The two great epics of India, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata were composed by Valmiki and Vyasa respectively. The Ramayana consists of seven Kandas namely Balakanda, Ayodhyakanda, Aranyakanda, Kishkindhakanda, Sundarakanda, Yuddhakanda and Uttarakanda. The first and the last Kandas are considered as later additions to the original five kandas which are ascribed to Valmiki. The Ramayana is considered as a kavya (poem), and is confined to the life of Rama and his brothers and their vicissitudes.
The Mahabharata consists of 18 books, each called a parva and an annexe called Harivamsha which deals with the life and history of Sri Krishna. The 18 parvas are Adiparva, Virataparva, Udyogaparva, Bhishmaparva, Aranyaka or Vanaparva, Shantiparva, Anushasanaparva, Sabhaparva, Karnaparva, Dronaparva, Shalyaparva, Sauptikaparva, Striparva, Ashvamedhikaparva, Ashramavasikaparva, Mausalaparva, Mahaprasthanikaparva and Svargarohanaparva. The Mahabharata is considered as a ithihasa (history) and hence has utilized and incorporated a large mass of ballads and bardic verses preserved in many prominent families.
Ramayana and Mahabharata are Bardic literature
According to P.L.Vaidya, the Ramayana, the Mahabharata and the Puranas form a class of literature by themselves and should be styled as bardic literature. The main characteristic of this literature is that originally it consisted of small songs, ballads and even stray verses called Gatha narasamsi and continued to be sung by traditional bards and transmitted by them to succeeding generations by oral traditions. These songs or ballads later developed into Epics, Puranas and early Kavyas. According to R.N.Dandekar, ancient Indian literature was characterized by two distinct literary traditions, called the suta tradition and the mantra tradition. The mantra tradition relating to religious thought and practice, soon came to be consolidated and began to manifest itself in fixed literary forms. The suta tradition, comprising a large number of popular bardic, legendary and historical material, however continued to remain fluid for a petty long period. The historical epic poem which dealt with the Bharata War and was appropriately called Jaya, was the first literary monument belonging to the suta tradition. Jaya gradually became transformed into the epic Bharata by subsequent additions.
Orally transmitted during earlier days
Both Ramayana and the Mahabharata were in the early stages transmitted by oral traditions. Vyasa who composed Mahabharata narrated it to his five pupils who each one of them had a separate samhita of his own. Of these five samhitas of Mahabharata, we possess the full text of Vaishampayana’s samhita, transmitted through Lomaharsana Suta and his disciple Shaunaka.
Similarly Valmiki first taught the poem, Ramayana to his two disciples, Lava and Kusha, who first sung it at the court of Rama. It must have been committed to memory by several bards and sung to people in regions far and wide. In course of this propagation of Ramayana or Ramakatha, the bards must have added and even altered the story in a number of ways in the direction of its wordings or even contents. These recitations of the bards got localized and when they were reduced to writing, they assumed the form of recensions and versions current in that particular locality.
The Mahabharatha
The theme of the epic Mahabharata is the fight between the two lines of princes belonging to the dynasty of Bharata. That is why the book is called Mahabharata. The Mahabharata is the national saga of India and according to German Indologist Hermann Oldenberg - “In the Mahabharata breathe the united soul of India, and the individual souls of her people”. In the words of C.V.Vaidya, “the Mahabharata is the national poem of India and the store house of Indian genealogy, mythology and antiquity”.
Vyasa was a contemporary of Pandavas and Kauravas and he was a witness to many of the events of the Mahabharata. Vyasa composed the Mahabharata over a period of three years after the passing away of Sri Krishna and the Pandavas and the story was propagated by his disciple Vaishampayana at the time of the serpent sacrifice of Janamejaya, the great grandson of Arjuna. As the great Bharata War was a great catastrophe for the nation and its culture, the surviving Vyasa should have deemed it necessary to preserve all the traditional lore, which might have already assumed a literary form. Vyasa had composed only the essence of Mahabharata comprising 8800 shlokas and that work was called Jaya. Vaishampayana added a few verses of his own and brought the number to 24,000 verses and the book was named Bharatasamhita and finally Suta made more additions and inflated the work to 1,00,000 verses and named it Mahabharata.
The Mahabharata text was originally committed to memory and recited freely and differently by different rhapsodists. Hence from generations to generations, from place to place, from bard to bard, the wording, even the contents would vary a little, until the text is committed to writing. According to P.V.Kane, in the present text of Mahabharata there are three elements- 1. The bare story of the Pandavas and the Kauravas, 2. The Upakhyanas, concerning gods, sages, brahmins, kings and others and 3. Didactic matters insisting on doing one’s duties and the role of dharma and philosophy. It is clear that the Mahabharata had become, long before the 7th century A.D., a work for popular education and was being recited before general audiences of men and women in India.
