The Ramayana

by Valmiki

  The Internal and External Audiences

  Like the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa is enclosed within a frame story. Besides that, it tells its own story several times within itself. There are, thus, at any given time, two audiences for the Rāmāyaṇa, the internal audience and the external audience.22

  The opening frame of the Rāmāyaṇa involves the composer of the poem, Vālmīki, who is told Rāma’s story by the celestial sage Nārada. Shortly thereafter, Vālmīki is moved to compassion when he sees the grief of a bird whose mate has just been killed by a hunter. His compassion expresses itself spontaneously in a new metre and Brahmā encourages him to sing Rāma’s tale in this new metrical form. Vālmīki looks around for the students most likely to do justice to the tale and the metre and decides upon teaching it to the twins Kuśa and Lava. As Wendy Doniger O ‘Flaherty points out, the names Kuśa and Lava constitute the two parts of the noun Kuśilava, meaning ‘wandering bard’.23 Needless to say this has an added significance in the context of what is going to happen next.

  Kuśa and Lava are also Rāma’s estranged sons, born in Vālmīki’s settlement when their mother, Sītā, was banished from Ayodhyā. Vālmīki encourages the boys to sing the story of Rāma’s life at a huge sacrifice that Rāma himself is performing. The twin boys are handsome and charming, with melodious voices and fine musical talent. Their listeners are enthralled by the tale and are drawn to the young men. The audience notices that they are like mirror images of Rāma and even Rāma is fascinated by his own story.

  As the boys sing the tale in the intervals between the rituals of the sacrifice, Rāma finally recognizes them as his own sons. He asks them to bring their mother to him. Vālmīki brings Sītā to the sacrificial enclosure and when she is asked to prove her chastity again, she disappears forever into the earth. Rāma is heartbroken, but Brahmā appears and encourages him to listen to the rest of his own story from his sons. The young princes continue with their tale, reciting, apparently, even the death of Rāma.

  The story is over. But the shocking and moving fact is that we experience these final chapters as Rāma does—not in the backward movement of the story, but rather with the past become present or future (and the future presented as past.) There is no visible seam separating the text’s statement that Kuśa and Lava sang the end of the poem from the actual content of this ending—the description of Rāma’s depression, the golden image of Sītā, and so on. The frame has melted away, our sense of time is confused, past conflates with future—as it does already at the very beginning of the epic, in Vālmīki’s proleptic vision of past and future combined—and we find ourselves once again listening with Rāma to the story of his own life, but at this point to that part of it that is still to unfold. We might ask ourselves if the ‘actual’ narrator, Vālmīki, is continuing his narration through the mouths of his pupils, or on his own, as it were—but does it matter?24

  According to the outer frame of the Rāmāyaṇa, the first audience of the poem are the kings, brahmins, townspeople, monkeys and rākṣasas who are present at Rāma’s sacrifice. The monkeys and the rākṣasas have participated in some parts of the story they are listening to and many of them have already heard about the events that they did not participate in. This was possible because the Rāmāyaṇa tells itself internally on several occasions.

  When Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and Sītā first meet the sage Agastya, Lakṣmaṇa introduces himself and his companions by telling Agastya’s student how Rāma came to be exiled into the forest. After Sītā has been abducted and the princes reach Kiṣkindha, Lakṣmaṇa again tells Hanumān all that has happened up to that point. Once Hanumān enters the picture, he becomes the carrier of the story within the story, from one person to the next (from Rāma to Sītā and Rāma to Rāvaṇa, then back from Sītā to Rāma and finally, from Rāma to Bharata) as well as from one location to the next (from Kiṣkindha to Lankā, from Lankā to Kiṣkindha and then from Kiṣkindha to Ayodhyā). The tale precedes Rāma’s presence in Lankā as well as his return to Ayodhyā.

