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300 Ramayanas, one of the seminal essays in Indian literary theory, deconstructs the various versions of the Ramayana story
as it exists across South and South East Asia. A.K. Ramanujan, the Padma Shree winning scholar, prefers to call them
"tellings", as the word 'version' seems to suggest that there is an original master narrative and all other forms of the story have
deviated from it. It recounts the different ways in which the Ramayana story survives today amidst different cultures and draws
connections between various tellings.
There are more than 25 different tellings of the Ramayana in Sanskrit alone. Many later versions of the Ramayana take
inspiration and draw from previous versions. Ramanujan narrates one of his favourite passages from the sixteenth
century Adhyatma Ramayana — "When Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with
him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile and so on.
When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, 'Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you
know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?'".
Ramanujan's essay also discusses Jain tellings of the Ramayana. Here Ravana is a tragic figure and his virtues are extolled.
In some Jain tellings, the story has shades of what psychoanalysts refer to as the Elektra-complex, where Sita is his daughter,
though Ravana is not aware of this. Jain Ramayanas are full of Jain homilies and legends, and presents Rama as an evolved
Jain man who does not even kill Ravana. On the other hand, the Thai Ramakien regards Rama as a human figure. Hanuman
is portrayed as quite a ladies man, and Thai audiences are more fond of him than Rama. Also, though Valmiki's telling
focuses on Rama, other tellings focus on different characters. In some later extensions like the Adbhuta Ramayana and the
Tamil story of Satakantharavana it is Sita who goes to war and slays Ravana. In Santhal oral tellings, Sita is even portrayed
as an unfaithful wife and is seduced by both Ravana and Lakhshmana.
1.1 Key Terms and Ideas
Iconic

1. "Where Text 1 and Text 2 have a geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to another
(whatever the angles, sizes, or colors of the lines), we call such a relation iconic" (156). In this sense, an iconic relationship is
established between the two texts if the second text retains a structural similarity such as order of episodes and approximate
similarity in the plot curve.
2. "In the West, we generally expect translations to be 'faithful', i.e., iconic" (156). As an example, take Text 1
to be a poetic work in the Greek language. Text 2 is a translation of that into the English language. Here iconic can be
understood as not only the preservation of the structure of the Greek poetic work but also the reproduction of the meter of the
poem as well as an exact copy of the number of lines.

Indexical "The text is embedded in a locale, a context, refers to it, even signifies it, and would not make sense without it"
(157). An indexical text is one wherein the basic structures such as plot and characters stand in iconic relation to a second
text, but the former text has varied in terms of indigenous customs, folklore, language, traditions, philosophies etc. This is a
case where two texts bear an iconic relationship, but also have an indexical relation superimposed on the former.

Symbolic "Text 2 uses the plot and characters and names of Text 1 minimally and uses them to say entirely new things,
often in an effort to subvert the predecessor by producing a counter-text" (157). Here, the two texts approach similarity only in
their minimal utility of plot and characters, but differ in all other respects like settings and sequence of events. In this case, two
texts may sit in stark contrast to one another in their conveyed meaning and message.
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Tellings vs Variations "I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms
can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original Ur-text" (134)
Prof. Ramanujan is clear in his linguistic intent. He seeks to talk about each story as an individual telling, rather than one
telling as being superior than another. The distinction is crucial to the crux of the entire article. A telling is an untamed
expression of the human capacity or potential, which does not take into account or seriously consider the relative closeness or
departure from another telling. The spirit of this idea is found in Prof. Ramanujan's discussion of how Valimiki was inspired to
write the Rāmāyaṇa. He writes: "This incident becomes, in later poetics, the parable of all poetic utterance: out of the stress of
natural feeling (bhava), an artistic form has to be found or fashioned, a form which will generalize and capture the essence
(rasa) of that feeling. This incident at the beginning of Valimiki gives the work an aesthetic self-awareness" (151).
In short, a telling is a direct channeling of the eternal and it carries a kind of force to serve in the quest for rendering man free.
A variation or version lacks the courage and bravery in finding its own path to the pathless truth. It is bogged down by self-
criticism, evaluation, comparison, and etc. A variation is a convoluted, confused attempt of the former.

