Many Ramayanas: Ancient and Modern

Catalog description

India’s Ramayana is a rip-roaring adventure story, with kings, queens, heroes, villains, lovers, monsters, magic, and miracles. Over thousands of years across South Asia, it has also been the master narrative defining issues of critical ideological importance: power, gender, race, caste, divinity, dharma. In this course we will study the canonical Sanskrit text in translation and sample some of the epic’s tellings in vernacular media, including comic books, live performance, and television. The emphasis, however, will be on cinema, with a lineup of films featuring several spectacular recent Bollywood productions. How does this story, popular for more than two thousand years, speak to the politics of the present?