Week 1: Orientation

Orientation Activities - Instructor: laura-gibbs@ou.edu


Course Content Overview (and Quiz)

This overview has several pages, so make sure you take a look at each one:


Welcome to the last Orientation Week activity for Indian Epics! You have taken care of all the basic online technology and class procedures, and now I'd like to take the chance to tell you some more about the content of this class.

Unlike other classes that I've taught at OU, where the students are often familiar with a lot of the material already, the content of this class - the Ramayana and the Mahabharata - may be something very new to you. So what I would like to do here is to give you some information to help you get started. The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are both very important to me personally, and I consider it a great opportunity to be able to teach this class. I want to start by telling you how I first happened to learn about these epics. Like many of you, I had never heard of Pandu or Bhima or Draupadi or Karna or ... until one fateful evening in 1992!

How I Found The Mahabharata (or... How It Found Me!)

I was living in Nashville, teaching high school while I was working on getting my high school teaching certificate. So, one evening I just happened to be in the kitchen, washing dishes, and the TV was playing in the background. And I heard the most lovely music - absolutely beautiful, irresistible music. So I left the dishes to soak and went to see what was on TV. From the very first moment, I was absolutely enchanted and had to watch. As it turned out, this was the film adaptation of Peter Brook's stage version of the Mahabharata.

I sat there, enthralled, for several hours, and then I watched the rest of the show the next night (this particular film version is about 6 hours long). What staggered me was that here was this astounding story, a monumental epic, completely unforgettable... but I had never heard of the Mahabharata before! I did not even know what it was exactly! And that was a real shock: I mean, I had a B.A. in Comparative Literature from Berkeley, and a Master's from Oxford, also in Comp. Lit., and I was supposed to know something about epics. In fact, I was supposed to know A LOT about epics (the epic tradition was allegedly one of my specialties). But here was the most amazing epic I had ever seen, and yet I had never heard of it.

Something clearly had gone wrong with my education and needed to be fixed!

So, the next day I went to our local bookstore (yes, this was before there was Google... before Wikipedia.. before Amazon.com... when bookstores were like my second home!). I was determined to find out everything I could about the Mahabharata. What I found in the bookstore was the version by William Buck which we will be reading in this class. I stayed up all night reading it, completely blown away. After reading Buck's version, I was hooked!

In the next months, I spent a lot of time in the library, learning about the Mahabharata, about Indian epics in general, and about Sanskrit. This was the beginning of a great new part of my life, where I started learning not just about Indian epic and religion, but also about Buddhism and Hinduism in India, and also about Islamic culture in India, and then Islamic culture more generally, and how both Indian and Islamic culture entered into Europe during the Middle Ages, and all kinds of beautiful, exciting new things. These were things nobody had ever taught me in school in all my years and years and years of school.

Two years later I found myself back in school, doing a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature, determined, this time, not to be trapped by the narrowness of what passes for a "good" education in classical literature (i.e. a Greco-Roman classical education). I was very lucky to be able to take a course in the Mahabharata and Ramayana from Robert Goldman and to learn Sanskrit from Sally Goldman, two of the best teachers that I ever had in school. The Goldmans are the directors of a Valmiki Ramayana translation project, and they have also written a Sanskrit textbook. In the Sanskrit class, we read selections from both the Ramayana and from the Mahabharata - an experience that was unforgettable for me. I hope very much that in this class I can manage to share with you at least part of the wealth of knowledge that the Goldmans shared with me.

So what is the Mahabharata exactly? And what is the Ramayana?

Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are oral epics that existed in spoken form as chants or songs long before they were written down. This is very important. In ancient India, the oral tradition was prized much more highly than anything in written form. There is a sacred reality contained within the vocal utterance, something that can never be captured in writing. You might be aware of the Sanskrit term "mantra" which expresses this idea of the sacred utterance. A mantra is a special chant or prayer whose words contain what we might call a magical power. You do not gain the power of the mantra by copying it out in writing. You gain the power of the mantra by pronouncing its words, using the power of the voice.

This emphasis on the oral tradition is quite different from what happened in the western epic tradition. In the West, the advent of writing quickly led to the demise and disappearance of the oral tradition of epic song. For example, the Greek epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were composed in oral form by illiterate singers who used a technique called "oral formulaic composition." These epics were composed during the so-called "Dark Ages" of ancient Greek culture, between 1100 and 800 B.C.E., before Greek writing had even been invented. The first singers of the Iliad and the Odyssey did not know how to write.

Yet when Greek writing was invented (and it has even been argued that Greek writing was invented precisely in order to write down the words of the epic songs), the oral tradition was largely destroyed. The ancient Greek and Roman poets were no longer singers; they were writers. So while there were probably many oral versions of the Iliad (and many singers who contributed to the composition of the Iliad), only one version was preserved in writing. The other famous epics of Greece and Rome, such as Vergil's Aeneid, are literary works which exist in a single version written by a single author, published as a book intended to be read, rather than a chant to be recited in oral performance.

