SECTION I._The Rāmāyana, Volume 1. Bālakāndam and Ayodhyākāndam

Produced by James Simmons.

This file was produced from page images at the Internet Archive.

Transcriber's Note

This book was transcribed from scans of several different copies of the

original found at the Internet Archive. The typesetters of the original

book represented the letter a (with a macron above) as a (with

circumflex above) when italicized, but this etext uses the macron

throughout. Words in italics in this etext were italicized in the

original book. I have corrected obvious misspellings (for example in one

place the word "spices" was used when "spies" was clearly meant) but

I've left variant spellings alone.

THE RAMAYANA

Translated into English Prose from the original Sanskrit of Valmiki

BALAKANDAM.

EDITED AND PUBLISHED BY

MANMATHA NATH DUTT, M. A.

Rector, Keshub Academy.

printed by Girish Chandra Chackravarti, Deva Press, 65/2, Beadon Street.

CALCUTTA. 1891

FOR THE COMPLETE SET, IN ADVANCE. INCLUDING POSTAGE.

In India Rs. 16.

In Europe L 2.

THE RAMAYANA IN AN ENGLISH GARB.

The immortal Epic of Valmiki is undoubtedly one of the gems of

literature,--indeed, some considering it as the Kohinur of the literary

region, which has for centuries, and from a time reaching to the dim and

far past been shedding unparalleled and undying halo upon the domain

presided over by "the vision and the faculty divine." The burthen of the

bard's song is the perpetual contest between good and evil,that is

everywhere going on in this mysteriously-ordered world of ours,and which

seemingly sometimes ending in the victory of the former,and at others in

that of the latter,vitally and spiritually results in the utter

overthrow and confusion of evil and in the triumph and final conquest of

good. Rama sprung from the bright loins of the effulgent luminary of

day, and bringing his life and being from a long and illustrious

ancestry of sovereigns, Rama taking birth among the sons of men for

chastising and repressing rampant Iniquity and Injustice, typifies the

spirit of good that obtains in this world,--Ravana, that grim and

terrible Ten-headed one, a Rakshasa by virtue of birth, and worthy to be

the chief and foremost of Rakshasas by virtue of his many misdeeds and

impieties, who challenges and keeps in awe the whole host of the

celestials--"to whom the Sun did not shine too hot, and about whom the

Wind did not dare to breathe," represents the spirit of unrighteousness

and evil. Lakshmana, disregrading the pomp and splendours of princely

life, to follow his beloved brother Rama into the forest, and cheerfully

undergoing there a world of trials and privations, and daily and nightly

keeping watch and ward over his brother and his spouse in their

cottage,--and Bharata, stoutly and persistently declining, despite the

exhortations of the elders and the spiritual guides, to govern the

kingdom during Rama's absence in the forest, and holding the royal

umbrella over his brother's sandals,are personations of the _ne plus

ultra_ of fraternal love, and consummate and perfect ideals of their

kind. The righteous Bibhishana, who for Rama's cause forsook his royal

brother, and set small store by the splendours of royalty, who suffered

no earthly considerations to interfere with his entire and absolute

devotion to his friend, embodies in his person the sterling virtues

going under the precious name of friendship. The ever-devoted Hanumana

glorying in the appellation of Rama's servant,--ever-prompt at the beck

and call of his master to lay down his life--is the grandest and

loftiest conception of the faithful servant that is to be found in all

literature. Shall we say aught of Rama and Sita, or keep silence over

themes too sacred for babblement and frofane mouthing? The kingdom is

astir and alive with the jubilations of the populace at the prospect of

Rama's coronation; pennons by thousands are streaming like meteors in

the air at the tops of stately edifices; and drums and _panavas_ and

other musical instruments are sounding forth the auspicious anouncement.

The royal household swims in a sea of bliss surging and heaving on all

sides. Delight and Joy move about and laugh and talk under the names of

Dacaratha and Kaucalya. Anon a thunder-clap bursts in the midst of the

Merry-making, and converts delight into dole, the sounds of laughter and

hilarity into loud wails and lamentations issuing from hearts knowing no

consolation. All is lost! Rama is to be banished into the woods for

fourteen years. He cheerfully makes up his mind and repairs to the

forest in consonance with his father's promise. Sita steps forth--a

divinity clad in flesh--Sita would follow the fortunes of her lord. She

considers it as the height of undutifulness to remain behind, continuing

to enjoy the pleasures of the palace, while her beloved Rama is leading

a life of toils and privations in the remote woods. The daughter as well

as the daughter-in-law of kings, brought up in the lap of luxury and

amidst the soft ministrations of those pleasures that pertain to a royal

household, Sita, the idol of every one's love and regard, boldly and

with alacrity faces all the toils and terrors of a forest-life, in

preferance to remaining in Dacaratha's residence, bereft of the company

of her sweet lord.

