 Rama - The man and the avatar
The boyhood - Rama and Krishna
This idea of Rama being a father’s child is deep-seated in the minds of almost every poet who has composed something or the other revolving around Ramayana. Whenever a child divine is thought of, the mind goes immediately to Krishna, and the poet either sings of the child and its mother - Yasodha - or associates himself directly with the mother, dons her robes. It is thus we see Periyazwar donning the saree of Yasodha without difficulty and singing almost all the scenes involving a loving mother and her endeared son, playing every role of the mother, including breast-feeding. This tradition continues down the line, till Bharati, who has perceived Krishna from many and differing angles, including that of a lover - male as well as female - mother, father, child - son as well as daughter - friend, guru etc.
Now, let’s turn to Kulasekara Azwar, whose pieces on Ramayana composed before Kamban are available to us. Take a look at the way in which he sings lullaby to the child, Rama.
‘mannu pugaz kOsalai than maNi vayiru vaaytthavanE,’ he begins. ‘The son of the celebrated Kausalya,’ is the way in which he addresses the baby. And ends every quartet with the refrain
‘irAgavanE thaAlElO’ lullaby to thee O Raghava! One is able to see easily that the mother - or whoever be the person - that sings lullaby here is NOT Kausalya, but someone else. It becomes obvious by the simple fact that if it was Kausalya that the poet intended to be the person singing the lullaby, he could not have addressed Rama with the epithet,
‘mannu pugaz kOsalai than maNi vayiru vaaytthavanE,’ or, ‘lullaby to thee O son of the celebrated Kausalya.’ Kausalya could not refer to herself as ‘celebrated Kausalya,’ that too by her own name.
And compare this with the next ten quartets that follow (known as
‘vanthaaLiNai’). It depicts the laments of Dasaratha, on sending Rama on exile. See the way in which the poet Kulasekara speaks in the first person, donning the robe of Dasaratha on his own shoulders, with ease. In other words, Kulasekara Azwar is able to associate himself more with Dasaratha - than with Kausalya - as easily as Periyazwar could associate himself with Yasodha. On the same scale, one can also see that none of the poets could play the part of Nandagopa, as they could with ease, that of Yasodha. Crossing the barriers of genders. Even Bharati plays the mother, when he sings of his Kannan or Kannamma as the child. (By the way, the
bhava in Bharati’s song ‘thIraadha viLayaattu piLLai,’ is more from the angle of a friend than that of a parent. The lines like,
‘viLyaada vAvendrazaippan,’ ‘he would call me to come for playing with’ and
‘ammaikku nallavan kaNdIr,’ ‘the fellow is a good boy to (or, ‘in the eyes of’) his mother,’ bring out the relationship between the singer and the sung.)
That captures how Rama and Krishna - as a child - are perceived, in our long, long tradition. Yasodha and Krishna. Dasaratha and Rama. I do not deny that some poets might have played the role of Kausalya too in their works. But such names are very rare, and are almost unknown.
That’s how we see Rama in the hands of Valmiki as well as Kamban too. They give us a picture of the birth of the four and the camera quickly moves to show the picture of a boy of sixteen. Not a single line exists in either of the versions that give us the joy of seeing Kausalya carrying her child in her hands and the
bAla-rAmA babbling and playing around, as we could see the pictures of Krishna through the eyes of various poets.
Think of it. We get to know a glimpse of the childhood of even Indrajit through the eyes of Kamban. Mandodari, lamenting on the headless trunk of Indrajit, recalls, ‘I was carrying you in my arms and feeding you, pointing to the moon.
‘ambuli, amma vaa endru azaitthalum,’ You stretched out your little hands and called the moon to come to your side. Like every other child.
‘namba, un thaadhai aaNaikku anjinan marungu naNNa,’ And the moon, afraid of your father, came down to earth and stood by your side. ‘Like every other child, you called the moon. But in your case, the moon came down and stood with folded hands by your side, because you are the child of the Terror of Universe.’
When that being so, avoidance of the joyful childhood pictures of Rama tells us something of the way in which this personality is moulded; cast and constructed. Always a matured personality. His sense of humour and hunger for little jokes not denied. But even the practical jokes of Rama, which can be counted on the fingers of one hand, are that of a grown up; and not that of a child. We are unable to see a single ‘mischief’ of the child, Rama, except, perhaps, the one and only boyhood mischief that Kamban has brought in (absent in Valmiki), which goes to form one of the important links in the chain of events. Shooting the clay-tipped arrows on the hunchback of Mantharä. Rama recalls this mischief in his advice to Sugriva, when the latter is installed as the King of Kishkindha, only to emphasise that ‘none is to be disregarded, or is to be treated curtly, even as a matter of joke.’
If at all something, we get just two verses in the Bala Kanda of Kamban, which bring out the boyhood traits of Rama.
|
