Ramayana

The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic poem traditionally attributed to the sage Valmiki, with scholars dating its core composition to roughly 750 to 500 BCE and later additions extending to around the third century CE. Running to nearly 24,000 verses across seven books, it tells of Prince Rama of Ayodhya, exiled for fourteen years through the scheming of his stepmother, who travels into the forest with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana; when the demon king Ravana abducts Sita and carries her to his island kingdom of Lanka, Rama assembles an army, notably aided by the monkey general Hanuman, to win her back in a war that ends with Ravana's defeat and Rama's eventual return to Ayodhya as king. Composed and transmitted for centuries within an oral tradition before being fixed in its written Sanskrit form, the poem is counted among the largest and most influential epics in world literature and has shaped narrative and poetic convention across nearly every South and Southeast Asian language and literary tradition. As a work of literature the Ramayana is prized for its sustained narrative architecture, its richly drawn characters and its extensive use of extended poetic simile and description, qualities that made it a model for centuries of subsequent Sanskrit court poetry.