Ramáyana Book I: Boyhood: Ancilliaries

Introduction

1. General Introduction

Few works of literature produced in any place at any time have been as popular, influential, imitated, and successful as the great and ancient Sanskrit epic poem, the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. A. A. Macdonell’s sweeping comment is hardly an overstatement of the case: ‘Probably no work of world literature, secular in origin, has ever produced so profound an influence on the life and thought of a people as the Rāmāyaṇa.’[Note 1] For at least the last two and a half millennia, the tragic tale of Rāma and Sītā, the oldest and most influential surviving version of which is Vālmīki’s poem, has entertained, moved, enchanted, and uplifted untold millions of people in India and much of Southeast Asia for countless generations. The poem in all its versions and representations in the literary, plastic, and performing arts has constituted traditional India’s most pervasive and enduring instrument of acculturation.

If the Rāmāyaṇa has dominated the cultures of India and Southeast Asia, it has similarly fascinated a whole tradition of modern scholarship both in India and the West. The one hundred fifty years since the appearance of Schlegel’s partial edition and Latin translation [Note 2]have witnessed the growth of an enormous body of scholarly, pseudo-scholarly, sectarian, and popular literature on the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma, and the Rāma cult and literature. This corpus includes an extraordinary variety of works, ranging from editions, translations, and serious research into the language, metrics, and text history of the poem to bizarre retellings, traditionalist apologia, and wishful fantasies about airborne monkeys, Indian pharaohs, and long-tailed tribal peoples.[Note 3]

The reasons for these two closely related phenomena — the extraordinary influence of the epic at home and the curious fascination that it has exerted upon scholars and others in India and abroad — are interesting and important. An examination of them bears centrally upon our understanding not only of the poem and the culture whose touchstone it has become, but on the nature and function of traditional literature, and even on our own response to fantasies that touch the deepest roots of our being.

The story of Rāma, Prince of Ayodhyā, is not one that could be expected to interest greatly a general western audience. Aside from its rootedness in a foreign and alien-seeming culture, one far removed from ours in space and time, the poem’s central characters lack the quality of inner conflict, the human frailty that we have come to associate with the protagonists of the finest examples of western literature from Job and Achilles to the heroes and heroines of the contemporary novel. Were this absence of psychological complexity a universal feature of ancient Indian literature, it could constitute the basis for cross-cultural literary criticism. But the poem differs sharply in this respect from the work with which it is most intimately associated in time, place, style, content, and general world view — the other great epic of ancient India, the Mahābhārata. What is most interesting, as we shall see, is that this very feature of monovalent characterization is at the heart of the epic’s extraordinary success.

Leaving the characterization of Rāma and the other principal figures of the Rāmāyaṇa aside for the moment, there remains something in this long tale of the irreproachable but ill-starred prince and his faithful but ill-used princess, of their magical flying monkey companions, and their terrifying and implacable enemy, the ten-headed demon king, that continues to haunt us, to move us with its peculiar enchantment long after we set the book, with its textual and philological puzzles, aside. It is in an effort to convey something of this strange enchantment, this haunting sense of a distant yet somehow familiar inner world that we offer here what we have tried to make a readable and yet philologically accurate translation of the critical edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa.

Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa: its nature and history

In the form in which we have it today, the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa is an epic poem of some 50,000 lines retelling in Sanskrit verse the career of Rāma, a legendary prince of the ancient kingdom of Kosala in the eastern portion of north central India. The text survives in several thousand partial and complete manuscripts,[Note 4] the oldest of which appears to date from the eleventh century a.d.[Note 5]The poem is traditionally divided into seven major kāṇḍas, or books, that deal chronologically with the major events in the career of Rāma, from the circumstances surrounding his birth to his death. The central body of the poem recounts his disinheritance and exile and the abduction and recovery of his wife.

The text has come down to us in two major regional recensions, the northern (N) and the southern (S), each of which has a number of versions defined generally by the scripts in which the manuscripts are written.[Note 6] The versions of N are somewhat less homogeneous than those of S and, in fact, the former may conveniently be spoken of as having two regional subrecensions belonging to the northeast (NE) and northwest (NW), respectively.[Note 7] The three major recensions and subrecensions differ considerably among themselves; approximately one-third of the text of each of them is common to neither of the other two.[Note 8] Nonetheless, elaborate text-historical studies of the Rāmāyaṇa, culminating in the preparation of the critical edition have, in our opinion, more than adequately established that all existing recensions and subrecensions are ultimately to be traced to a more or less unitary archetype.[Note 9] The numerous interesting and important textual differences that characterize the various recensions, subrecensions, and versions of the epic — differences that we shall discuss in detail below — are not, in fact, reflected in any significant variations in the major outlines of the story, its contents, tone, moral, or characterizations.

Let us turn now to the central epic tale before continuing with a discussion of the history of the Rāmāyaṇa and of Rāmāyaṇa studies.

The story

The central narrative of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, as it is contained in the critical edition, is easily told.[Note 10]

The poem, in its surviving form, begins with a curious and interesting preamble (upodghāta) that consists of four chapters (sargas) in which the audience is introduced to the theme of the epic, the story, and its central hero. This section also contains an elaborate account of the origins of the poem and of poetry itself and a description of its early mode of recitation by the rhapsodist-disciples of the traditional author, the sage Vālmīki. The upodghāta is of great importance to the study of the textual prehistory of the poem and to an understanding of traditional Indian thinking on the subject of emotion and literary process. As such we will treat it at length when we discuss the epic’s history and again in our detailed introduction to the Bālakāṇḍa.

The epic proper, which begins with the fifth, tells us of the fair and prosperous kingdom of Kosala whose king, the wise and powerful Daśaratha, rules from the beautiful, walled city of Ayodhyā. The king possesses all that a man could desire except a son and heir. On the advice of his ministers and with the somewhat obscure intervention of the legendary sage Ṛśyaśṛṅga, the king performs a sacrifice, as a consequence of which four splendid sons are born to him by his three principal wives. These sons, Rāma, Bharata, Lakṣmaṇa, and Śatrughna, we are given to understand, are infused with varying portions of the essence of the great Lord Viṣṇu who has agreed to be born as a man in order to destroy a violent and otherwise invincible demon, the mighty rākṣasa Rāvaṇa who has been oppressing the gods, for by the terms of a boon that he has received, the demon can be destroyed only by a mortal.

The king’s sons are reared as princes of the realm until, when they are hardly past their childhood, the great sage Viśvāmitra appears at court and asks the king to lend him his eldest and favorite son, Rāma, for the destruction of some rākṣasas who have been harassing him. With great reluctance, the aged king permits Rāma to go. Then, accompanied by his constant companion, Lakṣmaṇa, the prince sets out on foot for the sage’s ashram. On their journey, Rāma receives instruction in certain magical spells and in response to his questions, is told a number of stories from ancient Indian mythology that are here associated with the sites through which the party passes. At one point Rāma kills a dreadful ogress and as a reward for his valor, receives from the sage a set of supernatural weapons. At last the princes reach the hermitage of Viśvāmitra where, with his newly acquired weapons, Rāma puts an end to the harassment of the demons.

Viśvāmitra’s ostensible goal accomplished, the party proceeds to the city of Mithilā where Janaka, king of Videha, is said to be in possession of a massive and mighty bow. No earthly prince has so far been able to wield this divine weapon, and the old king has set this task as the price for the hand of his beautiful daughter, Sītā. After arriving at Mithilā, Rāma wields the bow and breaks it. Marriages are arranged between the sons of Daśaratha and the daughters and nieces of Janaka. The weddings are celebrated at Mithilā with great festivity, and the wedding party returns to Ayodhyā. On the way, Rāma meets and faces down the brahman Rāma Jāmadagnya, legendary nemesis of the warrior class. At last the brothers and their brides settle in Ayodhyā where they live in peace and contentment. This brings to a close the first book of the epic, the Bālakāṇḍa.

The Ayodhyākāṇḍa

The second book of the epic is set, as the name suggests, largely in the city of Ayodhyā. Here we find that, in the absence of Prince Bharata, Daśaratha has decided to abdicate his sovereignty and consecrate Rāma as prince regent in his stead.

The announcement of Rāma’s succession to the throne is greeted with general rejoicing, and preparations for the ceremony are undertaken. On the eve of the great event, however, Kaikeyī, one of the king’s junior wives — her jealousy aroused by a maidservant — claims two boons that the king had long ago granted her. The king is heartbroken, but constrained by his rigid devotion to his given word, he accedes to Kaikeyī’s demands and orders Rāma exiled to the wilderness for fourteen years while the succession passes to Kaikeyī’s son, Bharata.

