Valmiki

Valmiki is the sage-poet to whom Indian tradition ascribes the Ramayana, and is honoured as the Adi Kavi, the First Poet. Nothing about him is securely known as history; the epic itself and later legend present him as an ascetic who, moved by grief at the death of a bird, found the verse form of the shloka, and who sheltered Sita in his hermitage.

The Sanskrit Ramayana, the story of Rama, his exile, the abduction of Sita by the demon-king Ravana and her rescue, took shape over several centuries and is dated variously between about the fifth century BC and the second century AD. The standard Sanskrit epic is divided into seven books; Ralph T. H. Griffith's English verse translation (1870–1874), the version offered here, renders the first six, with the Uttarakanda summarised rather than versified.