The Sanskrit text is divided into seven kandas. Bala Kanda covers Rama's birth and youth; Ayodhya Kanda the succession crisis in which Kaikeyi extracts the boons that send Rama into fourteen years of forest exile; Aranya Kanda the forest years and Sita's abduction; Kishkindha Kanda the alliance with the monkey king Sugriva; Sundara Kanda Hanuman's leap to Lanka and his finding of Sita, which is the book most often recited on its own as a devotional and protective text; Yuddha Kanda the war, Ravana's death and the return to Ayodhya; and Uttara Kanda the aftermath.
The first and last are widely held by textual scholars to be later additions to a core of books two to six. The grounds are stylistic and doctrinal together. In the core, Rama is a man of exceptional virtue; in the Bala and Uttara Kandas he is explicitly an incarnation of Vishnu, born to a divine plan, which changes the meaning of everything he suffers. The Uttara Kanda also contains the most disturbing material in the epic: after the return, Rama hears his subjects doubting Sita's purity and banishes her, pregnant, to Valmiki's hermitage, where she bears the twins Lava and Kusha, and where she finally asks the earth to take her back rather than submit to another public ordeal. Much of the modern argument about the Ramayana, about kingship, about what Sita is asked to bear, about whether the ending is tragedy or theology, is argument about a section many scholars regard as appended.
The Oriental Institute at Baroda produced a critical edition between 1951 and 1975, working from roughly two thousand manuscripts and sorting them into a Southern recension and a Northern one with north-western and north-eastern branches, whose differences are substantial.