How do re-tellings offer shifts of perspective? Illustrate.

 What Forms Do Retellings Take? The relation between forms of “telling” and forms of “retelling” is not a one-way traffic. A lot of written texts are retellings of narratives that originally existed only in the oral form. However, written narratives can also flow back into oral forms, Earlier grandmothers might have told us stories that they had only heard, present parents “tell” children stories that they have read, often with changes to suit the particular child’s interests and environment.  Harikatha is the most interesting and complex example of written literature retold in the oral mode, practised primarily 10 South India.

These harikathas are oral discourses on Ramayana, Mahabharata or the puranas. They are reenactments or tellings of them often containing fresh interpretations. Re-telling may be of the entire epic in serial episodes (daily over a month or so) or may be single discourses on particular episodes (such as Sita’s marriage). A combination of speech, music or dance, these discourses draw from – and re-interpret. various other retellings and forms of culture. For example, a harikatha on the slaying of Vali in the Tamil Ramayana of Kampan, basically delivered in Tamil, always made with recitations from the Tamil bhakt poets, will turn multilingual, with excerpts from Valmiki (Sanskrit), Tulsidas (Hindi), the songs of Saint Tyagaraja (Telugu), Purandarasa (Kannada), Mira or Surdas (Hindi) or Namdev (Marathi) or quotations from Mahatma Gandhi or Jawaharlal Nehru (inglish) Look for example, at the forms or modes that it combines.

Numerous literary classics have been retold in various genres. Perhaps the earliest example was Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare (published in 1807). Hamlet Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, a play by Tom Stoppard, 1966, later as a film with the same title, 1990, Gertrude and Claudius, a novel by John Updike, 2000), The Tempest (a play with the same title, by Aime Cesaire, 1969), King Lear (Lear, a play by Edward Bond, 1971) have been retold.

Many of the theatrical productions of plays by Shakespeare and others are retellings because of the new interpretations they provide and of the changes they make in plot or characterization. In the retelling, the very settings, costumes and appearance of the characters either may recapture the original impact of the works or give a new interpretation. These retellings can also be compared. For example, the retellings of the Mahabharata can be compared.

Retellings of the Indian Epics :

Ramayana and Mahabharata are never regarded as mere literary creations or artefacts but monuments of social, cultural, religious, moral and even political significance. A great deal of research has been undertaken in the past century to trace the origins of Mahabharata and Ramayana.

Valmiki Ramayana: Telling or Retelling?

Valmiki is regarded the Adikaviand and Valmiki Ramayana is the Adikavya. It is shown that Valmiki did not create the Rama story. Scholars have the view that the Jataka Tales, which were in circulation between the 5th and 1st centuries B.C., might have been the source for Valmiki Ramayana, which is believed to have been composed during the 4th or 3rd century B.C. There had been numerous Rama tales much earlier and these tales were used by the various authors of the Jataka Tales as well as by Valmiki.

Besides, there appears to have been an Adiramayana consisting of five Kandas, i.e. without the Bala and Uttara Kandas before Valmiki and it might have been the source for him. These views are the findings of researchers over a period. Valmiki Ramayana generally considered as the original tale was itself a retelling. Scholars also beleived that Valmiki Ramayana, though believed to have been composed before the Christian era, settled into something like its present “authentic” form around the 2nd or 3rd c. A.D. but that interpolations, additions, substories, descriptions and philosophical and moralizing passages continued to be added to it till about the 10th c. A.D.. Besides, even the Sanskrit text exists in two major recensions (revised editions or texts), the Northern and the Southern, based on differences in content and style.

Retellings of Ramayana :

The Ramayana and Mahabharata stories are already there in our memory or consciousness. In his well-known essay, “Three Hundred Ramayanas”, A.K. Ramanujan points out that the Rama story is found in at least twenty two different languages with some of these languages hosting more than one telling. “If we add plays, dance-dramas and other performances, in b the classical and folk traditions” and forms of spatial arts like paintings and sculpture, the total number may easily be hundred

In a compendious research work carried out in Tamil entitled Rama Kathaiyum Ramayanankalum (Ramayanas) A. Manavalan has listed forty eight major Ramayana books brought out in twenty two different languages (including Tibetan, old Javanese, Japanese, Malay, Burmese, Filipino Thai and Laotian). If translations and retellings in English are added to the lists, the number will grow much larger. A Kannada poet called Kumaravyasa chose to write a Mahabharata because he heard the cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Ramayana poet

Translations as Retellings 

In translation, many changes, additions, omissions may happen. “Translation itself may not be the right term to describe all these Ramayanas in various Indian languages. Scholars have pointed out that while there is a long tradition of retellings in India. The nearest Hindi terms for translation are, anuvad strictly means “speaking after” or “following” and rupantar literally denotes “change in form”. In Tamil, mozhipeyarppu mozhimatram (“change of language”) and mozhiyakkam (“creating in another language” or “transcreation”) imply “translation”.

