Tradition · epic tradition & performance · Cambodia
Reamker
Also known as Reamker — the Khmer Ramayana
The Cambodian Ramayana, carved in the galleries of Angkor Wat and the Bayon, performed as masked lkhon khol and shadow theatre, and rebuilt almost from nothing after the Khmer Rouge killed most of the people who knew it.
- Function
- Text & inscription
- Confidence
- Not assessed
- Location
- 13.412, 103.867
Worth knowing
Its ending differs from every Indian version: Rama and Sita are reconciled after her ordeal but do not stay together, and the Khmer telling dwells on Hanuman's adventures and on Sita's refusal at much greater length than on the war.
Connections (2)
- Canonised by textRāmakien
The Thai Ramakien and the Khmer Reamker are close enough to be versions of one another, and both depart from every Indian telling in the same directions: far more space for Hanuman, more sympathy for the demon king, and an ending in which Rama and Sita's reconciliation does not hold. The Thai text was reworked under Rama I in 1797 after the older manuscripts were lost at Ayutthaya, and the Khmer one had to be reconstructed after the 1970s, so both are also survivals of catastrophe.
- AnalogueKakawin Rāmāyaṇa
The Javanese Kakawin and the Khmer Reamker are the two oldest Southeast Asian Ramayanas and they took different Indian sources: the Kakawin works from the Bhattikavya, a Sanskrit grammarian's showpiece, and the Reamker from a version closer to Valmiki with a large admixture of local material. Both give far more space to Hanuman than any Indian telling, and both survive partly in stone — at Prambanan and in the Angkor galleries.
On these journeys
Sources
Wikipedia, “Reamker”. Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaṇas (1991); Santosh Desai and the standard Southeast Asian Ramayana literature.
Open Reamker in the repository →