An epic spread

Literature gives another fine example of unity in diversity. Indian literatures are extremely varied (and among the richest in the world). Over the centuries, despite differences in language and style, they have shared important themes and concerns.

Who has not heard of the Pañchatantra? This collection of delightful stories, with animals as the main characters, teaches important life skills and values such as honesty and kindness. The original Sanskrit text is at least 2,200 years old, but its stories have been retold in almost every Indian language. They have travelled far beyond India too, to Southeast Asia, the Arab world and Europe: there are about 200 adaptations in more than 50 languages! One collection of stories has become many.

The most striking case is India's two epics (long poems telling the adventures of heroes and other great figures of the past), the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. Together these Sanskrit epics might fill some 7,000 pages in their original versions. Their heroes fight to restore dharma. In the Mahābhārata, the Pāṇḍavas, with Kṛiṣhṇa's help, fight their cousins the Kauravas to win back their kingdom. In the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma, helped by his brother Lakṣhmaṇa and by Hanuman, defeats the demon Rāvaṇa, who had kidnapped his wife Sītā. Both contain many shorter stories about values that keep asking what is right and what is wrong.

For more than two thousand years these epics have been translated or retold in regional literatures in India and beyond, and there are countless folk versions. A scholar who surveyed Tamil Nadu alone counted 'about a hundred versions [of the Mahābhārata] that have come down to us in folklore forms'. Imagine the number for the whole of India!

Many communities have their own versions of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, and their own legends linking their history to the epics. This is especially true of tribal communities such as the Bhils, Gonds and Mundas, and most tribes of the northeast and the Himalayan regions, including Kashmir. These tribal versions are passed on by word of mouth, along with legends of how the heroes visited the tribe's own region. In a Nilgiri forest, Irula people still look after a shrine around a carved stone showing the five Pāṇḍava brothers, to mark their passing through.

The anthropologist K.S. Singh, who directed the 'People of India' project, observed: 'There is hardly a place in the country which the epic heroes such as the Pandavas, did not visit according to folklores.' The same is true of the Rāmāyaṇa. Over the centuries, perhaps more than any other texts, these two epics created a dense web of cultural links across India and much of Asia.

The chapter ends: 'Indian culture celebrates diversity as an enrichment, but never loses sight of the underlying unity which nourishes that diversity.' Or, in its last summary line: 'Diversity does not divide — it enriches.'