Smugglers and Sycophants: Postcolonial Satirical Subversions of the Ramayana in Aubrey Menen and Hariśaṅkar Parsāī

Abstract

Although the Ramayana narrative has come under scrutiny recently for its nationalist and imperial ambitions (Prakash 2023), this paper traces a pre-1992 history of anxieties surrounding the identification of the nation-state with the epic. Through a comparative study of Aubrey Menen’s Rama Retold (1954) and Hariśaṅkar Parsāī’s laghukathās on Rama (1980s) as satiric subversions, this paper puts into conversation writers across languages, periods, and forms. The first section argues that satire enables a defamiliarization (Shklovsky 2015) of epic heroes by bringing them to the contemporary socio-political context. It shows that Menen in the 50s, uses the Rama story as an apt allegory to warn against the dangers of Gandhi’s Ramrajya shaping India’s ideas of rulership. Parsai’s reworking of the Ramayana through contemporary political realities, this paper claims, shows that some of those dangers had already been realised through a cult of leadership, nepotism and an obsequious bureaucracy in a post-Emergency era. The second section argues that since satire lacks any rigid form, it can shapeshift into a novel (Menen) or a laghukathā (Parsai), thereby collapsing the epic distance (Bakhtin 1981) of the Ramayana through dialogism. Menen’s novel form enables him to make his epic characters more dialogic and bridge the epic distance between his readers and the myth and Parsai through the laghukathā, with its brevity and journalistic nonchalance, completely deflates the aura of the epic.