Vernacularising Dharma: Transitivity, Agency, and Ethical Recontextualisation in the Vālmīki and Kandali Rāmāyaṇas

Abstract

This article suggests that the vernacularisation of Rāmāyaṇa that happened in Assamese by the 14th-century writer, Mādhava Kandali, is neither mere translation of the Vālmīki narrative in a different language but rather a reconfiguration, at the level of grammar, of the linguistic representation of ethical agency. Themes of the four ethically decisive moments examined in the article, from both textual sources – Rāma's exile, the confrontation between Kaushalyā and Kaikeyī, Bharata's rejection of the throne and Sītā's agni parīkṣā – are analysed through the lens of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), which focuses on transitivity analysis, participant-role coding and modality. A common theme that can be seen across the verses studied is that Vālmīki's Sanskrit tends to frame the ethical subject as the grammatical Patient of the causative and/or obligatory processes, whereas Kandali's Assamese tends to frame the ethical subject as the volitional Actor. The pattern presented in the article is not a statistically determined pattern, rather it is an illustrative, qualitative pattern and the result of the author's proposal can be the basis for a future study of the clause coded corpus. The article does not necessarily treat Vālmīki and Kandali as two distinct moral philosophy, but it does suggest that the text of Kandali does remodulate and redistribute moral emphasis already implicit in the shared narrative tradition, and that this is a linguistically verifiable example of what Sheldon Pollock calls vernacularisation as philosophical reorientation, which is later discussed with other critics of Pollock's model. The article's contribution is methodological, rather than interpretive: it suggests that the technique of transitivity analysis can be used to study the ethical agency of premodern South Asian narrative more generally.