There are children across India and its diaspora who could not tell you the year of their grandparents' wedding but can tell you, without pausing, how Hanuman leapt the ocean. The Ramayana is not so much a book Hindus read as a story they are born into. It is performed at Ramlila every autumn, remembered at Diwali when lamps are lit for Rama's homecoming, and quoted whenever someone needs a word for loyalty, exile, or a promise kept at great cost.
What follows is for anyone who knows the story in fragments and would like to see its whole shape.
Valmiki and his poem
Tradition names the sage Valmiki as the author and calls him the adi-kavi, the first poet. Walking by a river, the story goes, he saw a hunter shoot one of a pair of krauncha birds and heard the mate cry out in grief. A curse rose to his lips, and he noticed it had come out in a perfectly measured verse. From that grief (shoka) came the shloka, the metre in which the Ramayana and most Sanskrit poetry is composed.
The Sanskrit Ramayana runs to roughly twenty-four thousand verses in seven books, called kandas:
- Bala Kanda: Rama's birth, youth and marriage to Sita.
- Ayodhya Kanda: the coronation that never happens, and the exile.
- Aranya Kanda: the forest years and Sita's abduction.
- Kishkindha Kanda: the alliance with the monkey king Sugriva.
- Sundara Kanda, the beautiful book: Hanuman's leap to Lanka and the finding of Sita.
- Yuddha Kanda: the war and the return to Ayodhya.
- Uttara Kanda: the later years, Sita's second exile, and Lava and Kusha.
Scholars place the core of the poem roughly between 500 BCE and the early centuries CE, and many regard the first and last books as later additions.
The story in brief
King Dasharatha of Ayodhya, of the solar line of Ikshvaku, has three queens and no heir. After a sacrifice for sons, four are born: Rama to Kausalya, Bharata to Kaikeyi, and the twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna to Sumitra. Rama is Vishnu born as a man to end the tyranny of Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, whose boons made him invulnerable to gods and demons but not to a human being.
As a youth Rama is taken by the sage Vishvamitra to guard his rituals from demons, and at Mithila he lifts and breaks the great bow of Shiva that no other prince could string. By this he wins Sita, daughter of King Janaka, who had found her as an infant in a furrow of the earth. The wedding is remembered as Sita's swayamvara, her choosing of a husband, though in Valmiki it is a test of strength set by her father.
Years later Dasharatha prepares to crown Rama. On the eve of the coronation Kaikeyi, poisoned by the words of her maid Manthara, claims two boons the king once promised her: Bharata is to be crowned, and Rama is to live in the forest for fourteen years. Dasharatha is broken, but Rama accepts without protest. Sita insists on going with him, and Lakshmana will not be left behind. Dasharatha dies of grief. Bharata, who was away, refuses the throne, follows Rama to the forest, and when he cannot persuade him to return, carries Rama's sandals back to Ayodhya and rules in their name.
In the forest Ravana's sister Shurpanakha, rejected by both brothers, is disfigured by Lakshmana. Ravana's revenge is to send the demon Maricha as a golden deer; while both brothers are drawn away chasing it, he comes as a wandering mendicant and carries Sita off to Lanka. The old vulture Jatayu dies trying to stop him.
Searching southward, Rama befriends the exiled monkey king Sugriva, kills his brother Vali to restore him, and the monkey hosts spread out to search for Sita. Hanuman, son of the wind, leaps the ocean, finds her in Ravana's Ashoka grove, gives her Rama's ring, is captured, and burns Lanka with his flaming tail before returning. A causeway is built across the sea, Ravana's brother Vibhishana comes over to Rama's side, and in the war that follows Kumbhakarna, Indrajit and finally Ravana himself fall. Sita passes through fire to prove her purity, and the exiles return to Ayodhya in the flying chariot Pushpaka as the fourteen years end. Rama's reign, Rama Rajya, becomes the Hindu image of a just kingdom.
The seventh book tells how gossip in the city leads Rama to send the pregnant Sita to Valmiki's hermitage, where she raises the twins Lava and Kusha, who years later sing the Ramayana before Rama himself. Asked once more to prove herself, Sita calls on her mother the Earth, who opens and takes her home.
Maryada Purushottama
Rama is called maryada purushottama, the best among men who kept within the bounds (maryada) of right conduct. He is not shown as a god who finds dharma easy but as a man who chooses it when every alternative would be more comfortable: exile over the throne, his father's word over Lakshmana's urging to seize it, his people's trust over his own happiness. The tradition has never been silent about the cost of those choices; the treatment of Sita in the final book has been questioned by devotees for as long as it has existed. Rama's greatness lies in holding to his word, not in any claim that every outcome was happy.
What each character teaches
- Sita is no passive figure: she argues her way into exile, refuses Ravana for a year under threat of death, and in the end chooses her own departure.
- Lakshmana is service without self, guarding his brother for fourteen years. His wife Urmila waited the same fourteen years in Ayodhya, a sacrifice the poem barely mentions.
- Bharata shows that renouncing power can be harder than seizing it.
- Hanuman is devotion that asks for nothing. His strength is enormous and never used for himself; the Sundara Kanda is recited in many homes because it is his book.
- Ravana is learning without humility. He knew the Vedas, worshipped Shiva and ruled a golden city, and desire undid it all.
- Vibhishana chose dharma over family and was called a traitor for it; Kaikeyi chose family over dharma and lost both.
- Dasharatha reminds us that promises carelessly given still bind.
- Shabari, the forest ascetic who offered Rama berries she had tasted to be sure they were sweet, teaches that love outweighs protocol.
Many Ramayanas
The story has been retold in every Indian language and across Southeast Asia, not as translations but as fresh poems with their own emphases.
Kamban's Ramavataram in Tamil, placed by scholars somewhere between the ninth and twelfth centuries, is one of the summits of Tamil literature, with a Ravana of real grandeur. Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, composed in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, is the Ramayana most North Indians know by heart. Tulsidas wrote in the people's language rather than Sanskrit so that the story could reach everyone; his Rama is openly the supreme Brahman, the poem is steeped in bhakti (loving devotion), and it leaves out Sita's final exile. The Ramlila plays performed every autumn follow his text, and the Hanuman Chalisa is his too. Krittibas in Bengali, Ezhuthachan in Malayalam and Madhava Kandali in Assamese are among many others; the Jain and Buddhist traditions have Ramayanas of their own; and in Thailand it is the Ramakien, in Cambodia the Reamker. When people say "the Ramayana" they are naming a river with many streams.
To reflect on
Choose one character and read their part of the story as though it were about a choice you yourself have to make this week. The epic's enduring question is Dasharatha's: what do you do when every option breaks a promise to someone? Rama's answer is not the only one the tradition offers, but it is the one that gave India its image of what a good man might look like.