All these and various other characters that figure on the fascinating

and enchanting boards of Valmiki, have been developed fully and

elaborately, and with and perfect consistency of portraiture through the

length of his gigantic poem of Ramayana. Ravana standing before us in

stupendous proportions as the personation of terror and wrong-doing,

before whom the human spirit trembles as Sita in the Asoka wood; the

lotus-eyed Rama self-forgetful and heroic, and possessed of the highest

perfections that can adorn humanity, and through the extremes of misery

and misfortune ever abiding by righteousness and truth; Sita the best

and fairest of her sex, the embodiment of all loveliness and grace

physical and mental, she who rose from the sacrificial fire of

inspiration--a goddess in all her manifold perfections and unsurpassed

exellences, whose name carries in the very mention a world of pathos;

the faithful Lakshmana, aye cleaving to his brother on the perilous edge

of raging battle, and in the dreary forest leading a life lorn and

desolate,--these and others whom we forbear reluctantly to name, have

been pourtrayed to the life; they are quick with the Promethean spark

and occupy prominent positions in that ideal world brought into being by

those mighty intellectual wizards--the poets; and are the perennial

fountains of our joy and sorrow, never suffering the good and the

beautiful to degenerate into cant and commonplace in our minds. Oh! the

privilege of genius.

The influence exercised by the Ramayana upon the Hindus reaching down to

the lowest strata of the society, is literally and in actual fact

immense. Truly of the Ramayana it can be said in Baconian language that

it has come home to the business and bosoms of all men. If there is one

test which more than another distinguishes the true from the false in

Art, it is the circumstance of a work influencing or not influencing

life: a work that assimilates itself with the mental constitution of a

nation, lending energy to impulse, contributing to clearness of thought,

and ennobling and spiritualis- ing the higher emotions and aspirations,

must by the very reason of its doing so, be true; while that which fails

in doing so, is not the real and genuine thing and can well be spared.

The Ramayana has become a household-word in Hindu Society, and

expressions embodying the memories of incidents celebrated in the epic,

pass current amongst all ranks of the people, being mouthed alike by

high and low, by prince and peasantry the aristocracy and the nobility

of the land, by merchants and mechanics, by cultivators ploughing the

field, and by shepherds keeping the flock, by princesses and high-born

dames in towering edifices, and the women of the peasantry plying their

daily tasks, religionists and politicians and men of letters,--in short

by the community universally. Such absolute and all-commanding and

comprehensive sway and influence of literature is perhaps unknown in the

West, with the single exception of the Bible. _Rama's regime_ embodies

the popular conception of administrative perfection--the ideal of a

monarchy. Ravana is remembered not only in consequence of the prominent

part he plays in the Ramayana, but also on account of his famous advice

to Rama immediately before his death,--namely that the execution of evil

projects should be deferred, but that good ones should be promptly

executed,--a very sage counsel doubtless, answering partially to

Macbeth's observation on hearing of Macduff's escape:

"----------From this moment

The very firstlings of my heart shall be

The firstlings of my hand------"

"The vow concerning the bow-breaking," applied sarcastically to a case

of contumacy, "The war between Rama and Ravana is matched by that war

alone," "Ravana's family." "Ravana hath been ruined by domestic

disclosure," "Lanka hath met with destruction in consequence of excess

of pride," "That won't render the Ramayana incorrect,"--these are some

of the adages universally current in Hindu society, mixing constantly

into common talk. Does not this unequivocally and unmistakably prove

that the influence of Valmiki has entered into the pith and marrow of

the nation, and vitally sways its intellectual and emotional tendencies?

Sita has become the grand exemplar to Hindu women as the embodiment of

purity, chastity, and wifely fidelity. She has furnished Hindu ladies

with the highest and noblest conception of their duties in their various

and manifold relations in life. Her empire is both wide and deep over

the hearts of her sex, performing for their eternal behoof spiritual

services of incalculable worth. She should be looked upon as one of the

greatest teachers of her kind--as a teacher in that highest and best

sense in which Christ and Chaitanya, Nanat and Socrates are called

teachers. Ah, who can say how many women have turned away in the budding

prime of youth from the primrose path of dalliance, and have in

preferance followed virtue, who alone is truly fair,--how many stirred

and influenced by the example of her matchless self-sacrifice have

firmly made up their minds to tread in her foot-steps? In like manner it

may be said of almost all the principal characters of the Ramayana, that

they have more or less deeply influenced the thoughts and sentiments of

the people.