1.2 Ideas of Essay

Thesis and Objective of the article
"...no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling - and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in the text."
Prof. Ramanujan's main objective in the article is purely a literary one in terms of observing texts as they are in themselves.
The essay, concerned with what is only, illustrates how "all translations, even the so-called iconic ones, inevitably have all
three kinds of elements", which are iconic, symbolic, and indexical. Through the five examples he presents of various tellings
of Rāmāyaṇa, he illustrates the difference in the proportion of each of these elements present in the tellings. Through this
process of each telling retaining a different proportion of these three elements, no telling remains original, nor does any telling
become a retelling. Having done this, Prof. Ramanujan wants to state that "we read [different tellings] for different reasons and
with different aesthetic expectations".
Discussion regarding the five different tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa
Prof. Ramanujan draws upon expansive sources across South and Southeast Asia to demonstrate the proliferation of
Rāmāyaṇas across space-time. The essay gives a brief glimpse of the expansive depth and magnitude of the Rāmāyaṇa's
history, retreating to only five tellings in order to concisely convey the main themes present in the various tellings of
the Rāmāyaṇa.
The essay opens with a lengthy story of about the Rāmāyaṇa, detailing Rāma's many reincarnations with the following: "This
story is usually told to suggest that for every such Rāma there is a Rāmāyaṇa. The number of Rāmāyaṇas and the range of
their influence in South and Southeast Asia over the past twenty-five hundred years or more are astonishing. Just a list of
languages in which the Rāma story is found makes one gasp: Annamese, Balinese, Bengali, Cambodian, Chinese, Gujrati,
Javanese, Kannada, Kashmiri, Khotanese, Laotian, Malayasian, Marathi, Oriya, Prakrit, Sanskrit, Santali, Sinhalese, Tamil,
Telugu, Thai, Tibetan--to say nothing of Western languages." (133)
However, Prof. Ramanujan adds that "Sanskrit alone contains some twenty-five or more tellings belonging to various narrative
genres (epics, kāvyas or ornate poetic compositions, purāṇas or mythological stories, and so forth). If we add plays, dance-
dramas, and other performances, in both the classical and folk traditions, the number of Rāmāyaṇas grows even larger. To
these must be added sculpture and bas-reliefs, mask plays, puppet plays, and shadow plays, in all the many South and
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Southeast Asian cultures." (133-134).

