Take a Sad Song and Make it Better?

I'd remembered Gandhi's last words, after he was shot by his asassin, were "He Ram!", which was translated, perhaps a little too universal-ifyingly, as "Oh God!" Though it may be that's what Gandhi would have intended.

Anyway, so it was the alternate transliteration of he that got my attention in this headline, from the Mumbai newspaper DNA:

The article raises a lot of issues from India's recent past, particularly the place, literally and figuratively, of the god Ram, and stories associated with him, in Hindu (and Indian) identities. In the 1990s the flashpoint was a mosque torn down in Ayodhya because it stood on a site associated by some with Ram (his birthplace? I forget). Now it's to do with plans to dredge a canal through Adam's Bridge, the shallow archipelago that links India and Sri Lanka, which has traditionally been linked with the bridge built by the monkey-god Hanuman in the the Ramayana. An atheist minister in Tamil Nadu made some comments about it being silly to think of the bridge as an architectural site worthy of protection (as some from the anti-canal camp were arguing), and then the argument got to be over whether said minister ought to have made those comments, whether it was an insult to Indian-ness/Hindu-ness.

Anyway, so Ram-awareness is on the upswing among Hindu nationalists, even to the point of coopting Gandhi's favorite Ram-hymn (despite the fact that the mahatma himself was quite at odds with the anticedants of today's Hindu nationalists—or at least the extreme ones. And they (witness the asassination) with him.

Serious and complex matters. But, a little pathetically, the main thing the headline made me think of was The Beatles' song "Hey, Jude". I'll hold off on deciding whether that song could, with the simple name substitution, be used to illustrate an episode or two from the Ramayana (and whether or not that'd be a good thing).

Laugh not, it's been done before: witness animator Nina Paley's mesmurizing, inspiring, and vaguely troubling Betty-Boop-meets-Busby-Berkley-meets-the-Delhi-Durbar series, The Sitayana, in which episodes from the Ramayana are given a feminist slant and set to the alluring melancholy music of 1920s jazz vocalist Annette Hanshaw:



If you liked that segment, head to the The Sitayana site proper, which has segments from several episodes/songs, in a slightly better quality form.