Ramayana

The Sanskrit text is divided into seven kandas. Bala Kanda covers Rama's birth and youth; Ayodhya Kanda the succession crisis in which Kaikeyi extracts the boons that send Rama into fourteen years of forest exile; Aranya Kanda the forest years and Sita's abduction; Kishkindha Kanda the alliance with the monkey king Sugriva; Sundara Kanda Hanuman's leap to Lanka and his finding of Sita, which is the book most often recited on its own as a devotional and protective text; Yuddha Kanda the war, Ravana's death and the return to Ayodhya; and Uttara Kanda the aftermath.

The first and last are widely held by textual scholars to be later additions to a core of books two to six. The grounds are stylistic and doctrinal together. In the core, Rama is a man of exceptional virtue; in the Bala and Uttara Kandas he is explicitly an incarnation of Vishnu, born to a divine plan, which changes the meaning of everything he suffers. The Uttara Kanda also contains the most disturbing material in the epic: after the return, Rama hears his subjects doubting Sita's purity and banishes her, pregnant, to Valmiki's hermitage, where she bears the twins Lava and Kusha, and where she finally asks the earth to take her back rather than submit to another public ordeal. Much of the modern argument about the Ramayana, about kingship, about what Sita is asked to bear, about whether the ending is tragedy or theology, is argument about a section many scholars regard as appended.

The Oriental Institute at Baroda produced a critical edition between 1951 and 1975, working from roughly two thousand manuscripts and sorting them into a Southern recension and a Northern one with north-western and north-eastern branches, whose differences are substantial.

Tradition makes Valmiki both author and character: a reformed bandit who becomes a sage, who shelters the exiled Sita, and whose grief at seeing a hunter shoot one of a mating pair of cranes breaks out of him as metrical speech, the origin, in the text's own account, of the shloka, the couplet in which most Sanskrit narrative was afterwards composed. He then hears Rama's story from the sage Narada and teaches it to Rama's own sons, who recite it back to him.

The scholarly account is of a bardic composition worked over for centuries. The core books are generally placed between roughly the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, with the text reaching something like its present shape in the early centuries CE. It was transmitted orally by reciters before it was written, and unlike the Vedas it had no permutation recitation to freeze it, which is why the recensions diverge as freely as they do.

What it did to Sanskrit literature is not disputed. The formal ornament, the elaborate descriptions of seasons and cities, the long similes and the sustained emotional register, particularly grief, which the text treats as its founding sentiment, became the model for kavya, courtly Sanskrit poetry, for the next fifteen hundred years. Kalidasa's Raghuvamsha retells Rama's dynasty within that inheritance.

Its political afterlife is equally live. Rama's reign, Ram Rajya, became the standard Indian image of just government, invoked by Gandhi to mean a moral polity and invoked since by Hindu nationalist movements to mean something considerably more specific, in a dispute over Rama's birthplace at Ayodhya that has occupied Indian courts and politics for decades.

The version most north Indians actually know is the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, begun at Ayodhya in 1574 and finished about three years later. It is not a translation. It is composed in Awadhi, an eastern Hindi vernacular, in seven kands mirroring Valmiki's but with a different theological centre: Rama is God without qualification, and the path offered to the reader is devotion. It is sung, recited in households, staged annually as the Ramlila across the Hindi belt, and quoted in ordinary speech. For most north Indian practice, it is the Ramayana; Valmiki's Sanskrit is the scholar's text.

The plurality goes much further. Kamban's Tamil Iramavataram, of about the twelfth century, is an independent poetic achievement with its own emphases. Krittibas Ojha produced a Bengali version in the fifteenth century. Jain retellings, beginning with Vimalasuri's Prakrit Paumachariya, make Ravana a noble Vidyadhara brought down by his own passion and have Lakshmana, not Rama, do the killing, since a Jain hero may not. The Buddhist Dasaratha Jataka makes Sita Rama's sister as well as his wife and dispenses with the war.

Outside India the story travelled with trade and with Sanskrit court culture. The Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana dates from around the ninth century; Thailand's Ramakien is a national epic with its own iconography and royal associations; Cambodia has the Reamker, Laos the Phra Lak Phra Lam, the Malay world the Hikayat Seri Rama, in which Islamic framing sits over the Hindu narrative. A.K. Ramanujan's essay on the many Ramayanas made the point academically and, when Delhi University removed it from a syllabus in 2011 after protests, demonstrated how contested the point remains.