In the foreword to his thought-provoking travelogue Arrow of the Blue-Skinned God, Jonah Blank underlines the significance of the Ramayana of Valmiki in modern Indian culture:
Imagine a story that was the Odyssey, Romeo and Juliet, the Bible and a Hollywood blockbuster all rolled into one … [This is a timeless story] that could make young children marvel, grown men weep, and old women dream.
For better or worse, no Indian – Hindu or non-Hindu – can escape the influence of the Ramayana on their life and consciousness. My own name, Rajiv, is found in the Sanskrit version of the epic: Rama is described as Rajivlochana, or “lotus-eyed”. Like most Indians of my generation who grew up in the late 1980s, I was under the spell of Doordarshan’s television adaptation of the Ramayana. As Punjabi kids, we were especially thrilled to see one of our own, Dara Singh, play the role of Hanuman, the vanar (or monkey) god. Once, in an attempt to mimic Hanuman’s punching power, I gave another boy a severely bloody nose – the horrific sight and the boy’s howling made me realise the necessary distinction between fantasy and reality.
Over three decades, in India and the West, I studied literature and read many works, including the Bible and Homer’s epic poems. These texts reveal curious narrative and stylistic parallels with the Ramayana, indicating how ancient cultures exchanged and borrowed ideas.
I recently read the Ramayana in its entirety, thanks to a single-volume translation prepared by Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman. It is a remarkably lengthy work, comprising twenty-five thousand Sanskrit couplets, numerous unrelated subplots and repetitions that point to its origins in ancient oral narratives.…
Poetry as authority and ideology
Like much ancient world literature – such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and the books of the Bible – the Ramayana began as an oral poem designed to be easily memorable and authoritative. Similarly, the Qur’an was composed in highly refined Arabic verse, conveying the authoritative voice of Allah, making it easy to memorise and recite. Committing the entire Qur’an to memory is considered a significant achievement for any Muslim, earning them the honorific of Hafiz (or Hafiza for women).
Most religions have used archaic languages in their liturgy to convey authority and tradition – Sanskrit (in orthodox Hinduism), classical Arabic (in Islam) and Latin (in the Roman Catholic Church). As Wendy Doniger points out, ancient Brahmins most likely spoke native Indian dialects or Prakrit in everyday life, reserving Sanskrit for religious rituals. Priestly Brahmins also used Sanskrit to exclude the lower castes from studying religious texts, thereby preventing any challenge to Brahminical fiction that demeaned them and exploited their labour.
The Hindu linguistic and liturgical exclusion is evident in the Ramayana. In the Sundarakanda – one of the seven books of the Ramayana – Sita expresses Brahminical ideology in sarga (chapter) 26 when, during her captivity in the evil Ravana’s palace, she says: “I am no more able to give [Ravana] my affection than a twice-born brahman is able to teach a Vedic mantra to a sudra [the lowest of the four classes].”
Indeed, denying education to lower castes is a recurring motif in a number of Hindu texts. During British rule, upper-caste Hindus vehemently resisted efforts to educate Dalit children. Meanwhile, moderate Hindus like MK Gandhi romanticised “The Ideal Bhangi”, a Dalit who gladly performed his dharma (“sacred duty”) of cleaning non-flushing toilets and “would not dream of amassing wealth…” In early 2025, wretchedly poor Dalits are forced to live out the Gandhian vision as they clean overflowing makeshift toilets and filth for millions of pilgrims in a massive Hindu festival.
The first sarga of the Ramayana provides an overview of Rama’s exemplary life and career, stating that he “has set the four social classes each to its own work in the world”. How can a devout Hindu ignore what god has ordained?
Poetry to delight the heart
The Valmiki Ramayana claims to “delight the heart” – it tugs at the heartstrings with sentimental scenes, entertains with playful moments and brims with humour of all kinds. During battle scenes, the text radiates gleeful excitement when Rama slays demons and chops off their limbs, reminiscent of the Iliad.
One of the humorous portraits is that of Manthara, the scheming hunchbacked palace maid responsible for Rama’s exile. The tragic turn of events is punctuated with adolescent humour at Manthara’s expense. She is told in sarga 9 of the Ayodhyakanda:
There are hunchbacks who are misshapen, crooked, and hideously ugly – but not you. You are lovely, you are bent no more than a lotus in the breeze.
Such veiled insults pile up:
And this huge hump of yours, wide as the hub of a chariot wheel – you must store all your clever ideas in it …
Since she is a low-class woman, the literary dice are loaded against her, much like Shakespeare’s Caliban and Shylock. Manthara’s burlesque culminates in a crowd-pleasing finale in sarga 72 when, in a revenge attack, Rama’s brother Satrughna “dragged the howling hunchback across the ground”, shattering her precious jewellery.
Valmiki’s poetic fixation on fair-skinned feminine beauty, including Sita’s, mirrors modern India’s deep-seated skin colour prejudice, where dark-skinned women suffer psychological trauma and popular scorn.
On the positive side, the Ramayana features enchanting descriptions of climate, landscape and the natural world. The summer season is not something people long for, unlike in English poetry. Rama is compared to “the rain that refreshes people parched by summer's heat”. Throughout the epic we find stunning images of an India filled with lotus ponds, rivers, forests and mountains alongside wondrous wildlife.
One of Sita’s motivations for accompanying Rama into exile is the allure of “the honey-scented woods”. She tells him: “I long to see the streams and mountains, the ponds and forests … the lotus ponds in full bloom, blanketed with hansas [the bar-headed geese] and karandavas [ducks]”. She yearns for “the trackless forest, teeming with deer, monkeys, and elephants”. Even Hanuman, in the Sundarakanda, while on his grave mission to rescue the kidnapped Sita, is moved by beauty. He hears “the tinkling of women’s belt ornaments, and the jingling of their anklets”. He is enchanted by the trees and flowers, which make the landscape appear “like a mountaintop dusted with pollen”. The “exquisite women” are portrayed as “resplendent as a storm cloud illuminated by flashes of lightning”.
In the Kiskindhakanda, we encounter fragrant glades “where bees hum, a gentle breeze is blowing, cooled by sandalwood trees. The Aranyakanda tells us that winter is Rama’s “favourite season”, when “the world crackles with frost”, the water turns uninviting and the warmth of a fire “appeals the most”. These verses evoke my own memories of north Indian winters. Valmiki’s image that reminds me of my childhood is that of jamuns in the hot, rainy season: “Black as bees, the succulent fruit of the jambū tree can be eaten to one’s heart’s content …”
One might argue that the epic’s scope is narrow, focusing primarily on the two highest classes – Brahmins and Kshatriyas. Yet, over two thousand years, it has accumulated layers, making it an encyclopaedia of Indian civilisation in all its glorious and unsettling aspects, troubling both liberal and orthodox factions.
Rajiv Thind is a literary scholar, fiction writer and visiting academic at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. This is an excerpt from his article published on the ABC Religion and Ethics website.
