Friday, July 30, 2010

About 'Ravan/Ravanan'

Tis post is being written as a response to a few other blogs that I saw in which the author(s) had written about the movie Ravanan, mostly with a tone of disdain towards the portrayal of the characters in the movies that he felt were not an appropriate rendition and rather blasphemous as it was against the accepted convention that the protagonist Ram(a.k.a Ramar,Ram, etc) is an incarnation of a hindu deity. I would like to point out that there have been many versions of the ramayana in the past(And I'm not just talking about Valmiki Ramayana,Kamba Ramayana etc).The Ramayana (and many other epics) started out as a orally transmitted one before being recorded after writing became an integral part of human lives.Ie,it happened in a similar manner to other epics such as the Lliad. And though the above said epics are ascribed to one author or a group of authors,it is not really so. To bring an analogy, all versions of the Ramayana are like different linux distributions with certain distributions being more known publicly.
In fact,the indonesian version of the ramayana tends to treat hanuman as a more sinister character than other versions and these kind of variations are what contributes to the richness of the story of the ramayana(Im talking about a generic ramayana,not any specific version).
In that way,the movie Ravanan/Ravan can be expressed as the director's interpretation of the epic (Not a very good one though :P) but there is nothing very new about it as localized or individual interpretations of epics have been done for literally,thousands of years.Thus,there is no point to the outcry at all.


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