Two kinds of translation are: First, present-day translations into English provide extremely faithful translations, making no departures, changing nothing, but adding linguistic or cultural notes wherever necessary for ease of understanding or in cases of difficulty of interpretation. Second, the one represented by most of the retellings in the various Indian languages, e.g. Kamparamayanam in Tamil (10th c. A.D.) or Ramcharitmanas in Hindi (16th c. A.D.)

Sujit Mukherjee calls these acquisitions in these languages and says that they “Can only loosely be described as translation because, while the basic story remained, some of it was left out and a lot of new writing done to fill it out again”. Mukherjee calls these “Translation as new writing”.

What Happens in Retellings? 

There may be changes in the genre from the original” or from earlier (re) tellings. In this cotext, two points worth emphasizing are: First, the genre of the retelling is generally determined by literary traditions and contemporary literary fashions. Valmiki Ramayana and Mahabharata were themselves composed in verse and it is not surprising therefore, for example, that most early translations/retellings of those epics were in verse form as verse was the major vehicle for literary creations.

The “foreign” versions like the Japanese, Tibetan and Burmese are in prose. Champu Ramayanam in Sanskrit, believed to have been composed in the 11th c. A.D. and Bhaskara Ramayanam in Telugu, created in the 13th c., used a combination of prose and verse. One Tamil Ramayana, composed in the 16th-17th centuries, is named Takkai Ramayanam because it was created to be sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument called “takkai”.

To make the myths and epics accessible to a wider public, we find retellings came to be written in the genres of drama, the novel and the short story. Sanskrit drama had existed from about the advent of the Christian era and the plays of Bhasa, “discovered” only in early 20th c., might have been written as early as the 1st c. B.C. Many of his plays retell episodes from Mahabharata. Many of the perspective retellings, i.e. retellings from the point of view of particular characters from the epics, like Draupadi or Bhima, are in the novel form.

The short story helps to focus on particular episodes and often provides reinterpretations of them.  There may be changes in the content, Most tellers have made such chnages without any explanation or apology, some justify them. The introductory remarks of Madhava Kandali, author of the Assamese Ramayana, is quite thought-provoki He says: Poets compose their verse following the literary and cultural conventions of their times.

Therefore, some of the statements may be true and some may have been imaginatively invented. This was not a tale told by God; it was a tale in popular vogue. Therefore, you shouldn’t fault me in my poetic endeavour in which I leave out some and add some. The omission of the entire Uttara Kandam in many tellings of Ramayana (including Kampa, Adhyatma, Molla and Bhaskara Ramayanas) is an example.

The Yuddha Kandam ends with the coronation of Rama after his re-union with Sita and return to Ayodhya and the Uttara Kandam tells the story of Sita’s banishment and her final absorption into the earth.  Why such a major departure was considered necessary by these poets:

One explanation is that according to literary convention, no work was to have a tragic ending; there are no tragedies in Sanskrit drama. The other explanation is in the way the characters are conceived. Valmiki visualized Rama as an ideal man, of heroic proportions of course, but still as a human being.

In many of the retellings on the other hand including Kampan) he is presented as an avatar. The moral and emotional dilemmas that the banishment of Sita would present to Rama would not have been consistent with his projection as an incarnation.

The retellings also shift the focus on some characters who play a secondary or marginal role in earlier tellings.  There may be additional descriptions, changes in the landscape, the flora and fauna of the setting in which the action takes place. In retelling, the nucleus of a myth or an epic episode or character is taken and an entirely modern narrative is created.

For example, in Shaw’s play Pygmalion, the Greek sculptor who falls in love with the statue that he sculpts, tells the story of an English professor of phonetics and his relationship with the flower-girl whom he transforms into a lady. A popular Tamil film describes the attempt of a man to possess his brother’s wife: the title is Vali. Another film presents the tale of an abandoned child who grows up into a hero and becomes the lieutenant of a mafia chief: the hero is called Surya.

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