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How many Ramayanas are there? Literary scholar A K Ramanujan asked whether it was three hundred or three thousand. In “Nepal’s Ramayanas”, Amish Raj Mulmi looks at the ones that belong to Nepal. He traces Ram worship in Nepal back to 608 CE, to a Licchavi inscription at Hadigaon, and to an 11th-century manuscript in a Nepalbhasa script that is considered one of the oldest versions of the epic. He notes that Janakpur, today the main site of Ram worship in Nepal, has a recorded history that goes back only to the 18th century, and follows anthropologist Richard Burghart’s account of how ascetics came to identify it as Sita’s home. The essay asks whether the study of history and culture should stop at modern political boundaries: himalmag.com/nepals-ramayana…

Garment workers in Bangladesh are asking for a minimum monthly wage of 30,000 taka (USD 242 approximately). That is more than double the current standard, and workers cite rising living costs. After days of protests, which turned violent in Dhaka on Sunday, hundreds of factories have closed. Workers take home around 13,000 taka (USD 105 approximately) a month, among the lowest pay in the world, in an industry that employs around four million people and generates nearly USD 40 billion a year. We’re returning to Dina M Siddiqi’s 2022 essay which looks at four decades of Bangladesh’s garment industry through the 2013 Rana Plaza collapse, the Bangladesh Accord and the pandemic, when mass order cancellations left workers unpaid. She cites Mark Anner’s finding that average prices paid to Bangladeshi suppliers fell 13 percent between 2011 and 2016, and asks how a model of development built on the industry still leaves workers without a cushion after 40 years. Read the essay: himalmag.com/scandalising-th…