Critical Edition of the Mahabharata
The need for a critical or correct edition of the Mahabharata was first mooted by Prof. M. Winternitz in 1897. The task of preparing the critical edition was taken by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona in 1919 and scholars like Utgikar, V.S.Sukthankar, S.K.Belvalkar, R.N.Dandekar, S.K.De and and others worked as editors of various parvas. The manuscripts of Mahabharata selected for preparing the critical editions were written in eight scripts, namely Sharada, Nepali, Maithili, Bengali, Devanagari, Telugu, Grantha and Malayalam scripts. Of the two recensions of Mahabharata, northern and southern, the northern was found to be more authentic while the southern was found to contain later elements. Hence the editors preparing the critical edition of Mahabharata accepted the northern text as the principle and southern as a secondary text.
The Mahabharata was composed earlier than the Ramayana
According to P.V.Kane, the main characters of the Mahabharata were known long before Panini and tales related to Pandava heroes had been embodied in a work or in works in verse long before Patanjali wrote and that the core of the Mahabharata existed before 500 B.C. The same cannot be said about the Ramayana and there is no evidence to show that the principal characters of the Ramayana were known to Panini or even to Patanjali. At the most one can say that the three names, Dasharatha, Rama and Sita were probably known about 250-200 B.C., but not described as endowed with the qualities they bear in the extant Ramayana. In the view of P.V.Kane, the core of the Ramayana story may be only as old as 300 -250 B.C. at the most. According to V.S.Sukthankar, Ramayana was composed in the interval which separated Bharata from the Mahabharata. Ramayana was a well-known work before the Mahabharata reached its ultimate form and it is also possible that when the Ramayana was composed by the poet Valmiki, the heroic poem Bharata, the nucleus of our Mahabharata was already long in existence.
Mahavibhasha, a commentary on the Jnanaprasthana of Katyayaniputra composed perhaps during the reign of king Kanishka, has a short passage which says that in the book called Ramayana, there are 12,000 shlokas and they refer to two topics – the abduction of Sita by Ravana by violence and the rescue of Sita by Rama and their return. This is the earliest record mentioning the word Ramayana and its size. A terracotta from Kausambi dated 2nd century B.C., (in the Allahabad museum) depicts the abduction of Sita by Ravana. H.D.Sankalia is of the view that even the critical edition of the Ramayana is not only later than Mahabharata but also later than the Puranas like Vayu Purana and Matsya Purana. According to him the Ramayana in its present state cannot be earlier than 5th century A.D.
The Bharata and the Ramayana may have been indeed more or less independent products, different in origin and treatment. But when the Bhargava redactors set to work and convert the Bharatha into the Mahabharata, they had already the archetype of our Ramayana text before them and they made full use of it, absorbing in their own encyclopaedic work and perhaps also influenced by it in no small degree.
The Ramayana
Of the two epics, the appeal of the Ramayana has been deeper and larger than that of the Mahabharatha, the main reason being that the Ramayana is a homogeneous text, with a simple and straightforward story. The Ramayana is a living tradition not only in India but in several countries world wide. Since ancient times it has been in the limelight and the source of ethical and moral values to Indian society. The immortality of the Ramayana is proclaimed by Brahma - “As long as the hills endure and rivers flow, till that date Ramayana will continue to flourish”.
The original Ramayana composed by Adikavi Valmiki must have been a text quite brief and probably without embellishments. No manuscript of this text is available today. It consisted of only five Kandas and it represented Rama as a human hero, while the Balakanda and the Uttarakanda glorify Rama as an incarnation of Vishnu. According to Ananda Guruge, the development of the Ramayana took place in various stages. First there were the ballads and cycles of ballads centering round Ayodhya, Kishkindha and Lanka. Secondly they were put together by the poet Valmiki into an epic of about 12,000 verses. Thirdly the poem which was originally divided into Adhyayas came to be divided into five Kandas. Fourthly the original text developed into recensions and interpolation took place. Finally the legendary portion of the Balakanda and the Uttarakanda were added probably under Brahmanical influence. The extant Ramayana consists of 24,000 verses.
Later the text must have gone on expanding and through the course of centuries several additions must have been made to the text of the Adikavi and later transmitted to south India. Later more additions were made to the southern recession texts also.
