‘Not the Rama we’re familiar with’: The different Ramayanas across South-East Asia

“You won’t find Rama in the palace; you must seek him in the forest.”

Tiao Nith knows both the palace and the forest. He grew up in the royal court of 1960s’ Laos. As an adult, following a period of exile after the overthrow of the royalty by the revolutionary party, he settled near the woods overlooking Luang Prabang, a temple town. Every day for the past twenty years, in the unfolding light of dawn, he climbs the wooded hill that rises across from his cottage. Trees, branches, thickly knitted vines, and undergrowth rustling with secret life slowly reveal themselves as daylight breaks over the hill. Tiao Nith examines the forest floor, carefully selecting fallen leaves to bring home.

“The forest is my teacher,” Tiao Nith once told me. “A carcass falls and becomes a feast. Bodies stop stirring and sprout worms. All death is turned to life.”

The Dasaratha Jataka

This is also the lesson of the Dasaratha Jataka, he explained. Over the next few days, the leaves from his morning expeditions are arranged on his desk like scripture to be studied. He reads their veins and dried, crumbling surfaces. He turns them around in his hands and in his mind before getting to work, drawing needle and thread to his service.

Tiao Nith spent his childhood observing his mother and grandmother’s gold embroidery, a tradition once reserved for women. After an extended apprenticeship, young Tiao Nith became a mo, a traditional embroidery master. Sixty years later, now older than the grandmother preserved in his memories, he wraps thin gold fibres around a silk thread. He darns through leaves, capturing their patterns. Green and brown are slowly replaced by gold, strand by strand, tattered crumbling edges and all. He is left with finely filigreed, paper-thin, golden leaves. These are displayed in his living room and in exhibitions across the globe, a delicate reminder of the forest’s lessons. “I capture death, the decomposition of the elements,” he said, “but this is also a portrait of life. If the leaf doesn’t die, nothing new will grow.”

In my extended travels across different countries, I pursued books or authors who allowed me access to the communities I worked or lived with. In Palestine, I discovered Mahmoud Darwish whose verses posed a simple question: are we ever fully present in a place if we do not have rights? In Laos, I discovered the continental reach of the Ramayana. I met Tiao Nith while studying the Ramayana’s retellings, to use the poet-scholar AK Ramanujan’s favoured phrase, across the Mekong region in Southeast Asia.

Among Tiao Nith’s most pressing concerns was the restoration of Ramayana murals across medieval temples in the Buddhist nation, working with novice monks, artisans, and historians. On temple walls, mother-of-pearl inlaid Lakshmanas dive into action and wood-carved Hanumans leap across walls. They survive in the assiduous care of Tiao Nith and his monk assistants.

His life’s credo drew from the Dasaratha Jataka, one of the earliest references to Rama, from the Jataka cycle of stories recounting the Buddha’s previous lives. The Dasaratha Jataka is a short text, more Buddhist allegory than grand epic. But it cements Rama’s exalted position in Buddhist Southeast Asia. It firmly establishes him as a previous incarnation of the Buddha.

In the text, Dasaratha sent Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita to the forest for their protection from their stepmother, and not in exile to fulfil the promise to Kaikeyi (the Valmikian impetus for Rama being sent away). Following Dasaratha’s death nine years into the siblings’ stay in the forest, Bharata went with his army to inform Rama, Lakshmana, and Sita. On hearing the news, “Rama neither grieved nor wept; there was not even the slightest commotion of his senses”. Sita and Lakshmana broke down. Surrounded by his distraught sibling and spouse, Rama counsels:

“As ripe fruits
always are in danger of falling,
so born mortals
always are in danger of death.

In the evening some are not seen (any more)
(although) in the morning many were seen;
(and) in the morning some are not seen,
(although) in the evening many were seen.”

And elsewhere:

“What cannot be preserved
by man, even if much bewailed,
for such a thing’s sake why should the intelligent (and wise man) distress himself.”

This is not the Rama we are familiar with. This is no angry god. This is not the divine prince summoning an army of simians to cross the seas with him and tame demons. This is the sage Rama, confronting a greater adversary, the horror of our inevitable deaths. But there is no horror; it is simply a trick that we play upon ourselves. “In the morning some are not seen (although) in the evening many were seen.” The Rama from the Dasaratha Jataka would have no place in a mob of young men waving swords in front of others' places of worship, a sight of frenzied intimidation we have grown accustomed to. His voice is a morning spreading across a forest, reminding us that dusk will arrive with its darkness as will the next dawn.

These sentiments are not bound to distant shores; they have deep echoes in India. Seven hundred years ago, Kabir wrote:

“While you’re busy perfuming
Your body with sandalwood
Someone else is chopping
The wood for your funeral.

Rama is the only truth, says Kabir,

Everything else a monstrous lie?”

The three narratives of the Ramayana

In Laos, my quest for the Ramayana unveiled three narratives. They sprawled like branches from a banyan tree, dropping roots to the ground until it was unclear which held up the whole. First, the concise Jataka; second, the fantastical exploits in the Laotian epic rendition the Phra Lak Phra Lam; and finally, the performances at the Royal Theatre (this third aspect, the performative, I explore elsewhere, but not in this piece). Each version had one author, or rather a single name repeated as a pseudonym through the centuries, Boddhaghosacharya, the voice of the Buddha. Different authors, monks working through long monastery nights, chose not to attach their own names to the text. This is a different idea of authorship than the one we are now used to. They wanted to be a part of a river that stretched through the centuries, not a monument on its banks.

