The Ramayana has been widespread in India for millennia, as textual content in Sanskrit and lots of different languages, as folks theatre, as puppet exhibits, and as numerous kathas or oral retellings organised in villages and small cities. Nevertheless, the epic enjoys reputation a lot past Indian shores, and the unfold of the Ramayana can also be testimony to how Indians travelled internationally — as affluent merchants, as preachers, and as bonded labourers.
On this article, we take a look at two broad durations of the unfold of Ram’s story: the primary few centuries of the widespread period, when it reached nations like Thailand, Cambodia, Laos, China, Tibet and so forth., and the nineteenth century, when it gained reputation in components of Africa, the Caribbean, and Oceania.
How the Ramayana unfold in Asia
As Santosh N Desai, then Assistant Professor of Asian Historical past and Faith at St John’s College, New York, wrote in 1969, the Ramayana travelled from India to the remainder of Asia in “the early centuries of the Christian period” alongside three routes, “by land, the northern route took the story from the Punjab and Kashmir into China, Tibet, and East Turkestan; by sea, the southern route carried the story from Gujarat and South India into Java, Sumatra, and Malaya; and once more by land, the japanese route delivered the story from Bengal into Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Vietnam and Cambodia obtained their tales partly from Java and partly from India through the japanese route.”
Why have been Indians travelling to this area “within the early centuries of the Christian period”? Primarily for commerce, in spices, gold, and fragrant wooden. Many stayed again there, both as a result of they married native ladies or obtained jobs.
Historian Karmveer Singh, in a analysis paper titled, ‘Cultural dimensions of India-Thailand relations: A historic perspective’ (2022), writes that the merchants introduced with them “Indian faith, tradition, traditions and philosophy”. “They have been additionally accompanied by Brahmin clergymen, Buddhist monks, students and adventurers and all of them performed an vital position within the transmission of Indian tradition to the natives of Southeast Asia.”
Over time, the Ramayana turned an integral a part of the tradition of many of those nations. In Thailand, the Ayutthaya kingdom (1351 to 767) is believed to have been based mostly on the Ayodhya of the Ramayana. A UNESCO article on the town of Ayutthaya says, “When the capital of the restored kingdom was moved downstream and a brand new metropolis constructed at Bangkok, there was a acutely aware try and recreate the city template and architectural type of Ayutthaya…to emulate the perfection of the legendary metropolis of Ayodhaya.”
In Cambodia, the Angkor Wat temple advanced, constructed within the twelfth century, options murals from the Ramayana, and was initially a temple devoted to Vishnu.
The way it survives within the area right now
Even right now, the Ramayana stays an vital a part of the tradition of many of those Southeast Asian nations, although the dominant religions vary right here from Buddhism (for eg. Cambodia, Laos) to Islam (Malaysia, Indonesia).
The Ramakien, a model of the Ramayana, is Thailand’s nationwide epic. The present king belongs to the Chakri dynasty, whose rulers are all named after Ram. Vajiralongkorn, the present constitutional monarch, is styled Rama X. In Laos too, the story of Phra Ram is the nationwide epic.
After all, in all these nations, the story of Ram has undergone varied modifications. Additionally, the inspiration for his or her variations of Ram’s story should not essentially the Valmiki Ramayana. For instance, within the nations the place the story was popularised by merchants from south India, it bears extra similarity to the Tamil epic Kamban Ramayana. The late scholar AK Ramanujan wrote, “ It has been convincingly proven that the eighteenth-century Thai Ramakien owes a lot to the Tamil epic. As an example, the names of many characters within the Thai work should not Sanskrit names, however clearly Tamil names.”
Some variations that these tales of Ram have from the Indian epic are: in Cambodia’s Reamker, a mermaid princess Suvannamaccha falls in love with Lord Hanuman; in Java, the Javanese deity Dhayana and his sons change into a part of the story; the Malaysian Hikayat Seri Rama is extra sympathetic to Ravana (Maharaja Wana); whereas in Laos, “Phra Ram is taken into account a earlier incarnation of Gautama Buddha…Hapmanasouane, the Lao Ravana, is taken into account the earlier incarnation of Mara, the demon that attempted to impede the Buddha’s ascent to enlightenment,” in response to an article printed by the College of Washington’s Heart for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas.
In all these nations, the story has been stored alive via performs, dance dramas, puppet exhibits, and so forth.
Desai writes, “Usually the tales derived from the northern strand of legends emphasise the the Aristocracy and greatness of Rama. The variations based mostly on the southern legends, however, depict Ravana as a hero and reward his scholarship.”
Ramayana outdoors Asia
A serious present that took the Ramayana to Africa, the Caribbean, and so forth. was the girmitiya migration outdoors India within the nineteenth century. After slavery was abolished, there was an pressing demand for labourers who may work on plantations earlier serviced via slave labour. Waves upon waves of women and men have been despatched out from British India as indentured labourers to nations like Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and so forth. The phrase ‘girmitiya’ comes from ‘settlement’, which these folks signed (or have been made to signal) to work within the plantations.
Majority of those girmitiya labourers have been from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. Whereas they may not carry a lot as they boarded ships in the direction of a completely new life, they did carry their tradition and faith alongside, and a big a part of this tradition was Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, written in Awadhi and arguably the preferred spiritual textual content in North India.
The way it survived
The girmitiyas weren’t wealthy merchants more likely to affect kings, however there’s a extra private factor in how they remembered and preserved the story of Ram. In an alien land, far-off from their properties which they’d left to flee both poverty or caste oppression or some type of social boycott, the Ramcharitmanas turned a supply of succour, of nostalgia, the image of a homeland extra actual than the precise dwelling.
Writer VS Naipaul, born in Trinidad to a household descended from indentured labourers, wrote, “The opposite the place Gandhi and Nehru and the others operated was historic and actual. The India from which we had come was impossibly distant, nearly as imaginary because the land of the Ramayana, our Hindu epic.”
British historian Clem Seecharan, born in Guyana in a girmitiya household, wrote that for his forefathers, “The Ramayana…was constructed as an genuine illustration of the motherland. The true japanese UP and western Bihar disappeared from the radar.”
He additionally explains that the “India of the Ramayana endured”, “as a result of it’s a narrative that answered lots of the monumental, pressing wants of the girmitiyas”.
“The theme of Lord Rama in exile within the Dandak forest is resonant amongst Indians within the diaspora. His triumphal return to Ayodhya has a freshness… It’s an evocation of hope and renewal, even of their very own triumphal return, nevertheless illusory.”
He additionally writes about what Sita meant to girmitiya ladies. “…the Sita persona spoke to ladies who have been in digital exile, had severed all hyperlinks with their households in India, needed to endure aspersions forged on their sexual life on the plantations (often ending in homicide by jealous companions), whereas toiling to reshape a life and recreate a household in a distant land.”
At present, in lots of of those nations, the people theatre of Ramleela remains to be widespread. In 2017, on Ram Navmi, India gave Mauritian Rupee 8,376,000 to develop and renovate the Ramayana Centre advanced in Mauritius. In Fiji, the Ramayana has been translated into the indigenous iTaukei language.