How Ramayana became popular outside India, from east Asia to the Caribbean

How the Ramayana spread 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 rest of Asia in “the early centuries of the Christian era” along 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 were Indians travelling to this region “in the early centuries of the Christian era”? Mainly for trade, in spices, gold, and aromatic wood. Many stayed back there, either because they married local women or got jobs.

Historian Karmveer Singh, in a research paper titled, ‘Cultural dimensions of India-Thailand relations: A historical perspective’ (2022), writes that the traders brought 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 became an integral part of the culture of many of these countries. In Thailand, the Ayutthaya kingdom (1351 to 767) is believed to have been based on the Ayodhya of the Ramayana. A UNESCO article on the the city 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 looks at the wall carvings related to Ramayana at the Angkor Wat Temple complex, Cambodia. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)

In Cambodia, the Angkor Wat temple complex, built in the 12th century, features murals from the Ramayana, and was originally a temple dedicated to Vishnu.

How it survives in the region today

Even today, the Ramayana remains an important part of the culture of many of these Southeast Asian countries, though the dominant religions range here from Buddhism (for eg. Cambodia, Laos) to Islam (Malaysia, Indonesia).

The Ramakien, a version of the Ramayana, is Thailand’s national epic. The current king belongs to the Chakri dynasty, whose rulers are all named after Ram. Vajiralongkorn, the current constitutional monarch, is styled Rama X. In Laos too, the story of Phra Ram is the national epic.

Performance of a fragment 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 countries, the story of Ram has undergone various changes. Also, the inspiration for their versions of Ram’s tale are not necessarily the Valmiki Ramayana. For example, in the countries where the story was popularised by traders from south India, it bears more 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 differences 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 become part of the story; the Malaysian Hikayat Seri Rama is more sympathetic to Ravana (Maharaja Wana); while 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,” according to an article published 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 countries, the story has been kept alive through plays, dance dramas, puppet shows, etc.

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 outside Asia

A major current that took the Ramayana to Africa, the Caribbean, etc. was the girmitiya migration outside India in the 19th century. After slavery was abolished, there was an urgent demand for labourers who could work on plantations earlier serviced through slave labour. Waves upon waves of men and women were sent out from British India as indentured labourers to countries like Fiji, Mauritius, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname, etc. The word ‘girmitiya’ comes from ‘agreement’, which these people signed (or were made to sign) to work in the plantations.

Majority of these girmitiya labourers were from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. While they could not carry much as they boarded ships towards an entirely new life, they did carry their culture and religion along, and a large part of this culture was Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, written in Awadhi and arguably the most popular religious text in North India.

How it survived

The girmitiyas were not rich traders likely to influence kings, but there is a more personal element in how they remembered and preserved the tale of Ram. In an alien land, far away from their homes which they had left to flee either poverty or caste oppression or some form of social boycott, the Ramcharitmanas became a source of succour, of nostalgia, the symbol of a homeland more real than the actual home.

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

Author VS Naipaul, born in Trinidad to a family 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 family, 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 also 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 also writes about what Sita meant to girmitiya women. “…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 many of these countries, the folk theatre of Ramleela is still popular. In 2017, on Ram Navmi, India gave Mauritian Rupee 8,376,000 to expand and renovate the Ramayana Centre complex in Mauritius. In Fiji, the Ramayana has been translated into the indigenous iTaukei language.