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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

How Kamban’s 1,000-year-old epic helped ease my Gulf-Hormuz anxiety

Read the Kambaramayanam, fully or in part, in the original stately Tamil or in translation. Immerse yourself in it. The irksome wars and issues of today will fade.

Shakespeare’s Richard III, the Crookback, talks about a “winter of discontent”. It is to such a winter that current media reports are leading us. The talk is of darker days ahead in and around the Strait of Hormuz. I have now lived off and on in Mumbai for five decades. And Mumbai has always had a close connect with Hormuz.

Elderly Gujarati ladies still refer to natural pearls, as distinct from cultured pearls, as “Basra” pearls. The Gulf may have its Bandar Abbas—“bandar/bunder” refers to a landing place, a jetty or a harbour—and in Mumbai, our famous Taj Hotel stands on Apollo Bunder. Those who have played the board game “Trade”, and who are by definition at least fifty years old, may remember Bori Bunder. The mercantile Bohris were prominent at this jetty more than a century ago.

So the Gulf (do note that I am politically correct and do not call it the Persian Gulf, although that was how my school geography texts described it) and the Strait are physically, metaphorically, and emotionally close to us. Now perhaps readers can understand why I am worked up.

But like Maria von Trapp, when I am sad, I can always fall back on remembering my “favourite things”. Admittedly, one of my favourite things is not the Kambaramayanam. But it was my grandfather’s favourite, and it is my friend Seetharam’s favourite. So I decided that to help me get out of my Gulf-Hormuz anxiety, I would head back to Kamban’s classic.

Also Read: The West’s real crisis isn’t war. It is the weakness within

The power of minor characters

In our country, there are literally hundreds of renderings of the Ramayana. In recent times, Ramanand Sagar created his version. Even today, writers, poets, minstrels, sculptors, painters, singers, composers, movie-makers, choreographers, and dancers are creating new versions. And of course, our friends in countries like Thailand and Indonesia are busy adapting inherited versions and creating contemporaneous ones.

Why is Kamban important? Why do we continue to pay homage to his work with a celebration every year, a thousand years after he wrote his epic, with a special function in the Srirangam temple?

One reason is that Kamban had a near-surgical understanding of the literary craft. Among other matters, he understood the importance of minor characters. To bring it home to readers who may not be close to medieval Tamil, Jacques is important in As You Like It; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and even the dead and absent Yorick, are important in Hamlet. And one of the greatest accomplishments in English literature has to be the role accorded to the Convict in Great Expectations. After all, it turns out in the end that Estella........

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