How does chandrabati ramayan challenge the ramayan narrative of Valmiki and Tulsidas
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Having fallen prey to the literary charms of Chandrabati, I was utterly thrilled with the prospect of getting acquainted with yet another sixteenth-century woman poet who rewrote the Ramayana. I soon discovered that Molla had not been translated into English. Irrespective of the endless references to her Ramayana the text itself was not available in translation. So I set out out to find her myself in Andhra Pradesh, her homeland, and finally did manage to get hold of a tattered copy of a Hindi-Telugu bilingual edition of the Molla Ramayana, long out of print. This happens to be the only available translation of the text in any language. And as I studied Molla—I discovered that this poet wasn't like Chandrabati at all. There were more differences between the two women re-writers of the epic than the few superficial similarities.
Molla's Ramayana is regarded as one of the classical Ramayanas in Telugu, ranked after the two other medieval Telugu Ramayanas by Ranganatha and Bhaskara. Molla's Ramayana is still widely available in Telugu—thin paperbacks in cheap newsprint, with a shiny colourful picture of a beautiful young Molla lost in meditation on the cover.
Hardly anyone knows about Chandrabati's Ramayana, except for researchers of medieval Bengali literature. Even then, it is known only as a notoriously weak attempt at retelling the Ramayana. Thus, no one generally cares to read it. I wouldn't have, either, had I not felt an unholy urge to see just how bad this Ramayana was. That's when I came to know Chandrabati, in 1989. You will find Chandrabati's Ramayana either in D.C. Sen's collection, Maimansingh Geetika, volume IV (1916), or in K.C. Moulik's Purva Banga Geetika, volume VII (1976). Both scholarly editions are out of print, and therefore rare. Only the most exhaustive libraries may have them.
There is one uniform opinion in the sparse literature on Chandrabati's Ramayana: that it is her worst piece of work. Not only is Chandrabati's Ramayana regarded as incomplete, it is also labelled structurally and stylistically weak. Even D.C. Sen, who was full of praise for two of Chandrabati's other works, agrees. Sukumar Sen has ripped the text apart, and believes it to be fake. In fact, he believes the whole of the Maimansingh ballad collection poems to be fake!