The five main tellings Prof. Ramanujan gives as examples are: (1) Vālmīki and (2) Kampan tellings through a comparison of
the Ahalyā episode, (3) the Thai Ramakien, (4) Jain tellings, and (5) South Indian folk tellings.
Comparison of the Valmiki and Kampan tellings
Drawing a comparison between Vālmīki's and Kampan's Rāmāyaṇas, Prof. Ramanujan de-privileges the
canonical Rāmāyaṇa and synthesizes both the histories and historiagraphies of all the Rāmāyaṇas which make up the body
of "Rāmāyaṇa" as a genre itself.
"Kampan, here and elsewhere, not only makes full use of his predecessor Vālmīki's materials but folds in many regional folk
traditions. It is often through him that they then become part of other Rāmāyaṇas." (141) Kampan is seen as a nexus point for
various transmissions of the Rāmāyaṇa. In this telling, we also see the role of symbolic and iconic elements playing out in
translation. With regard to iconicity, Prof. Ramanujan comments:
"[Kampan] is largely faithful in keeping to the order and sequence of episodes, the structural relations between the characters
of father, son, brothers, wives, friends, and enemies. But the iconicity is limited to such structural relations."
Southeast Asian Tellings
The Tamil Rāmāyaṇa of Kampan "generates its own offspring, its own special sphere of influence" and becomes "an
important link in the transmission of the Rāma story to Southeast Asia" (143).
The effects of Kampan's composition and transmission are best exemplified by the Thai Ramakien, an important
representative of the Southeast Asian tellings. "It has been convincingly shown that the eighteenth-century
Thai Ramakien owes much to the Tamil epic. For instance, the names of many characters of the Thai work are not Sanskrit
names, but clearly Tamil names (for example, Ṛśyaśṛṅga in Sanskrit but Kalaikkōtu in Tamil, the latter borrowed in Thai)."
(143) Prof. Ramanujan shows us how the Vālmīki telling does not play a central role in its for the transmission of
the Ramakien, so that the lineage of the Ramakien and its successors is that of Kampan's rather than of Vālmīki's telling.
The Ramakien becomes a telling, rather than a variant, because the Ramakien, being located in Thai history and culture,
focuses greatly on the facets of the Rāma story concerned with war. In the Valmiki and Kampan tellings, war only comprises a
small section of the entire epic. The text then becomes a largely symbolic translation. The author makes this case for both the
Thai and Jain tellings, when he states:
"Vālmīki's Hindu and Vimalasuri's Jain texts in India - or the Thai Ramakirti in Southeast Asia - are symbolic translations of
each other" because of the extent to which each of the Rāma stories becomes "almost a second language of the whole
culture area, a shared core of names, characters, incidents, and motifs" (157). One narrative uses this core to make certain
statements while another uses them to make totally different statements.
1.3 Summary
Conclusive remarks on the summary/key points
By illustrating the various ways that each of the 5 tellings expresses the three elements of indexical, symbolic, and iconic
translation, Prof. Ramanujan asserts with strong evidence that each telling is neither original nor a retelling of another. Using
his literary analysis, Prof. Ramanujan is able to argue that the Rāmāyaṇa "is not merely a set of individual texts, but a genre
with a variety of instances" (157).
It is then fitting to conclude with the following remark by Prof. Ramanujan in his article:
"To some extent all later Rāmāyaṇas play on the knowledge of previous tellings: they are meta-Rāmāyaṇas. I cannot resist
repeating my favorite example. In several of the later Rāmāyaṇas (such as the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, sixteenth century),
when Rāma is exiled, he does not want Sītā to go with him into the forest. Sītā argues with him. At first she uses the usual
arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile and so on. When he still resists the idea,
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she is furious. She bursts out, 'Countless Rāmāyaṇas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sītā
doesn't go with Rāma to the forest?' That clinches the argument, ans she goes with him (Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa 2.4.77-78; see
Nath 1913, 39). And as nothing in India occurs uniquely, even this motif appears in more than one Rāmāyaṇa" (143).

Introduction
The purpose of directly addressing what the article does and does not say is twofold. On the one hand, this will act as a
corrective to many accusations made against the article in the highly emotionally charged atmosphere surrounding the court
case and the article's subsequent removal from the Department of History syllabus at Delhi University. In the weeks and
months following these events, the accusations were passed along by word of mouth and on the internet while access to the
article itself was extremely limited, not least of all by OUP's decision to let the various books in which it appears go out of print.
Thus, many readers' only access to Prof. Ramanujan's article were short excerpts in news coverage of the controversy, which
made frequent reference to aspects in which alternate tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa differed from that of Valmiki, particularly
versions in which Sita was Ravana's daughter. Unfortunately, the references in these news articles extracted such aspects
entirely divorced from their wider context in Prof. Ramanujan's article and often neglected to adequately explain the nuanced
way Prof. Ramanujan puts these alternate tellings to use in illustrating one approach to the critical analysis of texts. In many
ways, this indirectly led to the sensationalization of the article under conditions in which the article could not speak for itself. It
is hoped that the present section will more fully lay out for those who have not read the article an accurate picture of its
contents and the larger structure into which they are arranged. Secondly, by examining what the article does and does not
say, we will be able to more fully appreciate Prof. Ramanujan's contribution to critical reading and analysis of texts in historical
studies of their development and their cultural provenance, but also their enduring power as narratives.
2.2 What the Essay Does

 The essay elegantly weaves the five tellings into a defense for assertions later. All the while, it does posit
that the Valmiki telling has had additions, revisions, and possibly deletions already from its inception and it does offer a kind of
compounding theory of the Rāmāyaṇawith every other version being a meta-Rāmāyaṇa, building up a different telling from
previous knowledge of another telling;
 The essay seeks to introduce a way of doing history and seeks to convey an instance of use of a literary
analysis method that looks at ancient texts;
 The essay does state that almost any work contains the three elements of transplantation,
translation, transliteration, namely, those of indexical, iconic and symbolic translation.