Antecedents of sage Valmiki
The Drona Parva of the Mahabharata mentions a Bhargava Valmiki, a brahmin born in the Bhargava gotra or family. The popular legend connected with Valmiki, identifies Valmiki with a certain robber who later became a poet. The earliest reference to Valmiki as a robber is found in the Skanda Purana which is dated 800 A.D. and according to scholars is not a very reliable source of information about Valmiki. Indian traditions believe Valmiki to be a contemporary of Rama and an eye witness to at least some of the important events of the story. He lived in an ashram on the banks of river Tamasa and his hermitage was visited by both Sita and Shatrughna and Lava and Kusha were born in his hermitage. Alfred Bloch assumes Valmiki to be a court poet of the Ikshvaku dynasty and a contemporary of Rama while Minoru Hara opines that Valmiki was a singer of tales and according to J.L.Brockington Valmiki used and to some extent incorporated older material in his epic. The view that Valmiki incorporated older material in his epic is also echoed by C.Rajagopalachari, one of the foremost interpreters of the Ramayana and Ananda Guruge, the Sri Lankan scholar. According to C.Rajagopalachari, the story of Rama had been in existence long before Valmiki wrote his epic and gave form to a story that has been handed down from generation to generation. Similarly Ananda Guruge opines that ballads centering round Ayodhya, Kishkindha and Lanka were put together by the poet Valmiki into an epic of about 12,000 verses. But according to Kamala Ratnam, nowhere in the Indian literature, Valmiki is called a compiler and the Ramayana itself shows that it is no haphazard collection of cycles of ballads but a unitary poem, mostly the work of a single poet.
Morning Star of Indian Classical Poetry
Hailed as Adikavi, the first poet, and the mentor of all later poets, especially of those of the Rama narrative tradition, Valmiki is described by Prof. M.Hiriyanna as the Morning Star of Indian Classical Poetry, while the great poet Bhavabhuti regards Valmiki as the essence of poetry. According to G.K.Bhat, Valmiki is a Maha Kavi and Bharata Kavi. While other poets could be remembered for their great poetic achievements and read for pleasure and enjoyment of beauty, Valmiki is a national memory, never to be forgotten. Monier Williams opines that in the whole range of worlds literature, there are few, more charming poems than the Ramayana.
Beginning of Sanskrit language
The composition of the Ramayana marks a distinct stage in the development of Sanskrit language and poetry. Actually the denomination ‘Sanskrit’ is used for the first time in the Ramayana. Sanskrit means Samskrita, refined or cultured. The language of the earlier Vedic literature, in fact, had no name. It was called just Vak, speech. Panani used the term Chhandas to refer to the language of the Vedas and Bhasha (Sanskrit) as the language spoken by the people during his times.
Critical edition of the Ramayana
The task of preparing the critical edition of the Ramayana was taken by the Oriental Institute of Baroda in 1954 on the lines of the critical editions of Mahabharata published by the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Poona. A number of scholars like G.H. Bhatt, P.L.Vaidya, D.R.Mankad and others brought out critical editions of the various Kandas of Ramayana with the help of original manuscripts. In the preparation of the critical editions of Ramayana, two major groups of recessions of Ramayana, the northern and the southern were utilized. Manuscripts of the northern group included those of Sharada (Kashmiri), Nevari (Nepali), Bengali and Devanagari scripts. The southern group had manuscripts in Telugu, Grantha and Malayalam scripts and also in Devanagari. The date of these manuscripts range from 1020 A.D. to 1860 A.D. and no manuscript of the Ramayana older than 1020 A.D. was found. Though inflated, the southern recension of the Ramayana contained a more archaic text and was adopted as the main text by the editors preparing the critical version of the Ramayana.
Reference
G.K.Bhat – The Genius of Valmiki, ABORI, vol -67, No 1/4, 1986
Kamala Ratnam, R.Rangachari – Valmiki and Vyasa, Publication Division, Government of India, 2012
Dinesh Sakalani – Questioning the Questioning of Ramayanas, ABORI, vol – 85, 2004
P.V.Kane – The Two Epics, ABORI, vol – XLVII, 1966
P.Nagaraja Rao – Sri Rama and the moral ideal (Dharma), Journal of the Ganganatha Jha Research Institute, vol -xvii, May-Aug, 1961
Vettam Mani- Puranic Encyclopedia, Motilal Banarsidass, 1975,
Guruge Ananda W.P. - The Society of the Ramayana, Abhinava Publications, New Delhi, 1991
A.D.Pusalker – Studies in the Epics and Puranas, Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Bombay
Vaidya P.L. - Edited - The Ayodhya Kanda, 2nd Book of Valmiki Ramayana, Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1962
Vaidya P.L. - Edited - The Yuddha Kanda, 6th Book of Valmiki Ramayana, Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1971
D.R.Mankad – Edited – The Kishkinda Kanda, 4th Book of Valmiki Ramayana, Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1965
P.K.Gode – Edited, V..S.Sukthankar – Critical Studies in the Mahabharata, Vol – I, V.S.Sukthankar Memorial Edition, Karnatak Publishing House, Bombay, 1944
H.D.Sankalia – The Ramayana in Historical Perspective, Macmillan India Ltd, 1982
C.V.Vaidya – The Mahabharata – A Criticism, 1905
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