Rhymes and Reincarnations: On India’s Epic Poems
- Amit Majmudar
- 3 hours ago
- 15 min read
Amit Majmudar
In the Upanishads, some of India’s oldest musings on the nature of the divine, the rishis (seers) evolved the idea of Brahman. Ultimately, Brahman was “unspoken” or avyakta. You could not see or hear or experience or communicate with it, but it took countless forms, each one a “spoken” or vyakta Brahman. These “spoken” forms of Brahman are the Gods and Goddesses we pray to, engage with, and seek the blessings of; they are the ideas through which we know the unknowable. In our myths and epics, we tell its stories.
Those Sanskrit epic poems, in Hindu life past or present, have a hidden, “unspoken” quality to them. The everyday adherent gets the stories of the Ramayana and Mahabharata from every type of source. Your parents or grandparents might tell you some selected episodes, leaving gaps in the storyline. You might encounter the stories in picture books early on, some artist’s rendition altering forever how you imagine the events. Later, you might check an English-language retelling out of the library. Festivals dovetailed with characters: Janmashtami, Krishna’s birthday, or Diwali, celebrating the return of Prince Rama from exile. You might watch any of several screen versions on television or in the theater. Earlier generations welcomed puppet-plays or traveling singers, who provided the evening’s entertainment and, like makers of modern versions, preserved, modified, and rejuvenated millennia-old tales of love, separation, battle, and death.
Of course, as a modern Indian, you might also hear about the epics in the news. That movie version you were eager to go see in the theater might have set off a controversy over whether the main characters were portrayed reverently enough; the public may have declared a boycott. Or the whole country might be celebrating the inauguration of a temple on the site of Rama’s birthplace in Ayodhya, with opening ceremonies broadcast on public television and online around the world. Tens of millions of Hindus, of course, hear the names of the epic heroes every day, since their names derive from the epic mythological world, boys with first names like Lakshman and Arjuna, girls with first names like Sia and Radha, families with last names like Radhakrishnan, or Ramalingam, or Ramakrishnan.
Because Hindu civilization has produced a pair of epics, analogy with the Iliad and Odyssey comes easily. As it happens, one epic deals primarily with war, the other with the journey of an exiled hero—but as anyone familiar with all four epics can tell you, the similarities end there.
Even their role in their civilizations, although similar, don’t seem to match all that closely. Pausanias describes a shrine to Achilles on an island near the mouth of the Danube; archaeologists on northwestern Ithaca confirmed, as recently as 2018, a shrine to its most famous local son, Odysseus. Yet antiquity’s hero-cults don’t exactly represent the modern-day, mass worship of Rama, Sita, Hanuman, and Krishna, some of the most popular figures in the Hindu pantheon, with temples, it seems, on every other street corner.
The difference may be due, in part, with how the divine interpenetrates and influences the action of the epics. In Homer, the Gods and Goddesses are distinct characters who show up on the battlefield frequently, taking part in almost every battle. Rama and Krishna are avatars of a deity, Vishnu; Vishnu “participates” through them, and the other Gods generally stay off the battlefield, exerting their influence by gifting mortal heroes magical weapons or other equipment. Incarnations of divine force, Rama and Krishna constitute the point where the spiritual and worldly intersect. They live on separately from their long-since-vanished bodies; they continue to act in this world, and do not regard the daily lives and struggles of their devotees as beneath their notice or care.
In this sense, they resemble the character of Jesus in the Gospels more than any Homeric hero. The supernatural story records a life on earth, but to worship this figure now is to worship a being alive outside time, aware of you, receptive to prayer, who is intimately concerned with your welfare and happiness. This analogy—a hybrid between the Homeric hero and Jesus of the Gospels—illuminates how the Indian epic poems, for Hindus, occupy a status between modern categories of “literature” and “scripture.” Homer’s epics had a similarly exalted status in antiquity, but today the Homeric epics are experienced across cultures as literature. Renaissance Europe relearned Homer’s Greek, but it could not re-experience his piety. Languages are easier to revive than the Gods.