2.3 What the Essay Does Not Do

While this assertion may seem straightforward enough, an examination of some of the accusations made against the article by
members of right-wing Hindu groups will reveal how important it is to give a detailed defense of the fact that nowhere
in "Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas" does Prof. Ramanujan make any pronouncement for or against Hindu religious practice and
religious expression, and, as such, in no way sets out to insult Hindus in presenting cases of variant tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa.
One accusation made by Delhi state secretary of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) Rohit Chahal, as reported
in Daily News and Analysis, is that Prof. Ramanujan chose the examples given as evidence in his article with the specific
mindset of injuring Hindu religious sensibilities: "There are 300 versions of the Rāmāyaṇa, but Prof. Ramanujan chooses to
quote five examples that are bound to hurt our sentiments. They want students to learn about those five." [1] While Chahal
does not point out which five examples he's referring to (Prof. Ramanujan makes direct reference to at least 10 different
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tellings), we might take the example of the two versions of the Ahalya story, one in in Valmiki's Sanskrit version, one in
Kampan's Tamil version. While both versions contain elements which could be considered bawdy, both versions are well
attested in Hindu tradition; the story of Indra disguising himself as the sage Gautama to sleep with Gautama's wife Ahalya is
widely known. Furthermore, Prof. Ramanujan does not make much of the bawdy elements or highlight them; if anything, he
only mentions them in passing. The main purpose of juxtaposing the two versions is to show how South Indian motifs are
worked into the frame story and how elements of the frame story are carefully rearranged, giving it a different flavor and subtly
changing the ways in which the characters relate to each other, thus making the story uniquely South Indian. Therefore, to
fixate on aspects that are bawdy (aspects that, it must be said, have long been part of Hindu tradition) would be to
misconstrue Prof. Ramanujan's objectives in the article and miss the point completely.
A further accusation made by an anonymous senior BJP leader to Tehelka finds the mention of any alternate version of
the Rāmāyaṇa which differs from Valmiki's to be offensive: "Our party and its ideology over the past 25 years have been built
on the values imbibed in the original (Valmiki)Rāmāyaṇa, which has the most number of followers than of any other version. It
is hurtful to devout Hindus if the story is said in any other way...No matter what the essay says, it is wrong to question the
authenticity of Valmiki’s Rāmāyaṇa. We should focus our history (learnings) on the deep values imbibed in it." [2] It is not that
Prof. Ramanujan chooses only seemingly offensive examples, as in Chahal's complaint. Here, it is the very mention
ofany other version even existing, let alone 5, 10, or 300. Prof. Ramanujan does not question the "authenticity" of
Valmiki's Rāmāyaṇa, whatever authenticity may mean here. In fact, he recognizes that Valmiki's version is the most
prestigious of all tellings -- that point is nowhere controverted and stands as a fact in the article. Prof. Ramanujan likewise
recognizes that there are "minor" and "major" tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa story. No one would argue that, say, a minor Tibetan
version of the Rāmāyaṇa story has had as much of an historical impact as Valmiki's. What he does do, however, is to give
each telling an equal voice and equal time in his article for the sake of analyzing them in relation to each other. To do
otherwise would obscure important historical conclusions which can be drawn with respect to how the Rāmāyaṇa story has
traveled and has been adapted by different communities and different cultures. If offense is taken to this, then what else is
offensive but the very practice of historical analysis itself? How are we to gain knowledge, wisdom and awareness if we are
barred from inquiring into the past because some of it may just happen to be offensive to some?
Moreover;
The essay does not seek to be a chief representative for the five stories featured, i.e. does not take itself seriously with them,
but simply relegates them as instances to support Prof. Ramanujan's thesis. In addition, it does not elevate the Rāmāyaṇa by
Valmiki to a paramount position, nor does it seek to offend any tellings of the story since they are simply presented as tellings
and not critiques;
The essay does not give paramount credence to the story's religious roots, but treats it simply as a historical fact equal to all
the other facts like poetic tradition, customs, culture, etc and uses it purely for contextual reasons to affirm or deny arguments
Prof. Ramanujan makes.
Questions

