The work
Narahari, of Torave in northern Karnataka, composed his Rāmāyaṇa in the ṣaṭpadi — the six-line stanza that was the standard vehicle of Kannada narrative verse in the period — and took the name Kumāra Vālmīki, the younger Vālmīki, for himself. It is the Kannada Rāmāyaṇa that circulated most widely, and it belongs to the devotional literature of the sixteenth century rather than to the older Jain Kannada tradition, which had produced its own quite different versions of the story several centuries earlier.
The poem is Śaiva-inflected in places, and treats Rāma within a frame that acknowledges Śiva's supremacy — a common negotiation in Kannada country, where the epic had to be told in a landscape of strong Śaiva devotion, and where a poet who ignored it would have found no audience. It has been recited, sung and staged continuously, and supplies the text for several performance traditions in Karnataka.
Before and after
Narahari was not the first to tell the story in Kannada. Jain poets had done so from the tenth century onward, following the Paumacariya tradition in which Rāvaṇa is a vidyādhara king and Lakṣmaṇa kills him, and those versions had been the Kannada Rāmāyaṇa for several hundred years. The Torave Rāmāyaṇa belongs to the later devotional wave, and displaced them in general circulation without extinguishing them; both traditions survive in manuscript and in scholarship, and the contrast between them is one of the clearest illustrations available of how differently a single story could be told inside one language.
The poem's afterlife has been largely oral and theatrical. Passages of it are sung in the harikathā and gamaka traditions of recitation with exposition, in which a performer chants a stanza and then expounds it at length, and its episodes are staged in yakṣagāna, the all-night dance-drama of coastal Karnataka.
Gamaka
The Kannada tradition of gamaka — a performer chants a stanza and then expounds it at length, sometimes for an hour — takes the Torave Rāmāyaṇa as one of its principal texts. The form is closer to commentary than to recitation and it is still practised.
Episodes are also staged in yakṣagāna, the all-night dance-drama of coastal Karnataka, which has its own Rāmāyaṇa repertoire.
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.
- 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.
- Irāmāvatāram — The Irāmāvatāram is Kamban's Tamil retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa, a poem of some ten thousand verses that ends at the coronation and is regarded as one of the summits of Tamil literature.
- 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.
- Vālmīki — Vālmīki is the sage to whom the Rāmāyaṇa is attributed, called the ādi-kavi or first poet, and who appears inside his own poem as the hermit who shelters the banished Sītā and raises her sons.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.