The Ramayana – Duty the Distance of Perfection

52 Books in a Year – Week 6

Still here. Still reading. What a time to be alive.

After the Mahabharata I needed something smaller. Not small, nothing in this part of the reading list is small, but smaller. More contained. A story with a clear beginning, a clear middle, and a clear end. One you could actually hold in your hands without feeling like it was slowly consuming you from the inside.

The Ramayana is that. And after where I had just been, that felt like genuine relief.

So What Actually Happens?

The Ramayana follows Prince Rama, heir to the kingdom of Ayodhya, who is about to be crowned king. He is loved by the people, respected by everyone who knows him, and by all accounts the ideal man in every possible way. Virtuous, composed, noble. Perfect, basically.

And then it all collapses. Almost immediately.

His father, King Dasharatha, is bound by an old promise made to his youngest wife Kaikeyi. She calls it in at the worst possible moment, demanding that her own son Bharata be crowned instead of Rama and that Rama be exiled to the forest for fourteen years. Dasharatha is heartbroken. He cannot go back on his word. And Rama, characteristically, accepts the exile without argument because his father's honour matters more to him than his own crown.

So Rama goes into the forest with his wife Sita and his devoted brother Lakshmana. For a while the Ramayana becomes something almost peaceful, a wandering story, an exile story, three people learning to live in the wilderness together. It has a quiet quality that I found unexpectedly lovely.

It does not last.

A demon king called Ravana, ruler of the island kingdom of Lanka, impossibly powerful, granted near-invincibility by the gods through years of devoted prayer, becomes obsessed with Sita. He engineers a distraction, lures Rama and Lakshmana away from her, and abducts her. He carries her across the ocean to Lanka, installs her in his palace gardens, and spends the rest of the story trying to convince her to be his queen.

She refuses. Completely. Repeatedly. Regardless of threats or promises. That matters, and I will come back to it.

Rama, on discovering Sita is gone, is devastated. Genuinely, humanly devastated in a way that is actually one of his most relatable moments in the entire text. He and Lakshmana search desperately. They eventually form an alliance with Sugriva, the exiled king of the Vanaras, an army of monkey warriors, and his greatest general, Hanuman.

Hanuman is sent to find Sita. What follows is one of the great sequences in the book. He leaps across the ocean, an act of such impossible scale that it takes on the quality of a miracle, infiltrates Lanka, finds Sita, delivers Rama's message, and then before leaving allows himself to be captured so he can be brought before Ravana. His tail is set on fire as punishment. He uses it to burn half of Lanka to the ground before escaping.

I mean. Come on. Hanuman is absolutely brilliant.

Rama builds an army, constructs a bridge across the ocean with the help of the Vanaras, crosses to Lanka, and the great war begins. It is vast and mythic and relentless. Champion after champion falls. Ravana's brother Vibhishana, a good man deeply uncomfortable with what his brother has done, defects to Rama's side and becomes crucial to the final victory. Great warriors are lost on both sides. Eventually Rama and Ravana face each other directly and Rama kills him. Sita is rescued.

And then the story does something that still bothers me. Quite a lot, if I am being honest.

Rama, before taking Sita back, publicly questions whether she remained pure during her captivity. He says he fought for honour and duty, not necessarily for her, and that she is free to go wherever she chooses. Sita, to prove her innocence, walks into a fire. She emerges unharmed, the fire itself refusing to touch her.

They return home. Rama is crowned. And for a time it seems like resolution.

But in some versions of the Ramayana it does not end there. Public gossip about Sita's time in Lanka continues. And Rama, bowing to public opinion, exiles her while she is pregnant with his children, to live alone in the forest. She raises their sons there. When Rama finally seeks reunion, she asks the earth to swallow her rather than return.

That ending sat with me for a long time.

Rama and the Problem I Had With Him

Rama is considered one of the great heroic figures in Hindu tradition. The ideal man. And you feel that on every page. He is noble, righteous, composed, devoted. He does the right thing constantly, even when the right thing costs him enormously.

And I found that genuinely hard to connect with.

