Ramayana Film World  ·  9 min read

Who wrote the Ramayana?

Valmiki.

That is the answer, and it is correct. It is also about a tenth of the story.

Ask this question in a classroom anywhere in India and the answer comes back in half a second. It is one of those facts absorbed so early that almost nobody questions it later, which is a shame, because the moment you push on it even slightly it opens into something far more interesting than a name.

The Sanskrit epic we call the Ramayana, the one with seven kandas and roughly twenty four thousand verses, is attributed to the sage Valmiki. That attribution is ancient, it is consistent, and no serious scholar disputes that a text called the Valmiki Ramayana exists and is the oldest surviving version of the story as we have it.

But was Valmiki one person or a tradition? Did the story exist before he wrote it down? Why do the first and seventh books read so differently from the middle five? And what do you do with the fact that there are hundreds of other Ramayanas, some of which contradict the Sanskrit one on points that are not small?

None of this makes the standard answer wrong. It just makes it incomplete.

Valmiki, and the story the epic tells about itself

The Ramayana contains an origin story for its own composition, which is unusual and rather lovely.

Valmiki is walking near the banks of the Tamasa river when he sees a pair of krauncha birds, cranes, mating. A hunter shoots the male. The female cries out over the body. Valmiki, watching this, is struck by a grief that comes out of him as a curse directed at the hunter, and the curse emerges in perfect metre without him intending it.

He is startled by his own speech. The rhythm is unlike ordinary language. Brahma then appears and tells him the metre was divinely given, and that he should use it to tell the story of Rama, which Brahma says will endure as long as mountains stand and rivers flow.

The metre is the shloka, and the word is built on shoka, meaning grief. Poetry, the epic says of itself, was born out of sorrow.

It is telling you this in the opening pages of a story that is almost entirely about loss, which is either a coincidence or the whole point.

Whether any of it happened is beside the point. What the passage establishes is that the Ramayana understands itself as the first poem, the adi kavya, and Valmiki as the first poet, the adi kavi. That claim is part of the text's own self-image, and it shaped how every Indian poet after him thought about the form.

When was the Ramayana written?

This is where confident answers should make you suspicious. Two entirely different frameworks are in use, and people quote them at each other without noticing they are answering different questions.

These two are not really arguing with each other. One asks when the Sanskrit text as we have it was assembled. The other asks when the events it describes occurred. You can hold a view on both, and plenty of people do, but running them together produces a great deal of noise and very little clarity.

Did anyone write the Ramayana before Valmiki?

There is no earlier text. If you are looking for a manuscript that predates Valmiki and tells the same story, it does not exist and there is no evidence it ever did.

That is not the same as saying the story began with him.

The Rig Veda, considerably older, contains no Rama narrative. What it does contain are fragments that surface later in the epic. There are references to a figure named Rama, though not obviously the same one. There are hymns about recovering something stolen, about crossing water, about the tension between duty and desire. Whether these are seeds of the Ramayana or unrelated material absorbed later is genuinely unclear.

What is far more likely is that a Rama story circulated orally, possibly for a long time, as bardic performance. Professional reciters called sutas travelled between courts performing narrative poetry, and this was how most stories moved in that world. Valmiki's achievement, on this reading, was not inventing the story but giving it its definitive shape, its metre and its moral weight.

This matters for how you read the text. An oral epic is not composed the way a novel is. It accumulates. Sections get added by later hands, episodes get expanded for audiences who liked them, and the whole thing keeps growing until someone freezes it.

You can watch this happening inside the Ramayana itself. Books two through six, running from Kaikeyi's demand to the fall of Ravana, form a tight narrative with consistent characterisation and a clear arc. Book one, the Bala Kanda, and book seven, the Uttara Kanda, sit differently. They contain material that contradicts the middle books, they treat Rama as explicitly divine in a way the core does not, and their language shows later features.

The scholarly consensus, and it is a fairly firm one, is that these two books were added later, possibly by centuries. The Uttara Kanda in particular, which contains Sita's second exile and the Shambuka episode, is the part most often treated as a separate composition attached to the original.

If that is right, then the question has a slightly awkward answer. A core was composed by someone, or some tradition, that we call Valmiki. Material was added before and after by hands we cannot name. The result was then transmitted, copied and regionally varied for two thousand years.

