How the Ramayana unfold in Asia

As Santosh N Desai, then Assistant Professor of Asian History and Religion at St John’s University, New York, wrote in 1969, the Ramayana travelled from India to the remainder of Asia in “the early centuries of the Christian era” 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 again by land, the eastern route delivered the story from Bengal into Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Vietnam and Cambodia obtained their stories partly from Java and partly from India via the eastern route.”

Why have been Indians travelling to this area “in the early centuries of the Christian era”? Mainly for commerce, in spices, gold, and fragrant wooden. Many stayed again there, both as a result of they married native girls or obtained jobs.

Historian Karmveer Singh, in a research paper titled, ‘Cultural dimensions of India-Thailand relations: A historical perspective’ (2022), writes that the merchants introduced with them “Indian religion, culture, traditions and philosophy”. “They were also accompanied by Brahmin priests, Buddhist monks, scholars and adventurers and all of them played an important role in the transmission of Indian culture to the natives of Southeast Asia.”

Over time, the Ramayana grew to become an integral a part of the tradition of many of those international locations. In Thailand, the Ayutthaya kingdom (1351 to 767) is believed to have been primarily based 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 new city built at Bangkok, there was a conscious attempt to recreate the urban template and architectural form of Ayutthaya…to emulate the perfection of the mythical city of Ayodhaya.”

In 2010, then President Pratibha Patil seems on the wall carvings associated to Ramayana on the Angkor Wat Temple advanced, Cambodia. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

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.

How it survives within the area as we speak

Even as we speak, the Ramayana stays an necessary a part of the tradition of many of those Southeast Asian international locations, 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.

Performance of a fraction of the Ramayana, with the accompanying Legong dance, by Bina Remaja Troupe group, Ubud, in Indonesia in 2022. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

Of course, in all these international locations, the story of Ram has undergone numerous adjustments. Also, the inspiration for his or her variations of Ram’s story should not essentially the Valmiki Ramayana. For instance, within the international locations 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 shown that the eighteenth-century Thai Ramakien owes much to the Tamil epic. For instance, the names of many characters in the Thai work are not Sanskrit names, but 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 turn out to be a part of the story; the Malaysian Hikayat Seri Rama is extra sympathetic to Ravana (Maharaja Wana); whereas in Laos, “Phra Ram is considered a previous incarnation of Gautama Buddha…Hapmanasouane, the Lao Ravana, is considered the previous incarnation of Mara, the demon that tried to impede the Buddha’s ascent to enlightenment,” in accordance with an article revealed by the University of Washington’s Center for Southeast Asia and its Diasporas.

A Ramayana Relief at , Prambanan, Central Java. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In all these international locations, the story has been stored alive by way of performs, dance dramas, puppet reveals, and many others.

Desai writes, “Generally the stories derived from the northern strand of legends emphasise the nobility and greatness of Rama. The versions based on the southern legends, on the other hand, depict Ravana as a hero and praise his scholarship.”

Ramayana outdoors Asia

A significant present that took the Ramayana to Africa, the Caribbean, and many others. 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 by way of slave labour. Waves upon waves of women and men have been despatched out from British India as indentured labourers to international locations like Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, and many others. The phrase ‘girmitiya’ comes from ‘agreement’, which these individuals signed (or have been made to signal) to work within the plantations.

Majority of those girmitiya labourers have been from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While they may not carry a lot as they boarded ships in direction of a wholly 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 non secular textual content in North India.

How it survived

The girmitiyas weren’t wealthy merchants more likely to affect kings, however there’s a extra private component in how they remembered and preserved the story of Ram. In an alien land, far-off from their houses which that they had left to flee both poverty or caste oppression or some type of social boycott, the Ramcharitmanas grew to become a supply of succour, of nostalgia, the image of a homeland extra actual than the precise dwelling.

The Ramayana Centre in Mauritius. (Photo: ramayanacentremauritius.org)

Author VS Naipaul, born in Trinidad to a household descended from indentured labourers, wrote, “The other where Gandhi and Nehru and the others operated was historical and real. The India from which we had come was impossibly remote, almost as imaginary as 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 authentic representation of the motherland. The real eastern UP and western Bihar disappeared from the radar.”

He additionally explains that the “India of the Ramayana endured”, “because it is a narrative that answered many of the monumental, urgent needs of the girmitiyas”.

“The theme of Lord Rama in exile in the Dandak forest is resonant among Indians in the diaspora. His triumphal return to Ayodhya has a freshness… It is an evocation of hope and renewal, even of their own triumphal return, however illusory.”

He additionally writes about what Sita meant to girmitiya girls. “…the Sita persona spoke to women who were in virtual exile, had severed all links with their families in India, had to endure aspersions cast on their sexual life on the plantations (occasionally ending in murder by jealous partners), while toiling to reshape a life and recreate a family in a distant land.”

Today, in lots of of those international locations, the folk theatre of Ramleela is still popular. 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.