Text · Sanskrit epic · India
Ramayana
/rɑːˈmɑːjəɳə/
One of the foundational Sanskrit epics of South Asian civilisation, the Rāmāyaṇa narrates the life of Rāma, his exile, Sītā’s abduction, and his return to Ayodhyā. Its narrative connects a vast landscape including Ayodhyā, Citrakūṭa, Daṇḍakāraṇya, Kiṣkindhā and Laṅkā, and has shaped literature, pilgrimage, art and performance traditions across the subcontinent.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Mixed / layered
Worth knowing
The epic has inspired hundreds of regional retellings across South and Southeast Asia, including Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Bengali, Thai, Khmer and Javanese traditions.
The Rāmāyaṇa is a layered textual tradition with multiple regional retellings. Connections between epic locations and modern archaeological sites are not necessarily historically or archaeologically established.
Connections (2)
- Script and cultureLepakshi
Lepakshi’s paintings and sculptural traditions belong to the larger visual culture surrounding the Ramayana. The epic travelled across the Indian subcontinent through Sanskrit, regional languages, performance and temple art. Lepakshi therefore connects Andhra’s sixteenth-century artistic world with an enduring civilisational narrative shared from Tamil Nadu and Karnataka to Odisha and northern India.
- Devotional corpus onTōlpāvakkūttu, Palakkad
Tōlpāvakkūttu performs the Kamba Rāmāyaṇam — the twelfth-century Tamil Ramayana — in Malayalam-speaking Kerala, over as many as twenty-one nights, with the Pulavar puppeteers reciting the Tamil verse and then glossing it in Malayalam prose. The puppeteers must know Tamil poetry and Sanskrit commentary to do it. A Tamil epic kept alive by Malayali shadow-puppeteers in Bhadrakali temples is an unusually specific piece of literary transmission.
Sources
Wikipedia, “Ramayana”. Critical editions and published translations of the text itself.
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