Rāma exhibits no distress upon hearing of this stroke of malign fate but prepares immediately to carry out his father’s orders. He gives away all his personal wealth and donning the garb of a forest ascetic, departs for the wilderness, accompanied by his faithful wife Sītā and his loyal brother Lakṣmaṇa. The entire population of the city is consumed with grief for the exiled prince, and the king, his cherished hopes shattered and his beloved son banished by his own hand, dies of a broken heart.

Messengers are dispatched to bring back Bharata from his lengthy stay at the court of his uncle in Rājagṛha in the west. But Bharata indignantly refuses to profit by his mother’s wicked scheming. He rejects the throne and instead proceeds to the forest in an effort to persuade Rāma to return and rule. But Rāma, determined to carry out the order of his father to the letter, refuses to return before the end of the period set for his exile. The brothers reach an impasse that is only resolved when Bharata agrees to govern as regent in Rāma’s name. In token of Rāma’s sovereignty, Bharata takes his brother’s sandals to set on the throne. He vows never to enter Ayodhyā until the return of Rāma and to rule in his brother’s name from a village outside the capital.

Rāma, Sītā, and Lakṣmaṇa then abandon their pleasant mountaintop dwelling and move south into the wild and demon-infested forests of Daṇḍaka.

The Araṇyakāṇḍa

The third book recounts the dramatic events that occur during the years of Rāma’s forest exile. The trio have now pushed on into the Daṇḍaka forest, a wilderness inhabited only by pious ascetics and fierce rākṣasas. The former appeal to Rāma to protect them from the demons, and he promises to do so. Near the beginning of the book, Sītā is briefly carried off by a rākṣasa called Virādha in an episode that strongly prefigures her later abduction by Rāvaṇa, the central event of the book and the pivotal episode of the epic.

While the three are dwelling peacefully in the lovely woodlands of Pañcavaṭī, they are visited by a rākṣasa woman, Śūrpaṇakhā, the sister of Rāvaṇa. She attempts to seduce the brothers and failing in this, tries to kill Sītā. She is stopped by Lakṣmaṇa, who mutilates her. She runs shrieking to her brother, the demon Khara, who sends a punitive expedition against the princes. When Rāma annihilates these demons, Khara himself comes at the head of an army of fourteen thousand terrible rākṣasas, but the hero once more exterminates his attackers. At last news of all this comes to the ears of Rāvaṇa, the brother of Khara and Śūrpaṇakhā and the lord of the rākṣasas. He resolves to destroy Rāma by carrying off Sītā. Enlisting the aid of the rākṣasa Mārīca, a survivor of the battle at Viśvāmitra’s ashram, the great demon comes to the Pañcavaṭī forest. There Mārīca, assuming the form of a wonderful deer, captivates Sītā’s fancy and lures Rāma off into the woods. At Sītā’s urging, Lakṣmaṇa, disregarding his brother’s strict orders, leaves her and follows him.

Rāvaṇa appears and after some conversation, carries off the princess by force. Rāma’s friend, the vulture Jaṭāyus, attempts to save Sītā, but after a fierce battle, he falls mortally wounded. Sītā is carried off to the island fortress of Laṅkā where she is kept under heavy guard.

Upon discovering the loss of Sītā, Rāma laments wildly and maddened by grief, wanders through the forest vainly searching for her. At length he is directed to the monkey Sugrīva at Lake Pampā. This brings the Araṇyakāṇḍa to a close.

The book is remarkable in a number of respects. Like the following kāṇḍa, it has a number of passages of great poetic beauty in which the seasonal changes in the forest are described. Further, as has been noted by several scholars,[Note 11] it differs sharply from the preceding book in leaving the relatively realistic world of palace intrigue in Ayodhyā for an enchanted forest of talking birds, flying monkeys, and dreadful demons with magical powers. This is a difference, or perhaps an apparent difference, that we shall discuss further below.

The Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa

The fourth book of the epic is set largely in the monkey citadel of Kiṣkindhā and continues the fairy-tale atmosphere of the preceding book. Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa meet Hanumān, the greatest of monkey heroes and an adherent of Sugrīva, the banished pretender to the throne of Kiṣkindhā. Sugrīva tells Rāma a curious tale of his rivalry and conflict with his brother, the monkey king Vālin, and the two conclude a pact: Rāma is to help Sugrīva kill Vālin and take both his throne and his queen. In return for this, Sugrīva is to aid in the search for the lost Sītā.

Accordingly, Rāma shoots Vālin from ambush while the latter is engaged in hand-to-hand combat with Sugrīva.[Note 12] Finally, after much delay and procrastination, Sugrīva musters his warriors and sends them out in all directions to scour the earth in search of Sītā. The southern expedition, under the leadership of Aṅgada and Hanumān, has several strange adventures, including a sojourn in an enchanted underground realm. Finally, having failed in their quest, the monkeys are ashamed and resolve to fast to death. They are rescued from this fate by the appearance of the aged vulture Sampāti, brother of the slain Jaṭāyus, who tells them of Sītā’s confinement in Laṅkā. The monkeys discuss what is to be done, and in the end, Hanumān volunteers to leap the ocean in search of the princess. This brings to a close the Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa.

The Sundarakāṇḍa

The fifth book of the poem is called, for reasons that are not wholly clear, the Sundarakāṇḍa,[Note 13] and it is centrally concerned with a detailed, vivid, and often amusing account of Hanumān’s adventures in the splendid fortress city of Laṅkā.

After his heroic leap across the ocean, the monkey hero explores the demons’ city and spies on Rāvaṇa. The descriptions of the city are colorful and often finely written. Meanwhile Sītā, held captive in a grove of aśoka trees, is alternately wooed and threatened by Rāvaṇa and his rākṣasa women. Hanumān finds the despondent princess and reassures her, giving her Rāma’s signet ring as a sign of his good faith. He offers to carry Sītā back to Rāma, but she refuses, reluctant to allow herself to be willingly touched by a male other than her husband, and argues that Rāma must come himself to avenge the insult of her abduction.

Hanumān then wreaks havoc in Laṅkā, destroying trees and buildings and killing servants and soldiers of the king. At last he allows himself to be captured and brought before Rāvaṇa. After an interview he is condemned, and his tail is set afire. But the monkey escapes his bonds and leaping from roof to roof, sets fire to the city.[Note 14] Finally, Hanumān returns to the mainland where he rejoins the search party. Together they make their way back to Kiṣkindhā, destroying on the way a grove belonging to Sugrīva, and Hanumān reports his adventures to Rāma.

The Yuddhakāṇḍa

The sixth book of the poem, as its name suggests, is chiefly concerned with the great battle that takes place before the walls of Laṅkā between the forces of Rāma (Sugrīva’s monkey hosts) and the demon hordes of Rāvaṇa.

Having received Hanumān’s report on Sītā and the military disposition of Laṅkā, Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa proceed with their allies to the shore of the sea. There they are joined by Rāvaṇa’s renegade brother Vibhīṣaṇa who, repelled by his brother’s outrages and unable to reason with him, has defected. The monkeys construct a bridge across the ocean, and the princes and their army cross over to Laṅkā. A protracted and bloody, though far from realistic, battle rages. The advantage sways from one side to the other until, at length, Rāma kills Rāvaṇa in single combat. The prince then installs Vibhīṣaṇa on the throne of Laṅkā and sends for Sītā. But Rāma expresses no joy in recovering his lost wife. Instead, he abuses her verbally and refuses to take her back on the grounds that she has lived in the house of another man. Only when the princess is proved innocent of any unfaithfulness through an ordeal by fire does the prince accept her.

At last, traveling in the flying palace Puṣpaka, which Vibhīṣaṇa had given him, Rāma returns to Ayodhyā where, the period of his exile now over, his long-delayed coronation is performed.

The Uttarakāṇḍa

The seventh book of the Rāmāyaṇa is entitled simply ‘The Last Book’ and is more heterogeneous in its contents than even the Bālakāṇḍa. Of the nature of an extensive epilogue, it contains three general categories of narrative material. The first category includes legends that provide the background, origins, and early careers of some of the important figures in the epic whose antecedents were not earlier described. Approximately the first third of the book is devoted to a lengthy account of the early career of Rāvaṇa and to a much shorter account of the early life of Hanumān. In this section many of the events of the central portion of the epic story are explained as having their roots in encounters and curses in the distant past.