In the ancient Indian tradition, writing did not achieve the same kind of supremacy that it did in Greece and in Rome. Even after an alphabet was devised for Sanskrit (the great literary language of ancient India), the texts were transmitted and preserved primarily by means of the oral tradition, not in writing.

When you are dealing with works that circulate in oral form rather than as written texts, it is much harder to assign a date to their composition. As a result, it is very hard to say just when the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were first composed. In fact, it really does not make sense to talk about "the" Ramayana or "the" Mahabharata, since both of the epics exist in many different versions. There are versions in Sanskrit, but there are also versions composed in the other languages of south Asia. For example, when you read Narayan's English adaptation of the Ramayana (the first book we will read in this class), he is working from a version that was composed in the Tamil language (one of the languages of southern India) by the poet Kamban, who lived about one thousand years ago, in the 11th century C.E. When you read Buck's English adaptation of the Ramayana, he is working from the Sanskrit version attributed to Valmiki, which probably dates to around the 3rd century B.C.E., over two thousand years ago.

In addition, you need to understand that the versions of the epics that you will be reading in English by Buck and by Narayan are not translations: they are adaptations. The Indian versions of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are enormously long. The name of the epic Mahabharata gives you a clue that it is very large in size, since the prefix maha- means "great, big" (it is cognate with the Greek prefix mega-, meaning "big"). In fact, the complete Mahabharata is over 100,000 stanzas long in Sanskrit, over eight times as long as the Greek Iliad and Odyssey combined. There does exist a complete English translation of the Sanskrit text into prose:The Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa published in 12 volumes between 1883 and 1896. I have a copy of this English Mahabharata, and it takes up about half a bookshelf. Thanks to Sacred Texts Archive, this translation is also available online, so you can take a look there if you are curious to see what it is like.

In any case, I am sure you are glad to know that we are not reading the 12-volume version of the Mahabharata! :-)

What we are reading are two different English adaptations: one by the American author William Buck, and another by the Indian writer R.K. Narayan. We will also read two versions of the Ramayana, one by Buck, and one by Narayan.

I hope that you will enjoy reading the epics in two different versions like this. I think that the versions by Narayan and by Buck complement each other very nicely. Narayan provides a lively summary, much shorter than what you will find in Buck. The idea is that by reading Narayan first, you can become familiar with the most important characters and the basic outlines of the plot. Then, when you read the longer, more detailed version by Buck, you will already know the main characters, so hopefully you will not be too confused by the digressions and inserted stories that Buck includes. After you have read the the epics twice, you will be really and truly familiar with the stories.

Very few Americans are familiar with these stories, but throughout India and south Asia, these stories are more than just familiar: they are part of living cultural and religious traditions. Characters like Rama, Hanuman, and Krishna are the objects of intense devotion. This makes them entirely different from characters like the Greek gods or heroes, who are not a living part of our culture in this way at all. Zeus, Hera, Achilles and the rest are part of an elaborate intellectual tradition, but they are not sustained by any real popular beliefs or devotional practices.

Here's an example of what I mean. One of my favorite places in San Francisco was the Asian Art Museum, where they had a beautiful statue of Ganeśa, the elephant-headed god, that I liked to go see. Several times when I went to visit Ganeśa, I would find a precisely arranged row of Hershey's kisses placed in front of the statue, laid out very carefully according to the color of the foil wrappers. People were leaving them as an offering for the god! (Ganeśa is very fond of candy, and he is often depicted as carrying a bowl of candy in one of his hands.) So while Ganeśa is a character that you will meet in the books that you read this semester, he is also a living object of devotion for millions of Hindu people around the world.

This is especially true of Rama, the protagonist of the Ramayana. Rama is a human incarnation of the god Vishnu, the protector and preserver of the universe. You will meet another famous incarnation of Vishnu in the Mahabharata: Krishna. Yes, this is the same Krishna of the "Hare Krishnas." Both Rama and Krishna are incarnations, or avatars, of Vishnu, and they are both called upon in the Hare Krishna mantra, where the word Hare is a call to the god Vishnu:

Hare Krishna Hare Krishna
Krishna Krishna Hare Hare
Hare Rama Hare Rama
Rama Rama Hare Hare

So while this is not a course on Hinduism, I hope you will keep in mind that many of the characters and stories that you will read about in the epics are not just artistic creations or literary fictions. They are sacred divinities who are worshipped in many places around the world today just as they have been for thousands of years.


Modern Languages MLLL-4993. Indian Epics. Laura Gibbs, Ph.D. The textual material made available at this website is licensed under a Creative Commons License. You must give the original author credit. You may not use this work for commercial purposes. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one. No claims are made regarding the status of images used at this website; if you own the copyright privileges to any of these images and believe your copyright privileges have been violated, please contact the webmaster. Page last updated: October 16, 2007 12:22 PM