Ramayana
Book Review: Ramayana; A Retelling, by Daljit Nagra
Arifa Akbar, The Independent, Friday 18 October 2013
The Ramayana is regarded as the greatest of all devotional Hindu epics, alongside the Mahabharata. So it takes a brave poet to rework it with the audacity Daljit Nagra employs. "The Ramayana I present now is not the one I was told as a child," he writes in his introduction.
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Daljit Nagra interview: Yoda-speak and Yorkshire voices
Sameer Rahim, The Telegraph, 24 October 2013
Next Sunday, Indians all over the world will celebrate the festival of lights, or Diwali. The brightly coloured lamps and fireworks commemorate the climax of the epic poem The Ramayana, when the hero Rama brings home his abducted bride Sita. This much most schoolchildren will know from religious studies classes. But for the poet Daljit Nagra, born in Britain in 1966 to Punjabi parents, Rama's story was a powerful part of his upbringing. "My family would tell me the story in the small hours around Diwali time," he tells me over a fish curry at Rasa near Bond Street. "It was a good vs bad moral story - working hard and being dutiful rather than sensual or lazy."
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Daljit Nagra: My Ramayana
The Guardian, 11 October 2013
Growing up near London Daljit Nagra was enthralled by the fantastical stories of Rama and Sita told by his mother and grandmother. He explains why he wanted to retell these tales for a western audience.
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