Ramayana is an epic narrative that provides a philosophical platform for examining the nature of morality, kingship, and divinity in Indian society to this day.
This classic tale of the triumph of good over evil is ascribed to the father of Sanskrit poetry, Valmiki (ca. 400 B.C.), and has existed in roughly its present form since about the first century B.C., which makes it almost contemporaneous with the other great Indian epic, the Mahabharata. The Ramayana came to consist of twenty-four thousand verses in five principal books, later expanded to seven, each rich in imagery upon which Indian artists could draw. It found its fullest expression in the lavishly illustrated manuscripts commissioned in the court ateliers of Rajasthan, western India, and the Punjab Hills in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
(source: Metropolitan Museum of Art)
