Ramayana

• 1. Introduction

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  The Ramayana opens with a question. The sage Valmiki asks the divine messenger Narada whether any truly righteous man still walks the earth, and Narada answers with a single name: Rama. That exchange sets in motion a poem of nearly 24,000 couplet verses, divided into seven books and roughly 500 chapters, that scholars place among the longest epic poems ever written. Its oldest surviving portions may date as far back as the early 7th century BCE. Yet it remains a living text, retold in dozens of languages across South and Southeast Asia, staged in temples and theatres from Bali to Broadway, and still shaping the calendars, names, and greetings of hundreds of millions of people. How did a Sanskrit poem from ancient India travel so far, change so much, and yet remain so recognizable? That is the story this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Story in Seven Books

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  Rama is sixteen years old when the sage Vishvamitra arrives at the court of King Dasharatha in Ayodhya to ask for help against demons disrupting sacred rites. Vishvamitra chooses Rama, and from that moment the epic's engine is running. Rama strings and breaks the bow of King Janaka at a sacrifice in Mithila, wins Sita's hand in marriage, and returns to Ayodhya expecting to be crowned. Instead, his stepmother Kaikeyi calls in two long-held promises from Dasharatha: Rama's exile for fourteen years, and the throne for her own son Bharata. Dasharatha, bound by his word, grants both. Sita refuses to remain behind. Lakshmana, Rama's constant companion throughout the entire narrative, also refuses. The three walk into the forest together.

  In the Panchavati forest, a female demon named Shurpanakha arrives, attempts to seduce the brothers, and then attacks Sita out of jealousy. Lakshmana cuts off her nose and ears. Her brothers retaliate with a full assault; Rama defeats them. When news reaches Ravana, king of Lanka, he devises a more cunning plan: a demon named Marica takes the form of a golden deer and lures Rama away, and Ravana, disguised as a wandering ascetic, crosses to Sita and carries her off by force. A vulture named Jatayu tries to stop the abduction and is mortally wounded.

  The search for Sita leads Rama and Lakshmana into alliance with Sugriva, the exiled king of a forest-dwelling people called Vanaras, and his devoted follower Hanuman. Rama kills Sugriva's usurping elder brother Vali to restore the kingdom, and Sugriva pledges to help find Sita. Search parties fan out in every direction; only the southern party, led by Angada and Hanuman, succeeds, learning from a vulture named Sampati that Sita is held in Lanka.

• 3. Hanuman's Crossing

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  Sundara Kanda, the fifth book, stands as the emotional center of the entire epic. Hanuman assumes a gigantic form and leaps across the sea to Lanka in a single bound. He passes challenges on the way, including an encounter with the mountain Mainaka, who offers rest, which Hanuman politely refuses because time is short. Inside Lanka, he defeats the demon Lankini who guards the city, then searches the palace. He finds Sita imprisoned in the Ashoka grove, surrounded by Ravana's guards.

  Hanuman delivers Rama's signet ring as proof that Rama lives and is coming. He offers to carry Sita back across the sea himself, but Sita refuses. Her argument is pointed: if Hanuman carried her, the situation would mirror the original abduction, a demon carrying her away while Rama was absent. Only Rama himself must come, she says, and only by defeating Ravana can the insult of the kidnapping be properly answered. She gives Hanuman her comb as a token in return.

  Before leaving, Hanuman chooses to make himself known to Ravana. He destroys the Naulakha garden, kills warriors, allows himself to be captured, and delivers a direct speech to Ravana urging him to release Sita. Ravana orders Hanuman's tail set on fire. Hanuman escapes his bonds, leaps from rooftop to rooftop setting Ravana's citadel ablaze, and springs back across the sea. He returns to Kishkindha carrying the news that Sita is alive and waiting.

• 4. War and Return

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  Two Vanaras named Nala and Nila construct a bridge across the southern sea, and Rama's army crosses to Lanka. Ravana's brother Vibhishana, who had counseled peace, defects to Rama's side before the fighting begins. The war is long. In one of its most desperate moments, Ravana's son Meghanada strikes Lakshmana with a weapon that leaves him mortally wounded. Hanuman flies to the Himalayas to retrieve the sanjeevani herb that can cure him, and when he cannot identify which plant it is among the many growing there, he carries the entire mountain back to Lanka.

  The war ends when Rama kills Ravana. He places Vibhishana on Lanka's throne. But reunion with Sita does not bring immediate peace. Citizens question her chastity after so long in Ravana's captivity. Sita responds by entering a fire. Agni, the god of fire, appears from the flames carrying her unharmed, testifying to her fidelity. The gods arrive and acknowledge Rama as an incarnation of the supreme deity Narayana.

  The return to Ayodhya after fourteen years of exile is celebrated as a festival. The day of that return is connected by tradition to the festival of Deepavali. Rama's coronation, called Rama Pattabhisheka, installs him as king. His reign, Rama Rajya, is described as a time of justice and fulfillment for ordinary people. As a gesture of gratitude, Rama gives his most sacred object, the deity Sri Ranganathaswamy, to Vibhishana as a gift.

