The work
Kṛttibās Ojhā, a brahmin of Phulia in Nadia, composed his Rāmāyaṇa in Bengali in the fifteenth century, in the payār couplet — a simple fourteen-syllable line built for singing and for public recitation. It is the earliest major work of Bengali narrative poetry and, for most of the period since, the form in which Bengalis have encountered the epic. Printed cheaply from the nineteenth century onward, it was for generations one of the few books in an ordinary Bengali house.
The text as it circulates is not stable. It was copied, sung, expanded and printed in many versions, and modern editions differ considerably; a good deal of what is recited as Kṛttibās is later accretion.
What it adds
Kṛttibās works in a great deal of local and folk material that has no Sanskrit source, and much of it has become inseparable from the story in Bengal: Rāma's autumn worship of Durgā before the war — the akāl-bodhan, the untimely awakening of the goddess, which links the epic to Bengal's own great festival — and episodes involving Rāvaṇa's kinsmen, Hanumān, and the wives of the household that develop character far beyond the Sanskrit.
The register is domestic. Grief, marriage, jealousy and household relations are handled with an intimacy the Sanskrit does not attempt, and the divine figures are brought close enough to be scolded. This is characteristic of the eastern devotional literature of the period, and it is why the poem stayed alive as song rather than as scripture.
The akāl-bodhan
The episode most closely identified with the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa is Rāma's worship of Durgā before the war. Needing the goddess's help and finding it out of season, he performs her rite in autumn instead of spring — the untimely awakening — and, when one of the hundred and eight blue lotuses required is missing, offers his own eye in its place; the goddess stops his hand and grants the boon.
The episode is not in Vālmīki. It ties the epic directly to Durgā Pūjā, the central festival of Bengal, and supplies the reason autumn is the season for it. Very few pieces of regional retelling have done so much work.
Transmission
The poem's circulation was oral and musical long before it was typographic. It was sung by professional reciters, and its payār couplets are built for that: end-stopped, regular, easy to carry. In the nineteenth century the Battala presses of Calcutta printed it in cheap editions by the tens of thousands, and it became one of the standard books of a Bengali household, alongside a Mahābhārata in the same metre.
Modern scholarly editions attempt to recover the fifteenth-century core beneath these accretions; the recitation tradition has not waited for them.
A household book
Printed cheaply by the Battala presses of Calcutta from the early nineteenth century, Kṛttibās was for generations one of the few books in an ordinary Bengali house, alongside a Bengali Mahābhārata in the same metre.
That circulation shaped the text as much as any author did. Modern scholarly editions try to recover the fifteenth-century core beneath the accretions; the recitation tradition has never waited for them.
Further reading
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1999
- Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. University of California Press, 1991
- Sattar, Arshia. Valmiki's Ramayana. Harper Collins, 1996
- Whaling, Frank. The Rise of the Religious Significance of Rama. Motilal Banarsidass, 1980
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- Rāmcaritmānas — The Rāmcaritmānas is Tulsīdās's retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhyā in 1574, and the most widely recited work of North Indian devotional literature.
- Raṅganātha Rāmāyaṇa — The Raṅganātha Rāmāyaṇa is the earliest full Telugu retelling of the epic, composed in the dvipada metre and traditionally attributed to Gona Budda Reddy in the thirteenth or fourteenth century.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- Sītā — Sītā is the wife of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, found by King Janaka in a furrow, carried off by Rāvaṇa and held for a year in Laṅkā without yielding, and vindicated by fire only to be abandoned by her husband in the epic's last book.
- Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.