History of Ramayana.
                     History of Ramayana
The Ramayana
 The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic composed in the 
5th century BCE, which is based on the story of exile and 
return of Rama, the prince of Ayodhya, composed in 
Sanskrit by the sage Valmiki.
Composition
 The Ramayana was composed by Hindu sage and 
Sanskrit poet Valmiki, and is considered to be one of the 
greatest works of Indian literature, along with the 
Mahabharata. With 24000 verses, it is a long poem.
Influence
 The Ramayana was an important influence on later Sanskrit 
poetry and Hindu life and culture. It is a not just a story, it 
represent the teachings of ancient Hindu sages and has 
been retold by some of India’s greatest writers.
Characters
 The Ramayana portrays the ideal characters in life, 
Rama is the ideal son and king, Sita is the ideal wife, 
Hanuman the ideal devotee, Lakshman and Bharat the 
ideal brothers and even Ravana, the demon villain is not 
entirely despicable.
Culture
 The characters of Ramayana are all fundamental to the 
cultural consciousness of the people of India, Nepal and 
South East Asian countries such as Thailand and Indonesia. 
It is re-enacted in dance-dramas, village theatre, shadow-
puppet theatre and the annual Ram-lila.
Versions
 There are several versions of the Ramayana in Indian 
languages along with the Buddhist and Jain adaptations. 
There are also Cambodian, Indonesian, Filipino, Thai, 
Lao, Burmese, and Malaysian versions of the tale.
Textual history and structure
 The Hindu tradition unanimously agrees that Valmiki is the only 
poet who composed the Ramayana and in its extant form, 
Valmiki's Ramayana is an epic poem of some 50,000 lines. The 
text survives in several thousand partial and complete 
manuscripts, the oldest of which is a palm-leaf manuscript 
found in Nepal and dated to the 11th century CE.
Period
 The general cultural background of the Ramayana is one of 
the post-urbanization period of the eastern part of north 
India and Nepal, while the Mahabharata reflects the Kuru 
areas west of this, from the Rig Vedic to the late Vedic 
period
The Seven kandas
 There is general consensus that books two to six form the oldest 
portion of the epic, while the first and last books (bala kanda 
and uttara kanda, respectively) are later additions.
 Chronologically, the major events in the life of Rama are 
classified as Bala Kanda, Ayodhya Kanda, Aranya Kanda, 
Kishkindhaa Kanda, Sundara Kanda, Yuddha Kanda, and Uttara 
Kanda.