The Ramayana
A prince exiled, a wife stolen, a monkey who leaps the ocean — the story that began Sanskrit poetry, and has been retold so many times that no one can count them.
Most Hindus meet the Rāmāyaṇa long before they can read: as a bedtime story, a television serial, a temple painting, a shadow-puppet play, a name — Rama, Sita, Lakshmana — given to a child. The Rāmāyaṇa, “Rama’s journey,” is an itihāsa, a story told as what truly happened, and for millions it is also scripture: Rama is an avatāra of Vishnu, and his life a model of dharma. This page opens Vālmīki’s poem book by book, then looks at the many other Rāmāyaṇas — and at the episodes that readers have argued over for centuries.
The first poem
Tradition calls Vālmīki the ādi-kavi, “the first poet,” and his work the ādi-kāvya, “the first poem.” The Bālakāṇḍa tells how it began. The sage Nārada visits Vālmīki and, asked whether any truly virtuous man lives in the world, tells him the story of Rama in brief. Soon afterwards, by the banks of the river Tamasā, Vālmīki watches a pair of krauñca birds — usually taken to be cranes — courting, when a hunter shoots the male. The female’s cry pierces him, and words burst out in a new rhythm:
यत्क्रौञ्चमिथुनादेकमवधीः काममोहितम् ॥ mā niṣāda pratiṣṭhāṃ tvam agamaḥ śāśvatīḥ samāḥ,
yat krauñca-mithunād ekam avadhīḥ kāma-mohitam Hunter, may you never find rest for endless years, for you killed one of this pair of krauñcas, lost in love. Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, Bālakāṇḍa, sarga 2
Vālmīki is astonished at what he has said: a curse, born of compassion, in perfect metre. The god Brahmā appears and tells him to use this very form — the śloka — to tell the story of Rama. Later Sanskrit poetics made the scene into a creed: grief (śoka) became verse (śloka), and true poetry is born of feeling. The first poem of the tradition begins with pity for a bird.
For the tradition, Vālmīki was Rama’s contemporary: Sita gives birth to her sons in his hermitage, and they are the first to sing his poem. Tradition counts the poem at 24,000 verses; the critical edition of all seven books has about 18,700. Historians date its core, books 2–6, to roughly the middle of the first millennium BCE, with the first and last books added later (see below). The critical edition prepared at the Oriental Institute in Baroda (1960–1975) sets out the oldest recoverable text.
The seven books
Vālmīki’s poem is divided into seven kāṇḍas. Step through the journey:
The Sixth Book is sometimes called the Laṅkākāṇḍa. Its ending, Rama’s homecoming to Ayodhyā, is what many North Indian Hindus celebrate at Deepavali with rows of lamps (see Deepavali, where Tamil Hindus tell a different story).
The characters and their ideals
The Rāmāyaṇa teaches mostly through people. Tap a name:
Many Rāmāyaṇas
Vālmīki’s is the oldest surviving Rāmāyaṇa, but it is one among many. In his famous essay “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas,” the poet and scholar A. K. Ramanujan argued that there is no single “original” to which the others are copies: there is a pool of signs — names, episodes, relationships — from which each culture draws its own telling. In 2011 the University of Delhi removed the essay from a history reading list after protests, which only made it more widely read.
A few of the great tellings:
- Kamban’s Tamil Irāmāvatāram (usually dated to the 12th century) is a new masterpiece rather than a translation, more devotional than Vālmīki and gentler to its heroes. It ends with Rama’s coronation.
- Tulsidas’s Rāmcaritmānas (16th century, Awadhi Hindi) is the scripture of North Indian households and of the Rāmlīlā plays. Here Rama is fully God from the first page.
- Kṛttivāsa’s Bengali Rāmāyaṇa (15th century) is the beloved Bengal version; in the 16th century the woman poet Candrāvatī composed a Bengali Rāmāyaṇa that centres on Sita’s suffering.
- Jain tellings, beginning with Vimalasūri’s Prakrit Paumacariya, make Rama a non-violent hero who ends as a liberated soul — it is Lakṣmaṇa who kills Rāvaṇa.
- The Buddhist Dasaratha Jātaka tells a short tale of exile and return, with no abduction and no war, as a lesson in calm acceptance of loss.
Rama in Southeast Asia
The story crossed the sea centuries ago and became part of the region’s own heritage. Java’s Old Javanese Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa and the 9th-century reliefs of Prambanan are among its oldest monuments there; Balinese dance-drama, including the kecak, still performs it. Thailand’s Ramakien, in the version composed under King Rama I, is painted around the cloisters of Bangkok’s Temple of the Emerald Buddha.
Malaysia has its own Rāmāyaṇa. The Malay Hikayat Seri Rama is a prose telling with an Islamic frame — Rawana’s power is granted after long penance, through the Prophet Adam — and one of its manuscripts, in Oxford’s Bodleian Library since the 17th century, is among the oldest Malay manuscripts known. Kelantan’s shadow-puppet theatre, the wayang kulit, long drew on Rama stories. And in Malaysian Hindu homes, Kamban, Tulsidas and the television epics all still carry the tale.
Community practice Many Malaysian Tamil families keep up a reading of Kamba Rāmāyaṇam or of the Sundarakāṇḍa in times of trouble; Hanuman temples and Rama Navami celebrations are familiar across the country.
