L'institut Shastri

Shastri News - September 2009

The Greatest Story Never Told

How could a poem written thousands of years ago complicate commercial shipping activities along India’s eastern coastline today? To truly understand India, to engage in political, social, educational or commercial relationships with India, the world needs to understand what inspires Indian thought. Two critical texts that continue to influence all aspects of life in India are the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Dr. Robert Goldman, Professor of Sanskrit and India Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, has invested over 30 years of his life to a translation project that will open the floodgates of potential for study into India’s oldest epic, the Ramayana. For him it is still “the greatest story never told” in the West.

After releasing the sixth of seven volumes in his translation of the Ramayana this summer, Dr. Goldman visited the University of Alberta to lecture on the importance of this ancient text. The original text of the Ramayana is believed to have been written around the 4th century BCE by a Hindu sage named Valmiki. It includes some 24,000 verses of poetry within seven books, which tell the story of Rama (an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu), whose wife Sita is abducted by a demon king.

At best, most western thinkers classify the Ramayana as a great historical literary work within the ranks of Homer’s Iliad or the Sumerian Epic of Gilgamesh, but by doing so they neglect one critical fact. Unlike its literary counterparts, the Ramayana is very much alive and active in society today. The Ramayana is currently fundamental to the platform of one of India’s major political parties, the BJP. The cultural and social norms it conveys still hold religious, economic and political significance.

Anyone interested in understanding India should have a basic understanding of what its epics teach. Yet, finding quality English translations of these texts has not always been easy. “Previous translations of the Ramayana are quite archaic in their language,” says Goldman. “Our goal was to create a translation that would be readable and accessible.” Goldman’s current six translated volumes of the Ramayana have taken a team of translators decades to complete. They are the first to translate the ‘critical edition’ of the Ramayana, which was approved by Indian scholars as the version closest to the Valmiki original.

Goldman’s translations of the Ramayana are complete with thousands of pages of notes providing in-depth insight into the socio-cultural context of the text. The fifth volume in the series, the Sundarakanda, was cited as one of “The 100 Best Books of 1997” by the Los Angeles Times Book Review. Goldman expects that the last volume in the series will be published in a few years. Those interested in obtaining a copy of any volume should contact Princeton University Press, or Motilal Banarsidass in India.

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