 What do we truly mean when we say a work is original? Conversely what constitutes a derivative? Is it that
the original has a competitive edge, is more durable through time, has some otherworldly elements?
Do you rely on other people to deem your work original, or do you yourself announce that it is original?
 At what point in time does a work cease to be original? Since someone else first hears it, or since it is first
put into words, or since the moment of experiencing that which caused the work (i.e. since it came to your mind)?
What is the boundary between the violated sovereignty of an original and that of an original with its sovereignty intact?
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 If something is truly original, does that mean it is utterly private? Conversely, if something is not original
does that stipulate you to spread it the more?
 Doesn't any single creation imply knowing the whole causal story to deem it with absolute certainty that it is
original?
 What connotes ownership of anything that comes from the human mind? Who or what is the true owner of
the contents in one's mind?
 Don't all the works of man, be it the building, or the plow, or the scripture, come from thought? Why do we
choose to worship rather than observe without attachment that which comes from the result of thought?
 How are we to glimpse into the feeling and emotion of a time period and region if we do not peruse the
textual remnants that we have?

 When our ancestors began speaking and began inventing words for objects, did word inventors back then
declare an invented word their own barring its use by others?
If all the stories we devise had some collective origination of a population of words in some distant past, doesn't that make all
works derivative?
 What exactly is the bone of contention in the 300 Ramayanas conflict? Is it the bare-bones story of boy
meets girl, they fall in love, etc? Or is it that Hanuman made ten steps between the dropping of a beetle and the tree in
Ravana's garden? In other words, is this some dissatisfaction with the use of universal elements or is it a dissatisfaction with
mere details?

“How many Ramayanas? Three hundred? Three thousand? At the end of some Ramayanas, a question is sometimes asked:
How many Ramayanas have there been?” wondered the late poet and scholar AK Ramanujan of the Indian epic in a
compelling essay he wrote for a University of Pittsburgh conference in 1987.

Twenty four years later, the essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas:Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation, finds itself
at the centre of a fresh controversy. It has been dropped from the history syllabus of Delhi University after protests from
hardline Hindu groups and a number of teachers. They believe the many versions recounted in the essay offend Hindu beliefs.

As Dr Ramanujan tells the story, the number of versions of the epic which have existed in India and the rest of south-east Asia
for the past 2,500 years or more is simply “astonishing”. Though Valmiki’s Sanskrit poem Ramayana is the most influential
among Indians, Ram’s story is available in at least 22 languages, including Chinese, Laotian, Thai and Tibetan. Many of these
languages have more than one telling of the epic.

Popular epic

Twenty-five or more renditions of the epic in various genres – epics, poems, mythological stories – have been
in Sanskrit alone, wrote Dr Ramanujan. There are sculptures, mask plays, puppet plays and shadow plays around the epic.
One researcher, Camille Bulcke, counted 300 tellings of the epic.

Millions of Indians have read and “watched” the epic in a popular comic book and a hit TV series. I remember the soap nearly
shutting down India on Sunday mornings in the mid-1980s – streets would be deserted, shops would be closed and people
would bathe and garland their TV sets before the serial began.
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Hindu groups first protested against the inclusion of Dr Ramanujan’s essay in the syllabus in 2008. At that time, the head of
Delhi University’s history department was also assaulted by some hot heads. But the teachers had stuck to their guns and
refused to drop the essay.

Many Indians have grown up on the epic’s comic book version.

Three years later, bowing to renewed pressure, the university’s top academic body decided to take the essay out of the history
syllabus, though, reportedly, a minority of teachers protested against the decision. One of them, Abha Dev Habib, described
the decision as “very regressive and unfortunate”.

So why have the right-wing groups railed against Dr Ramanujan’s essay?