The second category of Uttarakāṇḍa material consists of myths and legends that are only incidentally related to the epic story and its characters. Some of these episodes concern ancestors of the epic hero and in the main, are related to the central story only in the loosely topical or associative way by which such material is included in the Bālakāṇḍa and in many sections of the Mahābhārata. This sort of material, as will be discussed below, is characteristic of only the first and last books of the Rāmāyaṇa.

The last and in several ways the most interesting category of material in the Uttarakāṇḍa concerns the final years of Rāma, his wife, and his brothers. Struggle, adversity, and sorrow seemingly behind him, Rāma settles down with Sītā to rule in peace, prosperity, and happiness. We see what looks like the perfect end to a fairy tale or romance. Yet the joy of the hero and heroine is to be short-lived.

It comes to Rāma’s attention that, despite the fire ordeal of Sītā, ugly rumors of her sexual infidelity with Rāvaṇa are spreading among the populace of Ayodhyā. In dreadful conformity to what he sees as the duty of a sovereign, Rāma banishes the queen, although she is pregnant and he knows the rumors to be false. After some years and various minor adventures, Rāma performs a great horse sacrifice during which two handsome young bards appear and begin to recite the Rāmāyaṇa. It turns out that these two, the twins Kuśa and Lava, are in fact the sons of Rāma and Sītā who have been sheltered with their mother in the ashram of the sage Vālmīki, author of the poem. Rāma sends for his beloved queen, intending to take her back. But Sītā has suffered too much. She calls upon the Earth, her mother, to receive her, and as the ground opens, she vanishes forever. Consumed by an inconsolable grief, Rāma divides the kingdom between his sons, and then, followed by all the inhabitants of Ayodhyā, enters the waters of the Sarayū river near the city and yielding up his life, returns at last to heaven as the Lord Viṣṇu. These events bring to a close both the book and the poem itself.

2. History and Historicity

Few questions in the history of world literature have evoked so many and so widely differing answers as those that bear upon the date of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and the historicity of the characters and events that are represented in it.[Note 15] Even if we leave aside the traditional ascription of the life of Rāma to the legendary era of the Tretā Yuga, c. 867, 102 b.c.,[Note 16] opinion as to the date of the poem and its central events range from the fourth century a.d. to the sixth millennium b.c.[Note 17] Surely the dating of no other work of world literature can boast such a range of scholarly disagreement. The problems of dating the poem are numerous and complex. As with most of the literary and philosophical documents of ancient India, there exists virtually no independent and objective testimony in the form of historical, archeological, epigraphical, or similar survivals on the basis of which to establish the dates even roughly. Literary works are mentioned and quoted in other literary or technical works, but in general, until quite recent times the dates of these other works are equally indeterminate. The problem is greatly compounded in the case of this immensely popular epic narrative transmitted both orally and through the medium of huge numbers of manuscripts — a narrative whose origins are obscure and whose author is known to us chiefly as a character in the poem itself.

The question of the authorship of the poem is complicated. For one thing, it has long been known that the poem in its present form cannot be the work of a single author, or even the product of a single period of time. The text, in all its recensions, is marked by a large number of passages, ranging in size from a quarter verse to hundreds of lines, that can be demonstrated on the basis of cultural, religious, linguistic, or text-historical evidence to be interpolations or additions that have become part of the text over the centuries. Moreover, it has been generally accepted by scholars, since at least the time of Jacobi, that much of the first book and most, if not all, of the last book of the epic, the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas, are later additions to the work’s original core, represented by Books Two through Six.[Note 18]

In the absence of reliable external evidence bearing on the date of any stratum of the Rāmāyaṇa, scholars have been thrown back on such evidence as the text itself affords and have tried to date the work relative to other equally problematic texts, chiefly the Mahābhārata. The general types of internal evidence used may be conveniently categorized as linguistic, stylistic, cultural, political, and geographical.

Linguistic investigations of the Rāmāyaṇa have been quite numerous, and several have been used in an effort to determine the date of the poem and the relative priority of its principal recensions.[Note 19] But the linguistic evidence can cut two ways, for the so-called irregularities of the epic language have been seen, on the one hand, as pre-Pāṇinian archaisms and, on the other, as late innovations.[Note 20] All such arguments, when they are applied to the question of the date of the poem, ultimately depend on their authors’ conception of the relation of the epic language to that described by Pāṇini.[Note 21] However, as a number of authors have argued,[Note 22] the language of the Sanskrit epics is a popular dialect of the rhapsodists, and its divergences from Pāṇini’s rules cannot convincingly be used as evidence that the epics are either earlier or later than the great grammarian.

In brief, then, analyses of the language of the epic, although they may be of great intrinsic interest and shed some light on the relative age of different parts of the text and of its various recensions, have not proven themselves useful as tools for determining the date of the poem or of the events that it purports to represent.

Stylistic studies of the Rāmāyaṇa, in our opinion, have shed no more light on the absolute date of the poem than have linguistic investigations. Here again the approach appears to be most productive when it is applied to the study of the relative age of the different sections of the work and its relationship to the Mahābhārata. This latter problem is extremely complicated. For, in the course of their parallel development, the two epics have influenced each other and borrowed from each other to the extent that it has become difficult in many cases to disentangle the web of their mutual involvement. Both poems employ the style of the popular oral-formulaic epic and share a considerable body of gnomic phrases and commonplaces as well as the same meters.[Note 23]

On the other hand, the Rāmāyaṇa does have a number of stylistic features that generally distinguish it from the Mahābhārata. The work is traditionally designated as kāvya, poetry, in contradistinction to the Mahābhārata, which is generally classified as itihāsa, traditional history.[Note 24] This is justified to a great extent by the frequent striving on the part of the poet for the creation of what in the Indian tradition is regarded as specifically poetic effect through the massive accumulation of figures, forceful use of language, dense descriptions, and the evocation of aesthetic pleasure through a play on intense emotional states.

One stylistic point at which the two epics diverge is the way in which the poets deal with the junctures at which the direct address of one narrator gives way to that of another. The point is important, for the virtually unvarying convention of the epic and puranic poets is that their works are represented as a series of direct narrations on the part of various speakers on various levels of the narrative. The Mahābhārata consistently introduces its speeches with the prose formulae that are common also to the purāṇas of the type arjuna uvāca and ṛṣaya ūcuḥ, that is, ‘Arjuna said,’ ‘the seers said,’ and so on. These formulae are not part of the metrical body of the text but occur between verses and unmistakably signal a change of speaker. By way of contrast, the Rāmāyaṇa typically integrates this sort of information directly into the text of the poem in the form of a variety of rather tedious metrical formulae. This difference has led several scholars to conclude that the Rāmāyaṇa is a later work than the Mahābhārata.[Note 25] For, they argue, Vālmīki’s usage in this respect represents a later development than the usage of the Mahābhārata, which they see as an archaic survival of the style of ancient balladry. But this argument is far from convincing. For one thing, the prose formulae of the Mahābhārata are universally employed in the purāṇas, all of which are later and most of which are much later than even the latest forms of either epic.[Note 26] Moreover, it is by no means clear that the integration of the formulae into the verses of the Rāmāyaṇa is a sign of anything other than a genre distinction between the poem and the Mahābhārata-purāṇa literature mentioned above.[Note 27]

The general stylistic inferiority of the first and last books to the others supports Jacobi’s theory of the textual prehistory of the poem. In general, however, the stylistic evidence adduced by scholars seems unlikely to shed much light on the question of the date of the Rāmāyaṇa.

In its great extent and its profusion of detail, the poem provides us with a wealth of data concerning the material, sociological, psychological, and general cultural conditions prevalent in ancient India during the period of its composition. These conditions have long been a major area of interest to students of India, and a number of books and articles have been devoted, in whole or part, to the cataloging and analysis of such data.[Note 28]

Such studies have organized for us a great deal of the cultural data to be gleaned from the epic. But because of the virtual impossibility of referring most of this data to a clear historical context and to the generally quite conservative nature of Indian society, we cannot tell with any certainty the dates of the culture represented in the Rāmāyaṇa. Moreover, the obscurity of the poem’s textual history, with additions and interpolations having been made over a period of some centuries, makes it virtually impossible to correlate a given bit of cultural data with the period of the composition of the core of the work. Thus, for example, the elaborate description of the city of Ayodhyā at 1.6 does not necessarily mean that the bulk of the poem cannot predate the age of significant urbanization in the Gangetic plains.

