The pleasures of the Mappila Ramayana

The Living Stream

Shurpanakha dressed up elaborately before meeting Lama to express her desire to marry him. Through a stroke of misfortune, her husband, the Sultan of the great Patalam, had died. She wanted to marry again. Her brother, Lavana, said she could do so if she found someone.

Shurpanakha was fifty-six years old but could appear less than forty if she tried. She blackened each hair on her greying head with charcoal and honey. She then asked her neighbour, Pattumma, to braid her hair and paid her for it. Daubing loads of make-up, she covered up the deep, well-like sunken parts around her eyes. She then plucked out the long strand of hair on her chin and struck her gums to set right the irregular teeth. She took out the snot inside her nose with a palm-leaf and chewed palm-sugar mixed with a reddening agent to bring a gloss to her lips. Before putting on ivory ear-pendants, she scrubbed her ears clean. She wore the gold jewellery from her grandmother’s jewel-box. She glittered in the waist chain, the ten sets of bracelets, a pair of armlets, and a heavy, swinging neck-pendant. Looking beautiful, she wore around her a blue wrap and a lengthy floral cloth that fluttered as she walked.

Desire overcame Shurpanakha at the sight of Lama. A hide wrapped around him, he was spreading grass and scattering flowers. With an imploring look, she asked who he was. Was the woman with him his wife? Did he have any children or nephews? He replied that he was Lama and Sita, his wife, and that she hadn’t given birth, and Lakshmana, his brother, was with them and that Kosala, his father’s kingdom, was riddled with intrigues, which was why they were in the forest. Who are you? he asked. Saying she was the sister of Lavana, king of Lanka, she asked him to go with her to Lanka.

Lama declined. ‘There is a woman for a man, and a man for a woman. This is the law in the Shari’at. If the bathing oil suits you, why should you change it for another one? Lioness of Lanka, it is better that you leave.’

She didn’t give up. ‘A man can marry four or five women, but a woman can marry only one. This is the law in the Shari’at! My gold! My pearl! My bower-tree in Hades! All three of my brothers will stand by us. We will have a seven-storied mansion for ourselves. Do not worry about marriage preparations.’

Lama stayed firm. ‘Why should we marry another woman after marrying one? My brother, who you see springing around like a parrot, wishes to get married. If he sees your nose, your ears, your thighs, will he be able to resist you?’

Entreating Sita to accept him, King Lavana described the royal ceremony with elephants, fireworks, drummers, and a thousand women that awaited them. And beautiful garments and jewels, he said, had already been made for her. He even lied that Lama had married another woman two months earlier and sailed away in a ship. ‘By Allah, who brings the monsoon rains! Don’t your spirits rise when you hear all this, my little golden parrot?’

King Lavana was getting his ten beards shaved when Anuman arrived in Lanka in search of Sita.

Lama and Lavana are of course Rama and Ravana and ‘H’ is dropped at the start in Anuman, all of which are in keeping with the phonetic features of the Mappila dialect of the Malabar region of Kerala. Rich Freeman, the ethnographer and literary historian, whose English translation I have relied on for my narration above, notes that the Mappila Ramayana was possibly composed by an eccentric, itinerant singer, Piranthan (‘crazy’) Hassankutty. The 700 lines that the reputed folklorist T H Kunhiraman Nambiar remembered from a performance of his that he had seen and heard 85 years ago when he was a fifteen-year-old boy, and which were later recorded from him by Malayalam scholar M N Karassery, in the 1960s, are all that remains of the Mappila Ramayana.

Intended to humour audiences, the Mappila version, which is composed as a folk ballad genre, renders the great Indian epic within the social-theological world of Mappila Muslims and joins retelling efforts found elsewhere in India and abroad in enriching the life of the epic. In the Valmiki original, for instance, Shurpanakha, who has the power to assume any guise, inexplicably shows herself to Rama in hideous form. But, as we saw, she does otherwise in the Mappila Ramayana.