  Hanumān as the carrier of the tale assumes significance in terms of the boon Rāma grants him at the end of their adventures together. In the very last book (‘Epilogue’), once Rāma has been crowned king of Ayodhyā, he lavishes gifts on the main monkeys and rākṣasas. On Hanumān, his special helper, he bestows the boon of conditional immortality: Hanumān will live as long as Rāma’s story is told on earth. Thus, Hanumān has a vested interest in keeping the story alive, telling it again and again, in all the places that he can and to all the people that he can.

  Scholars of oral epics will argue that the reason the Rāmāyaṇa tells itself within itself is to maintain the integrity of the text, i.e., to ensure that future tellers and scribes are reminded of the grid of major episodes upon which they can work. For example, the opening chapters of the first book (‘Childhood’) have Nārada telling Vālmīki the entire story of the Rāmāyaṇa which provides future tellers with an outline of the story. Further on, the frequent recapitulations of the story up to that point would, arguably, serve the same function.

  However, if we keep in mind the fact that the Rāmāyaṇa always has more than one audience (i.e., there are multiple audiences inside the story itself) we can see how the repetitions are necessary and valid for narrative reasons as well as compositional ones. If we add Hanumān’s boon to this, we see that for at least one of the storytellers within the tale, this is a matter of life and death. Besides, Shulman argues that Rāma himself has to keep hearing his own story told because the Rāmāyaṇa is ‘the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself’ and that Rāma remembers his divine nature only through his story as told by someone else.

  The Rāmāyaṇa as Epic

  The Rāmāyaṇa is considered by western scholars to be one of the two Indian epics, the other being the Mahābhārata. The indigenous tradition, however, classifies these long poems differently. The Rāmāyaṇa is called ādikāvya, ‘the first poem’ and the Mahābhārata is held to be itihāsa, ‘legend’ or ‘history’. While scholars have yet to define ‘epic’ satisfactorily, there is a strong consensus that, as a genre, epic is circumscribed by certain compositional and formal features. Most simply, an epic is often oral, it is narrative and it is heroic.

  Early scholars of Indian epics were confounded by the non-linear narrative style of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata. Their stories move forward episodically, in fits and starts. Where one might expect a grand elaboration, there is none. Action is often slowed down by a digression into another story or a long description of nature. While the central story does always come to a satisfactory conclusion, it winds and meanders through a ‘chaotic’ abundance of other tales and side tales, diversions into philosophies and moral discourses, genealogies and cosmologies, looping back on itself, framing one story after another, until finally it comes to rest.

  Since epics are often oral in origin, they have a particular way of telling their stories. Each teller has the privilege, perhaps even the duty, to tell the tale in her/his own way, dwelling on well-loved parts, elucidating morality and ethics, adding comic relief.

  … in a social milieu where the vast majority of the audience of traditional literatures are not literate, traditional texts must make heavy use of devices that maximize memorability. Among these devices are iteration, formulaic composition, simple metrical forms preferably subject to musical or quasi-musical recitation, copiousness, heavy use of epigrams and sententia, hyperbole and tales of wonder.25

  Inside these formal constructs, epics basically tell the stories of legendary heroes, often kings, who must go through several hardships before they can ‘live happily ever after’. The stories are complicated by disputed kingships, warring kingdoms, abducted or dishonoured wives, and journeys into dangerous unknown and uncharted territories. The hero of the tale must come through a series of adventures that test his valour as much as they test his virtue. He usually has a companion in his quest or on his journey who helps him come thr
ough the trials and tribulations that litter his path.

  The epic hero has a special relationship with the gods. Sometimes he is fathered by a divine parent, sometimes he has the gods’ particular favour and at other times he can be either a part of a god (amśa) or an incarnation of a god (avatāra). An epic brings the human and cosmic realms together, often in the person of the hero. Epics posit a critical relationship between cosmic order and human destiny: the cosmic plan of the gods becomes the human hero’s fate.26 The gods take sides in the battle that must be fought and the battle is fought primarily to reestablish the dominion of the gods over the earth.

