What South Asia’s Literary Classics Reveal About Its Linguistic and Cultural Diversity

While Ten Indian Classics features eight—or, as the voice in my head insists, nine—of South Asia’s languages, it invites the reader to engage with the region in its multilingual plenitude, its many literatures. Some measure of South Asia’s linguistic diversity may be gauged from the fact that India’s constitution recognizes twenty-two languages as “scheduled languages”; meanwhile, according to the 2001 Census of India, there are 122 “major” languages and 1,599 “other” languages in use across the country.

Of these, thirty languages are spoken by more than a million people each. Many of these languages are spoken not only in India but also across the comparatively recent territorial borders that demarcate South Asia into nation-states, in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka, and the Maldives.

Importantly, each of South Asia’s literatures is closely connected to a living tradition, which spans varied media and mutates with shifts in regional and sectarian context.

These living traditions are constantly being reframed by various cultural agents, through the lenses of aesthetics and ideology, into public outcomes that far exceed the scholarly boundaries of the annotated critical edition. South Asia’s literary classics must therefore be seen as texts continually caught up in a lively interplay with many other forms of cultural expression available through oral narrative, scribal record, performance, and print, as well as ranging across the classical, folk, and mediatic domains of experience. These would include scripture, recitation or storytelling, dance or theater, ritual ceremonies, as well as cinema, television, and comics.

Indeed, it could be argued that classical texts become widely available in South Asia precisely through such an interplay, rather than through the sovereign authority of the book. This insight lies at the heart of the assertion famously attributed—invariably in some misquoted or mangled form—to the renowned poet, translator, and cultural anthropologist A. K. Ramanujan: “No Indian reads the Ramayana [or the Mahabharata, the epics are switched at will, depending on who’s passing on the story] for the first time.”

To set the record straight, this is what Ramanujan actually wrote:

“No Hindu ever reads the Mahābhārata for the first time. And when he does get to read it, he doesn’t usually read it in Sanskrit. As one such native, I know the Hindu epics, not as a Sanskritist (which I am not), but through Kannada and Tamil, mostly through the oral traditions. I’ve heard bits and pieces of it in a tailor’s shop where a pundit used to regale us with Mahābhārata stories and large sections of a sixteenth-century Kannada text; from brahman cooks in the house; from an older boy who loved to keep us spellbound with it…in the evenings, under a large neem tree in a wealthy engineer’s compound; from a somewhat bored algebra teacher who switched from the binomial theorem to the problems of Draupadi and her five husbands. Then there were professional bards [who] would recite, sing and tell the Mahābhārata in sections night after night….They sang songs in several languages, told folktales, sometimes danced, quoted Sanskrit tags as well as the daily newspaper, and made the Mahābhārata entertaining, didactic and relevant to the listener’s present.”

Ramanujan situates this relay of South Asia’s classical narratives across vernacular genres in the public sphere, their intuitive rather than schooled transmission through home culture, and their dissemination through popular media in a broadly Hindu milieu. It should be clarified that the same processes have also long been integral to the cultural experience of many Indians belonging to other religious groups.

Elsewhere, he discusses the historical circulation of the other major Indian epic, the Ramayana, across South and Southeast Asia through a bewildering array of narrative, discursive, and performative forms, with Ram transformed variously into a Bodhisattva by Theravada monks and into an Islamic hero by the puppet masters of the wayang shadow theater. This leads him to dispense entirely with the notion of a single true and pure original of the epic: “I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or Ur-text—usually Valmiki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyana, the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki’s narrative that is carried from one language to another.”

With their picaresque, playfully unreliable narrators and their riffing, improvisatory energies, these rather colorful scenarios of the transmission of the Indian classics appear to be quite unlike that of the Greek and Latin classics, which are no longer linked to a collective living tradition. True, at one level, they are regarded with reverence as providing “Western” culture with its enlightened civilizational basis. And yet, on looking closely, one might be forgiven for noticing that women and slaves could not vote under the rules of Athenian democracy, while Roman political choices tended more toward authoritarian templates of empire than liberal models for a republic.

Undeniably, too, the Greek and Latin classics manifest themselves consistently through a Warburgian Nachleben der Antike, an “afterlife of the classical,” in the visual arts, literature, theater, and cinema. Hardly a year goes by, for instance, without a novelist invoking the shades of the Odyssey, a contemporary poet translating or critically adapting Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the Argonauts being incarnated in futuristic avatars on the screen. For the most part, though—and particularly through a lineage of scholarship that goes back to the Renaissance humanists—these classics of the ancient Aegean and Mediterranean worlds have been domesticated and reconstituted as relevant to elite academic and literary discourse rather than to the lived experience of rituals, seasonal ceremonials, and festivals articulated across social classes.

All the translations that appear in Ten Indian Classics are informed by the same fundamental question: How do we find the optimal language into which to render these texts? By which I do not mean a satisfactory set of solutions within the parameters of an admittedly absorbent and flexible English, but rather, a subtle architecture of nuance, register, tonality, familiarity, and strangeness that forms a third linguistic space beyond the binary of source and target language. A space that offers us revolving routes of discovery, difficulty and epiphany; that offers us gateways to forms of thought, imagination, and being that we may never have chanced upon before.

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What the classics that transit across the world’s borders in translation really do is invite us to step outside our zones of cultural comfort. They suggest that we could learn to appreciate the contours of thought and imagination from elsewhere and elsewhen. They educate us in an actively cosmopolitan sensibility, as a community of readers unconstrained by narrow definitions of identity and belonging, as participants in a Weltliteratur that does not subordinate the world’s literatures to a dominant model but builds into a polyphonic, kaleidoscopic assembly of them all.

This book, dear reader, is not the residues of vanished civilizations disturbed from their eternal rest in the archive of lost times. We hope that these poems and stories will resonate for you, find a place in your hearts, as prompts both to the visceral excitement and the generative disorientation of discovery.

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From Ten Indian Classics, forward by Ranjit Hoskote. Copyright © 2025. Available from Murty Classical Library of India and Harvard University Press.