• 5. A Contested Final Book

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  Scholars have long noted that the first book, Bala Kanda, and the last, Uttara Kanda, stand apart from books two through six in both style and outlook. The oldest surviving manuscript omits both. Hermann Jacobi and others identified linguistic and rhetorical differences that point to these volumes as later additions, with Uttara Kanda viewed by many as certainly not the work of the poem's original composer.

  The controversy over Uttara Kanda is not merely academic. That book contains two episodes that sit uneasily against the Rama depicted in the earlier books. In the Sita-parityaga, Rama abandons Sita after citizens question her purity, even though she had already proved herself through the fire ordeal. In the Sambuka-vadha, Rama kills a low-caste ascetic named Shambuka. Scholar M. R. Parameswaran argues that the way the Uttara Kanda handles the positions of women and Shudras marks it as a product of a different time and a different ideological agenda.

  Because Rama was revered as a model of dharma, any new idea about what dharma requires had to be placed in Rama's mouth to carry authority. The Uttara Kanda accomplishes this by masquerading as another section of Valmiki's original work. By contrast, the Adiya oral tradition of the Adiya tribe in Wayanad takes a strikingly different approach: in their version, Rama, Lakshmana, and Hanuman are brought before a tribal court, interrogated about the ethics of abandoning a pregnant wife, and Rama admits his mistakes and accepts Sita back.

• 6. Versions Across Faiths

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  The Buddhist Dasaratha Jataka places the story in Benares rather than Ayodhya and changes the terms of exile from fourteen years to twelve years. Crucially, this version contains no Ravana and no abduction of Sita. In the commentary on the Jataka, Rama is identified as a previous birth of the Buddha himself, and Sita as a previous birth of Yashodhara.

  The Jain tradition produces the most radical inversion. Vimalsuri's Paumachariyam, the earliest known Jain version and the oldest work of literature written in Maharashtri Prakrit, transfers the killing of Ravana entirely from Rama to Lakshmana, because Rama as a liberated Jain soul in his final life is unwilling to kill. Rama then renounces his kingdom, becomes a Jain monk, and attains moksha. Lakshmana and Ravana go to hell but are predicted to be reborn as righteous persons, and Ravana is identified as a future Tirthankara, an omniscient teacher of Jainism.

  Jain cosmology provides the theological scaffolding here. In each half time cycle, nine sets of three cosmic figures appear: a Baladeva, a Vasudeva, and a Prativasudeva. Rama, Lakshmana, and Ravana are the eighth set. Scholar Padmanabh Jaini traces the origin of this framework to the jinacharitra of Acharya Bhadrabahu, dating to the 3rd-4th century BCE.

• 7. The Epic Across Asia

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  The Ramayana traveled into Southeast Asia from the 8th century onward. The Javanese Kakawin Ramayana, believed to have been written in Central Java around 870 CE during the Mataram kingdom, is not based on Valmiki's version at all but on a 6th or 7th century Indian poem called the Ravanavadha by the poet Bhattikavya. It incorporates four indigenous Javanese characters, the Punokawan or clown servants, led by the guardian demigod Semar.

  Bas-reliefs depicting scenes from the Ramayana are carved on the balustrades of the 9th century Prambanan temple in Yogyakarta and on the 14th century Penataran temple in East Java. In Bali, the kecak dance retells the story with a chorus of over fifty bare-chested men chanting "cak", while dancers perform the roles of Rama, Sita, Hanuman, and Ravana, and a fire show enacts the burning of Lanka.

  Thailand's national epic Ramakien alters the story's genealogy: in that version, Sita is the daughter of Ravana and his wife Mandodari. Ravana's brother Vibhishana, cast here as an astrologer, reads Sita's horoscope and predicts it will cause Ravana's death, so Ravana throws the infant into the water. She is later rescued by Janaka. The Philippine Maranao people's Maharadia Lawana, documented and translated into English by Professor Juan R. Francisco and Nagasura Madale in 1968, centers on a monkey-king granted immortality by the gods. Francisco believed the Ramayana narrative arrived in the Philippines between the 17th and 19th centuries through trade with Javanese and Malaysian cultures.

• 8. Living Text

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  In 1576, Tulsidas completed Sri Ramacharit Manas in Awadhi Hindi, an acknowledged masterpiece that orients the story within the devotional bhakti tradition of Hindu literature and became the version most widely known across northern India. Around 1594, the Mughal emperor Akbar commissioned a simplified Ramayana text illustrated with narrative scenes, which he dedicated to his mother Hamida Banu Begum.

  Gopal Sharman's English-language stage adaptation, performed primarily as a one-woman show by actress Jalabala Vaidya, has run more than 3,000 performances in over 35 cities and towns in India alone, as well as at the United Nations Headquarters, the Smithsonian Institution, Broadway, and London's West End. Since 1978, Mount Madonna School in Watsonville, California, has staged the Ramayana every year under the supervision of Baba Hari Dass.

  A critical scholarly edition of the text was compiled in the 1960s and 1970s by the Oriental Institute at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda, drawing on dozens of manuscripts from across the region. An English translation of that critical edition was completed in November 2016 by Robert P. Goldman of the University of California, Berkeley. The name Rampur is the most common place name for villages and towns across India, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, and West Bengal, and the greeting Ram Ram passes between people daily as a trace of the epic that first asked whether any righteous person was still left in the world.