The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki by Vālmīki ISBN 9780691206868, 0691206864, B0973N29RL instant download

The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki by Vālmīki ISBN 9780691206868, 0691206864, B0973N29RL instant download

When contemplating a reading of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, it might well occur to a reader unfamiliar with the work to ask, “What is a Rāmāyaṇa, and who or what is Vālmīki?” If one were to be told that Rāmāyaṇa is the title of a famous and influential Sanskrit epic poem of ancient India, that Vālmīki is the name of its author, and that the work is in many ways similar to epic poems like the Iliad, the Odyssey, and the Aeneid, one might then ask, “Why don’t we refer to these latter works as ‘The Homer Iliad,’ ‘The Homer Odyssey,’ and ‘The Virgil Aeneid’?” And thereby hangs a tale—or rather, many, many versions of the same tale.

The name Rāmāyaṇa, “Rāma’s Journey,” is actually a generic term that, over the last two and a half millennia, came to be applied, either specifically or generically, to the innumerable versions of the epic’s central story that proliferated across the vast geographical, linguistic, cultural, and religious range of southern Asia from antiquity to the present day. The collectivity of these versions in poetry, prose, song, drama, cinema, and the visual arts is sometimes referred to as the Rāmakathā, “The Tale of Rāma.”