Similarly, attempts to date the poem on the basis of specific cultural phenomena associated with Hindu society have not yielded very convincing results. For example, several authors have noted that although the immolation of widows upon their husbands’ funeral pyres is commonplace in the Mahābhārata, this custom is almost wholly unknown to the Rāmāyaṇa.[Note 29] The case of niyojana, or levirate, in which a woman whose husband is dead, or otherwise incapable of fathering children, may conceive by another man in the name of her husband, is similar. Not only is this practice commonplace in the Mahābhārata, it is fundamental to the development of the epic story. In contrast, although the Rāmāyaṇa may know of the custom, it gives no clear examples of it and certainly none in the case of the royal family of Ayodhyā.[Note 30]

A further example of the use of cultural data in an effort to date the epic involves the much-discussed question of whether Rāma’s marriage to Sītā is a case of child marriage. In this case, the recensional evidence is so various that it is difficult to ascertain the precise age of Sītā at the time of her marriage.[Note 31] But here, again, whatever may have been the case in regard to this or any of the other practices of traditional Hinduism, their presence or absence in the Rāmāyaṇa is at best only secondary evidence of the priority or posteriority of the poem with respect to the Mahābhārata. This is so for two reasons. First, the Mahābhārata is encyclopedic and became a sort of compendium of traditional law and custom. As a result, it accumulated episodes illustrating virtually every social custom known to the epic bards and redactors. These episodes, moreover, were accumulated over a long period of time. Under these circumstances, the exclusion of a practice or convention from the Mahābhārata constitutes fairly good evidence that it was not known to the compilers and expanders of the text. This is not the case with the Rāmāyaṇa, which was never intended to be so inclusive. Therefore, the omission of a traditional practice from the Rāmāyaṇa does not, to our way of thinking, conclusively demonstrate that its authors were ignorant of the practice. It may be that they simply had no occasion to mention it. Moreover, in the absence of any independent historical or sociological evidence concerning the epic period, it is impossible for us to rule out the possibility that cultural differences between the two poems may reflect regional rather than chronological distance.

It would appear then, that internal linguistic or cultural evidence can, at best, shed some light on the relative dates of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, but it cannot provide us with anything like an absolute time frame for the dating of either epic.

By way of contrast, the geographical and political data gleaned from the Rāmāyaṇa can, as Jacobi argued, shed considerable light on the question of the latest date for the composition of the archetype.[Note 32] Let us summarize Jacobi’s arguments. Jacobi argued that, although the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa appears to originate in and centrally concerns the royal house of the Kosala-Magadha region of east central India, the area in which both the great Buddhist movement and the rise of the imperial Magadhan power occurred toward the middle of the sixth century b.c., it appears to know nothing of these important developments. The world known to the authors of the epic is that of small quasi-tribal kingdoms whose kshatriya overlords may or may not have owed some special fealty or deference to the Ikṣvāku monarch reigning in Ayodhyā. The poets are fairly familiar with the geography of northern India and with the countries and towns of the pre-Magadhan period.[Note 33]

An extremely important observation in this connection was made by Jacobi when he noted that the Bālakāṇḍa, which is closely concerned with the history and geography of the region through which Rāma is led by Viśvāmitra, appears to know that region at a time prior to the rise of Buddhism and the growth of Magadhan hegemony.[Note 34] For, although Rāma is led right past the site of the great Magadhan capital of Pāṭaliputra (1.34), and the sage is eager to discourse on the founding and origins of other urban settlements in the area, the city is not mentioned.[Note 35] Later in the first book (1.46-47), we find that for the poet the settlements of Viśālā and Mithilā, which we know to have been merged into the urban center of Vaiśālī by the time of the Buddha, were separate and under separate rulership.[Note 36]

Finally, we see that in the Bālakāṇḍa, as in the central five books of the epic, the kingdom of Kosala is represented as being at the height of its power and prosperity, governed from a major urban settlement called Ayodhyā. It is only at the very end of the Uttarakāṇḍa, in what must be regarded as a late epilogue to the poem, that we find reference to Śrāvastī as a successor capital to the ruined city of Ayodhyā.[Note 37] It is worth noting in this connection that, as Jacobi also pointed out, the capital city of the unified realm of Kosala is invariably known as Ayodhyā in the epic and never by the name Sāketa, the name by which it comes to be known in much of Buddhist and later literature.[Note 38]

Thus, the Rāmāyaṇa — including the Bālakāṇḍa, which is generally agreed to be among the latest additions to the text — appears to know or have a fresh recollection of the ancient janapada of Kosala at the time of its greatest glory. But, the last great ruler of Kosala, Prasenajit, was a contemporary of the Buddha and ruled from Śrāvastī. After his time the kingdom was absorbed into the growing empire of the new, non-kshatriya imperial dynasty of Magadha whose great capital, Pāṭaliputra, was founded approximately 460 b.c.[Note 39] Even if we grant no value at all to the traditional puranic dynastic lists[Note 40] or to the Buddhist view that the Buddha himself was a descendant of the ancient and glorious Ikṣvāku rulers of Ayodhyā and that the events recounted in the Rāmāyaṇa predate his birth by many generations,[Note 41] it is difficult to see how the portions of the Bālakāṇḍa mentioned above can have been composed later than around the beginning of the fifth century b.c. If, however, we take into consideration the tradition that the poem was set and composed in a long-distant past[Note 42] and the generally accepted notion of the relative lateness of Bāla, it seems reasonable to accept for the composition of the oldest parts of the surviving epic a date no later than the middle of the sixth century b.c.[Note 43]

In the matter of determining the earliest date for the composition of the poem, we can speak with far less certainty. The most we can say at the present with any confidence is that the language, style, content, and world view of the poem appear to be consistent with what we know of the late vedic and early Hindu periods, with small patriarchal kingdoms, heavy forestation, great emphasis on the knowledge of the vedas, and great śrauta rituals as the principal public expressions of religious life. In the poem itself, particularly in its later portions, we see the influence of the newly developing cult of Viṣṇu, but the text, even in these sections, is largely free from the devotional passion that came later to characterize traditional Hinduism.

Taking all of this into consideration, we feel that it is extremely unlikely that the archetype of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa can be much earlier than the beginning of the seventh century b.c., although it is impossible to demonstrate this with any sort of rigor.[Note 44]

The historicity of the Rāmāyaṇa

We have thus narrowed down the probable date of the composition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, sometime between 750 and 500 b.c. What now can be said of the historicity of the characters and events that the epic purports to represent? The author or authors of the central portions of the poem — including the older parts of the Bālakāṇḍa — appear to have been familiar with the Kosala-Magadha region at the time of the sixteen janapadas and well before the period from which we can recover our first verifiable historical data. Since their geographical and geopolitical data are in keeping with such knowledge of the place and time as we have, there can be no doubt that, at least in the first two books of the epic, the poets are dealing with real places and kingdoms. If we make some allowance for epic hyperbole in the elaborate description of the city of Ayodhyā and in the accounts of the wealth of the various kings that people the text, we have no difficulty in reading the setting of the first part of the poem as a credible, if idealized, rendering of a fortified township in the heavily forested plains of the Ganges-Sarayū watershed.

Our first difficulty relating to the historicity of the Rāmāyaṇa concerns the principal characters of the story. Of these the only thing that may be said with certainty is that the author did not invent their names. The names Rāma, Daśaratha, Sītā, Janaka, Vasiṣṭha, and Viśvāmitra are attested in various strata of the vedic literature, at least some of which are older than the Rāmāyaṇa.[Note 45] On the other hand, nowhere in the surviving vedic literature is anything like the Rāma story related in connection with any figures bearing these names, nor are any of these figures related to each other in ways paralleling their interrelationships in the epic.[Note 46] The finding of like-named or even parallel figures in the vedas merely pushes the problem one stage back to still more ancient texts whose historicity is at best as dubious as that of the epics. The most that one could hope to accomplish by examining the vedic literature is to find literary sources for characters or events in the Rāmāyaṇa, sources that finally shed no light on the problem of historicity.

