The Ramayana

Overview

Composed

Over several centuries: the central narrative probably took shape around the middle of the first millennium BC, and the poem reached roughly its present extent in the early centuries AD

Attributed to

Vālmīki, the sage-poet whom Indian tradition calls the ādikavi, 'the first poet'

Language and metre

Sanskrit, almost entirely in the śloka (anuṣṭubh), a stanza of four eight-syllable quarters; the tradition counts about 24,000 ślokas

Divisions

Seven kāṇḍas ('books'): Bāla, Ayodhyā, Araṇya, Kiṣkindhā, Sundara, Yuddha and Uttara, each divided into sargas ('cantos')

Standard text

The critical edition prepared at the Oriental Institute, Baroda (1960–75), under G. H. Bhatt and U. P. Shah; references here follow it as 'Rām. kāṇḍa.sarga'

Genre

Epic; Indian tradition calls it the first kāvya (artful poem), as distinct from the Mahābhārata, which it calls itihāsa ('history')

Setting

The kingdom of Kosala and its capital Ayodhyā, the forests of central and southern India, the monkey kingdom of Kiṣkindhā, and the island fortress of Laṅkā

Quoted translation

Romesh Chunder Dutt's condensed version in long rhymed couplets (1899), arranged in twelve books; Dutt spells many names in their modern Indian forms (Ravan, Bali, Bibhishan, Bharat, Lakshman)

Also on this site

Ralph T. H. Griffith's complete verse translation, The Rámáyan of Válmíki (1870–74), of which Books I–VI are given canto by canto

Main themes

Dharma and the keeping of one's word; kingship and the ideal kingdom (Rāmarājya); exile and loss; love, chastity and suspicion; the divine in human form

Context

The Rāmāyaṇa, 'the journey of Rāma', tells how Rama, eldest son of King Dasharatha of Ayodhya, is exiled to the forest on the eve of his consecration, loses his wife Sita to the demon king Ravana, and wins her back with an army of monkeys and bears. With the Mahābhārata it is one of the two great Sanskrit epics, and it has been for more than two thousand years one of the most widely told stories in Asia. Indian tradition treats it as the first poem of all, and its author Vālmīki as the ādikavi, the first poet.

The poem tells the story of its own birth. In the opening sargas the sage Nārada summarises the life of Rama for Vālmīki (Rām. 1.1). Walking by a river, Vālmīki then sees a hunter shoot one of a pair of mating krauñca birds; the female's cry moves him to a curse, and he finds that his grief (śoka) has come out in a new, measured form, the śloka (Rām. 1.2). The god Brahmā tells him to use this metre to tell Rama's story, and Vālmīki teaches the finished poem to Rama's twin sons, Lava and Kuśa, who sing it before their father. The legend makes compassion the source of poetry, and it frames the epic as a song heard by its own hero.

The poem is divided into seven kāṇḍas. Most scholars since Hermann Jacobi have held that the core of the work is Books 2 to 6, from the exile to the war, and that Book 1 (Bāla, Rama's childhood and marriage) and Book 7 (Uttara, 'the later book', which includes the banishment of Sita) were added later; the first and last books make Rama an avatar of the god Viṣṇu much more insistently than the rest (Jacobi 1893) (Brockington 1998). The text survives in two main recensions, northern and southern, which differ considerably. The critical edition published by the Oriental Institute of Baroda between 1960 and 1975, under the general editorship of G. H. Bhatt and U. P. Shah, reconstructs the oldest recoverable text from the manuscripts of both (Bhatt 1975), and it is the basis of the complete Princeton translation by Robert Goldman and his colleagues (Goldman 2017).

Dates are uncertain. The central books reflect a world of small kingdoms in the Gangetic plain and probably took shape around the fifth or fourth century BC; John Brockington traces a gradual growth in stages that continued into the early centuries AD (Brockington 1984). The epic was certainly transmitted by reciters before it was fixed in writing, and the poem itself presents Lava and Kuśa as wandering singers.

