The Valmiki Ramayana
Preamble
We began our discussion of the story of Rama with an outline of the main events as given in the Sanskrit epic known as the Ramayana and attributed to the sage Valmiki. Valmiki’s Ramayana, as it is commonly called, is also the oldest and most influential literary telling of the story available to us. The text has come down to us orally and in the form of hundreds of manuscripts; though the basic story—its characters, main events, temper and tone—remains the same, the various versions and recensions differ, sometimes significantly, in the details. (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.5-6).
Valmiki’s Ramayana, in the form in which we have it today, consists of 50,000 lines of verse arranged in seven kandas or books which tell the main events in the life of Rama in chronological order. The books, in order, are:
Balakanda (Childhood)
Ayodhyakanda (Ayodhya)
Aranyakanda (The Forest)
Kishkindhakand (Kishkindha)
Sundarakanda (The Beautiful)
Lankakand (Lanka)
Uttarakanda (Epilogue)
Each book is divided into sargas or chapters, which are made up of a number of slokas or verses.
Over time, the attempt by scholars, philosophers, writers and others to understand Valmiki’s remarkable text has resulted in an enormous number of treatises, commentaries, and analyses on virtually every aspect of the epic. However, fundamental questions about the epic—its date, authorship, history and historicity—still remain.
Tradition believes that the Ramayana was composed during Rama’s lifetime, in the legendary Treta Yuga, the second of the four ages of the world. This makes the Ramayana at least a million years old if not more, an idea which makes sense only in metaphorical terms. Even disregarding this, the date of the Ramayana remains difficult to determine, and estimates range from the fourth century CE to the sixth millennium BCE (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.14).
The historicity of the characters and events described in the epic is also fiercely debated. Tradition regards the epic as itihasam, history, a true setting-down of events as they happened. But there exists no external, objective evidence of any kind, whether in the form of contemporary texts, inscriptions, or archaeological record, to help confirm the period of composition of the epic or the events it describes.
Its authorship is also uncertain. Tradition believes the poem to be the work of a single author, the sage Valmiki, who is revered as ‘adi kavi’, the first poet, and the Ramayana as the first poem. But an analysis of the text shows that numerous passages, of varying lengths, have been added to it over the centuries, and that much of the Balakanda and almost all of the Uttarakanda were composed later than the other books. (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.15). This indicates that the Ramayana, as we have it today, is not the work of a single author; nor was the entire epic composed in the same period of time.
There are as many arguments in support of a particular view as against, and opinion remains divided on almost every question. For the purposes of our own understanding, let us begin at the beginning, with the first four sargas of the Balakanda, which form the upodghata or introduction to the epic. Though the upodghata is a later addition to the epic, it is still a useful and interesting place to start. It gives us a peep into the minds of the epic’s authors and, in the words of Robert Goldman, “our earliest glimpse of the tradition’s attitude towards art, emotion, and aesthetics” (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.71).
UPODGHATA: BALAKANDA SARGAS 1-4
Sarga 1 of the Balakanda opens with a conversation between the ascetic Valmiki and the divine rishi Narada and introduces us to the story of Rama.
Valmiki asks Narada whether there exists in the world a perfect man endowed with all the virtues. ‘You must know of such a man, Narada,’ he says. ‘Tell me, for I am eager to know.’
Narada, delighted with the question, thinks for a moment and replies, ‘These virtues are hard to find, sage, but there is indeed a man in whom they are all combined. He is Rama of the house of Ikshvaku.’ He then describes the many attributes of Rama and narrates, very briefly, the main events in the story of Rama. He closes his account with a description of Rama’s perfect reign and a listing of the beneficial effects of reading the Ramayana.
There are several interesting points to note in this sarga:
1. Narada begins his account of story of Rama with Dasharatha’s decision to appoint Rama his heir and regent and ends with Rama’s return to Ayodhya as its rightful king. This accounts follows the contents of Books 2 through 6.
2. His account does not include any of the events mentioned in the Balakanda, viz., the events that occur in Rama’s life prior to Dasharatha’s decision, from his birth to his marriage with Sita.
3. Though Narada does describe Rama’s perfect reign, he makes no mention of the events that take place later in his life, which are the concern of the Uttarakanda—Sita’s pregnancy, her banishment to the forest, the birth of her twin sons, her refusal of Rama and return to the earth, and finally, the end of Rama’s sojourn on earth.
