The global Ramayana
The simplest testament of what French publisher and editor, Diane de Selliers, achieved by collating a French edition of the epic Ramayana was encapsulated by Professor Sheldon Pollock of Princeton University. “Your jaw will fall slack
when you see the grandeur of Madame de Selliers’ Ramayana,” said Pollock, and added, “You need to go back to Akbar or Jagat Singh to find anything so sumptuous. This will clearly be the most beautiful edition of the work since the days of the Mughals.”
Diane’s coffee table books are much-loved and her one-book-a-year regime ensures that the curiosity is well-built and patrons of her work aren’t kept waiting for long. But for Ramayana she had to break the annual release rule, as it took her 10 years to come up with the French epic. She recalls, “When I had come to India 14-years-back (in Kerala) I was enamoured by the discovery of quality, beauty, elegance and spirituality here and decided to do a book.”
And of all the epics, Ramayana instantly struck a chord with her, she tells us why. “The Ramayana is very close to the Greek\Latin epics like the ones by Homer that featured a single hero and his entire cycle of life. And because I have a bias for all things that revolve around light I loved the luminous nature of the the entire epic — the sun, the jewellery, mirrors, water enamoured me. And Ramayana is a text that is in the heart of all Indians, whether they are religious or not.”
It took her and her team more than 10 years of research to identify around 5,000 miniature paintings illustrating the Ramayana. Of those, 660 were selected to make the volume an anthology of major works preserved in more than 70 museums in India, Europe, United States of America, Pakistan, Singapore, Australia and Canada, as well as a large number of hidden treasures kept in private collections around the world.
The seven volumes contain commentaries and introduction by Amina Taha Hussein-Okada, keeper of Indian Art at the Asian Arts Guimet museum (Paris) and is priced at approximately `58,000.
The daunting 10-year-long effort has been demanding, and when asked is she planned to work on other Indian epics, like the Mahabharat, Diane jocularly says, “It took seven volumes (that together weigh approximately 14 kilos) to do the complete Ramayana. For The Mahabharat, I’ll probably have to provide book buyers with porters and palanquins to take the volume home.”
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