I met Sachchidanand Sahai, a scholar who has spent decades chasing these stories across the Mekong region. He collaborated with the Cambodian government to restore the 7th-century temple ruins at Sambor Prei Kuk, home to the grand temple of Gambhireshvara, a form of Shiva, and an early example of sophisticated urban planning pre-dating the grand Angkor complex. During our interactions, his daughter told me, “I didn’t see him for years. I consoled myself saying I have a dad like Indiana Jones.”

“I am no Indiana Jones,” Sahai laughed, “the West claims to find new forgotten ruins all the time. But local communities have always known these places. I am simply trying to restore them.”

His primary commitment though was not to temples but to texts. “I discovered nothing,” Sahai said. “I only built a bridge, a translation where it did not exist.”

First, Sahai had to get hold of the Phra Lak Phra Lam text – or rather, the many texts – split across six palm-leaf manuscripts scattered across monasteries in Laos and neighbouring countries. Some unwieldy pieces of the puzzle, circa 1973, included differences in language and names, differences in the plot or emphasis due to the flush and swell of faiths and kingdoms across the centuries, the wars and alliances among entangled forces – Lao, Thai, Burmese, Khmer – that might have changed the story.

One manuscript was in northeast Thailand with missing sections, another split between a Laotian monastery and the former Ministry of Cults (an ominously named department that had within its purview the omnipresent spirits of the forests that were appeased with little shrines in every village). The texts were falling apart, unread and untouched. There was no librarian or archivist. Laos is a humid country: silverfish survive longer than scholarship. “I don’t know what keeps you up,” Sahai said. “The thought of these texts being lost kept me up. Of these precious records being lost not to grand historical forces, but to moths.”

Sahai was struck by the influence of the Ramayana, from Myanmar and Thailand to Bali. But he focused his energies on one version. For half his life, Sahai laboured on the translation of the Laotian epic, his skin wrinkling like the palm leaf manuscripts in his care. The first sentence took a month, the first page another two; it was a few years before he completed a satisfactory chapter. Outside his window, thirty winters saw thirty braids of orchids bloom while Sahai delivered the Phra Lak Phra Lam to English.

From Sahai I learned that the Phra Lak Phra Lam diverges significantly from Valmiki’s Ramayana, though some of these variations find echoes in different subcontinental versions. The text advises the maintenance of hierarchy and protocol among cousins and siblings. Ravana’s primary fault is that he did not adhere to social customs when he kidnapped Nang Chantha (Santa in some Indian tellings), his cousin and Rama’s elder sister. This seems like grandmother’s counsel, rather than a grand moral lesson – marriage should follow prescribed norms. But it is valuable advice.

In the medieval centuries over which the Phra Lak Phra Lam was written, Southeast Asian political formations followed the mandala structure, described as a “circle of power” with a strong centre capable of “extracting tribute from similarly organised smaller ones”. The region did not have kingdoms with defined boundaries. Maintenance of power balances and protocol was a vital political imperative. Rulers had to be sensitive to the nuances of power across diffused borders – like the dynamics between siblings or cousins, unwritten rules that had to be understood by all to ensure harmony.

There are other significant differences, many of which have echoes in Indian regional or non-Valmikian tellings. Sita (Nang Sida in Laos) is Ravana’s daughter and abandoned by her father. She spends her extended childhood first with a naga king, and then a hermit who builds her a palace and appoints ten doppelganger attendants to take care of Sita. These maids test Rama’s ability to pick out his future wife (spoiler alert: the Sita who blinks is the real one). Elsewhere, Rama is briefly turned into a monkey after eating a cursed fruit and fathers Hanuman in this simian form.

Centuries ebbed and flowed like river tides, leaving behind their rich sediment – restless spirits and old political rivalries, grandmother’s tales intertwined with the Buddha’s lives – deep within these narratives. As new religions spread across Asia, old spirits slipped into the epic and survived. In Indonesia, which has perhaps the richest Ramayana tradition outside India spanning over the last thousand years, the ancient punokawan guardian spirits of the island of Java were recast as clown-servants in Ramayana shows. They provide crass humorous interjections, even long flatulent noises that set off a train of giggles among Javanese village kids, or deep philosophical soliloquies during the Javanese wayang kulit puppet performances. Old gods, exempt from the demands of daily worship, were free to act as they pleased.

A divine tale for the faithful

Sahai believes the Ramayana is a template for tales across the continent. What roles did the Ramayana’s retellings play in the region? Obviously, a divine tale for the faithful. Realpolitik manuals in a corner of the world where borders and power circles shifted with the gods. A sprawling epic that offered shelter as it grew to accommodate local myths and spirits. A vessel for social and political commentary, with different versions alluding to contemporary kings and rivals, recasting them as the epic’s characters. Ask another set of questions and the tale changes shape. Was Hanuman’s late awareness of his own powers like consciousness being revealed to itself? What does one make out of Surpanakha’s mutilation? Or Shambhuka’s fate, a tragedy that erupts like a sore in the later text, the Uttara Kanda?

I was with Tiao Nith in his living room, the walls bedecked with his puppets and fabrics. Through the windows arrived the rustle of the forest above and the low growl of the highway beneath us. A few kilometres north of where we sat, hills were being carved open by global investors for large hydropower projects, prepping the stage for new stories. He told me there were three ways to preserve our oldest tales. First as a sacred act. Second as folk history. Third as political propaganda. Only two of these will keep our stories truly alive.

Do we concern ourselves with the text? Or with all that the text conveys and conceals? These are words written on water. If we keep staring at the text, we miss the river and its journey.

The author of two novels, Kaushik Barua won the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar award for his first novel Windhorse, set in the Tibetan refugee community. This article is based on the research he’s conducting for his next book, a non-fiction work on the versions of the Ramayana across Southeast Asia to be published by Penguin Random House in 2025/26. He works with an international development agency and has managed rural development projects across Africa, the Middle East and East Asia.