The narrative of Rama is recounted in the Sanskrit epic the Ramayana (“Rama’s Journey”), traditionally regarded as the work of the sage Valmiki. Rama is deprived of the kingdom to which he is heir and is exiled to the forest with his wife Sita and his brother Lakshmana. While there, Sita is abducted by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka. In their search for Sita, the brothers ally themselves with a monkey king whose general, the monkey god Hanuman, finds Sita in Lanka. A cosmic battle ensues; Ravana is defeated, and Sita is rescued. When Rama is restored to his kingdom, the populace casts doubt on whether Sita remained chaste while a captive. To reassure them, Rama banishes Sita to a hermitage, where she bears him two sons; eventually she reenters the earth from which she had been born. Rama’s reign becomes the prototype of the harmonious and just kingdom, to which all kings should aspire. Rama and Sita set the ideal of conjugal love, and Rama and Lakshmana represent perfect fraternal love. Everything in the epic is designed for harmony, which after being disrupted is at last regained.

The Ramayana identifies Rama as another incarnation of Vishnu and remains the principal source for the worship of Rama. Though not as long as the Mahabharata, the Ramayana contains a great deal of religious material in the form of myths, stories of great sages, and accounts of exemplary human behavior.

Although Hindus consider Rama to be the epitome of dharma, many passages from the epic seem inconsistent with this status and have provoked debate through the centuries. Rama’s killing of the monkey king Valin and his banishment of the innocent Sita, for example, have been troublesome to subsequent tradition. These problems of the “subtlety” of dharma and the inevitability of its violation, central themes in both epics, remained the locus of considerable argument throughout Indian history, both at the level of abstract philosophy and in local performance traditions. In Kerala, men of the low-ranking artisan caste worship Valin through rites of dance-possession that implicitly protest their ancestors’ deaths as soldiers conscripted by high-caste leaders such as Rama. Women performers throughout India have emphasized Sita’s story—her foundling infancy, her abduction by Ravana, her trial by fire, her childbirth in exile—thereby openly challenging Rama.

The Mahabharata

The Mahabharata (“Great Epic of the Bharata Dynasty”), a text of some 100,000 verses attributed to the sage Vyasa, was preserved both orally and in manuscript form for centuries. The central plot concerns a great battle between the five sons of Pandu (Yudhisthira, Bhima, Arjuna, and the twins Nakula and Sahadeva), called the Pandavas, and the sons of Pandu’s brother Dhritarasta. The battle eventually leads to the destruction of the entire clan, save for one survivor who continues the dynasty. As each of the heroes is the son of a god (Dharma, Vayu, Indra, and the Ashvins, respectively), the epic is deeply infused with religious implications. Hindus regard the Mahabharata as a compendium of dharma, and many passages in it debate dilemmas posed by dharma. Because of this, some Hindus refer to the work as the “fifth Veda.” Religious practice takes the form of Vedic ritual on official occasions as well as pilgrimages and, to some extent, the adoration of gods. Apart from the Bhagavadgita (part of book 6), much of the didactic material is found in the Book of the Forest (book 3), in which sages teach the exiled heroes, and in the Book of Peace (book 12), in which the wise Bhishma expounds on religious and moral matters.

The Vedic gods lost importance in these texts and survive as figures of folklore. Prajapati of the Upanishads is popularly personified as the god Brahma, who creates all classes of beings and dispenses benefits. Of far greater importance is Krishna. In the epic he is a hero, a leader of his people, and an active helper of his friends. His biography as it is known later is not worked out; still, the text is the source of the early worship of Krishna. Krishna is not portrayed as a god everywhere within the text; even as a god he has, in many places, superhuman rather than divine stature. He is occasionally, but not significantly, identified with Vishnu. Later, as one of the most important of the incarnations of Vishnu, Krishna is portrayed as an incarnate god. In the Mahabharata he is primarily a hero, a chieftain of a tribe, and an ally of the Pandavas, the heroes of the Mahabharata. He accomplishes heroic feats with the Pandava prince Arjuna. Typically, he helps the Pandava brothers to settle in their kingdom and, when the kingdom is taken from them, to regain it. In the process he emerges as a great teacher who reveals the Bhagavadgita, the most important religious text of Hinduism, in which he also reveals his own status as the supreme god. In the further development of the Krishna story, this dharmic aspect recedes and makes way for an idyllic myth about Krishna’s boyhood, when he plays with and loves young cowherd women (gopis) in the village while hiding from an uncle who threatens to kill him. The influence of this theme on art has been profound.

More remote than the instantly accessible Krishna is Shiva, who also is hailed as the supreme god in several myths, notably the stories of Arjuna’s battle with Shiva and of Shiva’s destruction of the sacrifice of Daksha. The epic is rich in information about sacred places, and it is clear that making pilgrimages and bathing in sacred rivers constituted an important part of religious life. Numerous descriptions of pilgrimages (tirthayatra) give the authors opportunities to detail local myths and legends, and countless edifying stories shed light on the religious and moral concerns of the age.