Journalist Sugata Srinivasaraju suggests that the groups love the “soap telling”of the epic poem which iconises Ram and
“want the narrative to retain the structure and simplicity of a bedtime story so that you fall asleep in consent and total belief as
you listen to it”. Literary critic Nilanjana S Ray writes in her blog that this may “have been part of the general climate of
intolerance and the battle over who had the right to tell the country’s history and its myths that was part of the Indian
landscape between the 1980s and the 2000s”. She talks about how self-appointed censors wilfully scan texts for “offensive”
phrases.

Ms Ray is correct. Last year Mumbai University withdrew Rohinton Mistry’s novel Such a Long Journey – shortlisted for the
Booker Prize in 1991 – from its curriculum after the nationalist Shiv Sena staged protests against its “derogatory” references
to party members. Mr Mistry said the move was “a sorry spectacle of book-burning”.

Last year the state of Gujarat banned Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joseph Lelyveld’s incisive Great Soul: Mahatma Gandhi
and His Struggle With India long before it had been released in India. Gujarat’s ruling Hindu nationalist politicians had been
told that the book sensationalised Gandhi’s friendship with a German man, who may have been homosexual. All this was far
from true, but the ban stayed.

‘Humiliated’

And everybody remembers how India swiftly banned Salman Rushdie’sSatanic Verses in 1988 because some clerics said it
had insulted Islam. The Indian-born Rushdie had said he was “hurt and humiliated” by the decision.

Gujarat banned a book on Gandhi in April.

The attacks on freedom of expression by the right-wing fringe extend beyond India. This July, a screening of Sita Sings the
Blues, an award-winning take on the epic by American animator Nina Paley, in New York was cancelled after a local Hindu
group bombarded the organisers with hundreds of protest emails. A man attending a lecture by American IndologistWendy
Doniger in London in 2003 threw an egg at her. He was apparently incensed “by the sexual thrust of her paper on one of our
most sacred epics”.

Salil Tripathi, who has written a book on Hindu nationalist attacks on free expression, finds Hindu groups engaging
in “competitive intolerance” after realising that other faiths are able to “attract attention by challenging text, interpretations,
films, books, music and imagery”.
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Many would agree with this. But the ease with which attacks on free expression can be mounted in a country which never tires
of calling itself the world’s largest democracy betrays a weak and inffectual state, which often fails to respect and protect
dissenters. That, many believe, means mischievous, trouble-making minorities can easily subdue and attack dissent.

When a Department let the University down

“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” wrote A.K. Ramanujan in 1968. “I have heard bits and pieces of it
[in Kannada and Tamil] in a tailor’s shop where a pundit used to regale us with Mahabharata stories; from an older boy who
loved to keep us spellbound with it after cricket …; from a somewhat bored algebra teacher who switched from the binomial
theorem to the problem of Draupadi and her five husbands.”

It was such an acclaimed linguist, folklorist and translator of all things Indian, forever opening doors to the interplay between
the epic and everyday experience, who was recently shunned as an “untouchable” by the academic caste panchayat of Delhi
University. This has invited a humungous uproar among academics and civil society in India and abroad. The now famous
Expert D, whose minority view justified the excision of Ramanajun’s classic essay on 300 Ramayans from the University
syllabus, feared that non-Hindu teachers will have difficulty putting across its excesses to believing students. By that token this
article should get killed right here, for my name might end up betraying my thoughts — a sad reflection that communities in
India cannot communicate!

In any case, the role played by the Oxford University Press (OUP) in the three-year long saga ending with the burial of
Ramanujan’s Ramayana piece illustrates how the world out there has come to unthinkingly push artefacts of the mind out of
public spaces. This is cause for grave concern, for OUP India is not only a major publisher; it is technically ‘a department of
the University of Oxford’. And it is tasked with furthering from New Delhi that premier University’s “objective of excellence in
scholarship” by making and selling books. A retail shop dispensing for the most part the famous Oxford English Dictionary for
nearly half a century, OUP India was transformed in the 1970s and 1980s into an intellectual power house by its
first desi general manager, the redoubtable Ravi Dayal. Brand OUP that Dayal built from his cubby-hole in the Walled City
endured well after his retirement into the 1990s. It was thus that the Ramanujan essay landed in OUP’s lap in an edited
volume in 1991.

