Ramayana

The Ramayana is one of the two great Sanskrit epics of India. It follows Rama, a prince of Ayodhya, who is exiled from his kingdom, and the long search for his wife Sita after she is carried off by Ravana, the ruler of Lanka. Tradition credits the poem to Valmiki, a sage remembered as the first poet of Sanskrit verse. Scholars place its core somewhere around the last centuries BC, though it grew over generations, because it lived first as sung and recited poetry before anyone fixed it in writing.

That oral life matters. Reciters carried it village to village, adding, trimming and polishing, so the epic we read is less a single act of writing than a long conversation across centuries. It runs to roughly 24,000 verses in seven books.

Then it kept moving. In the twelfth century the Tamil poet Kamban made his own version, and in the sixteenth century Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, a language ordinary people in northern India actually spoke, which turned the story into daily devotion for millions. It travelled abroad too: Thailand has the Ramakien, Java the Kakawin Ramayana, and shadow puppet theatres across Southeast Asia still stage its episodes. Every autumn, Ramlila performances act it out in the open air in northern India.

The name attached to this entry belongs to a much later chapter. C. Rajagopalachari, known to most Indians as Rajaji, was a leader in the independence movement and the last Governor General of India. In his later years he set out to give the epics back to a wide modern audience in plain prose, first in Tamil, drawing heavily on Kamban, and then in English. His retelling, published by the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, has sold steadily ever since and is how a great many readers, in India and outside it, first meet the story.

So the Ramayana is not one book with one date. It is a story that keeps being told again by whoever needs it.