Ramayana
Ramayana, shorter of the two great epic poems of India, the other being the Mahabharata. The Ramayana was composed in Sanskrit by the poet Valmiki.
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The Ramayana is thought to have been orally told when first composed and to have been written much later, possibly leading to several deletions from and additions to the original poem. In its present form, the Ramayana consists of some 24,000 couplets divided into seven books called kandas (“happenings”). Each kanda is named for the theme or location of the events it describes: Balakanda (Book of Youth), Ayodhyakanda (Book of Ayodhya), Aranyakanda (Book of the Forest), Kiskindakanda (Book of the Monkey Empire), Sundarakanda (Book of Beauty), Yuddhakanda (Book of War), and Uttarakanda (Book of Further Events, an epilogue considered by some to be a later addition). The Ramayana, which belongs to the mahakavya genre of Sanskrit literature, features as dramatis personae humans, celestial beings, shape-shifting asuras (demons) known as rakshasas, and a variety of anthropomorphic creatures.
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