J. Sources and Notes

What this retelling is based on

The narrative follows the critical edition of Valmiki's Ramayana, the text reconstructed by scholars from the surviving manuscript traditions. Where this book tells you something happened, it happened there.

Two other things get into a retelling, and it is worth naming them.

The first is later tradition. Some of the most familiar episodes in the Ramayana as people know it are not in the critical edition: the protective line drawn outside Sita's door is the best known example. This book uses a few of them, because leaving them out would produce a version most readers would find strangely incomplete. Where it does, the note below says so.

The second is the ordinary work of retelling: setting, transitions, and turning compressed verse into scenes a modern reader can walk through. That is everywhere in this book by necessity, and it is not separately noted. What is never done is inventing a fact, resolving a contradiction by picking a convenient answer, or supplying a character's private motive that the source does not give. Where the source is silent, this book is silent, and several of the notes below exist to say exactly that.

Notes by chapter

These were originally written into the narrative itself and were moved here so the story could be read without interruption. Nothing needs to be read to follow the book.

Prologue: The bird at the Tamasa. The bird Valmiki sees killed is a krauncha. Older English translations render the word as curlew; Julia Leslie's study of the question ("A Bird Bereaved", Journal of Indian Philosophy) compared thirty-two candidate species and identified it as the Indian sarus crane. This retelling says crane.

Ch 22: Agastya's weapons. The source gives the weapons to Rama. It does not say that Agastya separately arms Lakshmana.

Ch 23: Shurpanakha's marriage. A later Uttara Kanda retrospective calls Shurpanakha the wife of the rakshasa Vidyujjihva. It belongs to a different point in the chronology and is not needed to explain her arrival at Panchavati, so the forest chapter carries only the kinship the episode itself gives her.

Ch 24: Ravana's ten heads and twenty arms. The ten heads and twenty arms belong to the Uttara Kanda retrospective. They are a form that renders Ravana more than human rather than a physical description to be rationalised.

Ch 24: Ravana and Shiva at Kailasa. Chapter 24 carries a brief allusion to this: Ravana recalls that he once shook Mount Kailasa and incurred Nandi's curse. Chapter 58 tells it in full, and follows the critical account closely.

The critical account (Uttarakanda 7.16) has more in it than is sometimes supposed. Ravana does put his arms under the mountain and heave, Shiva does press it down with his toe, Ravana's arms are pinned, his cry fills the three worlds, and Shiva gives him the name from that cry. All of that is Valmiki, and all of it is in Chapter 58.

What later Shaiva and Puranic tradition adds is what happens in between. In the enlarged telling Ravana is held for a long time, sometimes said to be a thousand years, and his pain turns into worship and song; Shiva, pleased by the devotion rather than by the strength, releases him and grants him favor, often including a sword named Chandrahasa. The Shiva Tandava Stotra is traditionally attributed to him as the hymn he sang. That attribution is traditional rather than demonstrated: no date, author, or manuscript history supports it. This retelling does not use any of this material.

The difference is worth stating precisely, because it is easy to get backwards. Valmiki's Shiva is pleased by Ravana's strength and lets him go within the same scene. The devotional tradition's Shiva is moved by his worship. See back matter section D.

Ch 25 and Ch 26: The Lakshman Rekha. The protective line commonly called the Lakshman Rekha belongs to later Ramayana tradition rather than the critical Valmiki passage, as does Ravana's use of alms to draw Sita across it. Both are included in this retelling as marked traditional elements. The abduction itself, Sita's resistance, the ornaments, and Jatayu's defense are all Valmiki-supported.

Ch 28: Hanuman's parentage. Hanuman is called the Son of the Wind in the Valmiki passage. The familiar childhood cycle involving Anjana, the Sun, Indra, and later boons is not drawn on at this point; the material Valmiki does carry appears later, in Ch 72 and Ch 73.

Ch 44: Why Ravana's heads returned. Later tradition explains Ravana's survival by a store of nectar held in his navel. The critical account gives no such device. The heads return without a stated mechanism, and the duel ends only when Rama uses the weapon Agastya gave him.

Ch 52: Ravana's boon, and what the critical account withholds. The critical account does not record Brahma's answer to Ravana's request for immortality, and gives no reason for its non-grant.

Ch 52 and Ch 55: Kumbhakarna's sleep. Many later retellings make Kumbhakarna's sleep a cycle of six months asleep and six months awake, sometimes explained as Brahma lessening a slip of the tongue at Ravana's request. The critical account carries no such cycle and no such rhythm of waking: it says only that he asked to sleep for many years. This retelling follows the critical account throughout.

Ch 57: Ravana against Vaishravana. The critical account says Ravana entered a rakshasa illusion, and that when he emerged he swung his mace against Vaishravana's head.

