Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa रामायण

What it is

The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, "the journey of Rāma", is honoured as the ādikāvya, the first poem of Sanskrit literature. In about 24,000 verses it tells the life of Rāma, prince of Ayodhyā: his marriage to Sītā, his fourteen years of exile in the forest with Sītā and his brother Lakṣmaṇa, Sītā’s abduction by Rāvaṇa, king of Laṅkā, the search and the war to free her with the help of Hanumān and the vānaras, and the return to Ayodhyā.

How it is arranged

The poem has seven books (kāṇḍas): Bāla (childhood), Ayodhyā (the court and the exile), Araṇya (the forest), Kiṣkindhā (the alliance with the vānaras), Sundara (Hanumān’s leap to Laṅkā and his search for Sītā), Yuddha (the war) and Uttara (the later years). It opens with a frame story: the sage Nārada tells Vālmīki about Rāma, and Vālmīki, overcome by grief at seeing a hunter kill one of a pair of cranes, speaks the first śloka, the metre in which the whole poem is then composed.

What it teaches

The Rāmāyaṇa is a poem about dharma in relationships: what it means to be a good son, brother, wife, husband, friend and ruler. Rāma accepts exile so that his father’s word is kept; Bharata refuses the throne and rules only in Rāma’s name; Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā choose hardship out of love; Hanumān serves with courage and devotion. It also shows the destructive force of desire and pride in Rāvaṇa. Some episodes, such as Sītā’s ordeal by fire and her later exile, have been questioned and debated for centuries, and the tradition keeps that discussion alive.

What it can mean in your life

The Rāmāyaṇa offers images of steadiness to hold on to: keeping one’s word when it costs everything, loyalty between brothers, friendship across differences, and devotion like Hanumān’s that turns fear into courage. It has been retold in almost every language of South and South-East Asia, from Kamban’s Tamil Rāmāyaṇa and Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas to the Thai Ramakien, and it lives in festivals such as Dussehra and Diwali and in the Rāmlīlā plays, which UNESCO recognises as Intangible Cultural Heritage.

Where to begin

Begin with the first chapter of the Bāla book, in which Nārada sums up the whole story, then read the Ayodhyā book for the exile and the Sundara book for Hanumān’s journey, which many people recite on its own. The story pages on Vedyatra retell key scenes with pictures.

Origins and dating

Tradition holds that Vālmīki was a contemporary of Rāma and that Rāma’s sons first sang the poem. Historians think the poem grew over several centuries, with its core books (2 to 6) older than the first and last, and date it roughly between the 5th century BCE and the early centuries CE.

The text on Vedyatra

The Sanskrit here comes from Sanskrit Wikisource, one page per sarga, and every verse links to the exact page revision it was taken from. This is the vulgate, the text printed in most Indian editions and recited at home, with about 23,500 verses in 645 sargas. Where a page had a typing error in a verse number, leftovers of an automatic conversion inside a word, or a variant reading in brackets, Vedyatra corrected it, and every correction is listed in the open-source import tool. One verse (Ayodhyā 55.17) is left out because its text on Wikisource cannot be read, and an extra sarga that Wikisource prints after Araṇya 56 and marks as an interpolation is not included.

The Baroda critical edition (1960–1975) compared some two thousand manuscripts and reconstructed the oldest recoverable text. It is about a quarter shorter, about 18,700 verses: many passages found in the vulgate appear only in some manuscripts, so the critical edition prints them in its notes and appendices, and its sarga and verse numbers differ from the vulgate's. Where a passage here is absent from the critical edition or reads differently there, that is explained in a note on the passage, kept apart from the text, as passages are reviewed.

Most scholars regard the first and last books, and the Uttara Kāṇḍa above all, as later than the core of the poem (books 2 to 6). The Uttara Kāṇḍa is included because it is part of the received text, and each of its verses carries a note saying so. Wikisource prints Ayodhyā 48 to 88 and Araṇya 14 and 15 with the words separated (sandhi undone); those verses are shown as printed, with a note, until a joined text can be checked against a printed edition.

Passages to start with

• Bāla Kāṇḍa, chapter 1: Nārada tells Vālmīki the whole story in brief.
• Bāla Kāṇḍa, chapter 2: The grief of the crane and the birth of the śloka.
• Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa: Rāma accepts exile to keep his father’s promise.
• Sundara Kāṇḍa: Hanumān’s leap across the ocean and his search for Sītā.