Rama

There is no single Ramayana. There is a Sanskrit epic attributed to Valmiki, and there are a very large number of retellings in other languages, some of which change the story fundamentally, and the differences are not decorative.

Valmiki's text, assembled over centuries and usually placed in the last few centuries BCE and the early centuries CE, presents Rama largely as an exemplary man, the ideal son, husband and king. The explicit identification of him as an avatar of Vishnu is concentrated in the first and last books, which most scholars regard as later additions to a core of books two through six. The earlier layer is a heroic narrative; the divinity is added around it.

Tulsidas, writing the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, wrote something else: a devotional work in which Rama is God from the first line, and the reader's relationship to him is bhakti. This is the version most north Indians actually know, and it is recited and performed far more than the Sanskrit.

The Kamban Ramayanam in Tamil, the Bengali version of Krittibas, the Jain retellings in which Ravana is a tragic figure rather than a demon and Lakshmana rather than Rama does the killing, the Thai Ramakien, the Javanese and Balinese versions, these are not translations. A. K. Ramanujan's essay counting three hundred Ramayanas made this general point and became controversial in India for it.

Which Rama a person means depends on which telling they grew up inside.

Rama's birthplace is the most politically consequential claim about any figure in this atlas, and it is worth separating the parts.

Valmiki's Ayodhya is described as the capital of Kosala and the setting of the opening books. Whether the modern town of Ayodhya in Uttar Pradesh is that place is not established archaeologically; the identification is traditional and long-standing, and the question of continuity of occupation is contested.

The Babri Masjid, built in the sixteenth century, stood on a site that a body of Hindu tradition identified as the exact birthplace. Legal disputes over it run back to the nineteenth century. The mosque was demolished by a crowd in December 1992, and the riots that followed across India killed roughly two thousand people.

The Supreme Court of India delivered its judgment in the title suit in November 2019. Its findings are worth stating precisely because they are widely misreported in both directions. The court held that the demolition was a serious violation of law; that the archaeological evidence showed a pre-existing non-Islamic structure beneath the mosque but did not establish that a temple had been demolished to build it; that the archaeological report could not be used to determine title on faith grounds; and it awarded the disputed land to a trust for the construction of a temple while directing that separate land be provided for a mosque.

The judgment is a legal resolution of a title dispute. It is not, and does not claim to be, a finding about where a figure of the epic was born.

Where Krishna is loved for breaking rules, Rama is revered for keeping them, and the title the tradition gives him states it: Maryada Purushottam, the supreme person who observes the bounds, the ideal of dharma embodied as a man.

In the Ramayana Rama is the perfect son, who accepts fourteen years of forest exile without protest to keep his father's word; the perfect brother and husband; and, above all, the perfect king. His reign, Ram Rajya, became the enduring Indian image of just and righteous government, a realm without want or injustice, invoked far beyond religion; Gandhi used Ram Rajya to name the ideal social order he sought, detaching it from any sectarian sense.

But the ideal is not presented without cost, and the tradition knows it. To answer his subjects' doubts about Sita's purity after her captivity, Rama subjects her to an ordeal by fire, and later, when suspicion persists, banishes her, pregnant and innocent, to the forest. That a story about the perfect man contains his treatment of a faultless wife has troubled readers for centuries: it is debated within the tradition, dramatised differently in different retellings, and pressed hard by modern feminist critics, for whom Sita's ordeal is the crux rather than a detail.

The figure therefore carries a tension that devotion does not dissolve. He is held up as the standard of conduct in a bind where every choice costs something, and the maryada he never breaks is exactly what exacts the price, which may be part of why the ideal has held so long.

The story of Rama is one of the most widely diffused narratives in human history, carried across South and Southeast Asia and taking root in cultures with no other connection to Hinduism.

In mainland Southeast Asia it became a court and temple epic. Thailand's Ramakien is a national classic, its scenes carved along the galleries of the royal temple in Bangkok and performed in masked khon dance; Cambodia has the Reamker, Laos the Phra Lak Phra Lam, and Myanmar its own tradition. In Muslim-majority Indonesia the Rama story survives in the Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana and lives on in the wayang shadow-puppet theatre and the dance-dramas of Java and Bali, a Hindu epic held as cultural heritage in the world's largest Muslim nation.

In India the telling is inseparable from performance and festival. Ramlila, the popular dramatisation staged over successive nights and culminating in the burning of giant effigies of the demon Ravana, is enacted across the north each autumn and is inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. Diwali, the festival of lights, is understood in much of India to mark Rama's return to Ayodhya after his victory, the lamps lit to guide the exiled king home.

Paula Richman's studies of the "many Ramayanas" underline the point that there is no single authorised text behind all this, the epic lives as a tradition of retellings, each community's Rama shaped by its own language, faith and stage.