Week 4: Reading Diary A || Beginning of Buck's Ramayana

Although this text has been much more descriptive in terms of explaining characters physical appearance and the appearances of locations visited throughout the story, at the beginning of our reading I was confused by the power Valmiki held. Why was his curse on the hunter who shot the “bird in love and unsuspecting (Buck, 7)” so powerful that the man died later that day? Why was the hunter fearful at the sight of Valmiki?

Buck’s introduction to the story of the Ramayana is quite a bit more detailed than Narayan’s. I found the power of Brahma and Valmiki to be trivial. Is Valmiki simply telling stories through poetry and the characters of the Ramayana do not actually exist? I found this part most confusing when I read that Valmiki named Rama and Sita’s children, as if Rama and Sita had no opinion in the matter at all.

One huge difference between the two versions I noted was how well described characters and places were. Ayodhya has three paragraphs dedicated solely to explaining the beauty and prestige of of its belongings and its people. It was mentioned that the Kosalas had no enemies and their beautiful city was unconquerable, which I do not remember Narayan writing about but I wonder if there is significance to this fact.

Brahma appears more frequently throughout this reading than he has previously. His influence on other gods is overwhelming. I noted when he was speaking to Indra on page 13 and he reminded Indra of his power if he uses his intelligence correctly and I thought it was strange that a god would need to be reminded of this.

When the sacrifice for Dasaratha’s four sons had begun, I noted that Vishnu took on the title of Narayana in this version. I looked at the character list at the front of the text and noticed that Rama was not defined. I wonder if they did not define his character in this list because, well, how do you even define Rama in a few words.

After Dasaratha’s four sons were born to three mothers, I noticed the descriptiveness of their appearances. I would have never imagined Rama having green eyes or Lakshmana having blue ones. I wonder why they characterized these two sons has having bright eyes and the other two with rosy and black eyes. Another part Narayan did not mention in his version was how Bharata is to Satrughna as Rama is to Lakshmana. There has to be some significance to these relationships. Other than the obvious importance of Rama and Lakshmana’s relationship as described and told about in Narayan’s text, it will be interesting to see if Bharata and Satrughna make more appearances in this story.