The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan, ed. Vinay Dharwadker, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999, pp. 638 + xviii

This collections of academic essays has run into its eighth printing in 2014, a remarkable level of popularity for a book that is decidedly not “popular.” Ramanujan (1929-1993) is briefly introduced in two brief tributes by noted scholars (Milton Singer and Edward Dimock). Thirty of his essays follow, divided under four major themes.

The first section of six general essays on literature and culture is introduced by Wendy Doniger. Ramanujan’s profound perspective on India is summarized in the first essay in this volume:

I would like to suggest the obvious: that cultural traditions in India are indissolubly plural and often conflicting but are organized through at least two principles, (a) context-sensitivity and (b) reflexivity of various sorts, both of which constantly generate new forms out of the old ones. What we call Brahmanism, bhakti traditions, Buddhism, Jainism, tantra, tribal traditions and folklore, and lastly, modernity itself, are the most prominent of these systems. They are responses to previous and surrounding traditions, they invert, subvert, and convert their neighbours. Furthermore, each of these terms, like what we call India itself, is “a verbal tent with three-ring circuses” going on inside them. Further dialogic divisions are continuously in progress. They look like single entities, like neat little tents, only from a distance. (8)

This is repeatedly illustrated in the essays in this book which are chock full of anecdotal evidence about the complexity of Indian cultural traditions. The interaction (reflexivity) of literature and traditions is wonderfully illustrated still in this first chapter.

In the Adhyatma Ramayana (eleventh century?), as in every other Ramayana, the hero Rama is exiled. He tries to dissuade his gentle wife Sita from going with him into the dangerous forest, but Sita insists on sharing the exile and the hardships with him. When Rama continues to argue, Sita is exasperated and wins the argument by acclaiming, “Countless Ramayanas have been composed. Do you know of one where Sita does not go into the forest with Rama?” Such self-reference to other or prior examples of the narrative, often implicit, make texts like the Ramayana not merely single autonomous texts but also members of a series with a family resemblance. (21)

The second essay is a stimulating consideration of the question “Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?” Ramanujan suggests that “context sensitivity,” usually to the neglect of seeking universal principles, is definitive for Indian thought.

The second section is six essays on classical literatures, with an introduction by Vinay Dharwadker. The opening essay here is Ramanujan’s famous study of Three Hundred Ramayanas, which questions if there might actually be three thousand. This was dropped from the history syllabus in Delhi University in 2011 due to protesters complaining that it offended Hindu beliefs. Half of these essays focus on Tamil issues and are quite technical.

Six essays on bhakti and modern poetry make up the third section, introduced by John B. Carman. The first essay is on women saints, the second on men, women and saints. The introduction to the second points out that “as you know, every major group of south Indian saints has at least one woman and one untouchable among them” (279). The third essay on Siva bhakti suggests that

Virasaiva [Lingayat] poetry is about the worshipping subject, not the object of worship. Vedic hymns, Upanisadic speculations, describe god. But this bhakti poetry describes the inner movements of the speaker’s heart. Such poetry assumes Siva, agonizes over the speaker’s struggles, the stages of his snakes-and-ladders game with his god; he loves, hates, prays, suffers, and addresses it all to his god. I would hazard a guess that poets who are confident of their god, like Appar and Namalvar, describe him a great deal; and poets who concentrate on the hardships of bhakti describe their own feelings and shortcomings as if they could not help doing so. (296)

The final section is twelve essays on folklore, introduced by Stuart Blackburn and Alan Dundes. The breadth and depth of Ramanujan’s learning is clear in the first three sections of this book, but he was not merely an academic, rather was a noted poet and most notably a folklorist. The best part of the earlier sections were the many anecdotes; here the folklore takes center stage. The closing chapter of the book is “Who Needs Folklore?” and Ramanujan gives a clear answer:

For starters, I for one need folklore as an Indian studying India. It pervades by childhood, my family, my community. It is the symbolic language of the non-literate parts of me and my culture. Even in a large modern city like Bombay or Madras, even in Western-style nuclear families with their 2.2 children, folklore is only a suburb away, a cousin or a grandmother away….In a largely non-literate culture, everyone – poor, rich, high caste and low caste, professor, pundit or ignoramus – has inside him or her a large non-literate subcontinent. (532-533)

These few brief quotations and illustrations from this book barely scratch the surface of the material presented, and are introduced here in hope that readers will seek engagement with the thought of A. K. Ramanujan through these stimulating essays.