Rooster

Published on 25th March, 2018, in Mid-Day. Valmiki composed the Ramayana and it is still popular though no one reads the old 2,000-year-old Sanskrit version, nor the 1,000-year-old regional classics in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali, Assamese, Awadhi. What we usually access as colloquial folk versions, often transmitted orally, known as the Ramakatha. In Odisha, there have been many such local versions of the Ramayana with subplots that are unique to the region. One of these subplots involves a rooster. In the classical Valmiki retelling, after Ram discovering that the golden deer he was chasing was in fact a shape-shifting demon, Ram returns to his ..