A bad translation has one advantage you cannot pin the blame on a single person. Narendra Kohlis Initiation puts you into one of these predicaments.
It is the first novel in Kohlis episodic compilation of the Ramayana Abhyudaya and is also the only one to have been translated into English. However, since Initiation, or Deeksha, is complete in itself as the author claims and was written separate from the rest, it can safely be viewed in its individuality.
The novel draws a parallel between the situation in Bangladesh in 1971, when intellectuals were being targeted by Pakistan, and the brutal oppression of Harijans in Bihar. The author compares these two incidents with those in the Ramayana; particularly the ten days for which Vishwamitra borrows Rama and Lakshmana from Dashratha to protect Siddhashram from the Rakshasas.
The novel is basically those ten days retold. The author has a ready-made storyline to play with. Whats more, he has the secular freedom to do whatever he wants with it. He works on this foundation to reconstruct the logic which, he claims, got lost when additions to the text were made by people after Valmiki.
Kohli has tried to contemporise the Ramayana through parallels and rationalise the myth and ideology to conform to modern-day sense. However, there is a catch to it. He overlooks the fact that drawing parallels from a text like the Ramayana is tantalisingly easy. In this, he seems to have been overcome by his liberal/Marxist leanings. He commits the fatal error of taking the text at its face value.
His deconstruction could alternatively have been titled The Making of an Avatar. It is a story of Ramas initiation into the fight against injustice: how Prince Rama is transformed into Maryada Purushottama Rama, how the Rishis (intellectuals) have become inactive despite possessing the right values, and how the common man is left at the mercy of Rakshasas and a corrupt and apathetic ruling class.
Rama emerges a leader, a symbol of peoples revolution against injustice. A benefactor who helps the common folk restore their dignity and gives them the courage to stand up against oppression. He becomes some sort of a consciousness that transcends time, and in that he becomes an avatar. Rama says: ...Whenever you need me, I will come. I will come again and again...
Kohli picks up the eponym before the character has time to develop, initiates it through what he thinks is a logical methodology and then identifies the end product of his experiment with the original.
The Bihar incident is lifted and placed ditto into a sequence near Siddhashram. Ravana is a tyrant with no intellectual inclinations and Indra is a typical Hindi movie villain-rapist who gets away with whatever he does by virtue of his political power. Ahilya and Kausalya are both wronged by society. While Ahilyas myth is rationalised into a beautiful woman living alone in a forest, Kausalya is portrayed as a woman who has lost her individuality by conforming to societys expectations. But, the rationality behind the Ahilya episode cannot be contemporary and the idea behind the wrong done to Kausalya cannot be historical and we have an interplay of the past and the present. Whether this is intentional or incidental is debatable but the translation clearly shows it is downright casual, and when the author claims to restore logical consistency to the text, it becomes confusing.
However, several phrases and terms like intelligence (as in espionage), Shivas bow turned into some sort of a mammoth machine with built in safety-catches and self-destructive mechanisms, clever use of the language, like I thought, thought and thought, and 13-year old Lakshmanas quips littered liberally across the book, leaves the reader in splits, making the book unputdownable.
Despite the contemporary flavour, the impression that an irreverent joke has been played to tie up some loose ends lingers on. Irreverent, not because it is sacrilegious, but because the text has been used without any respect, which has led to a lack of clarity of the authors intention.
Kohli only manages to oversimplify the thought; something which even Marxist gurus like Lukacs warn against.
And the way the book is priced, I wonder if anybody but Orient enthusiasts will buy it.
