Countless Ramayanas: Language and Cosmopolitan Belonging in a South Asian Epic

In November 2011, A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the Ramayana, a South Asian epic, was removed from Delhi University' undergraduate history syllabus. Hindu nationalist student groups deemed the Ramayana stories in Ramanujan's essay as offensive towards the Hindu gods, and pressured the university's administration. However, how does the Ramayana, a continuously growing corpus of stories, belong to just Hindus, or any other group? How do such narratives become socially contested and debated? As a response to the Hindu nationalist treatment of the Ramayana as a singular, master narrative, the Kiski Kahani project, a not-for-profit program in Pune, India, compiles and rewrites fragments of Ramayana stories in print publications, theatre workshops, and web pages. Through this practice, Kiski Kahani's writers and performers, who are young, multi-ethnic, and multi-religious, articulate their opinions about the Ramayana debate and their itinerant life histories by retelling the epics as plural and inclusive. Drawing from participant observation and textual analysis, I examine how Kiski Kahani employs language modalities that index a sense of belonging to a cosmopolitan nation: using English rather than Hindi or Marathi, curating stories from diverse Indian ethnolinguistic regions, and reclaiming Ramayana stories as a socially situated, emerging genre. I offer a way of looking into texts not only as an imprint of macro-political ideologies, but also as a social commentary on language and life histories in urban India and beyond.