And thereby hangs a morality tale. At the first sign of trouble, in a letter written in September 2008, OUP decided to thank
those who felt aggrieved by it, “for pointing … out … that the essay has the potential of hurting religious sentiments.” It went
on to add “that neither are we selling the book nor there are any plans to reissue it.” This was a corporate’s way of being
economical with the truth, for the apology left unsaid that the offending article was also a part of another OUP-published
volume, the Collected Essays of A.K. Ramanujan, and whether that academic bestseller was being trashed forever as well.
That was not the end of the story. The Press also served a veritable notice on DU’s History Department for infringing its
copyright (and in effect profiting) by including the Ramanujan article in a book of readings! There was no such book, and no
intent, only a bunch of photocopies including that essay in a campus photocopy shop, and stories planted in the press about it.
The publishing house was being simultaneously both supine and assertive. And when the DU Academic Council took up the
issue this month, the letter from OUP washing its hands of Ramanujan got appended as a sort of covering note to the opinion
of the four experts.

Odd as it may seem, this takes us straight back to the well-known painting of Shaikh Muinuddin Chishti, the legendary saint of
Ajmer, from Jahangir’s Court. Emperor Akbar himself felt that the birth of his son was blessed by the power of this great Sufi
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of Ajmer (who died in 1230), to whose shrine elites and commoners continue to make a beeline. Jahangir in turn made large
endowments to the shrine, and also asked his court painter “Bicchitar” around the year 1620 to draw the great Sufi in a
suitable light. The painting shows a radiant Shaikh holding a globe — an orb with the Mughal crown — in the role of a
kingmaker. The message was made doubly clear in the inscription within: “The Emperor is endowed with victory both here in
this world and the world hereafter through the Shaikh’s grace.” One of the masterpieces of Mughal miniature, this painting is
currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

When OUP published a well-researched book on the cult and shrine of the Ajmer Sufi in 1989, those in the know naturally
decided to have this iconic image of Muinuddin Chishti adorn the cover of the book, also including it as a frontispiece.
Everyone, including OUP, Pakistan, thought it was a capital idea. The book was published with the painting of the renowned
Sufi on the cover and on the inside page. The managers of the shrine in turn objected to a sales agent about such a pictorial
depiction. OUP immediately buckled under, even though, according to insiders, no formal complaint had been preferred.

It reissued the book after replacing the dust jacket and tearing the luminous painting from its frontispiece! It thereby missed a
great opportunity to maintain that Sufis (including the sage of Ajmer) are routinely depicted in Mughal paintings. It might well
have noted that the depiction of these distinguished personages in Mughal paintings was not uncommon. In fact, the great
Rembrandt made a copy from a miniature (c.1650) showing the founders of the four major Sufi Orders in convivial converse
under a tree. Interestingly, the book that was partially vandalised by OUP itself, showed in fascinating detail that Emperor
Jahangir was a great devotee of the Ajmer Shaikh, a major benefactor of the shrine, and had no doubt commissioned this
particular portrait out of his profound regard for Muinuddin Chishti and his dargah at Ajmer. That was 20 years before the
Ramanujan abdication. I can’t vouchsafe for the saint and the scholar, but India’s knowledge economy must certainly be
turning in its grave all this while.

Is this being harsh on a reputable organisation charged by Oxford University to trade in ideas worldwide, and in India? After
all, OUP has launched many an academic career, including this writer’s, and continues to publish worthwhile works. Must
academics working out of their assured ivory towers cast stones at those who have to worry about litigation and unsold
stocks? I am sure a case can be made: “This is India and we do things differently here.” The problem is that every time a
major publishing house indulges in safe yet disingenuous marketeering, it also diminishes the scholars who entrust them with
their ideas. Those making money by ‘manufacturing’ knowledge need to think twice before shortchanging the very business of
enlightenment.