4. Further, though Narada compares Rama to Vishnu as being equal to him in might (Balakanda, Sarga 1, Sloka 17; Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.122), at no point in his account does he say that Rama is actually Vishnu or his avatar. It is only later, in Sargas 14 and 15 of the Balakanda, that Rama is identified with Vishnu. (We will come back to this later, when we consider the question of Rama’s divinity.)
Sarga 2 of the Balakanda is one of the most interesting and best known passages from Valmiki’s Ramayana. It sets the scene for the composition of the epic and tells us how Valmiki discovers the art of poetry and comes to compose the Ramayana. (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p. 71). The contents of this sarga are worth considering in some detail.
Narada, having completed his account of Rama’s life, is duly honoured by Valmiki and his disciples and flies off to the land of the gods. Valmiki, accompanied by his disciple Bharadvaja, now goes down to the Tamasa river to bathe. There, he finds the perfect bathing spot, but before he enters the water, he decides to go for a walk. As he walks about gazing at the forest, he sees a pair of mating krauncha birds, totally absorbed in each other. As the sage stands watching the beautiful birds, a Nishada hunter appears out of nowhere and kills the male bird. The female, seeing her mate covered in blood and writhing on the ground in agony, lets out a cry of deep distress. Valmiki is filled with pity for the birds, and, with the cries of the female bird ringing in his ears, spontaneously curses the hunter. Much to his surprise, his unpremeditated utterance emerges in metrical form.
The sage is taken aback. “Stricken with grief for this bird, what is this I have uttered?” he asks. (Balakanda, Sarga 2, Sloka 15; Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.128). He realises that his intense emotional response to the suffering of the birds has somehow been transformed into an aesthetic experience and expressed itself as poetry. (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p. 71-72). He declares “the utterance I produced in this access of soka, grief, shall be called sloka, poetry, and nothing else.” (Balakanda, Sarga 2, Sloka 17; Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.128). His spontaneously uttered curse has already been memorised by his delighted disciple.
The sage, still reflecting upon the krauncha birds and his profound discovery, finally takes his ritual bath in the river and returns to his ashram. There, four-faced Brahma himself comes to visit him. Valmiki is struck with wonder and welcomes the god with all due honour. Once they are seated, Valmiki, still pre-occupied with the krauncha birds, sings the verse again before Brahma.
Brahma smiles to hear it and says that it is a sloka he has composed, and that it was by his divine will that he spontaneously produced this verse. Brahma then commands him to tell the full story of Rama, leaving nothing out. He promises that every event of Rama’s life and all that happened to Lakshmana, Sita and the rakshasas, would be revealed to him, including the events he did not know about. Moreover, says Brahma, not one word of his poem shall be untrue. “Now compose the divine story in heart-delighting slokas,” says Brahma and declares that as long as the rivers shall flow and the mountains stand upon this earth, so long shall the story of Rama shall endure throughout the world; after making this prophecy, he disappears.
Valmiki’s disciples chant the verse again and again, and marvel how his grief, expressed in four quarter lines of equal syllables, has, by repetition, become poetry.
Valmiki then conceives the idea to compose an entire poem in slokas. He decides to call his great poem the Ramayana.
Note: A sloka is made up of four quarters (‘feet’ or ‘pada’), each with eight syllables. It is the metre most often used in the Ramayana.
Sarga 2 is important for many reasons:
Its statement, that Valmiki’s curse of the hunter is the very first example of true poetry (and, by implication, that Valmiki is the ‘adi kavi’, the first poet, and his Ramayana, the first poem) has been embraced quite literally by popular tradition. The idea has also been discussed widely and intensively in Sanskrit literary tradition, in other literary works as well as in technical treatises on poetics and aesthetic theory. Valmiki’s naming of the verse-form he so spontaneously discovers, his play on ‘soka’ and ‘sloka’, is an important statement on the relationship between emotion and aesthetic experience; this forms an important part of Sanskrit literary discourse on the nature of aesthetic experience and remains relevant in modern discourse on the subject. (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p. 71-72; see also Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, note on Sarga 2, Sloka 14, p.281).
Sarga 3 once again gives a summary of the great poem that Valmiki composes. This time, though, the summary includes the events, both in the past and those still to take place, that Narada had left out (essentially the events of the Balakanda and Uttarakanda), and which Valmiki learns through the special insight that Brahma has given him. According to this sarga, Valmiki begins his great poem with an account of Rama’s birth and ends it with his consecration as king, his dismissal of his troops, and his banishment of Sita.