Not because it is wrong. But because perfection at that scale creates distance. Achilles was compelling because he was a complete mess. Odysseus was compelling because he was flawed and knew it and made bad decisions anyway. Even Aeneas had the Dido moment, a crack in the armour where something real and human bled through. Rama does not really have that crack. When doubt surfaces it is resolved almost immediately by his sense of duty. He accepts exile without complaint. He questions Sita's honour without apparent internal conflict. He exiles his pregnant wife because public opinion demands it.

And all of it is framed as righteous. As the correct choice. As what the ideal man does.

That is where I struggled. Because by the end, I was not sure I liked him very much. And I think the text would consider that entirely my problem.

Sita

Let’s just start with, Sita is extraordinary.

She is abducted, refuses Ravana's advances repeatedly despite everything stacked against her, and maintains her dignity throughout an ordeal that would have broken most people. She didn’t take the easy way out. She is then required to prove her innocence by walking into fire. I mean, I know it was a different time, but what madness is this? And then, in some versions, I read that she is exiled anyway when her husband decides public opinion matters more than what he knows to be true.

Sita is someone with incredible inner strength, operating within a story that consistently treats her as an object to be rescued rather than a person who has survived something terrible.

Her final act, asking the earth to take her rather than return to a husband who exiled her twice, is the most powerful moment in the entire book for me. It is the one place where she refuses to perform what is expected of her. And the story almost does not know what to do with it. Which tells you something.

Hanuman

No contest. Absolutely no contest.

The devotion, the power, the moments of genuine warmth and almost playful energy in what is otherwise quite a serious text. Hanuman brings something that nothing else in the Ramayana does. The ocean crossing. And of course, the burning of Lanka. The image of him tearing open his chest to reveal Rama and Sita living inside his heart. Pretty dark thought, but if you look at it philosophically... I mean that is Fantasy Fiction at its finest.

Those moments have a mythic electricity that the rest of the book does not always match. If the Ramayana were a film, Hanuman is the character everyone would walk out talking about.

Ravana

This surprised me. Ravana is the antagonist, the demon king who takes Sita. He should be easy to dismiss.

He is not quite.

He is educated, powerful, devoted in his own way. Granted, near-invincibility not through treachery but through genuine years of spiritual dedication. And there are moments, particularly in his interactions with Sita where he refuses to touch her against her will despite his obsession, where something more complicated than pure villainy comes through. He knows what he is doing is wrong. There are points in the text where that is almost explicit. And he does it anyway. Pride. Desire. An inability to back down once he has committed to a course.

In a story where the hero is almost too righteous to feel entirely real, Ravana's complicated darkness is, perversely, one of the more human presences on the page.

Why It Sits at Three Stars

The Ramayana is easier than the Mahabharata. More focused, more propulsive, less likely to lose you in a philosophical digression for fifty pages. In that sense, it is a more satisfying read moment to moment.

But the emotional connection was not fully there for me. When Odysseus finally gets home, and Penelope tests him, I felt something land that was satisfying. When Achilles carries Patroclus back, I felt it. The Ramayana, for all its scale and beauty, kept me at arm's length. And the treatment of Sita, which I understand is tied to ideas of dharma and social order that are central to the text's philosophy, is something I could not fully move past as a modern reader. I understood what the story was doing, but I did not always agree with what it was saying. Some could argue the meaning, but I am speaking from personal opinion, so sorry if I have offended anyone with my perspective.

Three stars is still significant. This is one of the foundational texts of human storytelling. But it is a three-star reading experience rather than a three-star text, if that distinction makes sense. I think it does.

What It Does Better Than the Others

Narrative economy. For an ancient epic the Ramayana knows exactly what it is and does not overstay its welcome. It has a shape you can feel from beginning to end. After the Mahabharata that alone felt like a gift.

Just want to add that it is also contains an extraordinary visual imagination, and it does not waste it.

Final Verdict

★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Same rating as the Mahabharata. Very different reasons. The Mahabharata overwhelmed me with scale. The Ramayana kept me at arm's length with perfection. What I can say is that both left me with things to think about long after finishing.

Next Up: The Prose Edda by Snorri Sturluson