  Apart from the gods (daiva) and fate (viddhi), there are other significant forces that are active in the epic universe. In the Indian epics, karma, dharma and kāla (time) operate to determine what the hero can do, what he must do and what will happen to him. Curses and boons are further determining agents in these stories and elevate the stories to the level of mythic events.27 The hero’s actions are understood to be affected by any or all of these forces. Thus, the action in an epic, particularly in Indian epics, suffers from a certain degree of narrative hypercausality, where multiple causes are proffered for a single event.

  Vālmīki’s version of Rāma’s adventures displays almost all these epic features: the hero’s trials and tribulations, his intimate relationship with the gods and the operation of extra-human forces such as boons and curses. But at the same time, the Rāmāyaṇa also shares several themes and motifs with stories that have come to be classified as fairy and folk tales: the beautiful princess who is abducted by the wicked, monstrous enemy and imprisoned in a far-away, inaccessible place, the talking, magical animal companions, the divine maiden who can stay with her husband only for a short time before she returns to her original state, the magical objects (in this case, weapons) that help the hero rescue the princess.

  While the Rāmāyaṇa shares structural and thematic features with genres that have been defined primarily by western scholars against western texts, we must also take into consideration the fact that there is an indigenous category for the Rāmāyaṇa. The Indian tradition defines the Rāmāyaṇa as the ādikāvya, or mahākāvya, ‘great poem’, a category which appears to straddle the western genres of drama and narrative lyric.

  Perhaps the most characteristic feature of Sanskrit kāvya is alamakāra, or the adornment of verse with similes, metaphors and other figures of speech. The purpose of this is to create a distilled mood, a rasa. All rasas are based on human emotions. But while emotions are fleeting and rarely encountered in their pure state, a mood can be cultivated and developed through the sustained use of language which can, then, generate the further distillation of an essence.

  The most popular mood in kāvya remains viraha, i.e., love in separation. Through various techniques, the poet tries to create this mood of longing for the beloved among his audience which, ideally, consists of sahṛdayas, ‘like-hearted’ or ‘sympathetic’ people. As the hero or the heroine pines for the beloved who is far away, all of nature sympathizes—trees and flowers wilt, animals and birds weep, clouds gather and the world is covered in gloom.

  The Rāmāyaṇa is completely self-conscious about its connection with kāvya. In the opening chapters of the text, we hear the story of how Vālmīki’s compassion at the death of a mating bird was spontaneously expressed in metre. Vālmīki is then encouraged by Brahmā to recite the deeds of Rāma in this new metrical form and he teaches his poem, the Rāmāyaṇa, to his students Kuśa and Lava. They, in turn, recite the poem to Rāma. Rāma thus hears his own story for the first time as a poem. At the same time as the Rāmāyaṇa establishes itself as a poem, it is equally firm about its original oral status. The story is heard and retold many times before it reaches us, the last and outermost audience of the written text.

  Even a cursory reading of the Rāmāyaṇa shows that its style is ornate, laden with similes and metaphors, metonymy and other features of classical Sanskrit poetry. Nature functions almost as another character. Descriptions of nature abound, especially in the sections where Rāma and Sītā have been separated. Easily the most beautiful parts of the poem are the ones where Rāma is waiting for Sugrīva to fulfil his promise and begin the search for Sītā. It is the rainy season, the conventional season for love in Sanskrit poetry, and Sītā is far away. Everything around him reminds Rāma of his gentle, sweet wife.

  Further, the Rāmāyaṇa is a heroic poem, a heroic romance, in fact, and can be compared to classical Sanskrit nā?akas. Under this set of parametres, the story is simple—the lovers meet, they fall in love, they are separated, and after a period of unhappiness and trial, they are reunited. As in the paradigmatic nā?aka, Kālidāsa’s Abhijnānaśakuntalam, Rāma, the hero from the city, falls in love with the woman of nature (Sītā is born from the earth and her name literally means ‘furrow’) and their union results in the birth of crucial male heirs.

