Ramayana
What it is. The story of Rama, prince of Ayodhya, exiled for fourteen years, whose wife Sita is abducted by the demon king Ravana and recovered after a war. It is the more compact and more emotionally direct of the two Sanskrit epics, and by a wide margin the more culturally pervasive across Asia.
Except that it isn’t one text. This is the thing to understand before anything else: there is no single Ramayana. There are hundreds, in Sanskrit, Tamil, Awadhi, Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Thai, Khmer, Javanese, Malay, Tibetan, Lao, and Filipino, and they don’t agree, sometimes not on anything you’d think was essential.
A.K. Ramanujan’s 1991 essay “Three Hundred Ramayanas” is the best short piece ever written on this, and it has its own instructive afterlife: it was removed from Delhi University’s history syllabus in 2011 after protests, which rather proves its point.
| Version | Language | Date | Notable difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| Valmiki | Sanskrit | c. 5th–4th c. BCE core | The base text. Books 1 and 7 are generally held to be later additions |
| Dasaratha Jataka | Pali | c. 4th c. BCE – 3rd c. CE | Buddhist. Rama and Sita are siblings; no abduction, no war |
| Paumachariya (Vimalasuri) | Prakrit | c. 1st–5th c. CE | Jain. Ravana, a noble Jain layman destroyed by his own passions; Lakshmana killed him, not Rama |
| Iramavataram (Kamban) | Tamil | 12th c. | Ravana is treated with real grandeur and pathos |
| Ramcharitmanas (Tulsidas) | Awadhi | 16th c. | Fully devotional; Rama as God rather than exemplary man. The version most of North India actually knows |
| Ramakien | Thai | 18th c., earlier roots | Hanuman is a considerably more worldly figure |
| Reamker | Khmer | c. 16th–17th c., earlier roots | Sita’s ordeal and estrangement dominate the ending |
What’s it arguing about? Duty against desire; the cost of ideal kingship; and, increasingly, the reason modern readers engage with it, the treatment of Sita. Rama’s demand that she prove her purity by fire after the war, and his later banishment of her while pregnant on the strength of a subject’s gossip, is the tradition’s oldest open wound. Many later versions soften it, some refuse it outright, and a large body of women’s folk-song traditions across India retells the whole story from Sita’s side.
Where it shows up now. Ramanand Sagar’s 1987 television serial, watched by something like eighty million people weekly, shaped modern popular Hindu religiosity more than any text has in a century. Periyar and the Dravidian movement inverted the story, reading Ravana as a southern king and Rama as a northern invader. And Ayodhya: the dispute over Rama’s traditional birthplace, the destruction of the Babri Masjid there in 1992, the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment, and the temple consecrated in 2024. That thread runs through modern Indian politics more than any other single religious question.
What to read. For Valmiki, the Princeton translation project (Goldman et al.) is the scholarly standard, and Arshia Sattar’s abridgment is the readable one; Philip Lutgendorf’s translation of Tulsidas in the Murty Classical Library is the one that actually shaped North India. Then Ramanujan’s essay, which is twenty pages and worth more than any of them, serves as orientation.