Pictures designed by Sugandha Iyer
Preface
Ramayana is one of the great Indian epic tales with roots in an ancient era. Most inhabitants of India have met Ramayana in some form or other. As a child, you might have seen a puppet theater about Seeta, Ramas wife, when she was abducted by the demon king Rawana. You may, as a youngster, have got fascinated by some films about the fight between Rawana’s people and Rama together with the monkey army. As adult, you can immerse yourself in the poetical language as well as the religious ideas.
The story goes as follows.
God Shiva has incarnated in Prince Rama in order to destroy Rawana, who was ruling over the demons in Lanka. Rama is displaced from his throne by a stepmother and commanded to spend fourteen years in the wilderness. He accepts this as his duty. His wife, Seeta, follows him loyally and Laxamana, his affectionate half brother cannot leave him either.
The story can be read as an adventure story, but it is much more than that. It is about devotion and love, about fulfilling duty and engaging in moral purity. The story teaches about helping friends and fighting the evil. In short, it’s a story about how a person should be obedient to ”dharma”.
Ramayana is said to have been written down at first by Maharishi Valmiki, a holy man who lived between the sixth and fifth centuries before Christ. He, in turn, was trained by the goddess Narada. He expressed himself in Sanskrit, a language very close to the origins of all Indo-European languages. Sanskrit is still the second official language in the state of Uttarakhand in India.
It is said that Valmiki was the one who invented the shloka verse, and this was first used in Ramayana. The background is the following:
Once Valmiki saw a hunter killing a crane in the middle of a love act. He became so upset about this misdeed that he exclaimed (the following is a new construction in English):
Malicious arrow from stringed arc finished the ardent love of cranes.
May your mind be filled with agony all the remainder of your life.