The society depicted in the Sanskrit epics was divided into four great social/functional classes known as varnas. How is the hero's pedigree mythically established? Although this oral transmission was long ago supplanted by manuscript transmission, as the principal means of handing the epic down from one generation to another, many traditions and types of Ramayana performance- including recitation, folk and ritual drama, stage play, songs, puppet theater, and video and cinema-have continued to keep the epic tale with its heroes, heroines, and villains alive for Indian and Southeast Asian audiences down to the present day. There the twins perform the epic for its hero.įrom this charming story, which serves as the prologue to the Valmiki Ramayana, we learn that the epic was orally produced, performed, and transmitted in the early years of its existence. After some time, King Rama, who is ruling in the capital city of Ayodhya, hears of these two brilliant singers of tales and summons them to a command performance at the royal court. The two young bards take their show on the road, as it were, and perform the epic in the towns and villages of Kosala. We learn in the course of the epic, that the two are actually the sons of Rama, who is, however, unaware of their existence. The most apt and talented of these are a pair of twin boys named Lava and Kusha. Valmiki then taught his orally composed poem, which was designed for public musical performance, to his disciples. Valmiki with the benefit of the divine insight granted him by the god, then composed the Ramayana, a massive epic in seven books (kandas) containing some 50,000 lines of Sanskrit verse. Brahma further informed Valmiki that the purpose of this divine inspiration was to enable the sage to render the highly edifying tale of Lord Rama that he had been told by Narada into a great epic poem that would be both morally uplifting and aesthetically pleasing. The god informed the sage that it was he himself who had inspired him to create a new medium of verbal expression that had enable him to transform the powerful emotion of grief (shoka) into poetry (shloka). Suddenly his musings were interrupted by the arrival of the great creator divinity, Lord Brahma. Valmiki returned to his ashram, pondering this strange event. To his astonishment, the curse emerged from his mouth as a perfectly formed metrical verse, suitable for recitation to the accompaniment of musical instruments. Witnessing this terrible act and hearing the piteous cries of the bereaved hen crane, Valmiki spontaneously cursed the hunter. As the enraptured sage watched the birds a tribal hunter, taking advantage of the couples’ absorption in one another, shot and killed the male bird. There he became entranced by sight of pair of beautiful cranes mating. Upon the seer's departure, Valmiki walked to the banks of the nearby river to perform his obligatory ritual bath. Narada replied by narrating briefly the virtues and history of King Rama. The sage asked his guest if there were any truly noble, heroic, and virtuous men in the world of their day. One day the legendary sage Valmiki received a visit in his ashram (forest hermitage) from the divine seer Narada. The way the poem came to be composed is itself an interesting story, which is told in the opening chapters of the epic itself. The Valmiki Ramayana is a monumental epic poem about the exemplary hero and divine incarnation, Lord Råmacandra, of the ancient North Indian kingdom of Kosala. This interview with Robert Goldman analyzes the Ramayana through the lens of the Hero's Journey.
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