Further, the Ramayana has been all along a reservoir upon which

subsequent writers have drawn ceaselessly. Indeed most of the succeeding

poems owe to the Mahabharata and the Ramayana for their subjects. Not to

mention writers of less note, even Kalidasa's self has dunk deep of that

fountain. Bhababhuti not less celebrated has composed a poem treating of

the latter part of Rama's life and saturated with a pathos which perhaps

no other pen has surpassed.

To the antiquary and the student of oriental literature and manners, a

knowledge of the Ramayana is simply indispensable. Together with the

Mahabharata with which it is joined in popular parlance, and with which

it goes hand in hand in compass and variety of information, but to which

its superiority is pronounced in point of epic excellence and

consistency and uniformity of execution, the Ramayana constitutes the

great repository of wisdom and learning, the manners and customs of the

ancient Hindus. Indeed, the adage current in our socity with regard to

the Mahabharata, "What is not in _Bharat_ (Mahabharat), is not in

_Bharat_ (India)" applies to Ihe Ramayana as well. In it, cosmogony and

theogony, the genealogies of kings and princes,--of human and

extra-human beings, of _Ashuras_ and _Danavas_, of _Yakshas_ and

_Gandharvas_, and _Shiddhas_ and _Charanas_; folklore and anecdotes and

legends, and stories half- mythical and half-historical; descriptions of

cities existing at a period long anterior to the age of Troy and

Memphis, and the chronicles of kings that reigned before Priam and

Busiris,--all these with others too numerous to enumerate, have been

woven into the mighty web and woof of the magic drapery evolved by the

so potent art of Valmiki.

Nor is the poem less interesting in a political point of view. It can

hardly be questioned that all progress to be real and intrinsic must be

developed out of the inherent tendencies of a nation--the feelings and

sentiments and idiosyncracies into which it is born as well as those

which have been stamped on its life and mind by the stress and

exigencies of circumstances, social and political. For a nation,

therefore, to govern another with such an object as that with which

England has taken upon herself the Government of this country--namely,

the progress and advancement of the children of the soil--a close and

wide study of its laws, and institutions manners and customs, modes of

thought and emotional proclivities becomes a thing of paramount

interest. It is clear, hence, that to our rulers an acquaintance with

such works as the Mahabharata and Ramayana is most important for wise

and beneficient adminstration. Nor can it avail one to advance the

seemingly unanswerable objection that treating of as they do a state of

society divided from the real present by a huge and abyssmal gulf of

time, such works can by no means serve as useful and faithful guides to

the life and manners of Hindu society existing at this day. "In India,"

as Professor Monier Williams justly remarks, "the lapse of centuries is

powerless in effecting radical changes in the foundation and

constitution of Hindu society." The conservative character of the Hindu

nation is proverbial. In India usages and observances, the rituals

prescribed by the scriptures and the customs sanctioned by hoary age,

are clung to with a tenacity that is proof against time and innovation;

and those who think that England has materially swayed and influnced the

social life of the people, labour, we make bold to say, under a

lamentable delusion.