The genealogical and dynastic lists of the Ikṣvākus found in the purāṇas and the epics themselves provide another external source that has been used in attempts to verify the historicity of the characters in the Rāmāyaṇa.[Note 47] The problem with this sort of testimony is that we have no way of determining the reliability of such lists. In many cases it seems clear that names are inserted or invented simply to give the lineage of a given ruler or house a claim to great antiquity, and we are not convinced that the collation of these lists has any great value. Moreover, all the available lists, other than those in the Rāmāyaṇa, are drawn from texts that in their present forms are later than the epic.[Note 48] Even if, as Pargiter argues, some of the puranic lists are actually the sources of the Bāla genealogies, we can push this sort of material no further than to say that the purāṇas preserve a tradition of a lengthy Ikṣvāku genealogy according to which Rāma, the son of Daśaratha and descendant of Raghu, ruled in Ayodhyā during the Tretā Yuga.[Note 49]

Another level of the problem of the historicity of the epic is reached when one passes from the Ayodhyākāṇḍa to the remainder of the poem. For in the elaborate and detailed narrative of Book Two we have what is, if not a historical, at least a credible account of a harem intrigue and its political consequences; but in the Araṇyakāṇḍa we move abruptly into the enchanted realm of the forests, poorly charted and peopled by mighty sages who wield magic powers, dreadful supernatural monsters, and flying monkeys who can change their shapes and sizes at will and who speak elegant Sanskrit.

This abrupt change[Note 50] from the at least pseudo-historical to the totally fantasied has long been an object of interest to scholars, some of whom have seen the epic as pieced together from two different stories, the first a historical reminiscence of a family feud and the second a legend of a demon-slaying hero. A lucid statement of this seeming dissonance is that of Macdonell:

Macdonell’s statement is characteristically lucid and is responsive to what appears to be a real discontinuity in the poem. And yet we should, perhaps, attempt to see the poem as a coherent whole before accepting it as some species of hybrid. This is an extremely important point, for it bears directly upon our understanding of the epic, of what its authors intended it to be, and of the role it has played for more than two thousand years in the lives and thoughts of the Indian people.

Before undertaking a detailed discussion of the nature and purpose of the Rāmāyaṇa, however, it will be appropriate to examine critically the second of Macdonell’s ‘two distinct parts’ with an eye toward determining whether or to what extent the events described there may be said to be historical.

One of the most common approaches to the study of the Rāmāyaṇa, from the early days of modern Indological scholarship to the present, has involved the attempt to discover in Rāma’s strange alliance with the monkeys of Kiṣkindhā and his bitter war with the savage rākṣasas of Laṅkā the representation of some historical reality. In fact, the numerous attempts to determine the exact geographical location of the demon king’s island fortress and the ethnic or religious groups represented as apes or goblins may be said to form a minor genre of Indological writing. The rākṣasas have been identified as various of the Dravidian and tribal peoples of South India and Ceylon, the Sinhalese Buddhists, and even, in an extreme case, with the aboriginal population of Australia![Note 52]

Even Gorresio, who saw the central conflict of the epic as a struggle between two hostile races, recognized, with his usual insight, that this was also a narrative representation of the conflict of the two abstract principles of good and evil.[Note 53] If the demons have been viewed as hostile and barbarous aboriginals, the vānaras, or monkeys, are seen as tribesmen who, if they exist on a primitive level of culture, are well-disposed toward the Aryan warriors from the north.

The arguments against these interpretations have been tellingly made by a number of authors.[Note 54] The problem is that such interpretations that seek to allegorize or rationalize what is essentially a work of fantasy, fail to show why a text that gives rational and at least relatively realistic description of tribal groups such as Guha’s Niṣādas should represent other tribes as possessed of animal forms and supernatural powers. It seems to us as fruitless to attempt to read the epic as an ethnological roman à clef, as it is to try to demonstrate that the supernatural events described in the poem are, in fact, possible.[Note 55]

Despite the careful and copious scholarship on the geography of Rāma’s adventures in the forests and on the location of Laṅkā,[Note 56] we would still basically share Jacobi’s opinion that, once the poet has his hero cross the Ganges and move south into peninsular India, he has him enter a dimly known realm that he could safely represent to an originally provincial audience as inhabited by ogres, magicians, and talking beasts.[Note 57] We do not mean to argue that the poet does not set the latter portion of the epic in south India. He does. But it is a south India known to him only as a distant and wild land ideally suited to his purposes in pitting his fearless hero against the terrifying dark forces of what is, after all, an inner world.

Even the elaborate descriptions of the battles at Laṅkā do not, despite their minute concern with the various types of weapons, create an impression that the poet is trying to render real events. As Macdonell remarks, ‘The warfare in the epic nucleus of the Mahābhārata is that of heroic human combatants on both sides; in the Rāmāyaṇa it consists of conflicts with monsters and demons such as are described by writers of fairy-tales without knowledge of real fighting.’[Note 58]

Since the geography of the south becomes increasingly vague the farther the poet takes us from Ayodhyā, and since the poem gives evidence of only the most tenuous notions of coastal India, it seems improbable that the authors of the original portions of the epic had any very detailed knowledge of Sri Laṅkā (Ceylon). There is some evidence in the poem that the island was known, but is distinguished from Laṅkā. The most that can be said with any certainty is that the poet knew of an island kingdom, whether real or mythical, said to lie some distance off the coast of the Indian mainland. It seems unlikely that, as some scholars have contended, Laṅkā was conceived of as lying within the boundaries of peninsular India.[Note 59] In any case, we are convinced that attempts at the ethnological identification of the rākṣasas and the vānaras and the geographical location of their strongholds are not only futile but wrongheaded. For in seeking a historical basis for what is, in many respects, a kind of elaborate fairy tale, we are led away from a true understanding of the work.

Like all powerful works of the imagination, the Rāmāyaṇa is rooted in both the inner and outer realities of its creators. There was a kingdom of Kosala (although it could hardly have been the earthly paradise depicted by the poets), and there may even have been a Rāma who ruled it long ago. Yet, even for the historicity of the events of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa, there is not a shred of evidence other than the idealized, exaggerated, and clearly largely imaginary account of the poem itself. As to the kingdoms of the demons and the monkeys, it is our conviction that they never existed anywhere except in the mind of the poets and more importantly, in the hearts of the countless millions, among whom we must include ourselves, who have been charmed and deeply moved by this strange work.

Vālmīki and his sources: the origins of the Rāma story

We see then that the age of the Rāmāyaṇa is uncertain and its historicity dubious. Let us now examine the question of the authorship of the epic and the sources upon which its author or authors may have drawn for their subject matter.

The Indian tradition, as expressed in the first and last books of the Rāmāyaṇa, the Mahābhārata, and a large number of later poetic, puranic, and other texts,[Note 60] is unanimous in its agreement that the poem is the work of a single poet, the brahman sage Vālmīki, a contemporary of Rāma and a peripheral actor in the epic drama. On the basis of this unanimity and the general plausibility of single authorship for the middle five books, modern scholarship has, by and large, accepted Vālmīki as a historical personage.[Note 61]

An interesting concomitant to this acceptance is the almost uniform rejection by these same authors of the validity of the tradition concerning Vyāsa, the legendary author of the Mahābhārata. There are two main reasons for this difference. The first is the patent impossibility that the Mahābhārata could be the product of a single hand. The second is the fact that Vyāsa, ‘the arranger,’ is more of a descriptive title than a proper noun, and in fact, the tradition has also ascribed to him the composition of the purāṇas and even the arrangement of the vedas into their various textual divisions.

It seems to us that these grounds for the different evaluations of the historicity of the two sages are not very firm. If we are to ascribe any historical validity to the traditions with regard to either author, we must restrict the scope of the author’s work to the central epic nucleus: in the Rāmāyaṇa, the tales of Rāma’s exile, his loss and recovery of Sītā (Books Two through Six), and his restoration to his hereditary throne; and in the Mahābhārata, the tales of the Pāṇḍavas’ exile, battle with Duryodhana, and recovery of their hereditary kingdom. As is well known, however, the Mahābhārata has developed into an all-inclusive and virtually encyclopaedic repository of ancient Indian myths, legends, laws, and so on. All its inclusions, interpolations, and additions have naturally been fathered upon Vyāsa, just as the late portions of the Bāla and Uttara have been upon Vālmīki. There is in this no inherent reason to argue against the single authorship of the presumed Bhārata nucleus of the Mahābhārata.