The Rāmāyaṇa quoted in this guide is the condensed English verse version by Romesh Chunder Dutt (1848–1909), a Bengali civil servant, historian and novelist, published in 1899 (Dutt 1899). Dutt chose the most celebrated episodes, rendered them in long rhymed couplets that imitate the rhythm of the śloka, and joined them with short prose summaries, which this site omits; his twelve books do not match Vālmīki's seven. For the full text of the first six kāṇḍas, readers can turn to Ralph T. H. Griffith's verse translation, also on this site (Griffith 1874).

Plot overview

King Dasharatha of Ayodhya has four sons by three queens: Rama by Kausalya, Bharata by Kaikeyi, and the twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna by Sumitra. Rama wins Sita, daughter of King Janaka of Videha, by bending and breaking the great bow of Śiva. When the aged king decides to make Rama his heir, Kaikeyi, urged by her maid Manthara, claims two boons he once promised her: that Bharata be consecrated and Rama exiled to the forest for fourteen years. Rama obeys at once; Sita and Lakshmana insist on going with him, and Dasharatha dies of grief. Bharata refuses the throne, seeks Rama in the forest, and returns with his brother's sandals to rule as regent in his name.

In the forest, Rama protects the hermits from the rākṣasas, demons who disrupt their sacrifices. When the demoness Shurpanakha tries to seduce Rama and then attacks Sita, Lakshmana mutilates her. Her brother Ravana, ten-headed king of Lanka, sends the demon Mārīca in the form of a golden deer to lure Rama away; Lakshmana is driven off by Sita's reproaches, and Ravana, disguised as a mendicant, carries Sita off through the air.

Searching for her, Rama allies himself with Sugriva, an exiled monkey king, and kills Sugriva's brother Vali from ambush so that Sugriva can regain his throne. The monkey Hanuman leaps across the ocean to Lanka, finds Sita in Ravana's aśoka grove, gives her Rama's ring and sets the city on fire. Ravana's brother Vibhishana, who has urged him to return Sita, defects to Rama. The monkeys build a causeway to Lanka, and in a long war Rama's army kills Ravana's brother Kumbhakarna, his son Indrajit, and finally Ravana himself.

Rama publicly refuses to take back Sita, who has lived in another man's house; she enters a fire, and the fire god Agni returns her unharmed. Rama is consecrated king in Ayodhya and rules over a golden age. In the Uttarakāṇḍa, rumours among his subjects lead him to banish the pregnant Sita, who gives birth to Lava and Kuśa in Vālmīki's hermitage. Years later the boys sing the Rāmāyaṇa at Rama's horse sacrifice; Rama recognises them and asks Sita to prove her purity again. Instead she calls on the Earth, her mother, who opens and takes her back.

Book by book

Characters

Ayodhya

Rama

Eldest son of Dasharatha and Kausalya, the hero of the epic. He is the model of the dutiful son, loyal brother, devoted husband and just king, who accepts exile rather than let his father break his word. Yet his killing of Vali from ambush and his treatment of Sita after the war have troubled readers for centuries. In the central books he is mainly a human hero; in the first and last books, and in later devotional tradition, he is an avatar of Viṣṇu.

Sita

Daughter of Janaka, found in a furrow and so born of the Earth; wife of Rama. She insists on sharing his exile, rejects Ravana throughout her captivity, passes the ordeal by fire, and finally, banished and asked for proof again, returns to the Earth. She became the classic Indian model of the faithful wife, and is also read as a figure of quiet resistance and moral authority.

Lakshmana

Son of Sumitra and Rama's devoted younger brother, who follows him into exile and serves him constantly. Quick to anger, he mutilates Shurpanakha and kills Indrajit. His leaving Sita alone, under pressure from her reproaches, makes the abduction possible.

Bharata

Son of Kaikeyi. Absent when his mother secures him the throne, he rejects it, seeks Rama in the forest, and rules for fourteen years as regent in Rama's name, with Rama's sandals on the throne. He is the epic's model of loyalty without ambition.

Dasharatha

King of Kosala, ruling from Ayodhya. Bound by the boons he once promised Kaikeyi, he must exile his favourite son, and he dies of grief, remembering his own youthful killing of a hermit's son.

Kaikeyi

Dasharatha's youngest queen and Bharata's mother. Persuaded by her maid Manthara, she claims two boons to have Rama exiled and Bharata crowned. Her son rejects her, and she became a byword for the scheming stepmother, though some later versions try to excuse her.