The Fate of Traditions
Contrasting ancient India’s epics with ancient Greece’s tempt me to contrast the fates of the two traditions. Homer’s birth might have taken place in the same part of the world as the action of the Iliad: in Anatolia, a part of modern-day Islamized Turkey. Yet India was hardly insulated from the pantheon-dissolving monotheistic religions. Hundreds of years of rule by Central Asian Muslims gave way a few hundred more by European Christians. Both groups considered Hindus to be polytheistic idolators, an indigenous religion worthy of extinction like those of the Americas, Australia, pre-Christian Europe and pre-Islamic Arabia. Both groups made efforts accordingly; that temple built on Rama’s birthplace, for example, restored one that a Muslim invader had destroyed hundreds of years earlier. The Portuguese conquered Goa, and imported into India, along with chili peppers and tomatoes, the torture devices of the Inquisition.
Homer’s epics, even after their recovery, translation and dissemination in Western Europe, failed to become sacred texts. But these epic poems have survived because the religion survived, and the religion survived because the people survived. So why did the people survive?
First, there were so many of them. As late as 1900, at the tail end of Hindu India’s centuries of imperial subjugation, Hinduism was still the second-largest religion on earth, concentrated in one specific region of Asia. Its 20th-century demographic eclipse by Islam has been a function of differential birth rates, not conversions. Secondly, the jati or caste identities of Hindu Indians made conversion less attractive. While Hinduism, unlike Islam, does not sentence apostates to death, and unlike Christianity has no Church from which to excommunicate someone, the caste simply kicked out the convert, making it significantly harder to get married in a society where dating did not exist. It was excommunication by social death.
Islamic imperialism, through a combination of violence, desecration of holy sites, and differential taxation of non-Muslims, saw some success in the periphery of the subcontinent, often in once-Buddhist areas; that is why Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh are Islamic republics today, and the epics enjoy no audience there. Lahore, Pakistan, was originally Lavapur, founded by one of the twin sons of Prince Rama; in 1947, it was still 30% Hindu; today, it is less than 1% Hindu, though located only fifteen miles from the Indian border. The country to the east of the Radcliffe Line has remained majority Hindu for now, though; Islam did not take hold in South Indian kingdoms that were only briefly or intermittently conquered. Christianity, which arrived in India around the time of the apostle Thomas, failed to make much headway over eighteen centuries. Missionaries routinely wrote home bewailing how the natives welcomed them but dismissed their preaching. Several accounts document frustrating conversations with local Brahmins, serenely pointing out the similarities of the two teachings and failing to see the purpose in conversion.
These priest-scholars show up in all accounts of ancient India. They delighted Greek students like Apollonius of Tyana as much as they frustrated Iberian proselytizers like St. Xavier. Surely the persistence of this small, staunch priesthood has to be listed among the reasons for the survival of the Hindu epics. Theirs were the hands that copied, and the voices that recited, the ancient Sanskrit of Valmiki and Vyasa. Their twin obsessions with reverence and memory have resulted in the four-millennia-long oral transmission of the Vedas to this day.
A final reason is the population density and climate that led to a microbiologically devastating environment for Europeans, and strong Indian immunity to foreign diseases. Native Americans and other aboriginal populations did not enjoy this advantage; colonizers contracted rather than spread fevers when they showed up in India, from Alexander the Great to the British Viceroy Lord Cornwallis.
So the Hindus have proven anomalously resilient, and their epics with them. Yet the epics themselves have taken measures to ensure their survival. As I mentioned before, they have leapt to other forms, dramatic, musical, and sculptural, to continue their lives in the culture. They have even found their way into literary second and third lives as poetic reincarnations. Today, when you attend a Ramayana recitation with music, the epic poetic text being recited is most likely not the Sanskrit one by Valmiki that dates back to before the Common Era. It’s likely the rhymed Awadhi retelling that dates back to Tulsidasa, a contemporary of Shakespeare’s. Nor is Tulsidasa’s The Sacred Lake of Rama’s Deeds the only one; one of the monuments of Tamil literature is Kampan’s The Avatar Rama.