The tradition of Vālmīki’s contemporaneity with Rāma and, indeed, of his participation in the action of the epic tale is paralleled in the case of Vyāsa.[Note 62] Indeed if, as has been argued, this is a basis for judging the tradition to be a genuine historical reminiscence, then it is more so in the case of the longer epic. For as the biological grandfather of the epic heroes and a constant adviser to them and those close to them, he plays a much more central and significant role in the Mahābhārata than does Vālmīki in the Rāmāyaṇa where he plays an important role only in the late portions of the latest books.[Note 63] As for the name Vyāsa or Vedavyāsa, it is indeed an epithet of the legendary sage Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana, and he comes by it in a fashion quite analogous to that in which Vālmīki comes by the title Ādikavi or first poet. For Vyāsa has, doubtless, acquired the reputation as the editor of the huge mass of vedic, epic, and puranic literature on the basis of the tradition that makes him the author and first reciter of the great epic of the Bhāratas, in almost exactly the same way as Vālmīki, on the basis of the tradition that makes him the author and first reciter of the Rāmāyaṇa, has been elevated to the position of the first poet of all time. In both cases it is clear that the traditions of inspired authorship are considerably later than the oldest surviving portions of the epics.

There is, finally, no reason to regard Vālmīki as having any greater claim to historicity than Vyāsa. The traditions in both cases are late and are unsupported by anything other than still later texts that accept the stories as genuine and repeat, modify, or elaborate upon them as they find appropriate. In the end, the most that can safely be said is that there appears to be no real evidence to contradict the proposition that the central portion of the Rāmāyaṇa had a single author. On the basis of the unanimous tradition, there is no reason for us to doubt that this author’s name was Vālmīki; but to attempt, as has been done, to provide him with other than a legendary biography and to assign particular verses or passages to his hand is, we would argue, to waste one’s efforts.[Note 64]

We now turn to a brief discussion of the much disputed question of the author’s sources. Although a number of theories have been advanced as to the sources of the Rāma legend, we believe that most of the major issues have now been settled. In the last century and a half of Rāmāyaṇa studies, a number of literary texts have been put forward as the proximate or distant sources of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. Some of these, such as the Homeric epics, suggested by Weber and others, are no longer taken seriously, and it would be pointless to refute them here.[Note 65] It is a general and quite reasonable assumption on the part of many scholars that the poet Vālmīki drew his inspiration from some body of ballads or legends about heroism and self-sacrifice, and that no such materials are recoverable. Indeed, this is much the traditional view of the creation of the poem as it is dramatized in the opening two chapters of the first book. There, at 1.1, we are told that the sage Vālmīki heard the story from the divine seer Nārada who tells it to him in a highly compressed form. It is this simple account that the sage is represented at 1.2 as elaborating through the help of divine inspiration into the great epic. Nārada’s account is, of course, nothing but a terse, elliptical, and late abstract of the central portion of the existing epic. Nonetheless, it is interesting that the later strata of the text show the sage as first learning of Rāma and of his wonderful career as a story, despite the fact that he is considered to be a subject of the prince and in the Uttarakāṇḍa, a participant in the epic action.

Leaving the question of these floating ballads aside, only two of the surviving texts that have been suggested as sources for the Rāmāyaṇa are worthy of mention here. These are the Pali Dasaratha Jātaka and the Mahābhārata’s Rāmopākhyāna.

The suggestion that the story of the Rāmāyaṇa could be traced to Buddhist sources was put forward by Weber who saw it as growing, under the influence of the Greek epics, to its present form out of the Buddhist legend of Prince Rāma; the point of which was a glorification of the virtue of indifference to events in the real world.[Note 66] Weber then saw the Dasaratha Jātaka as the original of the Rāmāyaṇa, which was, he felt, a poetic expression of, among other things, brahmanical hostility to the Buddhists. This theory was cogently refuted shortly after it was promulgated,[Note 67] but owing to the excessively late date assigned to the epic by a number of reputable scholars and the inaccurate estimate by others of the antiquity of the prose portions of the jātakas, the theory has continued to be put forward in some quarters.[Note 68]There can be no doubt, however, that on the basis of the best historical and literary evidence available to us, the Dasaratha Jātaka is substantially later than the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and that it is both inspired by and derived from it.[Note 69]

The question of the relationship between the two great epics of ancient India, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, especially with regard to the latter’s elaborate version of the Rāma legend, the Rāmopākhyāna,[Note 70] is more complex and difficult and has generated a considerable body of scholarly writing.[Note 71]

Especially since the appearance of the critical editions of the two epics, the evidence confirms the view of Jacobi that the Rāmāyaṇa in its present form is on the whole somewhat older than the Mahābhārata in the form in which it has survived to us. There are numerous textual and contextual grounds for this assertion, not least of which is the fact that the longer epic knows, alludes to, and summarizes the shorter, which it regards as an ancient text, whereas the Rāmāyaṇa is ignorant of the events, issues, and characters that make up the central content of the Mahābhārata. As for the Rāmopākhyāna, Weber found himself unable to decide on the basis of his researches whether it was the source of Vālmīki’s epic, was derived from it, was derived from an unknown early version of the epic, or was an independent derivate from a common source.[Note 72] Jacobi argues on the basis of a detailed and cogent analysis that the Rāma episode of the great epic is a ‘Nachdichtung’ drawn, in fact, from Vālmīki’s poem. This opinion has been given powerful support by the meticulous textual comparisons of Sukthankar and the learned observations of Raghavan.[Note 73] We feel, on the basis of the available evidence, that this view is correct and should now be generally accepted.[Note 74] There is neither space nor reason here to attempt to adduce all the arguments and citations that bear on the various sides of this issue, and only two of the most recent need be discussed in any detail.[Note 75]

These views, closely related, have been put forward within the past decade by two distinguished authorities in the field of Sanskrit epic studies, the late professors Vaidya and van Buitenen. Because of the eminence of these scholars and the fact that their revival of the theory that the Rāmāyaṇa is not the source of the Rāmopākhyāna has been subjected to little published criticism, we will consider it in some detail. For the issue is an important one and should be put to rest.

Vaidya’s and van Buitenen’s efforts to disprove the priority of the Rāmāyaṇa were made in their respective introductions to the critical edition of the Yuddhakāṇḍa and the translation of the Araṇyakaparvan of the Mahābhārata. The two positions differ only slightly, because van Buitenen has borrowed several of his chief arguments from Vaidya. However, where Vaidya unequivocally regards the Mahābhārata episode as the direct source of the Rāmāyaṇa, predating it by ‘centuries,’[Note 76] van Buitenen prefers, in the end, to equivocate, stating only that ‘rather than viewing either one as the source of the other it is more profitable and also more interesting to see the story of Rāma (i.e. the Rāmopākhyāna), as preserved in The Mahābhārata, as the happy documentation of a stage in the development of The Rāmāyaṇa very close to the point in time when the main story of this text was given the form in which we now know it.’[Note 77] He concludes, somewhat nebulously, that ‘the only conclusion that seems reasonable concerning the relationship between the story of Rāma and Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa is that the former is a summary of a fully expanded Rāmacarita that after its contents were fixed in the story of Rāma, underwent further development, acquired a new beginning and a new end, attracted subsidiary elements, and became known as the original poem (ādikāvya) of Vālmīki.’[Note 78]

Let us now examine the evidence for these conclusions. Vaidya’s first argument is that since the Rāmopākhyāna is narrated to Yudhiṣṭhira at an appropriate juncture in the tale, it cannot therefore be an interpolation in the text. He goes on to say that, ‘being thus a genuine part of the Mahābhārata, it is much older than the poem of Vālmīki, and being a part of an Itihāsa, it is much more trustworthy than a Kāvya.’[Note 79] As to the first point, it may be said that practically all of the ākhyānas of the Mahābhārata are introduced at suitable points in the narrative. This is because particular events and situations in the central narrative suggest these stories and are used by the epic bards as the thematic pegs on which to hang the loose structure of the massive poem. If Vaidya’s point were allowed, then we would be obliged to accept all such episodes as part of the original saga and could then safely abandon the theory of interpolations.

As for the distinction of genre that separates the two poems, the itihāsa is in no discernible way either more or less valid historically than the kāvya. To assert that it is leads one to absurdities such as that proposed by Vaidya, who suggests that we must contrast the Mahābhārata’s ‘historical statement’ of the wind god’s testimony as to Sītā’s purity with the poetic innovation of having the god of fire give the same testimony in the Rāmāyaṇa.[Note 80] Vaidya follows this preamble with a list of eight differences between the two versions that he claims to be innovations on the part of Vālmīki. Many writers on this subject have collected lists of differences between the two texts, and one must expect discrepancies between poetic accounts of the same story when the one is some 50,000 lines in length and the other is less than 1,500. The great majority of these are consistent with Jacobi’s theory that the Rāmopākhyāna is a free retelling, with great condensation, of an orally transmitted text. Nonetheless, let us look at the following points marked with Vaidya’s numbers.

