Prof. Danino began his journey into the journey of the Ramayana by describing it as a unique phenomenon in the history of humanity–one that had not only pan-Indian but pan-Asian connotations. He explained how the Ramayana journeys through a great breadth of the Indian subcontinent from Ayodhya to Gandhaara and even along the Western Ghats to modern day Sri-Lanka in some accounts. Anticipating the question of historicity, Prof. Danino clarified that the historical validity of the text did not matter as long as people believed and engaged with it in their own capacity. It would perhaps constitute a mythologised history where communities (or Janas) engaged with the text for meaning-making and not history-making. Discussing the various versions of the Ramayana during the Q&A session, Prof. Danino concluded that the beauty of the epic was in its malleability and lack of absolute authorship, allowing the people of India to make themselves a part of it, adopt traditions based on it and create their own versions of it. He described how unlike the Iliad and Odyssey of the Greeks, the Ramayana and Mahabharata were texts that encouraged the people to ‘own them’ and ‘play with them’, render it in their own versions even as the story maintained a central plot-line.

Session 2 (4th February, 2021) – The Mahabharata: India’s First Anthropology Project

The second lecture offered by Prof. Danino was a comprehensive account of the anthropological insights to be found in the Mahabharata. He explained how the Mahabharata documents almost three hundred and sixty-three Janas and Jaatis along with a myriad of languages, cultures, rulers and regions. He also noted that unlike early colonial anthropology’s treatment of tribals as primitive, the Mahabharata in its exposition makes no such moral or qualitative distinction between the forest and urban dwellers of the epic and that it becomes essential to not view the social structures of the past through the categories of the present. Ultimately, Prof. Danino noted, it was important to try to understand why these epics were trying to incorporate and document such a vast region? How was it possible to engage in such a grand exercise? He reiterated from his previous lecture that accuracy and historical validity was not of consequence here. What was important was to try to understand the motives and intentions of the people seeking connections to the epic and the means through which they achieved it. It could have only been possible because regional cultures were at complete liberty to ‘adopt, adapt, transpose, translate and transcreate’ the two Indian epics. Prof. Danino concluded this riveting journey across India through these epics with a quote from a French historian Jules Michelet who entreats those tired of the dreary West to set their eyes to the glorious epics of India for inspiration.