Why do we revisit classics? How is retelling of a classic any different from writing a story or novel from scratch? What are we looking for consciously when we take a conscious decision to retell classics from a different light? Meena Kandasamy explains.
Published Sep 07, 2024 | 8:00 AM ⚊ Updated Sep 07, 2024 | 8:00 AM
Meena Kandasamy speaks about revisiting classics. (Screengrab)
What exactly is a classic? What makes a work of literature a classic? I believe that there are hundreds of ways of talking about it. But for me, what is a classic? I think the classic is a text that lives in our midst.
So she talks about the Thirukkural. And it’s something that children are learning in school. There are always one or two couplets from the Thirkkuural written on the buses, something that people quote on stages.
Even with the Ramayana, or the Mahabharata, these are stories that live in us in some form, shape, dimension, or perspective, which we cannot escape as they are transmitted culturally, and in every single way.
So then the question is, when the text is alive in our midst, do we consider that text a living thing or do we it something ‘dead’? If you look at this text as something that is fossilized in amber, something that cannot be changed, and something permanent and not alterable, that means that we are basically, considering the text as a dead thing, as a dead object, because only then that it has not changed.
If the text, on the other hand, is a living being, then it is going to do what all living beings do. The text is going to change according to circumstances. Under pressure, it’s going to reinvent itself.
So, and this is what I think that we have to understand in terms of text, the fact that they breathe, they have a life, and therefore it can breathe this life into them, to look at them with new meanings, to give them new interpretations, is also part of what writers do.
Text is made of two things—one is language and the other is culture. Language also constantly evolves. When language itself is constantly evolving, the text cannot be in a state of non-evolution. It cannot be in that stasis. Once we recognise that language and culture are living creatures with a heartbeat, you can understand why a text can transform itself, why it can metamorphose into something else, why it can take on different meanings, different shades, different characteristics, and different interpretations.
Why do we have to revisit classics? The practical answer to that is, if I want to write a feminist story, confronting the rape culture today, I can create a storyline. However, it is not easy to reach people with new storylines.
Whereas classics, myths and epics have these ready-made templates that everybody is aware of. So you do not do the hard work of having to establish the basic facts, you don’t have to say, okay, there is a story called the Ramayana, and there are these characters.
You allow yourself the opportunity to retell the story.
On another note, the reason we go back to the classics instead of telling our own stories is because it’s very essential to tell stories from the margins which have never been told. It’s essential to talk about women’s experience, which for some reason has never been considered part of high literature, part of high culture, culture with a capital C, literature with a capital L. So I think we owe ourselves that massive responsibility.
Spoke on the importance of revisiting classics from a feminist, anti-caste and decolonial perspective at the St Joseph’s College of Commerce, Bengaluru. Sharing the video, slightly long lecture 😳 pic.twitter.com/r7ZL25I6Nc
— Dr Meena Kandasamy (@meenakandasamy) September 5, 2024
At the heart of revising as an exercise is imagination – the fact that you can dream a different ending, a different plot point, a character reacting differently, or a different reinterpretation. This idea of revisitation of classics is rooted in this act of imagination as rebellion, imagination as a form of assertion, but also imagination as, you know, laying claim to space, to history.
When somebody does a feminist retelling, like Volga did with the Ramayana, saying it from Sita’s perspective, they are trying to capture the narrative and look at what the same story looks like when it’s told from the eyes of a woman. What the story looks like when it’s told from the eyes of the oppressed people.
What does this story look like when it’s told from the perspective of the victims or survivors? I think this active act of imagination allows you something to tell the story with a different ending because then you allow yourself to imagine a different fate, a different future, a different outcome. Nobody needs to give you permission to change or reinterpret the myths, and epics, because they are so much part of our culture that everyone has the right to access them.
There is no one version of Ram or Sita or Yudhishthira that belongs to one particular set of people. If they belong to the national imagination or the cultural imagination, that means each of us has the same rights to do with it, what we think we can do with it.
My first retelling was about “Ekalaivan”— an Adivasi person in Mahabharata, who wants to learn archery. When Drona refuses to teach Ekalaivan, he learns the art in the presence of Drona’s image and excels in it. And when he goes and wants to pay his respects, in the form of “Guru Dakshina”, Drona demands him to sacrifice his right thumb.
When I was writing poems, at 17 or 18, I was also seeing very closely what was happening within academic institutions, like the IIT Madras, places that somehow associate Brahmanic hegemony with academic excellence. Today, I read this headline that the rate of suicide among Indian students is higher than the rate of the population growth.
While they might not be comparing the most likely things, it’s still a shocking number. This shows that something is going wrong in our educational institutions, that sometimes if students are forced to part with their life, it means that it is a kind of academic terrorism that is happening. Because young people are the ones who want to live life the most.
