Ramayana

Attributed to the poet-sage Valmiki, traditionally called the 'adi kavi' or first poet, the Ramayana is composed in shloka meter across seven books (kandas) and narrates Prince Rama's exile from Ayodhya, the abduction of his wife Sita by the demon king Ravana, and the war fought to recover her with an army led by the monkey-general Hanuman. Its actual place and date of composition are genuinely uncertain: scholars generally treat the middle five books as an older core, with the first and last (Bala Kanda and Uttara Kanda) recognized as later additions that reframe the story in more explicitly divine terms, stretching the plausible composition and redaction window across several centuries.

The poem survives in multiple regional recensions, broadly grouped into northern and southern textual traditions that diverge in detail, a fact honestly reflected in the absence of any single 'original' manuscript; critical editions attempt to reconstruct a common ancestor rather than recover one. Despite this textual complexity, the Ramayana's moral architecture is comparatively unambiguous next to the Mahabharata's: Rama is presented as maryada purushottama, the ideal man bound by propriety, and the narrative repeatedly tests whether that ideal can survive contact with personal cost, most painfully in Rama's later doubt about Sita's fidelity after her rescue.

Hanuman's devotion to Rama in the epic became a template later absorbed into the broader bhakti (devotional) traditions of Hindu religious practice, while Ravana, though the antagonist, is given enough learning and stature to complicate any simple reading of the conflict as pure good against pure evil.

The Ramayana's influence extended well beyond the Indian subcontinent: distinct retellings took root across Southeast Asia, including the Ramakien in Thailand and the Kakawin Ramayana in Java, each adapting the story to local religious and political contexts. Within India, it remains one of the two great itihasa epics alongside the Mahabharata, and continues to generate new performance and literary traditions, from classical dance-drama to contemporary television.