Ramayanaਰਾਮਾਇਣ

The Ramayana is the story India tells about what a good life costs. Its hero does everything right: he gives up a throne without bitterness, keeps his father's word at the price of his own crown, and stays faithful through fourteen years of forest and war, and the poem never pretends the price was small. That is why the epic is not a museum piece but a living text, staged every autumn in Ramlila grounds, retold at bedsides, and carried across Asia wherever Indian stories travelled.

What is the Ramayana?

The Ramayana is a Sanskrit epic of about 24,000 shlokas arranged in seven kandas, books, and some 500 sargas, chapters. Tradition attributes it to Valmiki, honoured as the Adi Kavi, the first poet, who is said to have invented the shloka metre in a moment of grief and to appear inside his own poem, sheltering Sita in its later chapters. With the Mahabharata it forms the Itihasas, the two great epics, histories as the tradition counts them, of ancient India. Scholars date its core composition somewhere between the eighth and fourth centuries BCE, with passages and the final book added over following centuries, and the text survives in northern and southern recensions that differ in detail but not in story.

The story of Ram

Ram, eldest son of King Dasharatha of Ayodhya, is the heir apparent, perfect in every virtue. On the eve of his coronation his stepmother Kaikeyi claims two old boons: the throne for her own son Bharata, and fourteen years of forest exile for Ram. Ram accepts without protest, and his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana refuse to be left behind. In the forest the demoness Shurpanakha's insulted desire brings her brother Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, into the story; by a trick, a golden deer that draws the brothers away, Ravana carries Sita off to Lanka. Ram allies with the vanaras, the monkey people of Kishkindha, and their greatest servant finds her: Hanuman, who leaps the sea, speaks with Sita in her captivity, and carries her message back. A bridge is built, the armies cross, and after a terrible war Ravana falls. Sita is restored, the fourteen years end almost to the day, and Ram returns to Ayodhya to be crowned at last, the return that Diwali celebrates and Dussehra anticipates.

The seven books

The seven kandas carry the arc. Bala Kanda tells Ram's birth, childhood and marriage to Sita. Ayodhya Kanda, the book of the court, builds to the boons, the exile and old Dasharatha's death of grief. Aranya Kanda is the forest book, ending with Sita's abduction. Kishkindha Kanda makes the monkey alliance. Sundara Kanda, the beautiful book, belongs to Hanuman and is still recited on its own as a prayer. Yuddha Kanda is the war for Lanka. Uttara Kanda, the last book, tells what followed, including Sita's final exile and the end of Ram's time on earth; scholars widely treat it, like parts of the first book, as a later addition to the core poem.

Ram: the ideal and the god

Ram is honoured as maryada purushottam, the supreme man of honour, the ideal son, husband, brother and king, whose excellence lies in keeping dharma when it costs him everything. He is also worshipped as God: the seventh avatar of Vishnu, born to destroy Ravana. The poem holds both together, and India has argued about their balance ever since: the very human grief of Ram at Sita's loss, and his treatment of her after the war, are passages the tradition itself reads with discomfort as much as devotion, and modern retellings keep returning to them. Sita is no decoration in this: her refusal, her captivity, her fire ordeal and her final withdrawal are the moral weight of the poem's second half.

The Ramayana across Asia

No Indian text travelled further. In the sixteenth century Tulsidas retold the story in Awadhi as the Ramcharitmanas, the book that put Ram into the daily devotion of the Hindi north and remains, for millions, the Ramayana itself. Kamban's Tamil Iramavataram is older still and a classic in its own right. Beyond India the story became national epics: the Thai Ramakien, with its own Hanuman-centred splendours, the Cambodian Reamker carved on Angkor's walls, the Malay Hikayat Seri Rama, Javanese and Lao versions, and Jain and Buddhist tellings in which the characters carry different values entirely. The bones stay the same everywhere: exile, loss, loyalty, war and return.

The Ramayana in Punjab

Punjab meets the Ramayana most visibly in the autumn: the Ramlila grounds of its towns stage the epic night by night through Navratri to Dussehra, and the burning of Ravana's effigies is the signal that Diwali is twenty days away. Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas is read and sung in Punjab's temples and homes, and the story's sites are woven into the region's own map: tradition attaches episodes of Ram's exile and Sita's story to places across the wider Punjab region, and its characters, Ram, Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman, are household names in Punjabi speech, where a loyal man is still a Lakshman and treachery still has a Vibhishana to answer it.