Epilogue — The Story Continues

After Chapter 114

Back to Valmiki, and outward: the tellings that came after this one, in India and beyond it, and the reason the story has never settled into a single version.

The book ends where it began: with Valmiki, and with two boys who learned a poem by heart and sang it to a court that did not know whose sons they were.

That is a strange way for a story to end, and it is worth noticing what it does. The poem contains its own composition. It shows you the man who made it, the grief that gave him the metre, the students who carried it out of the hermitage, and the moment it first met an audience. A story that ends by handing itself to singers is a story that expects to be sung again.

It was. It has not stopped.

Told again, in other languages

Around the twelfth century, in Tamil, a poet named Kamban made the Iramavataram, and what he made is not a translation. Kamban writes inside a Tamil poetic inheritance centuries old, and inside the bhakti movement, where God is loved personally and particularly. His Rama is an object of that love in a way Valmiki's is not.

In 1574, by the date the poem gives itself, Tulsidas began the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi, and for a vast number of people in northern India it is simply the Ramayana: the one heard, memorised, and quoted. Behind it stands the Adhyatma Ramayana, a Sanskrit telling of the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries that reads the whole story through non-dual philosophy, so that Rama is the Absolute wearing a life.

In fifteenth-century Bengal, Krittibas Ojha put it into payar metre as a panchali, a sung narrative, made to be performed for a village rather than read at a court. In Telugu, Molla, a potter's daughter and one of the earliest named women poets in the language, wrote a Ramayana praised for plain speech at a time when court poetry ran to heavy Sanskrit.

And in Prakrit, in a Jain telling by Vimalasuri, the story changes shape entirely. Ravana is not a monster. He is a handsome and just ruler, a protector of Jain shrines, and the rakshasas are a civilised people rather than demons. Rama does not kill him: Lakshmana does, because a Rama committed to non-violence could not. There are said to be seventeen or so Jain Ramayanas. That one detail should be enough to show that these are not decorations on a fixed story. They are arguments about what the story means.

Told again, in other countries

Thailand's Ramakien was completed in 1797 under King Rama I, rebuilding what had been lost when Ayutthaya was destroyed thirty years earlier. Its Rama is a king among kings, and its Hanuman is nothing like the celibate ascetic of the Sanskrit: he is a romantic hero with a love story of his own, involving a mermaid, that no Indian telling contains.

Java has the Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana. Cambodia has the Reamker. Laos has Phra Lak Phra Ram, which has moved out of a Hindu frame entirely and is understood as a Jataka, a story of the Buddha's former lives, with Lakshmana as the central and more capable figure. Some Malay tellings of the Hikayat Seri Rama do the same, making Lakshmana the stronger brother. In Myanmar the story is Buddhist too, as the Yama Zatdaw. In the Philippines, among the Maranao, there is the Maharadia Lawana, whose Ravana-figure has eight heads and is a hero.

These are not exotic versions of an Indian original. They are national literatures with their own dates, authors and religious commitments, and they have been at this for centuries.

Told again, out loud

Most people who have known this story have not read it. They have watched it.

Ramlila, the cycle of open-air performances staged across northern India through the autumn and ending with Ravana's effigy going up in flames, was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2008. Javanese shadow puppetry, wayang kulit, was recognised in 2003, and the Thai masked drama khon, whose only source is the Ramakien, in 2018. Kathakali took shape in seventeenth-century Kerala, its most direct forerunner a Ramayana dance-drama.

Dussehra, or Vijayadashami, is the tenth day, the victory: the name is usually explained as the removal of the ten, meaning Ravana's heads. Diwali is widely held to mark Rama's return to Ayodhya, lamps set out to bring him home, though that connection is the tradition's own account of itself rather than anything history can date, and Diwali means other things in Jain and Sikh observance.

Told again, by Sita

For most of its life this story has been told by men, and the ordeal by fire and the banishment have been told as things that happened to Sita rather than to someone with a view about them.

Not everywhere. In sixteenth-century Bengal, Chandrabati, the first named woman poet in the language, wrote a Ramayan that stays with Sita's lament and gives the war almost no room at all, in village Bengali, meant to be sung, largely to women. In our own time the Telugu writer Volga wrote The Liberation of Sita, five linked stories in which Sita, after the abandonment, meets the other women of the epic: Shurpanakha, Ahalya, Urmila.

Chapter 109 of this book is where a reader is most likely to feel the need of those tellings.

No original

It is tempting to think of Valmiki as the original and everything after as versions. That is not how the scholarship reads it, and it is not how the tradition behaves. A. K. Ramanujan's essay "Three Hundred Ramayanas", and the volumes Paula Richman edited around it, argue that the plurality goes all the way down: not one authoritative text with copies, but a story that has always existed in the plural, in many languages, in Hindu and Jain and Buddhist and Muslim settings, told by people with incompatible convictions about what it is for.

That this remains a live question rather than a settled one is easy to demonstrate. Ramanujan's essay was taught in a history syllabus at the University of Delhi; it was objected to; and in October 2011 the university's Academic Council voted to remove it, a decision a number of historians publicly opposed.

What this telling is

One more of them.

It follows the critical edition, which is a scholarly reconstruction from many manuscripts, and it says so throughout, and section J will show you where it departs. It puts things in that Valmiki has and most modern retellings drop, including a great deal of the Uttara Kanda: Shambuka, the banishment, Sita's descent, Lakshmana's death. It does not soften Rama, and it does not explain him.

But it is a telling, not the story. The story is older than this book and will outlast it, and the right way to finish reading it is the way the poem itself suggests: hand it on, and let someone else say it differently.