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I did not, with uncompromising strength, press the almost certain into the absolutely assured. I now see clearly that some hidden elements in my nature have openly ranged themselves as obstacles in my path. That is exactly how Ravana, whom I look upon as the real hero of the Ramayana, met with his doom.
However, not deeming it safe to venture out again, I sat down on the sill of my mother's door to read the dog-eared Ramayana, with a marbled paper cover, which belonged to her old aunt.
Carey and Joshua Marshman." Until Gorresio published his edition and Italian translation of the whole poem this was the first and only attempt to open the seal of the second great Sankrit epic to the European world. In 1802 Carey had encouraged the publication at his own press of translations of both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana into Bengali.
But the achievement of mine which appealed most to my mother was that while the rest of the inmates of the inner apartments had to be content with Krittivasa's Bengali rendering of the Ramayana, I had been reading with my father the original of Maharshi Valmiki himself, Sanscrit metre and all. "Read me some of that Ramayana, do!" she said, overjoyed at this news which I had given her.
Relate if thou canst. Bhima replied, "He is even my brother, excellent with every perfection, and endued with intelligence and strength both of mind and body. And he is the illustrious chief of monkeys, renowned in the Ramayana. And for Rama's queen, that king of the monkeys even with one leap crossed the ocean extending over a hundred yojanas. That mighty one is my brother.
Romesh Dutt, who published abridged translations of the two poems in the late nineties, says of the Mahabharata that the great war which it tells of "is believed to have been fought in the thirteenth or fourteenth century before Christ"; and of the Ramayana, that it tells the story of nations that flourished in Northern India about a thousand years B. C. Is believed by whom, pray?
And neither the Mahabharata nor the Ramayana was composed in a day; but in many centuries; and it is quite likely that on them too Brahmanical hands have been tactfully at work.
Alas, my reading of Valmiki had been limited to the short extract from his Ramayana given in my Sanskrit reader, and even that I had not fully mastered. Moreover, on looking over it now, I found that my memory had played me false and much of what I thought I knew had become hazy.
Vedi-Vilagna madhya Vedi in this connection means a wasp and not, as explained by Mallinatha in his commentary of the Kumarasambhava, a sacrificial platform. I would remark in passing that many of the most poetic and striking adjectives in both the Raghu and the Kumarasambhava of Kalidasa are borrowed unblushingly from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata.
The braying of the battle conches is muted: all is cast in a more gentle mold. You get instead the forest and its beauty; you get tender idylls of domestic life. This poem, like the Mahabharata, has come swelling down the centuries; but whereas the latter grew by the addition of new incidents, the Ramayana grew by the re-telling of old ones.
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