The work
The Raṅganātha Rāmāyaṇa is the first complete Rāmāyaṇa in Telugu and among the earliest Telugu narrative poems of any kind. It is composed in dvipada, a two-line metre far closer to ordinary speech than the elaborate campū of courtly Telugu, and the choice was deliberate: dvipada was the metre of songs and of popular recitation, and using it for a major religious epic put the work outside the conventions of learned poetry. Later Telugu literati sometimes disparaged it for exactly that reason, and it outlasted their objection.
Authorship is traditionally assigned to Gona Budda Reddy, a chief of the Kakatiya period; the ascription is old and generally accepted, though the text has grown since.
What it contains
The poem follows the Sanskrit narrative and introduces a good deal of material from Telugu folk tradition, some of it not found elsewhere in the Rāmāyaṇa literature. Episodes involving the rākṣasa household, the childhood of the brothers, and the details of the war are expanded, and the poem's sympathies are broadly devotional. It has remained in circulation continuously and has been performed in the Telugu countryside in forms ranging from recitation to shadow puppetry.
The dvipada decision
Choosing dvipada was a considered act. Telugu literary prestige lay with campū, the mixed prose-and-verse form of the courts, whose vocabulary was heavily Sanskritized and whose audience was learned. Dvipada was the metre of song, of the countryside and of the storyteller, and using it for the Rāmāyaṇa placed the poem with the audience rather than with the connoisseurs.
Later Telugu poets writing in dvipada — including those who told the Basava and the Rāṅganātha traditions — followed the precedent, and the metre acquired a settled association with religious narrative meant for the many.
Afterlife
The poem has stayed in use continuously. Its episodes are performed in tholu bommalata, the leather shadow-puppet theatre of Andhra, whose puppeteers carried the story into villages across the Deccan and, by migration, into the shadow theatres of Southeast Asia. A companion work, the Uttara Rāmāyaṇa, was added by later hands to complete the story past the coronation.
In the shadow theatre
The poem's episodes travelled through tholu bommalata, the leather shadow-puppet theatre of Andhra, whose companies carried the story across the Deccan and, by migration, contributed to the shadow traditions of Southeast Asia.
A companion Uttara Rāmāyaṇa was added by later hands to carry the story past the coronation, which the original does not.
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.
- Torave Rāmāyaṇa — The Torave Rāmāyaṇa is the best-known Kannada retelling of the epic, composed in the sixteenth century by the poet Narahari, who wrote under the name Kumāra Vālmīki.
- Kṛttivāsī Rāmāyaṇa — The Kṛttivāsī Rāmāyaṇa is the Bengali retelling composed by Kṛttibās Ojhā in the fifteenth century, the form in which the epic has been known in Bengal for five hundred years.
- 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.
- Hanumān — Hanumān is the vānara minister of Sugrīva in the Rāmāyaṇa who leaps the ocean to find Sītā in Laṅkā and burns the city, and who became in later devotion the model of service and one of the most widely worshipped deities in India.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.