Sarga 4 is the final sarga of the Introduction.
It states at the beginning that Valmiki composed his great poem after Rama had regained his kingdom, and that included in his epic are all the events of Rama’s life, including those that had not yet taken place. (Balakanda, Sarga 4, Slokas 1&2; Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.132).
The sage’s great poem is now complete. He now ponders the question of its transmission and wonders who should perform it. Just then two of his disciples come up to him. They are Lava and Kusa, Rama’s twin sons, who live in the ashram with him. Since the two young men are well-versed in the vedas and have good memories, he decides to teach them the whole of his great poem. The two young men sing the poem as he has taught them before gatherings of rishis and wise men. The sweetness of their singing and the story they tell captivates everyone. Their fame spreads far and wide, till one day, Rama hears of them and brings them to his palace. The twins begin to sing the Ramayana before Rama and his three brothers, till even Rama himself becomes completely immersed in it.
The upodghata ends here, leaving us ready to receive the great tale.
The upodghata thus presents the Ramayana as being the creative work of a single author, the sage Valmiki, who recrafted in literary form an existing narrative. This bears out the more or less unitary nature of Books 2 to 6. However, the discrepancies between Narada’s account in Sarga 1 and the summary of Valmiki’s final poem in Sarga 3, support the conclusion that most of the Balakanda and the Uttarakanda were composed later than the middle five books.
The author’s appearance within the text itself as a character in the story is a device used in many Indian texts. Thus Valmiki’s appearance within the epic as the sage in whose hermitage Sita takes refuge, and who teaches her sons the Ramayana, is not unusual. In addition to the four upodghata sargas, he appears in the last book, the Uttarakanda.
According to the upodghata, Valmiki composed his poem during Rama’s lifetime. This does not help us in dating his epic, since we have no independent proof of Rama’s historicity. But, given the traditional belief that Rama lived during the Treta Yuga (which tradition dates as the period 2163163 BCE – 867102 BCE), the upodghata supports the popular belief that Valmiki’s Ramayana is the first, most ancient poetic expression of man.
The upodhghata represents the Ramayana as a work that was composed orally, and then memorised and transmitted orally in its memorised form. Analyses of the many recensions and manuscripts of the Ramayana have established that the epic was indeed composed and transmitted orally almost to the present day, even after it was put into writing several centuries after its composition. in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An epic of ancient India (Pollock, p. 82-83; ‘The Ramayan Text and the Critical Edition’ in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An epic of ancient India, Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1). The earliest extant manuscript of the Ramayana has been dated to 1020 CE (Bhatt, 1960 p.xv).
Rama’s twin sons, Kusa and Lava, represent the ancient tradition of the bards or kusilavas of ancient India. (For a discussion on the derivation of their names from the term, see Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, note on Sarga 4, Sloka 3, p.286) They appear only in the Balakanda and Uttarakanda, invented by their authors as a link between the origin of the poem and its main character; as they recite the poem before Rama, the introduction segues smoothly into the start of the story proper (Goldman et al., 2007, Vol 1, p.73).
There is so much more to be read, discussed and understood about this many-layered poem. Please write in with your comments and observations, on this post or Valmiki’s Ramayana, via the comment box below. (Subscribers can also email their comments by replying to this post from their inbox). We at Fish love to hear from you!
SOURCES AND FURTHER READING
In writing this post, I have mainly followed Robert Goldman’s translation of the Balakanda (which follows the critical edition of Valmiki’s Ramayana):
Goldman, R.P. et al. (2007) The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An epic of ancient India (7 vols). Delhi, India: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited.
His analyses, notes and observations have been invaluable to my understanding of the epic. Any mistakes I have made in interpretation, though, are purely mine.
For an introduction to the critical edition of Valmiki’s text, see Sheldon Pollock’s essay in Vol 1 of the Goldman translation:
Pollock, S.I. (2007) ‘The Ramayan Text and the Critical Edition’, in The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An epic of ancient India . Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited, pp. 81–93.
For a description of Ramayana manuscripts, see:
Bhatt, G.H. (ed.) (1960) The Balakanda, The First Book of The Valmiki Ramayana (7 vols). Baroda, India: Oriental Institute.
For more on Valmiki and the date and composition of the Ramayana, see:
Ramaswami Sastri, K.S. (1944) The Genius of Valmiki. Baroda: Dept. of Education.
Brilliant and illuminating! Kudos and thank you