Aaron Sherraden’s Śambūka and the Rāmāyaṇa Tradition: A History of Motifs and Motives in South Asia offers a comprehensive and engaging analysis of how South Asian authors throughout history have dealt with arguably one of the most problematic episodes of the Rāmāyaṇa: Rāma’s decapitation of the śūdra Śambūka for practicing prohibited austerities. Over nine chapters—inclusive of introduction and conclusion—Sherraden traverses an impressive trail of literary engagement with the Śambūka episode, from Vālmīki’s earliest Sanskrit treatment of the event up to the late 20th century. For Sherraden, grappling with Śambūka’s death in its many iterations lends valuable insight into the behemoth that is the Rāmāyaṇa narrative tradition as a whole: “To chart a pathway through the Śambūka tradition,” he argues, “is . . . to simultaneously chart a pathway through the Rāmāyaṇa tradition” (11).
Forging this trail, Sherraden moves diachronically throughout the book, examining how authors inhabiting different time periods and geographic regions, belonging to different religious traditions, and writing in different languages and genres, all confronted and made sense of Rāma’s behavior towards the low-caste Śambūka. Sherraden articulates four specific orientations that authors have taken toward the troubling episode. The first, exemplified by the vernacular Rāmāyaṇas of Tūlsīdās and Kampaṉ, is to simply ignore it. In his Irāmāvatāram, Kampaṉ omits the entirety of the Uttarakāṇḍa, the larger book in which the Śambūka episode usually takes place, and Tūlsīdās in his Rāmcaratimānas “avoids the [Uttarakāṇḍa’s] more troubling events including Sītā’s banishment and the death of Śambūka” (100).
The second orientation that authors have taken towards the Śambūka episode is to justify Rāma’s motivations and actions. This involves authors “fram[ing] the story in such a way that elevates Rāma by justifying his punitive action against Śambūka” (11). The larger category of justification is further bifurcated. Some authors, beginning with Vālmīki, justify Rama’s actions based on their upholding Brahminical varṇa hierarchies, which Śambūka’s austerities threaten. In many Rāmāyaṇa narratives Śambūka’s ascetic pursuits are causally linked to the sudden death of a Brahmin boy in Rāma’s kingdom. Rāma’s search for, and eventual killing of, Śambūka thus neutralizes this lethal threat to Brahmins. Other authors, including Kālidāsa and many of the later bhakti poets, justify Rama’s killing of Śambūka on devotional grounds: the grace of Rāma’s divine touch—even a lethal touch—is a boon to Śambūka that delivers the reward he desires from performing austerities.
The third orientation that Sherraden lays out “involves absolving Rama of any involvement in Śambūka’s death” (12). Here, authors move the episode of Śambūka’s death to earlier in the narrative and make Lakṣmaṇa, and not Rāma, Śambūka’s inadvertent killer. Sherraden traces this treatment of the Śambūka episode—termed the “accidental death motif”—to the earliest Jain version of the Rāma story, Vilamasūri’s 5th-century Prakrit Paümacariya, and demonstrates how later authors, both Jain and non-Jain, replicate this version of events.
Finally, the fourth and most recently emergent orientation toward the Śambūka episode that Sherraden identifies involves “prominent anti-caste leaders of Dalit and other non-Brahmin communities . . . call[ing] on the Śambūka episode as a means of demonstrating that caste-based discrimination is deeply engrained in Indian society” (12). In the book’s final chapters, Sherraden lays out how, in the late-19th century and throughout the 20th century, we see the emergence of narratives that focus intentionally on the life of Śambūka and not on Rāma. By examining how six Dalit and non-Brahmin authors incorporated the Śambūka episode into their own advocacy writings, Sherraden demonstrates how Śambūka becomes “a revolutionary leader who provides his followers with the tools they need to push back against their oppressors” (19).
Śambūka and the Rāmāyaṇa Tradition is well researched, well written, and clearly argued. Sherraden should be commended for his consistently insightful analysis of texts belonging to myriad genres and composed in myriad languages. I also want to bring particular attention to what I, as a scholar specifically of Jain literatures and their histories, see as one of Sherraden’s most important contributions in the monograph. In the latter half of the fifth chapter, titled “The Accident or the Execution,” Sherraden demonstrates how many vernacular-language South Indian authors, both Jain and non-Jain, incorporated the accidental death motif into their works. This motif, as previously shown, originates with the Jain author Vimalasūri and his Paümacariya, and Sherraden is clear about why recognizing this fact is important: “[T]he development of the Rāma story between the Jains and Hindus was not a unilateral flow of influence. Poets of the Brahminical tradition were just as liable to incorporate compelling and well-known episodic elements of Rāma’s deeds from the Jain tradition as Jains were in incorporating elements from the Hindu tradition” (133). This insight directly and productively challenges what remains a persistent and oftentimes uncritically accepted view of Hindu-Jain literary relations: that Jains have continuously responded to and been influenced by Hindu narratives, but Hindus have rarely been influenced by their Jain counterparts.
In sum, Śambūka and the Rāmāyaṇa Tradition is a valuable contribution to a now decades-long scholarly project to chart the vast diversity of Rāmāyạna narrative traditions historically and, simultaneously, to understand the greater diversity of the South Asian religious landscape through this vast narrative corpus. With its clear, engaging prose and systematic argumentation, I envision this book productively incorporated into many undergraduate and graduate courses, including my own “The Lives of the South Asian Epics” seminar.
Gregory M. Clines is assistant professor of religion at Trinity University.
Gregory Clines
Date Of Review:
August 20, 2024
