The Ramayana of Valmiki

The Ramayana is an ancient Sanskrit epic, and the older of the two Great Epics of India. It is probably the most influential Indian text, having local versions in almost all Indian languages, as well as being the national epic of Thailand, Laos, and being an important source of cultural influence in countries like Indonesia.

This website hosts the English translation of the Ramayana along with the Sanskrit version. The English translation was done by Ralph Thomas Hotchkin Griffith, and was digitized by Project Gutenberg. My work has been turning Gutenberg's plaintext into beautiful HTML and adding a search indexer to the epic.

Billions have grown up with the Ramayana, and I felt it must be accesible in a modern digital format. Most Indians grew up watching Ramanand's Sagar Ramayan (1987) which aired on Indian state TV and remains the most view mythological serial with over 650 million viewers. Arguably the highest point of the serial was the famous 'हम कथा सुनाते राम सकल गुणधाम की' (We Tell The Tale of the Virtuous Rama) song, which has been translated to English prose on YouTube.

There are of course, many versions of the Ramayana as shown above here, but we have decided like many others, to stick to the Valmiki version as it is considered "canon". Note: The original Griffith text has many cantos missing, many of these missing cantos have been filled using the prose translation and using GPT3.5 to generate a poem version similar to Ralph T.H. Griffith's style. These have been marked with a "GPT" beside the Canto heading.

Regards,
S.Gautam.

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