The epic tradition continues, in English, to this day. My own bibliography contains books published only on the Indian Subcontinent—my retelling of the Ramayana told through the voices of various characters, and my three-volume Mahabharata Trilogy. This is another factor in the survival of the epics: Their ability to attract literary talent in every generation, to commandeer the poets and reincarnate themselves in regional and even imperial languages. Around the time Tulsidasa was writing his version from scratch in a vernacular precursor of Hindi, India also produced the Razmnama, an abridged Mahabharata translated into Persian, the language of the Mughal emperor Akbar’s court. Our earliest Gita translation (1785) carried an introduction by the East India Company’s Governor-General Warren Hastings. Translations of the earliest Sanskrit versions abound today: Princeton has released Valmiki’s entire epic in multi-volume and single-volume formats, and Vyasa’s massive work has found its way into English several times in the past century, with complete prose versions by van Buitenen and Bibek Debroy, individual books translated into verse for the Murthy Classical Library, and several abridged translations by John Smith for Penguin Classics, among others. As someone who has fallen under their spell, both experiencing the stories and recasting the stories in living language, I can attest that there has never been a better time to be a fan of these epics, both in their original literary forms and in the various media in which they have reincarnated themselves around the world, whether you’re watching Japan’s 1993 anime Ramayana on DVD, or marveling at the epic sculptures in Bangkok’s Suvarnabhoomi (Sanskrit, “Golden Land”) Airport.
Why Poetry?
These civilization-centering mythic stories could have been recounted in prose. Vergil composed the Aeneid in prose before versifying it piecemeal. Retellings of the epics, including mine, opt for prose. Other works, such as the Bible, have done well written mostly in prose, and contemporary storytellers whose new fantasy sagas resemble or draw on the old epics almost always select prose as well. Yet the Indian epics, like Homer’s, are in verse. I can attest, as someone who has experienced these works as living sacred poems, that the choice of form is not incidental. It is, in fact, crucial related to mythological storytelling.
The first aspect has to do with mass dissemination. A modern mythic epic, like Star Wars, came naturally out of American filmmaking, the late 20th century’s mass form; it has subsequently spread out into novels, spinoff movies and television series, comic books, and so on. There is even a pseudo-Elizabethan William Shakespeare’s The Empire Striketh Back in blank dramatic verse and a pseudo-Homeric The Odyssey of Star Wars. But in Valmiki’s day as in Tulsidasa’s, before screens, theaters, and streaming services, the quest for the mass form led writers naturally to music. The “recitations” of Tulsidasa and Valmiki—which I have attended in person, and which are available online as well—do not resemble modern poetry recitals or even spoken word performances, except in a few brief, bridging passages; for the most part, these are music concerts, with several instruments and often a call-and-response with the audience. This is the form that mass art took back then, and storytelling linked itself to music in order to spread, and hold the public’s attention, as effectively as possible. Writers adapted accordingly and used verse to get their stories across.
Within the world of the myth, though, there is a different explanation for verse. The poet of the earlier of the two epics, Valmiki, is said to have invented the meter of epic poets when he saw two mating egrets shot with a hunter’s single arrow. The grief and indignant horror emerged as a curse for the hunter—and the curse, to Valmiki’s surprise, had a rhythm to it. That interruption of the reproduction of the airborne species, triggered the meter that would concern itself, primarily, with separated lovers and the wastage of war. Epic poetry is the record of martial exploits, the immortalizing vehicle of glory, example for the living, dirge for the dead. It requires a sacred frame and structure; meters are sacred in the Sanskrit tradition, and the “mother of the Vedas,” Gayatri, has both a meter and a mantra named after her.
In ancient Greece, Mnemosyne (the Goddess of Memory) was the Mother of the Muses. The mnemonic function of meter and music made sure that the text would undergo relatively less corruption in the course of its dissemination. The Vedas have successfully come down to us by the grace of meter and memorization. The epics themselves are classified, in Sanskrit, as smriti—literally, “remembered.”
