Journey
The Ramayana across the eastern seas
The same story told by people who owed India nothing: a Buddhist king in Thailand, a Jataka in Laos, a Muslim oral epic in the Philippines, a war-booty puppet theatre in Burma. Each telling changes the ending, relocates the geography, or promotes a different character — which is the point.
Stops (13)
- Ayodhyā · Ayodhyā — the named city
Where the story begins in Valmiki, and a name that travelled better than the text: Ayutthaya in Siam, Yodya in Burmese versions, and the Ayuta that a thirteenth-century Korean chronicle says a queen came from. Rama's own city has been continuously disputed ground in India for forty years, which the overseas versions are entirely untouched by.
- Rāmeshvara / Rameswaram · Rāmeshvara — the crossing
The southern anchor of the Indian Rama landscape, where the shoals run toward Mannar and the epic puts the causeway. This is where the Indian Ramayana ends geographically; every version east of here had to invent its own landscape for the same story.
- Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa · The Kakawin Rāmāyaṇa — Java, ninth century
An Old Javanese poem based not on Valmiki but on the Bhattikavya, a Sanskrit grammarian's showpiece, and the oldest substantial work of Javanese literature. Java took the hardest available Sanskrit source and made something new out of it rather than translating the obvious one.
- Prambanan, Java · Prambanan — the Ramayana in stone and nightly
The story is carved round the inner balustrade of the Shiva temple, and performed as a ballet on an open-air stage beside it most nights of the dry season, by dancers of the largest Muslim-majority country in the world. The wayang versions add clown-servants who carry the moral weight and have no Indian counterpart at all.
- Reamker · The Reamker — Cambodia
Carved in the galleries of Angkor Wat and the Bayon and performed as masked lkhon khol. Its ending differs from every Indian version: Rama and Sita are reconciled after her ordeal and then separate anyway. It had to be rebuilt almost from nothing after the Khmer Rouge killed most of the people who knew it.
- Angkor Wat, Cambodia · Angkor — eight hundred metres of relief
The galleries carry the churning of the ocean, the Kurukshetra war and the battle of Lanka in continuous low relief, executed by masons for a Vishnu temple whose patron took the title of a universal monarch. The Ramayana arrives here as royal iconography before it arrives as popular story.
- Rāmakien · The Rāmakien — Thailand
Given its present form by Rama I in 1797, performed as masked khon and painted along the whole cloister wall of Wat Phra Kaew in 178 panels. Its Rama is a Buddhist king, its Hanuman is markedly less celibate, and its Thotsakan gets a sympathy Ravana rarely receives.
- Ayutthaya, Thailand · Ayutthaya — the city named for the story
Founded in 1350 and named after Ayodhya, with kings titled Rama — a title the present Thai dynasty still uses and numbers. The Burmese sacked it in 1767 and carried its court performers away, which is how the Thai Ramayana became the Burmese one.
- Yama Zatdaw · The Yama Zatdaw — Burma
The Burmese national epic, performed as marionette theatre and dance-drama, which arrived largely through the Ramakien when Siamese court performers were brought to the Burmese capital as captives after 1767. Its music and costume are still recognisably Siamese. Burma had Rama relief at Bagan five centuries earlier; the performance tradition is war booty.
- Phra Lak Phra Lam · Phra Lak Phra Lam — Laos
Here Rama is a previous birth of the Buddha and the whole thing is a Jataka, painted on monastery walls at Luang Prabang and performed at the New Year. The geography is relocated entirely to the Mekong — Ayodhya in Laos, Lanka downstream — so the epic happens on the river the audience lives on.
- Bali · Bali — the Kecak and the living version
Bali kept the Ramayana as liturgy rather than as heritage: recited in Old Javanese at temple festivals, danced, and staged as the kecak, a chorus of men chanting the monkey army's sound, which was devised in the 1930s with a German painter's involvement and is now entirely Balinese.
- Maharadia Lawana · Maharadia Lawana — the Philippines
A sung Maranao epic from Lanao in the southern Philippines, recorded only in 1968, in which the Ramayana's plot survives in a Muslim community with no Hindu institutions for centuries. It is the furthest east the story travelled as a living oral tradition, and it got there before Islam did.
- Kaundinya–Kambuja tradition · Kaundinya and the naga princess
The foundation story these kingdoms told about themselves — a Brahmin arriving by sea and marrying a local naga ruler — is the same structure the Ramayana's travels take: an Indian element joined to something already there, with the local half doing at least as much of the work.