Books: Hindu Mock Epic

THE RAMAYANA (276 pp.)—Aubrey Menen—Scribner ($3.50).

The Ramayana is the closest thing in Hindu literature to Homer’s Odyssey. For centuries, young Hindus have been taught to revere its central characters. Dasa-ratha, the king, stands for fatherly devotion; Rama, his son and the hero of the tale, for strength of mind, arm and heart; Sita, his wife, for undying faithfulness. Under the guise of restoring the classic, Satirist Aubrey Menen (The Prevalence of Witches, Dead Man in the Silver Market) slyly milks a sacred cow for laughs. His freewheeling and irreverent Ramayana is a mock epic that owes less to its original author, the Hindu poet Valmiki, than it does to Voltaire’s Candide and Boccaccio’s Decameron.

In Menen’s version, King Dasa-ratha is an old lecher who ministers to his harem more assiduously than to his people, and totters on his throne from lack of sleep. Venal flunkeys catch the king’s ear, and tell him that his son Rama plans to kill him. Under a pious pretext, the old man banishes Rama from his kingdom for 14 years. Into exile with Rama go his dutiful wife Sita and his loyal brother.

Living to Eat. Rama is a simple soul who, like Candide, thinks he is living in the best of all possible worlds. He can scarcely believe what is happening to him until he is down to the last princely robe on his back. Fortunately, the Hermitage of Gluttons takes the exiles in. The Gluttons’ creed: “A man lives by eating . . . Whatever gods there be, one of them must be in a man’s belly.” Rama joins them in sacrificing to their god three times a day, and finds a friend in one fellow traveler of the Gluttons, the poet Valmiki. To while away the years, and wise up Rama in the ways of the world, Valmiki tells him some bedtime stories for grownups.

In one tale, four fishermen who do their net-casting at night are racked with doubt about the honor of their wives. The god Shiva gives them a magic powder to eat that allows each man to fish and to spy invisibly on his wife at the same time. At first the wives prove faithful, but the fishermen soon make cuckolds of each other, and inattentively lose their boat and all but their lives in a storm. In an other story, a not-so-holy man seduces the wife of a rich merchant only to find in her insatiable arms a compelling argument for the chastity he has hypocritically preached.

Laughing to Live. Rude bits of action interrupt these yarns. Amid flying swords and javelins, a robber tyrant takes Sita for his spoil, and the once dutiful wife rather likes it. In a war of comic confusion, Rama conquers the tyrant, wins Sita back, and, when his own evil father dies, resumes his rightful throne. The moral of it all? Rama asks as much of Poet Valmiki: “Is there anything that you believe is real?” Replies the poet (and the answer is obviously that of Hindu-Irish Author Menen): “Certainly, Rama. There are three things which are real: God, human folly, and laughter. Since the first two pass our comprehension, we must do what we can with the third.”