Ch 61: Anaranya's curse. The source does not have Anaranya name Rama, or know the later story as a private certainty.

Ch 61 and Ch 102: Pururavas, and Marutta, in two eras. Two figures appear at points in the story that seem too far apart for one lifetime. In both cases the critical account is what puts them there.

Pururavas. Uttarakanda 7.19.5 lists the kings who told Ravana they had been overcome: duṣyantaḥ suratho gādhir gayo rājā purūravāḥ. Uttarakanda 7.80.23 and 7.81.23 give Pururavas as the son Ila bore to Budha, who later ruled at Pratishthana. Both readings are stable in the witnesses consulted. The text never says the two are the same man, and this retelling does not say so either. Epic lists of kings are not always lists of contemporaries.

Marutta. This one the source does assert. At 7.18 Samvarta, brother of Brihaspati, officiates at King Marutta's sacrifice, the one Ravana interrupts. At 7.81.14 the horse sacrifice that restores Ila is carried out by saṃvartasya tu rājarṣiḥ śiṣyaḥ ... marutta iti vikhyātaḥ: the royal sage Marutta, known as Samvarta's disciple. The same identifying tag appears in both, in stories separated by generations, and this retelling follows it in both.

Neither the Baroda critical apparatus nor the Princeton commentary on these sargas was reachable when this note was written, so it remains possible that a manuscript variant or a scholarly note bears on the first case.

Ch 69: Indrajit's boon. Brahma's grant is Critical Uttarakanda 7.30. Meghanada first asks for immortality outright (amaratvam ahaṃ deva vṛṇomīhāsya mokṣaṇe, 7.30.8) and is refused: nāsti sarvāmaratvaṃ hi keṣāṃ cit prāṇināṃ bhuvi, no being on earth holds it (7.30.9). Only then does he name the condition of the fire offering, and the verse states the consequence in one direction only: if he fights while the rite is unfinished, tadā me syād vināśanam, then his destruction would follow (7.30.11-12). Brahma answers evam astv iti, so be it (7.30.14).

The familiar positive half of this boon, in which a chariot and horses rise from the flames and make him invincible while he stands on them, is not in the critical sarga. This retelling keeps the protection implicit in the bargain and does not describe a chariot rising from the fire. Nikumbhila is Meghanada's grove at 7.25.2, before the capture of Indra, not part of the boon scene; the retelling names it at Ch 66 and at Ch 40 rather than here.

Ch 69: Indra's humiliation. At this point the source recalls an earlier wrong by Indra as part of explaining his humiliation. Ahalya's own account is given in Ch 6; this retrospective does not replace it, and does not make her story the cause of another person's violence.

Ch 77: "A child is coming to us". Rama's line renders apatyalābho vaidehi mamāyaṃ samupasthitaḥ (Critical Uttarakanda 7.41.22). The participle samupasthitaḥ means that the gaining of a child has presented itself or is at hand; the verse uses no word for womb or conception, names no dohada, and the narration describes no physical sign. Published translations differ on how definite to make it, and Shastri renders it as an explicit pregnancy. This retelling states the pregnancy plainly at Chapter 77 and again at Chapter 79 because the manuscript's own narrative requires it: Sita is sent across the Ganga in Chapter 79 and gives birth at Valmiki's hermitage in Chapter 85. The banishment of a pregnant woman is the fact the reader has to be holding, and it was previously invisible.

Ch 98: The division of Brahmahatya. The source assigns the four portions of Brahmahatya to full rivers, trees, women during menstruation, and those who knowingly kill innocent brahmins. This belongs to the source's mythic explanation of the stain. It is not a rule the narrative adopts or defends.

Ch 111: Yudhajit's kinship. The Uttarakanda has Gargya address Rama and call Yudhajit mātulas te, your maternal uncle (7.90.9). Taken alone that is puzzling: Yudhajit is the Kekaya king and Kaikeyi's brother, and Rama's mother is Kausalya of Kosala. The Balakanda is explicit the other way, calling him sākṣād bharatamātulaḥ, plainly Bharata's maternal uncle (1.72.2), and Dasharatha and Kaikeyi both say yudhājin mātulas tava to Bharata (2.1.2, 2.66.6).

The two are not in conflict. Mātula is used across a shared royal household rather than strictly of one queen's line. A reader following the kinship closely cannot be expected to know that, so this retelling gives the genealogy that holds in every passage and calls Yudhajit Kaikeyi's brother. Nothing in the source is contradicted; only the looser epithet is set aside.

Ch 108: The witnesses at the assembly. The source gives no separate words to Rama's brothers, to Hanuman, or to Lava and Kusha at this moment. They are kept in the scene without being given responses the source does not record.