Valmiki Ramayana, as traditionally attributed to Valmiki, is a Hindu smriti epic poem (also described as a Sanskrit epic) from ancient India. It is one of the two important epics of Hinduism known as the Itihasas, the other being the Mahabharata,[7] narratives of past events (purāvṛtta), interspersed with teachings on the goals of human life. It is one of the largest ancient epics in world literature and consists of nearly 24,000 shlokas (verses), divided into seven kāṇḍa (chapters). Each shloka is a couplet (two individual lines).
The epic narrates the life of Rama, the seventh avatar of the Hindu deity Vishnu, who was a prince of Ayodhya in the kingdom of Kosala. The epic follows his fourteen-year exile to the forest urged by his father King Dasharatha, on the request of Rama's stepmother Kaikeyi; his travels across the forests in the Indian subcontinent with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana; the kidnapping of Sita by Ravana, the king of Lanka; and Rama's eventual return to Ayodhya along with Sita to be crowned king amidst jubilation and celebration.
Scholarly estimates for the primary (oral) stage of the text range from the 8th–5th to 5th–4th century BCE,[1][2][3][a] "although the legends constituting it go back farther in time"[2] and later stages extend up to the 3rd century CE.[3] There are two major regional recensions, the northern (N) and the southern (S), which inherited a common oral source from the original composition by Valmiki but evolved profound verbal differences because oral transmission continued along two separate regional pathways for a long period before they were eventually fixed in writing.[8] There are also many other versions of the Ramayana in Indian languages, including Buddhist and Jain adaptations.[b]