What Is the Ramayana? A Story Told Across Half the World
By the BrainSnail editorial team. How these articles are written and checked, and how to tell us when one is wrong.
A prince is exiled on the eve of his coronation by a promise his father cannot break. His wife follows him into the forest and is abducted by a demon king. He allies with an army of monkeys, crosses to the island fortress, kills the abductor and recovers her, and then, in the part that has generated two thousand years of argument, demands proof of her purity and later exiles her anyway. The story exists in hundreds of versions across a dozen countries and they do not agree about what it means.
The story in outline
The Sanskrit version attributed to Valmiki runs to about twenty-four thousand verses in seven books, and the shape is consistent across most retellings:
- •Rama, eldest son of the king of Ayodhya, is about to be crowned when a younger queen invokes two old promises to send him into exile for fourteen years and place her own son on the throne
- •Rama accepts without protest, which is the point of his character, and his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana insist on going with him
- •Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, abducts Sita by a trick and holds her in his garden, where she refuses him
- •Rama allies with the monkey kingdom, and Hanuman, the monkey general, crosses to Lanka, finds Sita, is captured and escapes
- •An army builds a causeway to the island, a long war follows, and Ravana is killed
- •Sita undergoes an ordeal by fire to prove her fidelity, and the couple return and are crowned
- •In the seventh book, popular rumour about Sita's time in captivity leads Rama to exile her while she is pregnant; she raises their sons in a hermitage, and when Rama later summons her she asks the earth to take her back, and it does
Why it is not one text
The most important thing to understand about it is that no single authoritative version exists. A. K. Ramanujan's essay counting three hundred versions, published in 1991, argued that the relationship between them is not one of original and copies but of a shared field of stories in continuous dialogue, and that a listener in any tradition hears a version against the background of others they know. The differences are substantial rather than decorative. The Jain versions make Ravana a tragic and admirable figure destroyed by his own passion and have Lakshmana rather than Rama kill him. Buddhist versions make Rama and Sita siblings and remove the war. Several South Indian and folk versions centre Sita and treat her ordeal as an indictment of Rama. Women's oral traditions across India preserve songs from Sita's perspective that are considerably less approving. The Tamil version by Kamban is a major literary work in its own right rather than a translation, and the sixteenth-century Hindi version by Tulsidas, the Ramcharitmanas, is the text most north Indians actually know and is closer to a devotional work than a narrative one.
How far it travelled
The story spread across Southeast Asia with Indian trade and religion from roughly the first millennium and was thoroughly localised in each place. Thailand's Ramakien is a national epic, with the story painted along the entire gallery wall of the royal temple in Bangkok and with kings taking the name Rama. Indonesia has the Kakawin Ramayana in Old Javanese and performs it in shadow puppet theatre, which is remarkable given that Indonesia is the largest Muslim-majority country in the world and treats the story as cultural heritage rather than as religion. Cambodia's Reamker is carved along the walls of Angkor Wat. Versions exist in Laos, Myanmar, Malaysia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Tibet, and in Chinese sources where the Monkey King of Journey to the West may owe something to Hanuman, which is disputed. Each version adapts the characters to local ideas of kingship and virtue, which is why the Thai Ravana is treated more sympathetically than the Sanskrit one.
The arguments it generates
The text is contested in ways that are current rather than academic. Sita's treatment is the oldest objection, raised within the tradition itself, and the fire ordeal and the later exile are read variously as evidence of a patriarchal social order, as a king sacrificing personal happiness to public duty, or as later additions, since many scholars regard the seventh book and parts of the first as added to an earlier core. Caste appears in the episode of Shambuka, an ascetic of low caste killed by Rama for practising austerities reserved to higher castes, which some traditions omit and which has been the subject of direct challenge, including a 1954 play by the Tamil reformer Periyar and an earlier one by the Marathi writer. The politics are live: the figure of Rama and the site claimed as his birthplace at Ayodhya became the centre of a dispute that produced the demolition of a mosque in 1992, subsequent violence and a Supreme Court judgment in 2019. Ramanujan's essay on the three hundred versions was itself removed from a Delhi University syllabus in 2011 after protests, which is a demonstration of the essay's own argument about which versions may be acknowledged.
The takeaway
The narrative follows a prince exiled by a promise, his wife's abduction by the king of Lanka, a war fought with an army of monkeys, her recovery, an ordeal by fire and her later exile. No authoritative single version exists, and Ramanujan counted three hundred, with Jain versions sympathetic to Ravana, Buddhist versions making the couple siblings, and women's oral traditions unapproving of Rama. The story is a national epic in Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia, and disputes about Sita's treatment, caste and the site at Ayodhya are current rather than historical.