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The Rama Story of Brij Narain Chakbast

Year: 2007
Type: article
Abstract: The Rama Story of Brij Narain Chakbast Recent work has brought an awareness of the multiplicity of Rama stories throughout the areas where Sanskritic culture flourished.For close to a thousand years, Sanskrit dominated public discourse in South and Southeast Asia.Even after regional languages supplanted Sanskrit and developed their own literatures, Sanskritic tropes and tales continued to captivate the imaginations of literary élites.In the twentieth century, Brij Narain Chakbast composed his own Urdu telling of the Rama story.That he chose to interpret Hinduism through the idiom of Urdu high literature at a time when language and religion separated the Hindu and Muslim communities of his time supplies yet another example of the historicity and cultural construction of the notion that Hindi and Urdu belong to the Hindu and Muslim communities, respectively.Chakbast also secularizes Rama throughout his trilogy of Ramayana poems, prompting an investigation into the reception of the Rama story throughout history.This paper will argue that at the turn of the twentieth century, Hindu poets like Chakbast could still identify as Urdu speakers and resist its designation as a Muslim language.This paper will also explore the reasons for which Chakbast deprives Rama of any direct theological import.To accomplish the former, I will review key texts which interrogate the development of Hindi and Urdu as modern languages.To address the latter, I will intertextually read Chakbastís Rama poems with his poem on Krishna, Masihís Persian Ramayana, and secondary scholarship on other Rama stories to adduce explanations as to his motivations.1 Because Chakbastís language, culture, and theology resist easy classification, this paper is not meant to advance any final word on the subject, but to open further lines of inquiry.
Language: Dutch
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2980662724
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