Rama - The story of a history
Sans Bala Kanda?
All the arguments for and against the Bala and Uttara Kandas remaining as they are, what we are going to see – and have been seeing – is the story as a whole. For, if there was no Bala Kanda and the story started from Ayodhya Kanda, we would then be reading something that begins abruptly, with the information, “The sinless Satrughna, the destroyer of the lasting enemies (concupiscence etc.) was taken away on that occasion by Bharata while the latter was proceeding to his maternal uncle’s home, full of affection as he (Satrughna) was for (Bharata).” (Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhya Kanda, Canto 1, Sloka 1)
That sounds something like one of those modern novels where authors prefer to begin their stories abruptly from somewhere in the middle of the events and go back and forth to give details on the events and characters. With such a beginning, how is the reader supposed to know who is this ‘sinless Satrughna’, what was the occasion on which his brother (at this first Sloka, we are clueless about what is the relationship between Bharata and Satrughna even) took him along, when going to his maternal uncles home etc. What we come to know is that there was a person by name Satrughna, who was sinless and he went to some other country when someone called Bharata went to his uncle’s place.
And then the first canto goes on to speak about Dasaratha, who – in the absence of the details of Bala Kanda – is another stranger to us at this stage and his decision to enthrone his eldest son Rama, though he considered his four sons as ‘his four arms sprung from one’s own person.’ Slowly we come to know that this king Dasaratha had three queens and that Rama was born to the queen by name
Kausalya.
Even going by techniques of story telling, one would not be able to buy the argument that in the initial stages the entire Bala Kanda was totally absent. We know that the most familiar way of beginning a story is that oft-repeated and well-worn phrase, ‘Long long ago there lived a king by name…”
For a very long time this was how the stories began. They did not start abruptly. Beginning a story as close to the climax as possible is a technique that is known to the Western world. Sri VVS Aiyar says that it was Aristotle who first formulated the rule for not starting the story from its beginning, a technique known as ‘in medias res.’ “The reader will have noticed that the Ramayana follows in its natural order the life of the hero from his birth and childhood,” says Sri VVS Aiyar, “up to the close of the action which forms the theme. On the other hand the epics of Europe as is well-known, follow their prototype and example, the Iliad, and start the story as near the end as possible, filling in the earlier events by slight allusion as well as by episodic narrative.’
That’s how every single one of our ancient classics has been narrated. They start from the beginning and move smoothly event by event to the end, in a chronological sequence. You take any classic for that matter. It follows the same pattern. Normally it contains a short recital at the beginning, giving out an outline of the story and then move to the main story, once again beginning at the beginning. First event first. This can be seen even in Cilappadhikaram which gives a short recital as well as the sequence of the titles of the cantos. This was something like an index page for them, who were using the palmyra leaves for their medium, which were never page-numbered. Such a habit seems to be non-existent in most of the classics and Dr U V Swaminatha Aiyar draws our attention to this fact when he suspected a few leaves must be missing in a long list of names of flowers in
kurinjip pAttu and how, left without a clue, he had to travel far and wide for another copy of the work, just because of the practice of indexing and page-numbering was absent.
This habit of short-recital at the beginning was very much in vogue, at least until the time of Cilappadhikaram. We see that this is absent in Kamban and his contemporaneous works like Periya Puranam. At least as far as Periya Puranam is concerned, we have the song,
‘thillai vAz andhaNar tham adiyaarkkum adiyEn,’ to fall back to, to lean on for a reference, at least to look for the number and sequence in which the
‘thiruth thoNdars’ have been listed.
Coming back to the Ramayana of Valmiki, where does the short-recital of Ramayana appear? Where are the details of (though minimum they are) Dasaratha are given? Where do we learn anything about the main hero and his heroine? How do we come to know that so-and-so is married to so-and-so? And – though not very important to the main story and the movement of events – how did the hero marry his heroine? Bala Kanda. Sans Bala Kanda, the story would not mean much to us and reading it would be a task, trying to understand the relationships, which would be extremely complex. Something like that in the Mahabharata, where one has to make a chart and keep a track of the names – different names for the same person and different persons with the same name – and the events as well, because of the various directions to which the story branches off, with its hundreds of sub-plots and stories within story.
Therefore, it is not possible for the story to have been written without the Bala Kanda. At least some portions of it would doubtless have been there, which later were re-classified and regrouped to form what is now known by the name Bala Kanda. And it may be true, to an extent, that the Uttara Kanda came to be added – or at least expanded – by and by. Nonetheless, both these Kandas are important for us, for our study. That’s how we have been dealing with it so far, and that’s how we are going to continue the study of Rama, now.
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