The other Ramayanas, and why they matter

Here is the part that usually surprises people. There is no single Ramayana. There are hundreds. A well-known count puts the number at around three hundred distinct versions across South and Southeast Asia, and that figure is conservative.

Tulsidas composed the Ramcharitmanas in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, and in much of north India this is the Ramayana people actually know. It is a devotional text, written to be sung, and Rama in it is unambiguously divine from the first line. Kamban wrote the Ramavataram in Tamil in the twelfth century, and it differs from Valmiki in characterisation and emphasis throughout. Krittibas Ojha produced a Bengali version in the fifteenth century. Madhava Kandali wrote in Assamese in the fourteenth.

Then there are the versions that change the story structurally. The Jain Ramayanas, of which the Paumachariya is the best known, reject the idea that Ravana was a monster. In them he is a sophisticated and learned Vidyadhara, and he is killed by Lakshmana rather than Rama, because a Jain hero does not kill. The Adbhuta Ramayana makes Sita the destroyer of a thousand-headed Ravana, which inverts the entire power relationship of the standard telling.

Outside India the story travelled and transformed again. Thailand has the Ramakien, a national text that gives far more space to Hanuman, who becomes a considerably more worldly character than his Indian counterpart. Indonesia has the Kakawin Ramayana and the Balinese performance tradition, where kecak retellings still happen nightly. Cambodia has the Reamker. Laos, Myanmar and Malaysia all have versions of their own.

Some contradict the Sanskrit text on basic facts. In certain versions Sita is Ravana's daughter, abandoned at birth because of a prophecy that she would cause his death. That makes the abduction something entirely different from what Valmiki describes.

Asking which of these is the real Ramayana is the wrong question. They are not corruptions of an original. They are what happens when a story is genuinely alive across many cultures for two thousand years, and each of them tells you something about the people who told it.

What the seven kandas contain

Since the structure of the Valmiki text comes up constantly, it is worth laying out plainly.

1. Bala Kanda. Rama's birth in Ayodhya, the sons of Dasharatha, the training under Vishwamitra, the killing of Tadaka, and the swayamvara at Mithila where Rama breaks Shiva's bow and marries Sita.
2. Ayodhya Kanda. The political heart of the epic. Manthara works on Kaikeyi, Kaikeyi calls in two old boons, and Rama goes into exile for fourteen years. Dasharatha dies of grief. Bharata refuses the throne and rules as regent with Rama's sandals on the seat.
3. Aranya Kanda. The forest years, the encounter with Surpanakha, Mareech taking the form of the golden deer, and Sita's abduction. Jatayu dies trying to stop Ravana.
4. Kishkindha Kanda. Hanuman and Sugriva enter the story, Vali is killed, and search parties go out in all four directions.
5. Sundara Kanda. Hanuman's book, and the one most often read on its own. He crosses the ocean, finds Sita in the Ashoka grove, delivers Rama's ring and burns Lanka on his way out.
6. Yuddha Kanda. The longest. The bridge, the war, the deaths of Kumbhakarna and Indrajit, and finally Ravana. Vibhishana is crowned and Rama returns to Ayodhya.
7. Uttara Kanda. Everything after, including Sita's second exile, the birth of Lava and Kusha, and Rama's final departure. Also the book whose authenticity is most debated.

Why the question is being asked again now

It is coming up more than usual at the moment, and the reason is a film.

Nitesh Tiwari's two-part adaptation releases on 6 November 2026, with the second part following at Diwali 2027. Ranbir Kapoor plays Rama, Sai Pallavi plays Sita and Yash plays Ravana. The reported budget across both films runs to around four thousand crore, and the production has said it is working from the Valmiki text rather than the Ramcharitmanas.

That last detail is not small, and it is why the question of authorship suddenly has a practical edge. The two texts differ. Tulsidas writes Rama as God from the opening. Valmiki writes him, for most of the epic, as a man who is exceptionally good and who suffers. The emotional register is different, the treatment of Sita is different, and several scenes exist in one and not the other.

Anyone watching the film and finding a scene that does not match what they grew up with is probably not watching a mistake. They are probably running into the gap between two different Ramayanas, both of them real, both of them old.

Published by Ramayana Film World. Dating ranges and version counts reflect current scholarly consensus, which is contested in places and noted as such above.