Kausalya

Dasharatha's senior queen and Rama's mother, who grieves bitterly at his exile and blesses Sita as she leaves.

Manthara

Kaikeyi's hunchbacked old maid, who persuades her mistress that Rama's elevation will ruin her and her son.

Janaka

King of Videha in Mithila and Sita's father, who found her in a furrow while ploughing and promised her to whoever could bend Śiva's bow; a royal sage famous for wisdom.

Monkeys and bears

Hanuman

Son of the wind god and counsellor of Sugriva. He leaps over the ocean, finds Sita, burns Lanka and brings healing herbs from the Himalaya. Clever, eloquent and devoted, he became one of the most popular gods of Hinduism, worshipped as the ideal servant of Rama.

Sugriva

Monkey king exiled by his brother Vali, who also took his wife. Rama kills Vali for him, and in return Sugriva commands the monkey army in the search for Sita and the war.

Vali

(Dutt: Bali) Sugriva's elder brother and king of Kiṣkindhā, a mighty warrior. Rama shoots him from hiding while he fights Sugriva. His dying reproach in Vālmīki raises the epic's most famous ethical question about Rama.

Tara

Vali's wise wife, who warns him not to answer Sugriva's challenge, laments him, and later becomes Sugriva's queen.

Angada

Vali's son, made heir of Kiṣkindhā; a leader of the search for Sita and a hero in the war.

Jambavan

The aged king of the bears, an adviser in Rama's army, who in Vālmīki encourages Hanuman to make his leap.

Lanka

Ravana

(Dutt: Ravan) The ten-headed king of the rākṣasas, ruling from Lanka. Learned, powerful and protected by a boon against gods and demons, he abducts Sita in revenge for his sister's mutilation and out of desire. His grandeur makes him a tragic antagonist, and in some later traditions a sympathetic hero.

Vibhishana

(Dutt: Bibhishan) Ravana's righteous younger brother, who urges him to return Sita, is insulted, and goes over to Rama. After Ravana's death he becomes king of Lanka.

Shurpanakha

(Dutt: Surpa-nakha) Ravana's sister, whose advances to Rama and Lakshmana end with Lakshmana cutting off her nose and ears. Her complaint to Ravana sets the abduction in motion.

Kumbhakarna

Ravana's gigantic brother, who sleeps for months at a time. He blames Ravana's folly, but fights for him out of loyalty and is killed by Rama.

Indrajit

Ravana's son, a master of magic and illusion who once defeated Indra (hence his name). He nearly kills Rama and Lakshmana and is finally killed by Lakshmana.

Mandodari

Ravana's chief queen, whose lament over his body recognises Rama as divine.

Sages and gods

Valmiki

The sage credited with the poem, the 'first poet'. He discovers the śloka in his grief at the killing of a krauñca bird, gives shelter to the banished Sita, and teaches the epic to Lava and Kuśa.

Vishvamitra

(Dutt: Viswa-mitra) A royal sage who takes the young Rama and Lakshmana to fight demons and brings them to Mithila for the bow contest.

Agastya

A great sage of the southern forests, who welcomes the exiles, praises Sita and directs them to Pañcavaṭī.

Jabali

A Brahman who urges Rama, with sceptical arguments, to give up his vow and return to Ayodhya.

Agni

The god of fire, 'witness of our sins and virtues', who returns Sita unharmed from the pyre and declares her pure.

Themes

Dharma and the kept word

Dharma, a word meaning law, duty, righteousness and the order of things, is the poem's central value. Its demands are often in conflict: Dasharatha must choose between his promise and his son, Rama between obedience and the claims of his mother and brothers, Vibhishana between righteousness and kinship. Rama consistently gives priority to truth (satya), the keeping of one's word, even at great cost.

The poem does not present dharma as simple. Jābāli's sceptical argument, Vali's reproach and Sita's protest at the ordeal are all given eloquent voice. The epic's continuing power partly comes from the unresolved tension between Rama's commitment to dharma and the suffering it causes.