When I was seeing what was happening around me, I felt we are living in many ways through the reiteration of the same thing, that people of certain dominant and oppressive castes are demanding the “ekelaivans” of today to sacrifice their most powerful, their most ambitious, their most rebellious personalities. That what education actually does is in some ways to castrate you intellectually, to make you somebody who is not efficient, to take from you what is it that you have worked so hard to get by yourself.
The 1901, 1911, and 1921 censuses reveal striking disparities in literacy rates among different castes. For instance, Tamil Brahmin male literacy in English was 17 percent in 1901, rising to 28.21 percent by 1921. In contrast, the literacy rate for dominant landowning castes like the Kamma Naidus increased from just 0.03 percent to 0.5 percent over the same period. Notably, female literacy was not even recorded due to the taboo that prevented the society from educating women.
These statistics highlight the deeply unequal educational system that existed. Despite efforts to address these disparities, such as the work of Jesuit institutions and Dalit movements like Ayyankali’s, the system remained fundamentally unequal. But at the same time, you throw young people, Dalit people, Adivasi people, and Bahujan people, into this system and you tell them to get an education.
The question is, is anybody willing to give them that education? And if the ydo get educated, what next? I think nobody talks about it because we all believe that our silence helps us, just as we don’t talk about rape culture because, you know, being quiet about it in some way allows us to escape.
My poem reads: “This note comes as a consolation. You can do a lot of things with your left hand. Besides, fascist Dronacharya warrant left-handed treatment. Also, you don’t need your right thumb to pull a trigger or hurl a bomb.”
By reimagining Ekalaivan’s story, the poem doesn’t change the fact that he loses his thumb but highlights how he can still resist and fight within the system. It portrays him as adapting and finding new ways to challenge oppression.
How do you fight the system? How do you call out fascism? And how do you work when you have been made disabled on purpose, when you have your things taken away from you? How do you reinvent yourself for the larger struggle? Reimagining him not as somebody who lost, but as somebody who, you know, what the corporate neoliberal world calls, he got a different skill set.
It’s very interesting to consider how stories like the Ramayana can be reinterpreted. In the Ramayana, for example, Sita’s desire for a deer leads to significant events—the chase that results in trouble, the advice she ignores, talking to strangers—all of which can be seen as contributing to the ensuing tragedy. One might say that the 14-year separation and the war with Ravana happened because of her, potentially placing blame on her as the root of suffering.
However, another perspective can reframe the same story without altering the facts. You could view Sita as a pioneer of autonomy and independence. In this interpretation, she is not merely a suffering figure or the cause of suffering but a radical feminist who challenges traditional boundaries. By stepping outside established norms and asserting her own desires and decisions, Sita becomes a symbol of female empowerment.
This approach of engaging with classic texts is not novel. For instance, Periyar rewrote the Ramayana to portray Ravana as the hero and Rama as the anti-hero, calling his version the Kimayana. Similarly, Ambedkar’s writings, like “Riddles in Hinduism,” challenged traditional texts and faced significant backlash.
The goal of feminist reinterpretation is not to erase or ban these epics but to infuse them with new, liberatory meanings. This transgressive approach allows for a reimagining of cultural narratives, providing a critical edge that aligns with contemporary values while acknowledging the enduring influence of these myths.
Engaging with these texts in this way can impact cultural memory and collective consciousness, highlighting the ways in which literature and mythology can be used to challenge and redefine societal norms.
The decolonial perspective involves more than just addressing the influence of British or Dutch colonialism on our fiction. While British colonial rule left a significant mark on literature and culture, decolonialism must also examine earlier forms of colonisation and cultural domination, such as Sanskritic hegemony and Brahmanical incursions into texts.
It is important to push the concept of decolonisation beyond the confines of European colonialism to include these internal forms of cultural oppression. Recognising that colonisation can come from within as well as from external forces is crucial. For example, Tamil has faced significant Sanskritic influence, with over 50 to 60 percent of its words borrowed from Sanskrit by the early 1900s. This domination led to a movement to revive Tamil by returning to its pure word roots and resisting Sanskritic encroachment.
This issue is not just about language but also about the broader impact on thought and cultural expression. Decolonialism, therefore, must address both external colonial influences and internal cultural hegemony to fully understand and dismantle the various forms of oppression that shape our cultural and intellectual landscapes.
This article is an edited version of Dr Meena Kandasamy’s speech on the importance of revisiting classics from a feminist, anti-caste and decolonial perspective at St Joseph’s College of Commerce, in Bengaluru from Thursday, 5 September. Dr Meena Kandasamy is a poet and a writer.
(Edited by Sumavarsha Kandula)
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