Ramanujan does not narrate, for example, the Pabuji cult, which I came across in William Dalrymple’s “Nine Lives”. Worshipped in a small area of Rajasthan near Bikaner, Pabuji’s tale is narrated in a 600-year-old poem, which revolves around the “semi-divine warrior and incarnate god, Pabu, who died protecting a goddess’s magnificent herds against demonic rustlers”. These include the wicked villain Jindrav Khinchi while Pabuji also protects his women from a “barbaric, cow-mudering Muslim marauder Mirza Khan Pathan.” Then Pabuji proceeds to Lanka and scores a splendid victory over “Ravana, the ten-headed Demon-King of Lanka, from whom he steals a herd of camels as a wedding gift for his favourite niece.” Dalrymple refers to sociologist Komal Kothari who was fascinated by the fusion of a local hero’s tale with the epic Ramayana and concluded that the distinction between classic epics and folk epics often gets blurred.

Left-wing scholars know well that over time, the Great Tradition tends to subsume the Little Tradition. In the case of Ramayana, Valmiki’s version, taken forward by Tulsidas’s Ram Charit Manas has emerged as the dominant interpretation of the Great Epic. Fishing out odd texts from local variations or taking recourse to folk and tribal versions to indoctrinate undergraduate students is a deliberate ploy to create confusion. At no stage can Valmiki Ramayana or Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas be compared in influence or importance to examples from the Little Tradition.