The Ramayana
Valmiki's first poem and its hundreds of tellings: Rama, Sita, Ravana, and the epic of dharma.
There is no single Ramayana. Valmiki’s Sanskrit text is the oldest surviving, but Kamban’s Tamil, Tulsidas’s Awadhi, the Jain and Buddhist retellings, and the versions across Southeast Asia are not translations of it. They are independent tellings, and they disagree about important things, including how Sita’s story ends.
A. K. Ramanujan’s essay counting the tellings made this the standard scholarly view, and also made it politically contentious.
The story itself is the moral vocabulary of a large part of Asia: an exiled prince, an abducted wife, a war, and a return that is celebrated every year as Diwali across much of India. Rama is held up as the ideal, and the tradition has also argued for centuries about his treatment of Sita.
These pages give the narrative, the major recensions, and where they part company.