The First Poem

A sage went down to the river to bathe. It was an ordinary morning on the banks of the Tamasa, and Valmiki, walking the bank, caught sight of a pair of krauncha birds, curlews or herons, moving together in the shallows, calling to each other in the unguarded way of creatures that believe themselves alone. As he watched, a hunter, a nishada, drew his bow and shot the male. The bird fell. Its mate, circling the body, broke into a cry that the sage would never forget.

And something happened in Valmiki that had, the tradition says, never happened to anyone before. His pity rose, and with it, unbidden, came words, and the words fell into a shape. Four feet of eight syllables each, perfectly balanced, a measure that had not existed a moment earlier. He had cursed the hunter. He had also, without meaning to, invented poetry.

This is how the Ramayana accounts for its own birth, and it is one of the most quietly radical origin stories any literature has told about itself. The first poem was not made to praise a god or flatter a king. It came out of a man undone by the grief of a bird.

Shoka into shloka

The verse Valmiki spoke is preserved, and the tradition treats it with the reverence due to a first thing. It stands at Balakanda 1.2.15 in the vulgate that Griffith and Dutt follow (1.2.14 in the critical edition), in the anushtubh metre, the four-line couplet that would go on to carry the Ramayana, most of the Mahabharata, and much of classical Sanskrit after them. Addressed to the hunter, it is a curse: may you never find rest through the long years, for you killed one of a pair while it was lost in love.

The point of the scene is not the curse. It is what Valmiki notices a moment later. In the public-domain rendering of the episode, he reflects that what has poured out of his grief, measured and fit to be sung, “shall be Shloka and nothing else.” Here the tradition makes a pun it considers a revelation. The Sanskrit for grief is shoka. The word for the verse is shloka. The one is the other with a single sound shifted. Poetry, the Ramayana says, is grief that has found its measure. Shoka became shloka. Sorrow became song.

Then, in the story, the god Brahma himself appears and tells the startled sage that this was no accident, that it was the god’s own will working through him, and commissions him to compose, in this new metre, the whole life of Rama. As long as the mountains and the rivers endure, Brahma promises, the story will live in the world. Valmiki becomes the adikavi, the first poet, and the work he makes is the adikavya, the first poem. The colophons of the text repeat the title like a signature: in Valmiki’s Ramayana, the first poem.

The story it told

The poem that grief opened is, on its surface, a tale of exile and rescue, and almost everyone in the subcontinent and far beyond it knows its shape.

Rama, the eldest prince of the kingdom of Ayodhya, is about to be made king when a promise his father once made to a jealous queen is called in, and Rama is sent into the forest for fourteen years. He goes without complaint, and his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana go with him. In the forest the demon-king of Lanka, Ravana, carries Sita off by force. (The standalone guide What is the Ramayana? tells the whole story in brief.) The long second half of the poem is the search and the war: the alliance with the vanaras, the forest people pictured as monkeys; the leap of Hanuman across the sea to find Sita in her captivity; the building of the bridge; the siege of Lanka; the killing of Ravana; the return.

To the tradition, the heart of the poem is the man, more than the war. Rama is held up as the maryada purushottama, the supreme person who keeps within the bounds, the one who does the right thing at every turn even when it costs him everything, the living measure of dharma. Sita is the model of faithfulness, Hanuman of devotion, Lakshmana and Bharata of brotherhood. For two and a half millennia people have learned what a good life looks like by watching these figures, which is why the hard places in the poem, the moments where Rama’s rightness turns cruel, have troubled readers so deeply. The fourth chapter of this volume goes to those places. This one stays with the poem as a whole, and with the question of how it came to be.

The layers in the poem

The Ramayana the tradition receives is one seamless revelation in seven books. The Ramayana the historian reads is a thing with seams.

The seven books are the Balakanda, the book of childhood; then Ayodhya, the forest, Kishkindha, the book of Hanuman’s leap called Sundara, the war book Yuddha, and last the Uttarakanda, the book of what came after. Scholars who have studied the language and the texture of the poem closely, John Brockington foremost among them, find that the middle five, Ayodhya through Yuddha, form the older heart, composed in a plainer and more consistent style. The first book and the seventh stand apart. They read as later, framing additions, wrapped around the core after it had taken shape.

This matters for more than dating, because of what those outer books carry. In the older core, Rama is overwhelmingly a man, a prince of surpassing virtue and sorrow, but a man. It is mainly in the later layers, the Balakanda and the Uttarakanda, that he is unmistakably declared to be the god Vishnu come down in human form, the seventh of the great descents. Brockington and Sheldon Pollock both trace this divinization as a development that can be dated and placed, a god gathering around a hero over time. The story of the birth of the shloka, beloved as it is, sits in the Balakanda, which is to say in a later book. The tradition’s most cherished account of its own origin is, by the historian’s reckoning, one of the last parts to be added.

On when all this happened, the honest answer is a range with names attached. Brockington places the older core around the fifth and fourth centuries before the Common Era, with the poem continuing to grow into the early centuries after it, the outer books latest of all. Other scholars stretch the floor a little earlier. No one can give a year, and anyone who does is guessing.

The first of many

There is a last thing to say before leaving Valmiki, and it complicates the very title of this chapter.

To call the Ramayana “the first poem” is the tradition’s claim, and within the world of Sanskrit it is a fair one. But “the Ramayana,” singular, is already a simplification by the time the ink is dry. The poem is stratified within itself, core and additions, a human Rama and a divine one held in the same covers. And beyond Valmiki the story would be told again and again, in Tamil and Awadhi and Bengali, by Jains and Buddhists, in Thailand and Java, in versions where Ravana is noble and versions where Rama never lifts the killing blow. The sixth chapter of this volume follows that vast branching. For now it is enough to plant the seed that the tradition itself plants: that this is the first telling, and that a first telling implies others.

Valmiki gave the tradition its first poem and its account of why poems exist at all. A pair of birds, a hunter, and a grief that found its measure.

The bird’s mate fell silent.

The song it caused has not.