The Ramayana

Table of Contents

About the Author

Title Page

Copyright Page

Introduction

Dedication

Chapter 1 - RAMA’S INITIATION

Chapter 2 - THE WEDDING

Chapter 3 - TWO PROMISES REVIVED

Chapter 4 - ENCOUNTERS IN EXILE

Chapter 5 - THE GRAND TORMENTOR

Chapter 6 - VALI

Chapter 7 - WHEN THE RAINS CEASE

Chapter 8 - MEMENTO FROM RAMA

Chapter 9 - RAVANA IN COUNCIL

Chapter 10 - ACROSS THE OCEAN

Chapter 11 - THE SIEGE OF LANKA

Chapter 12 - RAMA AND RAVANA IN BATTLE

Chapter 13 - INTERLUDE

Chapter 14 - THE CORONATION

Epilogue

Glossary

THE RAMAYANA

R. K. NARAYAN was born on October 10, 1906, in Madras, South India, and educated there and at Maharaja’s College in Mysore. His first novel, Swami and Friends (1935), and its successor, The Bachelor of Arts (1937), are both set in the fictional territory of Malgudi, of which John Updike wrote, “Few writers since Dickens can match the effect of colorful teeming that Narayan’s fictional city of Malgudi conveys; its population is as sharply chiseled as a temple frieze, and as endless, with always, one feels, more characters round the corner.” Narayan wrote many more novels set in Malgudi, including The English Teacher (1945), The Financial Expert (1952), and The Guide (1958), which won him the Sahitya Akademi (India’s National Academy of Letters) Award, his country’s highest honor. His collections of short fiction include A Horse and Two Goats, Malgudi Days, and Under the Banyan Tree. Graham Greene, Narayan’s friend and literary champion, said, “He has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian.” Narayan’s fiction earned him comparisons to the work of writers including Anton Chekhov, William Faulkner, O. Henry, and Flannery O’Connor.

Narayan also published travel books, volumes of essays, the memoir My Days, and the retold legends Gods, Demons, and Others, The Ramayana, and The Mahabharata. In 1980 he was awarded the A. C. Benson Medal by the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1981 he was made an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1989 he was made a member of the Rajya Sabha, the nonelective House of Parliament in India.

R. K. Narayan died in Madras on May 13, 2001.

PANKAJ MISHRA is the author of The Romantics, winner of the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World, and Tempations of the West: How to be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond . He is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, the New York Review of Books, and the Guardian.

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First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press 1972

First published in Great Britain by Chatto & Windus 1973

Published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 1977

Published in Penguin Books (U.K) 1977

This edition with an introduction by Pankaj Mishra published in Penguin Books (U.S.A.) 2006

Copyright © R. K. Narayan, 1972

Introduction copyright © Pankaj Mishra, 2006

All rights reserved

The decorations, drawn from Indian temple sculptures, are by R. K. Laxman.