 Rāmāyaṇa, although Hanumān’s allusion to it in Book Six appears in the best reconstruction of the text. More telling on the side of Jacobi’s view is a previously unnoticed allusion in the Rāmopākhyāna that would appear to presuppose a passage in the constituted text of the critical edition of the Rāmāyaṇa. At Mahābhārata 3.275.60 it is said that when Hanumān has been sent to bring the good news of Rāma’s victory to Bharata, he carried out his mission after ‘observing all gestures’ (lakṣayitveṅgitam sarvam). This phrase is obscure unless one has in mind Rāmāyaṇa 6.113.12-15, where Rāma charges the monkey to observe closely all of Bharata’s bodily and facial gestures when he hears the news, with the purpose of determining whether the prince is truly willing to relinquish his regency to Rāma. At verse 14 he says, ‘take note of all of Bharata’s gestures and behavior’ (jñeyāḥ sarve ca vṛttāntā Bharatasyeṅgitāni ca). The opacity of the former passage leads us to believe that it is an elliptical allusion to the latter. This would appear to be a better example of what Jacobi argues is evidence of the priority of Rāmāyaṇa with respect to the Rāmopākhyāna.
With the elimination of the Rāmopākhyāna as probable source or even a collateral descendent from a common source for the story, we can with some assurance assert that the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa or at least the text that can be reconstructed from the manuscripts of its three recensions, is the earliest surviving version of the Rāma legend.
The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa, as the oldest surviving version of the Rāma story, assimilated and superseded its presumed bardic sources. Moreover, an early stage of the text can, we believe, be recovered from the existing manuscripts and, to a large extent, has been reconstructed in the text of the critical edition. At an indeterminate but relatively early date, the work acquired tremendous prestige not only as an edifying and even redemptive tale but as both the first work of true poetry and a record of God’s deeds among men. It thus seems reasonable to view the poem as the ultimate source of all versions of the tale in existence.
Before turning to a discussion of the translation of the epic, its style, conventions, aims, and annotation, we must make some effort to explain it. In order to do so, we must probe into the nature and significance of the work as an expression of the needs, ideals, and beliefs of the culture that produced it and continues to cherish it.
Like any monumental work of literature, the Rāmāyaṇa has always functioned on a variety of levels. Through the millennia of its popularity, it has attracted the interest of many kinds of people from different social, economic, educational, regional, and religious backgrounds. It has, for example, served as a bedtime story for countless generations of Indian children, while at the same time learned śāstrins, steeped in the abstruse philosophical, grammatical, and metaphysical subtleties of classical Indian thought, have found it a subject worthy of their intellectual energies.
Originally the story, or at least its kernel, must have drawn its audience as a stirring martial saga of a legendary warrior hero of Kosala. On this level, the level of a legendary tale, the compound story has two main portions fused into an epic of intrigue, quest, and triumph such as we find in literature the world over. The first section of this story, the account of the events in Ayodhyā culminating in the exile of Prince Rāma, has, despite its relative realism and apparent historicity, much in common with the folk or fairy tale. Its central event, the dispossession of a favorite child through the machinations of a wicked and pitiless stepmother, is commonplace in fairy tales. [ Note 92] Although the epic, as we now have it, has treated this motif in its own peculiar fashion, modifying it in the service of other ends, the essential plot of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa is unmistakably allied to that of hundreds of stories in the collections of the folk and fairy tales of India, Europe, and the Middle East.
The subsequent portion of the poem seems even closer to such a source. For the hero, now exiled, wanders through a succession of enchanted woods peopled by strange creatures, filled with enormous and magical powers for good or evil. In these woods he is befriended by a powerful and beneficent sage who gives him magical weapons.[Note 93] With these weapons Rāma manages to kill huge numbers of dreadful demons, creatures common to the fairy-tale literature; but, at last, the lord of all the demons, using his magic power, steals away the beautiful princess Sītā whom he imprisons in a remote citadel across the sea. Then, just when Rāma seems to have lost everything, he is befriended by a group of talking monkeys who agree to help him. One of the monkeys flies across the sea and returns with news of the princess. Then, with the aid of the monkey army, the hero crosses the sea, fights a dreadful battle and, at last, recovers both the princess and his throne. Once more, similar stories could be picked out of virtually any collection of fairy tales. [ Note 94] Indeed, when told in outline, the story seems at times more like Puss in Boots than a great heroic saga or courtly epic.
The basic plot of the epic, then, is clearly derived from or heavily influenced by the folk literature of ancient India, which is closely allied to the folk literatures of Europe and West Asia. It is, perhaps, this that has led some scholars to see western influences at work on the authors of the Rāmāyaṇa. We may view the Rāmāyaṇa, then, as either an epic built upon a heroic legend of the Kosalan aristocracy and largely shaped by the hands of storytellers steeped in the tradition of Märchen and fairy tales, or as an ancient folktale adapted by the bards to suit the tastes and interests of the Kosalan nobility.
We cannot, of course, finally decide between these two hypotheses. But, in any case, the destiny of the Rāma story is such as to demonstrate clearly that it was from a very early date regarded as far more important than just another fairy tale or even legend of the heroic age, such as are recorded by the hundred in the Mahābhārata, the purāṇas, the kathā literature, and even the vedas. By the time of the addition of the Bāla and Uttara Kāṇḍas, the text had taken on a fully defined function as an exemplary tale, and its hero had assumed a role as a model for human behavior.
The intrusion of the theological element, albeit at a late and somewhat heterogeneous stratum of the text, gave rise to the tradition that the epic has a soteriological virtue. This development, however, is not very pronounced and is perceptible in the critically edited text in only a few obviously late passages. The first of these, and the only one accepted by the critical editors, is to be found at the end of Nārada’s Saṃkṣipta Rāmāyaṇa, which forms the bulk of the epic’s opening chapter. There we are told that the story is holy, the equal of the vedas, and that it purges one from sin. [ Note 97] The reading of it is said to free one from all sin. Further, it is said that the reading of the Rāmāyaṇa insures a place in heaven, not only for the reader, but for his sons, grandsons, and dependents. Finally we learn that reading it was open to all four of the social orders of Indo-Aryan society, and benefited them all, according to their respective social roles: it brought mastery in the use of the sacred utterances to brahmans, kingship to kshatriyas, success in business to vaishyas, and greatness to even the shudras.
The Rāmāyaṇa, then, although it has come to be regarded as an essentially devotional text, has become one only as a result of accretions. The devotional element never permeated the Sanskrit epic and has left the bulk of it untouched. As a result, the tone and feeling of Vālmīki’s work is markedly different from that of later versions of the Rāma story, such as those of the Vaishnava purāṇas and the poets of the bhakti movement who use the tale to give literary expression to the consuming force of their devotional passion.
With the rise of the cult of Rāma and development of the Vaishnava schools of theology, particularly that of Rāmānuja and his successors, the numerous commentators on the Rāmāyaṇa aimed to provide a Vaishnava hermeneutic for the poem as an account of God’s manifestation among his earthly devotees. We feel that this sort of interpretation is largely forced upon the poem.