New Anthropology and Literature Course on Epic Poetry and South Asian Cultures

New Anthropology and Literature Course on Epic Poetry and South Asian Cultures

In Fall 2016 poet and scholar Vivek Narayanan will be teaching an anthropology and literature course at Mason entitled, The Ramayana: The Many Lives of a South Asian Epic. The course stems from his on-going research on the classic epic poem, The Ramayana, a story depicting the clash of love, war, and statecraft. The course is designed to teach students about South Asian culture through close readings of the epic and the many cultural productions that have sprung from it. The course is also about research, writing, and the nature of literature. In that respect, students will learn, through lectures and assignments, how research can relate to their own analytical and/or creative work.

Students in this course will study the Ramayana as literature, translation, and living culture. The epic will be taught not as any single, bound book but rather as a story that has metastasized into hundreds, perhaps thousands of versions – in dozens of languages – as poetry, folk performance, painting, television mega-serial, comic book, political diatribe. Students will learn the tale from accessible contemporary sources, opening up conversations about translations into English, then go further, with readings that will help students understand the Ramayana as a place where a vast and fragmented but also very inclusive culture works out its various obsessions, passions, arguments and social conflicts. Eventually, students will be ready to experiment with and produce their own Ramayanas…. In other words, they'll learn to use this epic poem and tale as a fascinating, weird, profound and deeply enjoyable way of helping to understand and come to grips with contemporary South Asia and the relations between its pasts, presents, and futures. 

Trained in anthropology and literature, the instructor of this course, Vivek Narayanan researched riot narratives as part of his MA in Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University, and studied the writing of fiction and poetry for his MA in Creative Writing at Boston University. His first book of poetry, Universal Beach, was published in 2006 and was followed in 2012 by the Life and Times of Mr S. His current project is a "writing through" of Valmiki’sRamayana. It is a project of cultural translation, poetics, and history for which Narayanan was awarded a 2013-14 Radcliffe Fellowship at Harvard University and a 2015-16 Cullman Fellowship at the New York Public Library. His two fellowship years enabled him to research the historical, linguistic, and cultural aspects of the epic and work on his own manuscript of poems.

Narayanan brings a global perspective to the study of poetry. He was born in Ranchi, India, and grew up in Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s to Tamil Indian parents. His interest in the link between poetry and cultural anthropology dates back to the year after his BA, when he had a Watson Fellowship to travel in India, South Africa, and Trinidad, doing ethnographic research and writing poems and stories about the practice of storytelling, ethnic conflict, and state ideology. He has taught anthropology as a graduate assistant at Stanford, history as a lecturer at the University of KwaZulu-Natal, and poetry workshops at the Centre for Developing Studies / SARAI in Delhi, the New York Public Library, and elsewhere.