The conventions of epic poetry, and the necessary condensation of poetry itself, play into poetry being the form of choice for mythology. This may seem an odd thing to assert considering that the Mahabharata is one of the longest books in existence. But that epic gains its length through a proliferation of stories and embedded treatises, not a proliferation of superfluous details within those stories or gratuitous descriptive passages. The Mahabharata even contains a capsule retelling of the Ramayana within it. Epic poems or the Book of Job may give you extended monologues, but the omniscient narrator’s psychological commentary is often missing. The Shakespeare play, too, gives us asides and monologues, but the form itself offers no room for Shakespeare himself to editorialize. Epic poets, too, keep directdescriptions of motivation and psychology to a minimum.
By contrast, the windy novel has a tendency to overshare, incorporating too many trivial details and disjecta membra of everyday life. In the epic poem as in the fairy tale, the storyteller’s style is streamlined; the things of everyday life, when they appear in the story, take on exaggerated power and poignancy precisely because they are so carefully chosen and rarely included. The witch’s stove in “Hansel and Gretel” played on every child’s wide-eyed suspicion and dread of the first burning, tightly contained space he or she encountered; old Argus recognizing Odysseus plays on the love all dog owners have for their dogs; Golgotha’s specific detail of sour wine on a sponge, placed on a hyssop branch, is more poignant for its specificity, but that poignancy comes from the relative rarity of such details overall. A profusion of such details would have made that one detail get lost in the crowd. This may sound like literary style, but what we think of as effective style derives, here, from the compressive exigencies of poetry. It’s through this mechanism that poetry has determined the “mythic” storytelling style, even when that kind of storytelling happens in prose.
Conclusion: The Past and Future of Epic Hindu Poetry
Just as the past of the epics has depended on the fate of the people, its future is no different. An industrializing, newly independent India reaches back to its founding myths and stories. This phenomenon, of seeking out the past in a time of rapid change, is a repeated pattern among nations: A newly unified, modernizing Germany produced Wagner’s Ring cycle; the transformative scientific studies of the Renaissance coincided with a rediscovery of Greek and Roman philosophy and mythology; the Industrial Revolution coincided closely with the birth of the historical novels of Sir Walter Scott, the faux-archaic prose poems of Ossian, Gothic revivalism in architecture, and, later in the century, Tennyson’s reworkings of Le Morte d’Arthur.
The upheavals of the first half of the twentieth century saw European culture reaching out to several pasts at once, its artists looking to African masks and “primitive art” for inspiration, Pound translating classical Chinese poets, Eliot quoting Upanishads and Dante (and Wagner). The frightening prospect of the future sends people back to their ancestors for guidance, even if their interpretations may be new. The most vigorous movements in contemporary Islam present themselves as returning to a purer, early Islam. Orthodox Christianity and traditional Catholicism present themselves as havens within and against modernity. Contemporary Hinduism, too, is witnessing a renewed interest in its epics, with an eagerness to use modern techniques, including animation and CGI, to present the ancient epics as powerfully as possible.
In Asia, a demographic contraction is occurring in tandem with a geographic one. Like many other ethnic and religious groups, the Hindus of India have dropped well below replacement fertility; their number will contract with every generation, and along with them, the memory of the epics. Meanwhile, a geographic expansion is taking place, too, in the form of the global Indian Hindu diaspora, of which I am a part. A 51-foot state of Prince Rama stands in Mississauga, Ontario; a 90-foot statue of Hanuman, a divine figure from the Ramayana, stands in Sugar Land, Texas, both to the religious dismay of local monotheists (and the purely aesthetic dismay of some Hindus). But these self-assertions by the religious community are deceptive. They are downstream of a surge in immigration, not a surge in religiosity. Sure enough, religious observance declines precipitously within a generation, with up to a fifth of second-generation Hindus no longer identifying as Hindu; the grandchildren of the immigrant, often only part Indian, know little and care less about their ancestral epics. This is also a result of the open-minded nature of American society. Smaller, less assimilated diasporas, like the Indo-Caribbean Hindus of Trinidad, maintained their traditions very exactingly for generations. The West, so far, has not alienated diasporic Hindus—quite the opposite, in fact. Welcomed as friends, colleagues, and spouses, they readily deracinate.
