Shakespeare’s Othello and Valmiki Ramayana: Reading by the Honourable Srinivasa Sastri (Message No. 13,651)

You are an angel and Ravana is a bad person. When you were in his power, how is it possible that things were good? that was all he could say, a kind of negative attitude. In the case of Othello,

—Othello III iii. 326-9

Then at the last moment Lodovico asks Othello, when everything is over and Desdemona has been strangled, everything has come to light and the truth has come out.

What will be said to you? And listen to the answer. How true, how natural, how exactly a parallel to what Sri Rama says,

Othello :-

Why, and thing:

An honorable killer, if you will?

I did nothing rashly, but everything for honor

Othello VII 293-5

Then, at the end, right at the end, Othello says that he is taking leave, not only of Lodovico but of the others, of the world, and, as it were, teaching the world about the devastation wrought by jealousy.

—Othello V ii. 342-351

Othello, the great warrior, a stern man, who has seen men fall around him and yet he has not moved an inch, that man says:

“I have never cried in my life. I don’t know what tears are.”

“of one whose modest eyes

Although they are not used to the melting mood,

Let tears fall as fast as Arabian trees

Their medicinal gum”

Now I must take leave—I hope it is not too late—to show you the other side of the human character. We have just seen, ladies and gentlemen, how jealousy corrupts our nature, makes us see things that are not there, closes our eyes to clear evidence, makes us beasts—yes, that is what it does.

Then Sastri compared King Arthur of the Round Table by Lord Tennyson………………………

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My comments

Before the paragraphs quoted above, Sastri said that Rama also abandoned Sita under the influence of jealousy. Not many people will agree with Mr. Sastri. I don’t think Valmiki ever said that Rama sent Sita to the forest out of jealousy. He heard what the dhobiwala and others thought of Sita’s stay in Asokavana. He wanted to prove to the world that she was pure and behaved like a king. Even in the Tamil Puranas we see Manu Neethi Choza crushing his own sun under the chariot because a cow complained that the king’s son had crushed her calf by driving recklessly. The moral of the story is that a king should apply the laws of the land equally to everyone. Even Rama’s killing of Vali from behind a tree is justified by Vali himself. If Valmiki wanted to hide it, he could have easily cut that part out. So my point is, in Valmiki’s Ramayana Rama never acted out of jealousy towards Sita. But Kaikeyi did something out of envy.

xxxxxx

Queen Kaikeyi’s mind was poisoned by her evil hunchbacked maid, Manthara; a seed of distrust planted in the queen’s mind led to Ram’s banishment from Ayodhya and caused chaos in the royal family. In Othello, Iago acted like Manthara.

The game of manipulation in Othello, one of William Shakespeare’s four great tragedies, is similar to that in Kaikeyi’s story from the Ramayana. However, the contexts are very different. In the play, Iago plants a seed of distrust in Othello’s mind about the fidelity of his wife, Desdemona. So masterful is Iago’s psychological manipulation and exploitation of sexual jealousy that Othello is driven to strangle his wife.

–subham—

Tags – Jealousy, Envy, Othello, Shakespeare, Valmiki Ramayana, Honourable Srinivasa Sastri, Talking, Iago, Wicked Manthara, Kaikeyi, Desdemona