THE Ramayana and its sister epic, the Mahabharata constitute a veritable treasure – trove of Indian lore, learning, legends and mythology, both religious and secular. These two great ornate poems, the creation of the heroic age, constitute the national epics of the Hindus. For the last many centuries, these two epics have exercised a profound influence on India’s moral and religious living and thinking, and also on all types of creative expressions. Puranic in nature, these two great works have been quite popular among the masses. They have percolated through all the strata of Hindu society in the forms of literature, songs, sculpture, painting and classical and folk performing arts. The Vedas and the Upanishads written in Sanskrit were meant for the pandits and scholars, but the epics have been accessible to all and sundry in the form of translations in various vernacular languages of the country. For example, in Hindi alone, which is spoken by the majority of the Indians, there are over 350 versions of the Ramayana. The universal diffusion of the epics in India, nay the whole of the South-East Asia, has been quite wonderful. Their great popularity has been a living monument to the Hindu ideal of ultimate victory of good over evil. They both delineate the eternal principles of dharma and righteous living and triumph over the forces of evil.
In the words of Swami Vivekananda, “The Ramayana and the Mahabharata are the two encyclopaedias of the ancient Aryan life and wisdom, portraying an ideal civilisation, which humanity has yet to aspire after.” According to Sister Nivedita, “For, it would scarcely be going too far to say that no one unfamiliar with the story of Rama and Sita can be in any real sense a citizen of India, nor acquainted with morality as the greatest of Indian teachers conceived it. Perhaps one might go further and say that no one unfamiliar with the story of Rama and Sita can be a true citizen of the world.”
– Hinduism by Dr B.R. Kishore