Kingship and Rāmarājya

The Rāmāyaṇa is a political poem about legitimate rule. It opens with an ideal Ayodhya, shows a succession crisis caused by desire within the royal household, and ends with Rama's reign as a golden age. Bharata ruling in the name of the sandals models a power exercised in trust. Rama's banishment of Sita to satisfy his subjects shows the cost of a king who places public duty above private happiness.

Pollock argues that the epic constructs the ideal of a divine king who protects order against demonic forces, and that this image has been used repeatedly in Indian political history (Pollock 1984) (Pollock 1993).

Exile and the forest

Most of the poem takes place in the forest, a world of hermits, demons and animals, outside the order of the city. The exile purifies and tests the heroes: Rama and Lakshmana take on the dress of ascetics, and Sita shares their hardships. The forest is also where boundaries break down, as when demons take on human or animal forms and a king's wife can be carried off.

Love, chastity and suspicion

The love of Rama and Sita is the emotional centre of the poem, expressed in Rama's laments at her loss and her steadfastness in captivity. But it is overshadowed by the question of Sita's chastity, which she must prove twice. The poem's treatment of Sita as the model wife has been both celebrated and criticised; it also shows her as articulate, resolute and, finally, defiant (Sutherland 1989) (Hess 1999).

The divine in human form

Rama acts mainly as a human hero, grieving and making mistakes, but he is also presented as an incarnation of Viṣṇu who has come to destroy Ravana. The relationship between these two aspects is one of the great questions of the poem and of its later devotional tradition, in which the story became a form of worship.

Motifs

Tokens and recognitions

The poem advances through objects that stand for absent people: Rama's sandals on the throne, his ring given to Sita, her jewel sent to Rama. At the end, recognition comes through a song, when Rama knows his sons as they sing his story.

Boons and curses

Kaikeyi's boons start the exile, the curse of the blind hermit causes Dasharatha's death, and Ravana's boon of invulnerability to gods and demons explains why he must be killed by a man. Words once spoken have binding power in the epic.

Illusion (māyā)

Demons constantly change their form: Mārīca as a golden deer, Ravana as a holy man, Indrajit fighting invisibly and creating a false Sita. Appearances in the poem are dangerous, and much depends on seeing through them.

Pairs of brothers

The epic is full of pairs of brothers: Rama and Bharata compete in renunciation, Vali and Sugriva fight over a throne and a wife, Ravana and Vibhishana divide over righteousness. Each pair illuminates a different face of kinship and loyalty.

Seasons and landscape

Descriptions of the seasons, such as the winter at Pañcavaṭī and the monsoon at Kiṣkindhā, reflect the characters' moods and became models for later Sanskrit court poetry.

Symbols

The bow

Rama's breaking of Śiva's bow wins Sita and marks him as a hero beyond ordinary men; the bow remains his emblem, and his arrows kill Vali and Ravana.

The golden deer

Beautiful, illusory and fatal, the deer stands for desire for what is false, and has become a proverbial image in Indian languages.

Fire

Agni witnesses Rama and Sita's wedding and the fire ordeal, which proves her purity. Fire both tests and protects.

The Earth

Sita is born from a furrow and returns into the ground. The Earth is her mother and final refuge, and links her to fertility, patience and endurance.

The sandals

Placed on the throne of Ayodhya, Rama's sandals represent legitimate kingship exercised in absence and loyalty without ambition.

Critical debates

The growth of the epic

Since the nineteenth century, scholars have argued that the Rāmāyaṇa grew over a long period. Hermann Jacobi's Das Rāmāyaṇa (1893) set out the view that Books 2–6 form the original poem, with Books 1 and 7 added later, and that the Viṣṇu passages are additions; his arguments rested on differences of style, the two tables of contents in Book 1, and the way Rama's divinity is treated (Jacobi 1893).

John Brockington refined the analysis into several stages of growth, using linguistic and stylistic criteria, from an oral core to the later expansions and the regional recensions (Brockington 1984) (Brockington 1998). Goldman accepts the priority of Books 2–6 but stresses the poem's artistic unity as it has come down to us (Goldman 2017).

Rama's divinity

Is Rama a man or a god in Vālmīki? The view that he becomes divine only in the later books has been challenged. Sheldon Pollock argues that the epic's whole plot requires a divine king: Ravana's boon makes him invulnerable to every being except man, so that only a god in human form can destroy him. The figure of Rama thus expresses an ancient Indian ideology of kingship as divine (Pollock 1984) (Pollock 1991).

