Ramayana
Sanskrit epic of ancient India, traditionally attributed to the sage Valmiki — venerated as the 'first poet' (adikavi) for having fixed its poetic form — probably composed in an original core around the fifth century BC with later additions over several centuries, and running to some twenty-four thousand verses distributed across seven books (kandas), the second great epic of Hinduism after the Mahabharata, though with a far more unified and linear narrative structure. It recounts the life of Prince Rama, regarded as an avatar of the god Vishnu, from his birth in the kingdom of Ayodhya to his fourteen-year exile in the forest — the result of a court intrigue by his stepmother Kaikeyi — accompanied by his wife Sita, the quintessential model of fidelity and feminine virtue in Indian culture, and his brother Lakshmana. The dramatic core of the work is the abduction of Sita by the demon king Ravana, lord of Lanka, which triggers a great war in which Rama, allied with the monkey army led by the devoted Hanuman — a central figure of popular Hindu worship for his absolute loyalty — defeats Ravana and rescues his wife. The work explores with moral depth the tensions between personal, familial and royal duty (dharma), and culminates in controversial episodes, such as the trial by fire Sita must undergo to prove her purity and, in some versions, her subsequent banishment by Rama in the face of persistent rumours about her fidelity, passages that have generated intense debate in contemporary Indian feminist criticism. Disseminated in countless regional versions across India, Southeast Asia and beyond — from Tamil to Thai and Indonesian — the Ramayana remains today one of the most living religious, cultural and artistic texts of all Asia, performed in theatre, dance and popular festivals such as the Ram Lila.