1. The Rāmopākhyāna makes no mention of Viśvāmitra. This is interesting, but it seems to be in keeping with the compression of the text, which has eliminated many characters from the Bālakāṇḍa that do not figure significantly in the main narrative of the poem. Vaidya’s argument that in the original version, which for him is the Rāmopākhyāna, the hero’s marriage is arranged not by the Kauśika sage, as in Vālmīki, but by Tvaṣṭṛ has been shown by Raghavan to be based on a faulty interpretation of the passage in question.[Note 81]

2. The Rāmopākhyāna lacks the Rāmāyaṇa’s account of the curse of Ahalyā and of her liberation from it by Rāma. This is true, but since we are dealing here with what is undoubtedly part of the latest stratum of the Bālakāṇḍa, this can hardly be called ‘an innovation of Vālmīki.’[Note 82] Nothing about the relation of the two texts can be adduced from this fact.

3. The Rāmopākhyāna has a character, the venerable rākṣasa minister Avindhya, who aids and comforts the desolate Sītā and chides Rāvaṇa for his ill treatment of her. It is Avindhya who has the prophetic dream that is in Vālmīki ascribed to Trijaṭā, and he is rewarded by Rāma for his kindness to Sītā. This character, according to Vaidya, is unknown to the Rāmāyaṇa. van Buitenen was very impressed by this point and regards it as critical to his own argument:

The problem is that Vālmīki does know Avindhya and mentions him and his disregarded counsel to Rāvaṇa at two separate points in his poem.[Note 84] Clearly what has happened is that the Rāmopākhyāna has condensed Vālmīki’s version by largely merging the roles of Avindhya and Trijaṭā.

4. In the Rāmopākhyāna, Kumbhakarṇa is killed by Lakṣmaṇa, whereas in the Rāmāyaṇa he is killed by Rāma himself. This point is worthy of consideration, for it is representative of a class of such differences that characterize the two texts. What are we to make of situations in which one text ascribes a specific deed to one character and the other to a second, or where the two works use different names for what appears to be the same person or place? Do they require us to posit separate sources for the two versions? Surely not. For if we do, then how are we to explain the difference in the hypothetical sources? Can there really have been two ur-Rāmāyaṇas, one of which made Lakṣmaṇa the killer of Kumbhakarṇa and the other Rāma? Even if one were willing to accept such an unlikely state of affairs, how could we explain this difference in these hypothetical constructions other than by saving that one or the other had made a change? If we accept the possibility of such a change in these hypothetical texts, or in their own predecessors, we are forced back toward an ever more distant and imaginary source. We cannot in all cases expect to know the reason for such a change.

The remainder of Vaidya’s points are either erroneous[Note 85] or easily explainable as examples of the Rāmopākhyāna’s somewhat awkward and often pedestrian condensation of the tale as told by Vālmīki.

Most of van Buitenen’s points are either repeated from Vaidya or are subject to the same objections as Vaidya’s. He adduces, however, two additional arguments against Jacobi that deserve attention. First, he remarks that Jacobi’s observation that the Rāmopākhyāna knows the late Uttarakāṇḍa and must therefore postdate the composition of the older portions of the poem by a considerable period is not necessarily valid. For, he argues, the Uttara-derived material ‘may well have been inserted’ later in the Mahābhārata version.[Note 86] But although there is clear evidence for the lateness of the Uttara in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, there is none for the later addition of its references to Rāvaṇa’s antecedents to the Rāmopākhyāna.

van Buitenen’s second point deals with Jacobi’s observation that the Rāmopākhyāna’s allusion to the famous incident of Sītā and the crow[Note 87] is so terse that it is unintelligible unless we presuppose on the part of its author and audience knowledge of Vālmīki’s text. van Buitenen denies this, but his arguments are difficult to follow. He says that ‘it is in the nature of abridgments to abbreviate most concisely those episodes that are best known,’[Note 88] illustrating this enigmatic statement with a series of examples from the Mahābhārata. His examples, however, are elliptical versions of tales whose full narratives follow immediately, a common practice in the longer epic. Since the Mahābhārata has no longer version of the Rāma story than the Rāmopākhyāna, which is in any case hardly an episode of the type given in the examples, his point is not telling. van Buitenen concludes this argument with another bewildering statement: ‘the Mount Citrakūṭa episode, in my view, appears as a risqué story (not necessarily only told of Sītā), and the mere reference to could bring instant recognition.’[Note 89] Are we to understand the reference to reeds and crows to allude to some general habit of ancient Indian ladies? If so, how would an allusion to this serve to reassure Rāma that Hanumān had actually seen Sītā? In any case, this argument leaves us with no known source for the reference other than the improbable proto-Rāmacarita hypothesized by its author. The whole point is, in fact, based on a passage of dubious-textual authority. The actual crow episode is known only to the northern recension of the Rāmāyaṇa, although Hanumān’s allusion to it in Book Six appears in the best reconstruction of the text. More telling on the side of Jacobi’s view is a previously unnoticed allusion in the Rāmopākhyāna that would appear to presuppose a passage in the constituted text of the critical edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. At Mahābhārata 3.275.60 it is said that when Hanumān has been sent to bring the good news of Rāma’s victory to Bharata, he carried out his mission after ‘observing all gestures’ (lakṣayitveṅgitam sarvam). This phrase is obscure unless one has in mind Rāmāyaṇa 6.113.12-15, where Rāma charges the monkey to observe closely all of Bharata’s bodily and facial gestures when he hears the news, with the purpose of determining whether the prince is truly willing to relinquish his regency to Rāma. At verse 14 he says, ‘take note of all of Bharata’s gestures and behavior’ (jñeyāḥ sarve ca vṛttāntā Bharatasyeṅgitāni ca). The opacity of the former passage leads us to believe that it is an elliptical allusion to the latter. This would appear to be a better example of what Jacobi argues is evidence of the priority of Rāmāyaṇa with respect to the Rāmopākhyāna.

With the elimination of the Rāmopākhyāna as probable source or even a collateral descendent from a common source for the story, we can with some assurance assert that the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa or at least the text that can be reconstructed from the manuscripts of its three recensions, is the earliest surviving version of the Rāma legend.

The fate of the Rāma story in India and beyond

The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, as the oldest surviving version of the Rāma story, assimilated and superseded its presumed bardic sources. Moreover, an early stage of the text can, we believe, be recovered from the existing manuscripts and, to a large extent, has been reconstructed in the text of the critical edition. At an indeterminate but relatively early date, the work acquired tremendous prestige not only as an edifying and even redemptive tale but as both the first work of true poetry and a record of God’s deeds among men. It thus seems reasonable to view the poem as the ultimate source of all versions of the tale in existence.

The pervasive appeal of the story and its principal characters is astounding. The enormous and diverse body of Sanskrit literature, from the time of the Mahābhārata onward, is filled with retellings, allusions, poems, plays, hymns, and philosophical and religious texts inspired by the Rāmāyaṇa. The literatures of even such powerfully anti-Hindu groups as the Buddhists and the Jains, from the time of the gāthās of the jātakas and the Paumacariya, respectively, have adapted this moving story to their own needs. The story has been enthusiastically adopted by the literatures of virtually every language of modern India.[Note 90] In some cases, such as that of Kamban’s Tamil masterpiece and Tulsi Das’s Rāmcaritmānas, works derived from the Rāmāyaṇa are still regarded as among the greatest pieces in the literary traditions of important languages. The power and popularity of the Rāma story has been such that it has been able successfully to cross not only the boundaries of caste, religion, and language but even those that divide major cultural areas. In this way the story has come to serve as one of the major wellsprings of poetry, folklore, and puppet theater in many of the languages and cultures of Southeast Asia. The power of the tale to inspire artistic creation has manifested itself as well in many of the finest examples of painting and sculpture in both South and Southeast Asia.[Note 91]

Before turning to a discussion of the translation of the epic, its style, conventions, aims, and annotation, we must make some effort to explain it. In order to do so, we must probe into the nature and significance of the work as an expression of the needs, ideals, and beliefs of the culture that produced it and continues to cherish it.