Others still read the core books as presenting a human hero whose divinity was progressively emphasised, especially in devotional retellings such as Tulsidas's Rāmcaritmānas (Lutgendorf 1991).

Sita and gender

Sita has long been held up as the model of the devoted wife, and this has made her a central figure in debates about gender in India. Sally Sutherland (later Sutherland Goldman) contrasts her with Draupadī of the Mahābhārata and argues that Sita turns her anger inward rather than against her husband, a pattern that the culture held up as ideal (Sutherland 1989).

Linda Hess traces the long history of Indian discomfort with Rama's treatment of Sita, from poets who soften or omit the banishment to modern audiences who openly criticise it (Hess 1999). Feminist retellings in Indian languages have made Sita a figure of resistance (Richman 2001).

The killing of Vali

Rama shoots Vali from hiding while he fights his brother, an act that seems to violate the warrior's code. In Vālmīki the dying Vali accuses Rama of unrighteous conduct, and Rama answers that Vali had taken his brother's wife, that a king may punish crimes in his territory, and that animals may lawfully be hunted from concealment (Rām. 4.17–18) (Lefeber 1994).

Commentators and later poets have found these answers inadequate or have tried to supplement them; some versions explain that Vali had a boon that let him absorb the strength of anyone who faced him. The episode remains a test case for whether the epic's ideal hero can do wrong.

The many Ramayanas

The Rāmāyaṇa exists in hundreds of tellings in Indian and Southeast Asian languages, in literature, theatre, painting and ritual. Among the best known are Kampaṉ's Tamil Irāmāvatāram (perhaps twelfth century), Tulsidas's Hindi Rāmcaritmānas (sixteenth century), and versions in Thailand (Ramakien), Cambodia, Laos, Java and Bali (Hart 1988) (Lutgendorf 1991) (Iyengar 1983).

A. K. Ramanujan's essay 'Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation' argued that these are not simply versions of Vālmīki's 'original' but distinct tellings, each shaped by its own culture, drawing on a common pool of story (Ramanujan 1991) (Richman 1991). In 2011 the University of Delhi removed the essay from a history reading list after protests by some who objected to its account of variant tellings, which provoked a public debate about scholarship and religious sentiment. The essay is reprinted in Ramanujan's collected essays (Ramanujan 1999).

The Ramayana and political imagination

In 1993, after the destruction of the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya, Sheldon Pollock argued that the Rāmāyaṇa had served for centuries as a political resource: from the twelfth century, kings in India used the image of Rama and the 'othering' of the demonic enemy to represent their wars and their legitimacy (Pollock 1993).

In the late 1980s the hugely successful television serial Ramayan, directed by Ramanand Sagar, gave the story a new national audience; Lutgendorf studied its reception (Lutgendorf 1990). The epic's role in modern politics, including the movement for a temple at Rama's supposed birthplace, remains contested.

The Uttarakāṇḍa

The seventh book is widely regarded as a later addition, but it contains the episodes that most trouble modern readers: the banishment of Sita on the basis of gossip and the killing of the śūdra ascetic Śambūka for practising austerities forbidden to his class. Goldman and Sutherland Goldman, in their translation, discuss both its late position in the textual history and its place in the poem's reception (Goldman 2017).

Some traditions omit or alter the book; Tulsidas, for example, ends with Rama's happy reign. Others find in it the poem's deepest moral seriousness, since it shows the costs of the ideal kingship that the earlier books celebrate (Richman 2001).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does the Rāmāyaṇa begin with the story of how it was composed, and what does the legend of the krauñca birds suggest about the nature of poetry?

   Consider the link between śoka (grief) and śloka (verse), and the fact that the poem is later sung by Rama's sons before Rama himself.

2. Is Rama right to obey his father's command to go into exile? What does his decision reveal about the epic's idea of dharma?

   Consider Dasharatha's promise, Kausalya's grief, Lakshmana's anger and Jābāli's argument; think about the value of truth (satya).

3. How does the poem portray Kaikeyi? Is she simply a villain?

   Look at her first reaction to the news of Rama's consecration and at the role of Manthara.

