The Fountainhead of Creativity

I keep hearing that the movie “Ravan” Starring Vikram and Aishwarya Rai is based on Ramayan where Vikram is Ravan and the First Lady of India is Sita. Attempts to reinterpret Ramayan and project Ravan as a hero are rife in India, especially in Tamilnadu.

We have great thinkers like E V R Periyar painting Ravan as a representative of the downtrodden Dravidians, and more particularly, the Tamil races and Ram as the embodiment of the Aryan invasion of Dravidian lands south of the Vindhyas.

Many of our Dravidian brethren proudly display the name plate Ravanan outside their government cabins little realizing that Ravan was a pure Brahmin and son of a Maharishi. He took great pride in his assiduity in performing the Vedic rituals and was himself the greatest exponent of Sam Ved in his time!

Mahakavi Bharathiyar has also attempted a spoof of the Ramayan all be it in humorous vein.

In recent times we have the great Drama Actor and Director R S Manohar reinventing the role of Ravan as a benign and valiant hero who slipped and met his downfall due to his own arrogance. In this version, Sita is portrayed as Ravan’s daughter!

Many social dramas and movies have used metaphors from the Ramayan to depict love for children, love for wife, devotion to master, love for brother and so on.

The point is, with so much already done, how will merely moving the basic story of the Ramayan into a twenty first century context be new or different. Wait and hope…I suppose!

The broader question is when did the fountainhead of creativity of our artists and intellectuals dry up and our collective genius become so impoverished that we are unable to think of better and more modern themes and are forced to ransack old and bygone themes or make feeble attempts to reenact old success stories?

When will Tamil Cinema produce an Ameer Khan or, for that matter, another Kamal Hasan or a K Balachnder or a Bharathi Raja again? While KB changed the themes, BR changed the locale and the construct. At least, they did their best to remain honest unto themselves.