A Study Guide for R. K. Narayan's "The Ramayana"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for R. K. Narayan's "The Ramayana," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535839150

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The Ramayana

R. K. Narayan

1972

Introduction

The Ramayana is one of the great masterpieces of Sanskrit and of world literature, an epic poem that ranks alongside the Iliad, the Odyssey, and Beowulf from Western culture. At the same time, the Ramayana is a sacred text of Hinduism, narrating the incarnation of the god Vishnu on earth in the same way the Christian Gospels narrate the incarnation of Jesus. R. K. Narayan's prose version of the epic, The Ramayana, first published in 1972, retells the story in a brief novel in a highly modern style. Set in a mythical version of Indian history, the plot of The Ramayana unfolds like a fairy tale, belying its serious philosophical and theological purpose. The prince Rama is cheated out of his rightful inheritance of his father's kingdom and forced to flee into the wilderness, where his wife, Sita, is captured by the demon Ravana and can only be rescued by a band of flying monkeys. Rama is the incarnation of the god Vishnu as a mortal man who alone can save the world from Ravana. Composed by the early Indo-European invaders of ancient India, the Ramayana is a work that, though not well known in the West, contains many elements that will remind readers of Western legends and tales. L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900), was a member of the Ramayana Brotherhood of the Theosophical Society and borrowed the flying monkeys for his own novel. The leader of the Ramayana's monkeys, the god Hanuman, is the basis for Sun Wukong—known in the West as the Monkey King—the hero of the medieval Chinese novel Journey to the West.

Author Biography

Narayan's novel version The Ramayana comes at the end of a progression of literary development over two millennia long. Narayan's authorship cannot be disentangled from this tradition since he describes his own work as a version (i.e., an adaptation) of the traditional epic. The original composition of the Ramayana is attributed to the poet Valmiki, but this is, at best, an oversimplification. Bards in the Indo-European culture that conquered northern India about 1500 BCE produced the epic of the Ramayana as the foundation story of their civilization. This process was carried out over a thousand years through oral performances by generations of illiterate bards, until a full version of the story was written down from performances in the first century. The singer in question was not Valmiki, and the authorship remains unknown and may not have been a single individual. In fact, Valmiki is understood to be a fictional creation (he appears as a character in the original version of the Ramayana), like the Greek Homer, invented to supply a poet to be, in the modern sense, responsible for the text, once the bardic nature of its composition history had been forgotten.

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