4. Compare the brothers Rama and Bharata with the brothers Vali and Sugriva and Ravana and Vibhishana. What does each pair show about kinship and loyalty?

   Consider competition in renunciation versus violence, and the question of where loyalty is owed.

5. Can Rama's killing of Vali be justified?

   Consider Vali's offence against Sugriva, Rama's promise, the warrior's code and Rama's arguments in Vālmīki (Rām. 4.17–18), which Dutt omits.

6. How does the epic present Ravana? Is he a tragic figure?

   Think about his learning and power, his council of war, his grief for Indrajit and Mandodarī's lament.

7. What is the role of Hanuman in the poem, and why might he have become an object of devotion?

   Consider his leap, his eloquence with Sita and his total devotion to Rama.

8. How should we read Sita's fire ordeal? Is Rama's behaviour cruel, prudent or something else?

   Consider the role of rumour and public opinion, Sita's own words, and the comparison with her banishment and final return to the Earth.

9. In what sense is Rāmarājya an ideal, and what does the Uttarakāṇḍa suggest about its costs?

   Compare the description of Ayodhya in Book I with Rama's joyless palace and his confession in Book XII.

10. What does Dutt's condensed version leave out, and how do his choices shape our understanding of the epic?

    Compare with the summary of the seven kāṇḍas; consider the frame story, Vali's reproach, the burning of Lanka and the banishment of Sita, and look at Griffith's fuller translation on this site.

Further reading

• Bhatt, G. H., and U. P. Shah, gen. eds. The Vālmīki-Rāmāyaṇa: Critical Edition. 7 vols. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1960–1975.
• Brockington, J. L. Righteous Rāma: The Evolution of an Epic. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1984.
• Brockington, John. The Sanskrit Epics. Handbuch der Orientalistik 2.12. Leiden: Brill, 1998.
• Dutt, Romesh Chunder, trans. The Ramayana: The Epic of Rama, Prince of India, Condensed into English Verse. London: J. M. Dent, 1899.
• Goldman, Robert P., trans. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. 1, Bālakāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. (Gen. ed. Robert P. Goldman; 7 vols., 1984–2017.)
• Goldman, Robert P., and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, trans. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. 7, Uttarakāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.
• Griffith, Ralph T. H., trans. The Rámáyan of Válmíki, Translated into English Verse. 5 vols. London: Trübner; Benares: E. J. Lazarus, 1870–1874.
• Hart, George L., and Hank Heifetz, trans. The Forest Book of the Rāmāyaṇa of Kampaṉ. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988.
• Hess, Linda. 'Rejecting Sita: Indian Responses to the Ideal Man's Cruel Treatment of His Ideal Wife.' Journal of the American Academy of Religion 67, no. 1 (1999): 1–32.
• Iyengar, K. R. Srinivasa, ed. Asian Variations in Ramayana. New Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1983.
• Jacobi, Hermann. Das Rāmāyaṇa: Geschichte und Inhalt nebst Concordanz der gedruckten Recensionen. Bonn: Friedrich Cohen, 1893.
• Lefeber, Rosalind, trans. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. 4, Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994.
• Lutgendorf, Philip. 'Ramayan: The Video.' TDR: The Drama Review 34, no. 2 (1990): 127–176.
• Lutgendorf, Philip. The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Lutgendorf, Philip. Hanuman's Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
• Pollock, Sheldon I. 'The Divine King in the Indian Epic.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 104, no. 3 (1984): 505–528.
• Pollock, Sheldon I., trans. The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India. Vol. 3, Araṇyakāṇḍa. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991.
• Pollock, Sheldon. 'Rāmāyaṇa and Political Imagination in India.' Journal of Asian Studies 52, no. 2 (1993): 261–297.
• Ramanujan, A. K. 'Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation.' In Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, edited by Paula Richman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Edited by Vinay Dharwadker. New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• Richman, Paula, ed. Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
• Richman, Paula, ed. Questioning Ramayanas: A South Asian Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.
• Sutherland, Sally J. 'Sītā and Draupadī: Aggressive Behavior and Female Role-Models in the Sanskrit Epics.' Journal of the American Oriental Society 109, no. 1 (1989): 63–79.