  Ramanujan believes that to classify the Rāmāyaṇa as an epic is to deprive it of the religious significance it holds in India and parts of South-east Asia.28 On the other hand, since the Rāmāyaṇa cannot obviously be contained by any single genre, the more genre considerations we apply to it, the more we open up the text for exploration. Each particular categorization highlights another aspect of the story and of the text and each of these deepens our understanding of the multiple layers the poem holds within itself. None of the genres, whether eastern or western, are mutually exclusive and it is entirely possible, perhaps even necessary, for a text as multivalent as the Rāmāyaṇa to straddle many boundaries. Seeing the Rāmāyaṇa as kāvya or a nā?aka or as an epic or a fairy tale, or even as all of them, provides a rich and complex backdrop to the religious significance the text has acquired over the centuries.

  The Critical Edition and the Greater Rāmāyaṇa Tradition

  It is very likely that the bulk of the Rāmāyaṇa was composed by a single author (or at least by like minds at a single period in time). Nonetheless, more and more scholars have come to believe over the years that Rāma’s story was in circulation for a long time before Vālmīki composed it into his particular version.29 The existence of the Daśaratha Jātaka and the Rāmopakhyāna in the Mahābhārata have been cited as evidence that Rāma’s adventures were known before Vālmīki, that Vālmīki retold the story in his own unique way. Equally though, it has been argued that the Vālmīki version is the oldest Rāma story we have and that the Daśaratha Jātaka and the Rāmopakhyāna are derived from it.30 Whichever camp scholars fall into, there is almost no one who suggests that Vālmīki’s is an original tale.

  The Rāmāyaṇa has had a long history of transmission, from its presumably oral origins to written manuscripts and now to the printed text.31 Even though Vālmīki probably composed his text sometime between 750 and 500 BCE, the earliest extant Rāmāyaṇa manuscript dates only to the eleventh century CE. Rāmāyaṇa manuscripts appear in different scripts from all over the Indian subcontinent. Because of the plethora of manuscripts and the multiplicity of manuscript traditions, scholars are compelled to sort through them and value them in terms of age and authenticity.

  There is no longer any doubt about the fact that while Books two through six were composed by a single person at a particular time, the first and the last books of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, the Balā and Uttara Kāṇḍas, were very likely to have been composed later than the rest of the text. From their style, content and linguistic features, they are also likely to have been composed by someone other than Vālmīki. Nonetheless, the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa as it is constituted today consists of all seven books, the first and the last serving as bookends, almost, to the central books where the main story is contained.

  Since 1975, scholars of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa have had at their disposal the Baroda Critical Edition of Vālmīki’s poem. This presents a standard edition that can be cited easily and efficiently. The enterprise of critically editing an ancient text that has several recensions and manuscript traditions is pr
imarily motivated by the scholarly desire to reconstruct the original text. On the basis of linguistic, cultural and historical evidence, experts attempt to reconstruct, as closely as is possible, the original text as it was composed by the author.

  The critical edition is constructed by the meticulous and painstaking comparison of manuscripts and manuscript traditions. The passages that constitute the body of the critical text are those that appear in all (or at least most) of the manuscript traditions. These are considered to be indubitably a part of the original composition. Verses that are not substantiated by several manuscripts are judged to be late in composition and/or as the work of later redactors and editors of the text and these are placed outside the main body of the critical edition.

  Such an enterprise involves, for example, the labeling and separation of verses and passages that were composed at a date later than the bulk of the text. These, then, are regarded as ‘interpolations’ or ‘additions’ to the main text. The material in these passages is marked off from the rest of the verses and placed either in appendices or in multiple footnotes marked by asterisks and a separate set of numbers.

  Opponents of the text critical method are accused of ascribing a non-rationality to the original producers of the text. Those who reject the critical edition and its findings are charged with romanticizing the oral tradition and crediting the composers with an entirely different method of text production, one that makes the criteria of critical apparatus irrelevant. On the other hand, complete reliance on and belief in the construction of such critical texts devalues the native traditions that produce them. This belief insists that the critically edited product is the legitimate text and ignores the cultural differences that inform the production and development of a text outside western modes of authorship. Nonetheless, the idea that the critical edition defines the boundaries of the ‘text’ itself persists, despite the fact that all those familiar with Indian texts agree that a unique notion of tradition (paramparā) informs and circumscribes these texts.