Nor are Hindus likely to increase in number through proselytization. Hindus are notoriously averse to missionary work; many consider it embarrassing at a purely social level, besides being a form of religious aggression alien to the broad-minded, accepting nature of Hinduism; they do not see it, as other religions do, as a service to humankind, a religious obligation, or a form of devotion. Hinduism’s most successful international proselytizing movement, ISKCON or the “Hare Krishna” movement, does foreground the Bhagavad-Gita (the didactic poem embedded in the Mahabharata), but the Krishna of its movement is the youthful, musical, dancing Krishna of his childhood and adolescence, not the worldly-wise philosopher-politician of the epic.
Because the Hindu identity is also a political one in democratic India, the religion comes in for criticism from India’s Left, which follows its (traditional) role as an opponent of traditional religion. Orthodox churches saw far worse attacks during the Bolshevik Revolution, and so did Spanish Catholic nuns and priests during the 1930’s; in India, the attacks usually take the form of demonizing rhetoric and deliberately unflattering academic papers. When it comes to the epics specifically, the ancient texts are mined for examples of wrongthink. Rama’s unfair harangue of Sita toward the end of the Ramayana, or Karna’s maltreatment by the Pandavas for being mistaken as lowborn, serve as a polemicist’s examples of misogyny or casteism in Hindu society. A scene in which Arjuna and Krishna burn densely forested land to build the city of Indraprastha becomes proof of ecocide, the environment damaged to serve patriarchal ambition.
Such “research” mines the epics for evidence of the social evils of Hindu society, and it seeks to represent each epic’s avatar as worthy of disdain instead of reverence. These criticisms have been around for centuries, and both epics contain criticism of the avatars from other characters in the epic. But the criticism, repeated endlessly, does have a cumulative corrosive effect on educated elites, and in the arena of Indian religious politics, they serve a purpose: alienating the people from their heritage. The pro-Hindu “right wing” in India responds to it by stoking hair trigger outrage over any disrespect shown the epics, especially their portrayals in cinema. The wish to police gratuitous irreverence can give way, very easily, to the stifling of creative expression and outright censorship. Any storyteller who works with an epic in any medium knows he or she runs a risk; it is volatile material.
Eventually, the Indian epics might persist in the same way as many other epic poems: as texts to be studied by academics and as names embedded in the cultural milieu. The movie treatments that pack theaters and stir controversy today might wane in their appeal, and the temples dedicated to these epic figures may see diminished attendance and eventual closure. Whether the epics structure the culture or become historical artifacts depends, ultimately, on the collective that chooses to uphold them or let them pass.
For the foreseeable future, though, the epics continue to be reborn, in new media and with new variations. The ancient poems themselves remain the source material, revisited in each generation; creative minds stick closely to the original stories or play variations or inversions, telling the Ramayana’s story from Ravana’s perspective, or casting the Kauravas as the heroes of the Mahabharata. Other writers, myself included, seek out ambiguities and depths in Sanskrit or other languages that popular versions elide. The poems offer infinite opportunities with either approach. That is, ultimately, the true test of longevity for a poem or a myth: whether it remains generative. The living poem inspires new poets to recite it aloud or imitate it; the living myth inspires new storytellers to restage it, retell it, portray it in images or music. By this test, the Indian epics remain the most vibrantly alive of all ancient poems.
Amit Majmudar is Marginalia's George Steiner Editor for Poetry and Criticism, a poet, novelist, essayist, translator, and the former first Poet Laureate of Ohio. He works as a diagnostic and nuclear radiologist and lives in Westerville, Ohio, with his wife and three children. Majmudar’s essays have appeared in The Best American Essays 2018, the New York Times, and the Times of India, among several other publications. His most recent collection of essays, focusing on Indian religious philosophy, history, and mythology, is Black Avatar and Other Essays (Acre Books, 2023). He is most recently the author of The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024) Later Adventures of Hanuman (India Penguin, 2024), The Book of Vows: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 1 (Penguin India , 2023), and The Book of Discoveries: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 2 (Penguin India , 2024). The Book of Killings: The Mahabharata Trilogy Volume 3 is forthcoming from Penguin India. Learn more at www.amitmajmudar.com. X@AmitMajmudar