The hard episodes
The Rāmāyaṇa is a story about ideals, and so readers have always asked whether its heroes live up to them. Four episodes have been argued over most. Each tab gives the traditional defence and the critique side by side.
The episode. After the war, Rama speaks harshly to Sita in public: she has lived in another man’s house. Sita rebukes him with dignity and enters a fire; the fire-god Agni returns her unharmed. This is the agni-parīkṣā.
Defences. Rama, it is said, never doubted her; he acted as a king who must be seen to be beyond reproach. Later tellings such as the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa and Tulsidas add that the real Sita had been hidden in the fire before the abduction, and only an illusory Sita was taken — so the ordeal simply brings her back.
Critiques. Feminist readers point out that the test is imposed on the woman, not the man, and that the later “illusory Sita” is itself a sign of how uncomfortable the scene made the tradition. Many prefer Vālmīki’s Sita precisely because she answers back.
The episode. In the Uttarakāṇḍa, Rama hears that his subjects gossip about Sita, and — though he knows her innocent — sends her, pregnant, to the forest. Later she refuses a second test and returns to the Earth.
Is it later? Most scholars think the Uttarakāṇḍa, like much of the Bālakāṇḍa, was added after the core poem: the Yuddhakāṇḍa ends with a natural conclusion and a blessing for those who hear it, and the first and last books stress Rama’s divinity more strongly. Many traditional Rāmāyaṇas, including Kamban’s and Tulsidas’s, do not tell the exile at all.
Defences and critiques. Defenders see Rama sacrificing his own happiness for his duty as king, and suffering for it until his death. Critics see a woman sacrificed to public opinion. Bhavabhūti’s 8th-century play Uttararāmacarita rewrote the ending so that the two are reunited — evidence that the tradition itself was troubled.
The episode. Rama shoots the monkey king Vālin from hiding while he fights his brother Sugrīva. The dying Vālin reproaches him: what fault had he committed against Rama?
Defences. In Vālmīki, Rama answers that Vālin had taken his brother’s wife, that he himself acts under the righteous rule of Bharata, and that kings may hunt animals from cover. Vālin accepts the answer and dies at peace.
Critiques. Readers from Kamban onwards have felt the force of Vālin’s complaint, and Kamban gives it powerful voice. The episode is often cited, alongside the Mahābhārata, as a case where dharma is “subtle” and the hero’s conduct is not simple.
The episode. In the Uttarakāṇḍa a Brahmin’s young son dies, and Rama is told the cause: somewhere a śūdra is practising austerities forbidden to his class. Rama finds the ascetic Śambūka and beheads him; the boy revives.
Defences. Traditional readers note that the passage belongs to the later Uttarakāṇḍa, that in some tellings Śambūka is granted heaven by Rama’s hand, and that the episode reflects the law books of its time, not Rama’s character.
Critiques. For Dalit and anti-caste thinkers — B. R. Ambedkar and Periyar E. V. Ramasamy among them — Śambūka is the plainest evidence that the epic upholds caste hierarchy by violence. The episode is stated here plainly: in this text, a man is killed for seeking the divine outside his birth. See Varna & Jati.
None of this cancels the poem’s power. It is part of why the story keeps being retold: each generation argues with Rama as well as loving him.
Check your knowledge:
Vālmīki’s first śloka was a response to…
A hunter shot one of a pair of krauñca birds, and Vālmīki’s grief became verse.
In which book does Hanuman leap to Laṅkā?
The Sundarakāṇḍa, the fifth book.
The Malay telling of the Rama story is the…
The Hikayat Seri Rama. The Ramakien is Thai; the Paumacariya is Jain.
Questions people often ask
Did Rama really live?
For the tradition, yes — in the Tretā Yuga, an age long before ours. Historians have found no evidence outside the texts, and treat the Rāmāyaṇa as a literary and religious work. Both views can sit beside each other: what the story teaches does not depend on archaeology.
Which Rāmāyaṇa is the “real” one?
Vālmīki’s is the oldest and the most authoritative in Sanskrit. But for a devotee in Varanasi the Mānas is the Rāmāyaṇa, for a Tamil scholar Kamban, for a Thai dancer the Ramakien. Ramanujan’s point was that all of them are real.
What should I read first?
A good retelling first — C. Rajagopalachari’s or R. K. Narayan’s — then a translation of Vālmīki, perhaps beginning with the Sundarakāṇḍa.
॥ Pause and reflect
- Which character do you most recognise in yourself — Rama, Bharata, Lakṣmaṇa, Sita, Hanuman? Why?
- How did you first hear the Rāmāyaṇa? Whose version was it?
- How do you hold a story you love when parts of it trouble you?
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Key terms on this page
Sources & further reading
- Robert P. Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland Goldman et al. (trans.), The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, 7 vols. (Princeton University Press, 1984–2017).
- G. H. Bhatt, U. P. Shah et al. (eds.), The Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa: Critical Edition, 7 vols. (Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1960–1975).
- A. K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (University of California Press, 1991).
- Paula Richman (ed.), Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition (University of California Press, 2001).
- John Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics (Brill, 1998).
- Arshia Sattar (trans.), The Rāmāyaṇa by Vālmīki, abridged (Penguin, 1996); R. K. Narayan, The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic (1972).