A Cast of Millions : ARROW OF THE BLUE-SKINNED GOD: Retracing the Ramayana Through India, <i> By Jonah Blank (Houghton Mifflin: $22.95; 351 pp.)</i>

What Hollywood attempted on the big screen with casts of thousands in “Gandhi” and “A Passage to India” Jonah Blank has achieved in 350 stylistically rich pages. The former reporter and editor for Tokyo’s Asahi Evenings News offers a pointillistic landscape of the turbulent Indian subcontinent that appeals to both the senses and the soul.

With a racially fragmented population that numbers three-quarters of a billion people speaking 40 major and 200 minor tongues, the fabled land of the rajahs is not easily defined. Instead, Blank suggests that India is “more a conglomeration than a country, a hodgepodge of cultures and peoples held together only by an idea.” And, he adds wisely, “I am not sure just what that idea is.”

It’s an elusive concept, not unlike the devilish spirits that darted through the forests to tease and torment the legendary Lord Rama on his 14-year journey of exile across India some 3,500 years ago. The Ramayana, the epic that describes Rama’s trek, has been revered in India for centuries, read and recited as holy Hindu text and as practical how-to manual for everyday good living.

With a smattering of Hindi, Sanskrit and Punjabi at his command, and a translation of the Ramayana as his thematic guidebook, Blank sets out to follow the geographic path taken by Hinduism’s most popular deity. The villages he stops at and the conversations he has along the way provide Western readers with a dazzling portrait of a country whose warring factions seem constantly on the verge of civil war, even while they strive for individual salvation.

The fact that he brings it off without resorting to the kinds of patronizing observations that ruin too many debut travelogues is a credit to Blank’s talents as a storyteller and listener. He lets Indians of all castes and religious persuasions tell their own tales, from the disappointments of a washerwoman whacking dirty shirts on the banks of the Ganges to the aspirations of a young terrorist headed for a Punjabi boot camp.

But mostly, the timeless rhythm of the Ramayana sets the artistic pace for the author’s wanderings and ponderings. Where the incarnate god wrestled with character-testing temptations on his voyage, Blank pauses to ask about today’s challenges to Hinduism, which he contends is undergoing its most radical transformation in three centuries. He muses about its survival as a polytheistic faith in the 20th Century, and offers his own impressions of the central concepts of karma, dharma, yoga and belief in reincarnation.

Blank takes a number of Page 1 headlines from the popular press and explores them in the light of Rama’s examples and teachings. He touches on the brain drain that has resulted from government policies designed to provide jobs for members of former Untouchable castes: Many of India’s 17 million unemployed college graduates are now seeking jobs in England and America. He visits Mother Teresa, the “most widely adored sage in Calcutta,” and finds that she has “built up a better stock of karma than just about anybody on the planet.” He also makes the trek to the “bloody proving ground of good and evil” that is the Punjab, where he is given a tour of a police detention center and reminded of the threat that 690 million Hindus apparently feel from 90 million Muslim neighbors.

The word moral recurs in each of Blank’s no-frills chapters--Fate, Illusion, Evil, Love, to name a few. Commenting on the fact that the caste system has lost its original duty-bound intent and “moral essence” in recent years, a Madras journalist of the Brahmin (priestly) caste contends that “There is no longer a class of people to be the spiritual guides for the country, to provide a moral touchstone, to instruct, investigate, criticize, encourage or create.”

For all its discourses, however, Blank’s pilgrimage is not merely an earnest one. Along the way he is continually amused by the surprisingly absurd, like a store-front sign he spots one day that advertises St. Jude’s School of Driving. “There could be no more appropriate deity for Indian highways,” Blank writes. “Jude is . . . the patron saint of lost causes.” Then there’s the big electric clock at Delhi airport that holds steady at 1:12 a.m. for some 15 minutes, then jumps to 1:27 for another 20 minutes or so: “Closer inspection revealed that the clock was not plugged in, and its digits were being flipped manually by a little man in gray overalls whenever the mood took him.”

The splendors of India past and present are mirrored in the author’s exquisitely detailed observations. He climbs a track chiseled out of the mountain face at Ellora to see the legendary Kailasha Temple, and compares the artist’s rendering of the Himalayan home of the deity Shiva to “an ivory statuette hidden in a bar of soap.” Kailasha, says Blank, is a “gilt-framed mirror in which India cannot recognize its own reflection, but is quite content to admire the golden trimming.” Another well-known temple, the Palace of the Winds in Jaipur, strikes Blank as “a soaring pink stage set, a well-disguised row of bleachers five floors high.”

Does the author have any regrets about his voyage of self-discovery through India? Only that he learned virtually nothing about the world beyond Europe and America as a schoolboy. At a time when multiculturalism is flourishing on secondary and university campuses in this country, and California’s public schools have made sweeping changes in curriculum with the recent adoption of new social studies textbooks, Blank makes a persuasive case for the teaching of Asian cultures.

“Every day we in the West close our eyes to the wisdom and the beauty of four millennia, because it comes from societies we make little attempt to understand,” he writes. “The Ramayana, like ‘The Odyssey’ or ‘Paradise Lost,’ is a cultural treasure, not of one particular race but of all races. It tells us much about India, but just as much about ourselves.”