana video cassette (Warrior Prince: The Legend of Ramyana). It was an animated film (a cartoon!), drawn in the japanime style, and maybe I was growing a little too old for cartoons, but hey, this was the Ramayana! Sure I was watching Beast Wars by that time, and was starting to get confused by the miserable crap they call the CBSE syllabus, but here was a piece of India, ironically animated by the Japanese (or maybe even more ironically, since they are primarily Buddhist?), that I enjoyed, something Desi that I liked. Over time, for us ‘Gulfi Students’, the idea of India became that of old, boring stuff, especially since we were force fed everything we learnt about it, but here was something that never became old and boring for me.

A few years later I would read RK Narayan’s Ramayana, and an English Translation of the Tamil Mahabharata. For a short time (like two sessions) I went to a Gita class (bo-oring), but slowly cut myself off from most of the Indian stuff as it just got more old and boring. For a fair amount of time I tried to be strictly a ‘Global’ citizen, didn’t want to go back to India, and wouldn’t call myself Hindu, because I didn’t do the stuff my grandad did. Its something I’d like to document someday, how living away from your country, studying in a lacklustre, vomit-filled system, and being exposed to mostly American culture, you get conditioned to believe that it is cooler, more hip than anything you were doing before.

But then I left the Indian school, and moved to a British one, filled with Qatari students, and White Teachers (I’m sorry, Caucasian teachers). I guess there’s a word in sociology for what happened here, but I started to rediscover India, and changed my mind about a lot of things. I made an attempt to understand the religion from sources a little more enlightening than comic books, and found that it made much more sense than the ‘revealed’ religions that were all around me. I started reading a lot more Desi English books, watching the Bollyflicks that I had missed and most recently approaching the bigger Indian blogs online, of which I had been completely unaware of in 3 years of blogging. If it weren’t for my move, I’d be stuck in that anti-India phase, possibly even pretending to be gangsta thru dE WAy I typ oNlyn. Fortunately, I came back.

I even rediscovered my old bias with the epics, as I decided that I preferred the Yoga Vasistha over the Bhagwad Gita (Rama Rules! Krishna, you’re going down…) and understood a little better why Amitab Bachhan keeps saying that almost every bollyfilm is based on one of the two Epics. In part that’s true because the full Mahabharat contains every single story known to man! But more than anything, I realised what I had missed, that I don’t need to apologise for loving Indian culture, and that it was as cool, as much fun, as geeky as anything else. I just recently bought the first book of Ashok’s Ramayana series, as they weren’t available in this country, and am looking forward to reading it as soon as I’ve cut down everything else on my reading list.

In between the Great Epic phase for the younger me, and the ‘renaissance’ of India in my mind, I had become a voracious reader, and developed a weakness for writing. My one big dream was to write the big novel that would introduce the Ramayana to the western world, which I soon realised has been done and done again. (Thanks, Ashok, for ruining my dream!) And then I though, hey, at least I can write the script and put it on TV, or in Cinemas, but once again, based on recent news, I’ve been beaten to the chase. I guess I’ll have to settle for something like reintroducing it, once the world has moved away from the Desi stories for a while.

And while every one’s off rewatching the Lord of The Rings, or rereading the Illiad, I’ll always know in my mind, that there are Indian stories more fun than these epics, and not just that they’re cooler but there’s even a very good chance that they actually happened in some form, in the past!

Comment

  1. Glad to hear about your rediscovery of the Indian epics. I was born in Africa and also discovered them by reading English retellings.

    I read LOTR because all my English schoolmates (I had moved to UK by then) were excited by it. I found it a tedious chore and have never reread it since. It is so insipid. I have probably read a half-dozen different retelling of the Mahabharat (inc. RK Narayan version)and am always on the lookout for new retellings of this ancient epic. I guess Ramayana just doesn’t have as much appeal.

    Anyway, if you want to read a modern slant on advaita/Sanatana Dharma, read Dr. Mani Bhaumik’s “Code Name: God.”

    — Shahryar · Apr 15, 04:52 · #

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