The Ramayana Manuscript Trails

           The Ramayana Manuscript Trails

Today I shall expound on texts old and colossal, which have prevailed through the upheavals of the human civilization and come to us profound and pure. In their inception, hands and souls worked tirelessly to give them their monumental status, imbuing them with metaphysical powers. Texts and illustrations created out of a labour of love and ingenuity, not of an age but for all times.  Along the way, they suffered and were maligned by ignorant fools, but the saving grace of the continuous tribe of cultural creatives, washed stains of negligence and tedium incessantly, breathing fresh vigour and strength into them intermittently. Such unfailing energy and ceaseless rallying against all odds have finally morphed the ageless texts to suit the climes of the present age.

Our greatest and longest love story with the epic Ramayana saw another triumph this year. The Mewar Ramayana, the most beautifully illustrated manuscript of the Valmiki Ramayan, is available today at the click of a mouse at www.bl.uk/ramayana. Sources say that it was a mega project costing Rs 27 lakhs sponsored by Jamsetji Tata Trust, and was unveiled at the Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya (CSMVS) Museum in March, 2014. Readers can view 377 rare paintings out of the 450, and listen to an audio, turning digitized pages like leaves of the original text.

My trail of research inspired by the lecture series VISUAL NARRATIVES OF INDIA: TEXT AND IMAGE by Professor Vidya Dehejia at the Goa University last month turned out to be an interesting tale of treasure lost and found. The seven Kandas of the Mewar Ramayana created in the 17^th century, got segregated and handed down to different people and countries through the continuing centuries, with trails gone cold.  It was commissioned by Maharana Jagat Singh of the Rajput kingdom in the early half of the 1650s. The Mewari Ranas extolled the service of scribes and artists to build great manuscript libraries, a mark of great prestige and honour of the times. The project was carried out by many painters, the Sahibdin workshop being the most noteworthy. A single scribe undertook the text. The entire manuscript took five years for completion and was revered by the dynasty as an extremely valuable treasure. (Sisodiya Rajputs are thought to be the direct descendants of Rama in the Suryavanshi clan).

 JP Losty, the curator of visual arts at the British library, recounts an interesting story of how the Mewar Ramayana comprising of seven volumes got segregated and transported to different lands from Rajasthan. In 1820, Maharana Bhim Singh, great friends with James Tod the then British agent of Rajput states, presented him four volumes of the mega literature who in turn gifted them to the Duke of Sussex, a man of letters with a magnificent library. Thereafter, they were bought by the British museum and pristinely bound into two volumes at the British library. Losty came upon them in the 1970s and, highly mesmerized by the magnitude of his find, relentlessly pursued all clues leading him finally to the volumes at Jodhpur and Mumbai in museums and private collections of royal families. After 200 years, the Mewar Ramayana, a colossal monument of our rich heritage, exists in a modern technological avatar within everyone’s reach, to savour and delight to our heart’s content.

The folios are horizontal, like leaves, with paintings on one side and the text on the other side. It is intriguing to note that the illustrations illuminate three forms of Mewar paintings– the Sahibdin and Manohar workshop studios and an unknown artist working in Mewar- Deccani style. Use of reds and browns, pointed nose, large eyes and angular features mark a Mewari figurative painting. The skyline is shown in waves and water in semicircular markings of inky blue. Trees are elaborate with the ubiquitous mango tree with fresh-washed green interspersed with dark green and red leaves.

Equally intriguing is the story of the first Persian manuscript of the Ramayana during king Akbar’s reign. The great patron of arts and culture commissioned the imperial Ramayana in the 16^th century to dispel the fanatical hatred between Hindus and Muslims, an offspring of ignorance of each other’s scriptures. He called upon his senior scholar Abdul Qadir Badayuni to render the Ramayana in Persian. The latter, a staunch Muslim, took up the project reluctantly, but meticulously worked on it for four years, to excellent results. The 176 illustrations are replicated in imperial Mughal art. The manuscript was greatly revered by his mother and line of Mughal rulers later, who perused it at different times through the next two centuries. It is interesting to note that about the same time, Tulsidas  too worked on the Ram Charita Manas, Rama’s story in Awadhi.

Greatly enamored by the  imperial Ramayana, Abdur-Rahim Khan-i-Khanan   commissioned the Khan Khanan Ramayana that was accessible to general public and scholars who came to see him in his library, workshop and at other forums. He was the mightiest general of Akbar’s army, son of Bairam Khan who had served as regent to young Akbar. Sources indicate that in 1886, Colonel Henry Bathhurst Hanna, a Britisher stationed in India for about thirty years, purchased the Khan Khanan Ramayana thinking it to be the Imperial Ramayana. Later research on the Persian scripts of the Ramayana itself proved that it was not the Imperial Ramayana. In 1907, Charles Lang Freer purchased the Khan Khanan Ramayana and since then it is in the collections of the Smithsonianâ Freer Gallery of Art in Washington D.C.  Written in lucid Persian in the Manaswi fashion rather than the cantos of Valmiki Ramayana, it is calligraphed by the experts of Akbar’s court. The paintings show apparent influences of Indian, Iranian and Mongolian styles of art. The text at times disrupts the paintings and appears on the same side of the folio as the painting. 

Another notable work is that of Masih, a Sanskrit scholar in Benaras for 12 years who reworked the  Ramayan into  5407 couplets. Sham Lal Angara in Jammu is in possession of a rare Ramayana in Persian which begins with Bismillah-i-rahman ar-rahim, which is also how the Quran begins: clearly indicative of the secular outlook of Shah Jahan’s son who was the translator of this beautiful treasure.

These old texts exist in a class of their own.  Custodians of our tradition and history, they are a living presence and bind centuries of human souls, who speak to us of our rich heritage. Mortals engaged in their creation and preservation acquire an immortality carried through   whispering echoes within the confines of these monumental volumes!