The meaning of the Rāmāyaṇa

Like any monumental work of literature, the Rāmāyaṇa has always functioned on a variety of levels. Through the millennia of its popularity, it has attracted the interest of many kinds of people from different social, economic, educational, regional, and religious backgrounds. It has, for example, served as a bedtime story for countless generations of Indian children, while at the same time learned śāstrins, steeped in the abstruse philosophical, grammatical, and metaphysical subtleties of classical Indian thought, have found it a subject worthy of their intellectual energies.

Originally the story, or at least its kernel, must have drawn its audience as a stirring martial saga of a legendary warrior hero of Kosala. On this level, the level of a legendary tale, the compound story has two main portions fused into an epic of intrigue, quest, and triumph such as we find in literature the world over. The first section of this story, the account of the events in Ayodhyā culminating in the exile of Prince Rāma, has, despite its relative realism and apparent historicity, much in common with the folk or fairy tale. Its central event, the dispossession of a favorite child through the machinations of a wicked and pitiless stepmother, is commonplace in fairy tales.[Note 92] Although the epic, as we now have it, has treated this motif in its own peculiar fashion, modifying it in the service of other ends, the essential plot of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa is unmistakably allied to that of hundreds of stories in the collections of the folk and fairy tales of India, Europe, and the Middle East.

The subsequent portion of the poem seems even closer to such a source. For the hero, now exiled, wanders through a succession of enchanted woods peopled by strange creatures, filled with enormous and magical powers for good or evil. In these woods he is befriended by a powerful and beneficent sage who gives him magical weapons.[Note 93] With these weapons Rāma manages to kill huge numbers of dreadful demons, creatures common to the fairy-tale literature; but, at last, the lord of all the demons, using his magic power, steals away the beautiful princess Sītā whom he imprisons in a remote citadel across the sea. Then, just when Rāma seems to have lost everything, he is befriended by a group of talking monkeys who agree to help him. One of the monkeys flies across the sea and returns with news of the princess. Then, with the aid of the monkey army, the hero crosses the sea, fights a dreadful battle and, at last, recovers both the princess and his throne. Once more, similar stories could be picked out of virtually any collection of fairy tales.[Note 94] Indeed, when told in outline, the story seems at times more like Puss in Boots than a great heroic saga or courtly epic.

The basic plot of the epic, then, is clearly derived from or heavily influenced by the folk literature of ancient India, which is closely allied to the folk literatures of Europe and West Asia. It is, perhaps, this that has led some scholars to see western influences at work on the authors of the Rāmāyaṇa. We may view the Rāmāyaṇa, then, as either an epic built upon a heroic legend of the Kosalan aristocracy and largely shaped by the hands of storytellers steeped in the tradition of Märchen and fairy tales, or as an ancient folktale adapted by the bards to suit the tastes and interests of the Kosalan nobility.

We cannot, of course, finally decide between these two hypotheses. But, in any case, the destiny of the Rāma story is such as to demonstrate clearly that it was from a very early date regarded as far more important than just another fairy tale or even legend of the heroic age, such as are recorded by the hundred in the Mahābhārata, the purāṇas, the kathā literature, and even the vedas. By the time of the addition of the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas, the text had taken on a fully defined function as an exemplary tale, and its hero had assumed a role as a model for human behavior.

By the time of the completion of the Bālakāṇḍa — and probably somewhat earlier — the original characterization of the unfortunate Prince Rāma had come to be obscured by a massive and hyperbolic catalog of manly virtues. At the very beginning of the poem as it now stands, the sage Vālmīki is represented as plying the divine seer Nārada with questions as to the existence in his own day of a man possessed of a long list of human virtues. In Nārada’s reply Rāma is identified as just such a man.[Note 95]

Thus it appears that the author or authors who put the text into the form and order in which it has survived wished to make it clear that their hero was not by any means an ordinary man, nor even an ordinary hero. He is the perfect man, an ideal toward which ordinary mortals should strive. Moreover, it is reasonable to suppose that this exaltation of Rāma to the status of a perfect man is an independent development of and, in fact, a precursor to the elevation of this ideal figure to the rank of earthly manifestation of God. For the first development seems to have become popular with early writers who are either only peripherally interested in the divinity of the hero or who, like the Buddhists and Jains, would reject it out of hand. In this way the character of Rāma, as delineated by Vālmīki, became an exemplary hero for the authors of the Rāmopākhyāna, the Dasaratha Jātaka and other Rāmāyaṇa-derived jātakas, and the Jain Rāmāyaṇas. The deification of Rāma appears to belong to the very latest stratum of the conflated epic. The great bulk of the text in the central five books is almost wholly unaware of his identification with Viṣṇu, and even parts of the Bāla seem uncertain on this point.[Note 96]

The intrusion of the theological element, albeit at a late and somewhat heterogeneous stratum of the text, gave rise to the tradition that the epic has a soteriological virtue. This development, however, is not very pronounced and is perceptible in the critically edited text in only a few obviously late passages. The first of these, and the only one accepted by the critical editors, is to be found at the end of Nārada’s Saṃkṣipta Rāmāyaṇa, which forms the bulk of the epic’s opening chapter. There we are told that the story is holy, the equal of the vedas, and that it purges one from sin.[Note 97] The reading of it is said to free one from all sin. Further, it is said that the reading of the Rāmāyaṇa insures a place in heaven, not only for the reader, but for his sons, grandsons, and dependents. Finally we learn that reading it was open to all four of the social orders of Indo-Aryan society, and benefited them all, according to their respective social roles: it brought mastery in the use of the sacred utterances to brahmans, kingship to kshatriyas, success in business to vaishyas, and greatness to even the shudras.

The more elaborate phalaśruti at the end of the Yuddhakāṇḍa, often cited as proof that the original poem ended with the sixth book, is rejected by the critical edition.[Note 98]

By the same token, the text is for the most part free from a strongly devotional attitude toward its hero. Even the Bālakāṇḍa, which explicitly describes Rāma’s birth as a manifestation of God on earth in response to the prayers of the lesser gods, shows almost nothing of the devotional fervor that will characterize the bhakti movement. Only at the very end of the Uttara and in a curious passage near the end of Yuddha[Note 99] do we see real devotionalism creeping into the epic. Even in the Bālakāṇḍa, with its unequivocally Vaishnava account of the circumstances surrounding the birth of the hero, we find few other references to Rāma’s divinity, even in contexts such as the breaking of Śiva’s bow that would appear to lend themselves especially well to a sectarian treatment. Only at the very end of the book do we find even a subdued reference to the identification of the hero with Viṣṇu.[Note 100]

The Rāmāyaṇa, then, although it has come to be regarded as an essentially devotional text, has become one only as a result of accretions. The devotional element never permeated the Sanskrit epic and has left the bulk of it untouched. As a result, the tone and feeling of Vālmīki’s work is markedly different from that of later versions of the Rāma story, such as those of the Vaishnava purāṇas and the poets of the bhakti movement who use the tale to give literary expression to the consuming force of their devotional passion.

It may well be that the Vaishnava element in the Rāmāyaṇa was first introduced in emulation of the authors of the Harivaṃśa, perhaps between the second and fourth centuries a.d.[Note 101] This latter work, an appendix to the Mahābhārata and the oldest surviving complete account of the career of Kṛṣṇa, stands, we feel, in a complicated relationship to the Rāmāyaṇa. There can be no doubt that the latter is the older work, for as we have argued it is in the main older than the surviving form of the Mahābhārata. The Harivaṃśa, on the other hand, at least in the form in which we now have it, presupposes the longer epic.[Note 102]

What the authors of the Harivaṃśa did was to take the somewhat obscure and enigmatic god-man of the Bhārata saga and of the popular legend of the Mathurā countryside and provide for him a coherent and sequential biography set an often highly poetic medium. In creating such a work, a poetic rendering of the legend of a kshatriya hero, the authors must certainly have used the Rāmāyaṇa as their inspiration and model.[Note 103]

If, however, the narrative poem of the life of Kṛṣṇa is inspired by the Rāmāyaṇa, there is evidence to indicate that the development of the cult of Kṛṣṇa considerably predates that of Rāma.[Note 104] If this is so, then it seems quite possible that the Vaishnava authors or expanders of the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas might, in turn, have been influenced in their conception of the Ikṣvāku hero as a demon-slaying warrior, an incarnation of Viṣṇu, by their exposure to the Harivaṃśa.[Note 105]

With the rise of the cult of Rāma and development of the Vaishnava schools of theology, particularly that of Rāmānuja and his successors, the numerous commentators on the Rāmāyaṇa aimed to provide a Vaishnava hermeneutic for the poem as an