Having regard alike to the surpassing and matchless excellence of the

poem itself both in its dramatic and lyric character, the extreme

interest it possesses for antiquaries and students of oriental

literature, and the importance with which its study is fraught

politically to Englishmen, it is most desirable that the Ramayana should

be presented before the public in an English garb. In consequence of its

being composed originally in Sanskrit, it literally remains a sealed

book to the majority of students. Few are the persons that can devote

their time and energies to master Sanskrit--a language which of all

languages existing on earth, is, in consequence of its highly complex

and complicated grammar, as well as the indefiniteness which

characterises it on account of its possessing countless synonyms, most

difficult to master by a foreigner. Nay, we can perhaps safely go so far

as to assert that very few amongst those Western scholars who have

devoted their lives to the study of Sanskrit literature, have been able

to enter into the spirit of that part of its vocabulary in which are

couched those peculiarly Hindu ideas and sentiments that constitute the

unique genius of the people. To translate, therefore, such a work as the

Ramayana from the dead and indefinite Sanskrit into the living and real

English, is, like unearthening a fossil and inspiring it with life; or

rather like transferring a light from a bushel in which it has been

hidden, to a mountain- top,--so that men may behold it and the

surrounding objects by help of its grateful rays. Surely, to render a

work from a dead tongue into a living language and specially such a

language as English with all its resources, is literally taking it from

its narrow and circumscribed sphere of influence, and placing it before

the world at large--in fact, making it the common property and heritage

of all mankind. The utility, therefore, we flatter ourselves, of this

present literary undertaking, will recomend itself to all thinking-minds

without any further elaboration on our part. Indeed, it would argue no

common hardihood in him who despite common sense and reason, would

endevour to maintain that the Epic of Valmiki published in an English

garb (always provided that the execution do not fall far short of the

requirements) would prove valueless as a contribution to the case of

literature and culture.

In translating the Ramayana into English, we are concerned with a work

composed by an illustrious ascetic passing his days in a hermitage in

devout contemplation and the practice of rigid austerities and

self-denial. It behoves us, therefore, to approach the task in a

becoming spirit, with minds duly prepared and fitted. Let us,

accordingly, begin by invoking Him whose presence can convert the

foulest and the most unclean spot, pure and clean, "like the icicle that

hangs on Dian's temple," or the hearts and aspirations of the Vestal

Virgins, or pious saints ever engaged in meditating the Most High. May

He in His infinite and eternal grace vouchsafe to purge our minds of all

ignoble feelings and motives,--may He enable is to find delight in duty

and doing His will! May our energies never flag while carrying the

burden we have taken on our shoulders! May He enlighten our

understanding to interpret aright and convey in clear and adequate

language the great thoughts and sentiments of the sublime bard,--so that

the English Ramayana being read by all the subjects of a Monarch on

whose dominions the sun never sets, it may contribute to their constant

profit and delight.

THE RAMAYANA IN AN ENGLISH GARB. ..................................

BALAKANDAM. .......................................................

SECTION I. ......................................................

SECTION II. .....................................................

SECTION III. ....................................................

SECTION IV. .....................................................

SECTION V. ......................................................

SECTION VI. .....................................................

SECTION VII. ....................................................

SECTION VIII. ...................................................

SECTION IX. .....................................................

SECTION X. ......................................................

SECTION XI. .....................................................

SECTION XII. ....................................................

SECTION XIII. ...................................................

SECTION XIV. ....................................................

SECTION XV. .....................................................

SECTION XVI. ....................................................

SECTION XVII. ...................................................

SECTION XVIII. ..................................................

SECTION XIX. ....................................................

SECTION XX. .....................................................

SECTION XXI. ....................................................

SECTION XXII. ...................................................

SECTION XXIII. ..................................................

SECTION XXIV. ...................................................

SECTION XXV. ....................................................

SECTION XXVI. ...................................................

SECTION XXVII. ..................................................

SECTION XXVIII. .................................................

SECTION XXIX. ...................................................

SECTION XXX. ....................................................

SECTION XXXI. ...................................................

SECTION XXXN. ...................................................

SECTION XXXIII. .................................................

SECTION XXXIV. ..................................................

SECTION XXXV. ...................................................

SECTION XXXVI. ..................................................

SECTION XXXVII. .................................................

SECTION XXXVIII. ................................................

SECTION XXXIX. ..................................................

SECTION XL. .....................................................

SECTION XLI. ....................................................

SECTION XLII. ...................................................

SECTION XLIV. ...................................................

SECTION XLV. ....................................................

SECTION XLVI. ...................................................

SECTION XLVII. ..................................................

SECTION XLVIII. .................................................

SECTION XLIX. ...................................................

SECTION L. ......................................................

SECTION LI. .....................................................

SECTION LII. ....................................................

SECTION LIII. ...................................................

SECTION LIV. ....................................................

SECTION LVI. ....................................................

SECTION LVII. ...................................................

SECTION LVIII. ..................................................

SECTION LIX. ....................................................

SECTION LX. .....................................................

SECTION LXI. ....................................................

SECTION LXII. ...................................................

SECTION LXIII. ..................................................

SECTION LXIV. ...................................................

SECTION LXV. ....................................................

SECTION LXVI. ...................................................

SECTION LXVII. ..................................................

SECTION LXVIII. .................................................

SECTION LXIX. ...................................................

SECTION LXX. ....................................................

SECTION LXXI. ...................................................

SECTION LXXII. ..................................................

SECTION LXXIV. ..................................................

SECTION LXXV. ...................................................

SECTION LXXVI. ..................................................

SECTION LXXVII. .................................................

AYODHYAKANDAM .....................................................