My View: I believe it to be a true story. The places mentioned in Ramayana and Ramcharitmanas eg. Ayodhya, Sri Lanka are real places and the journey of Rama from Ayodhya to Sri Lanka, as depicted, appears to be real. The remains of a bridge between India and Sri Lanka are a proof of this journey. A place near Amritsar, “Ramtirth”, is said to be where Ashram of Valmiki was and where Sita remained with Luv and Kush. There are a lot of such places associated with the Ramayana.
Relevant links:
A man or an avatar?
Rama's Equanimity: Myth & Reality
Fast Facts on the Ramayana
NASA Shuttle image of Palk Strait (Rama’s bridge)
Effect of Ramayana on Various Cultures and Civilisations
2 comments:
Traditionally the epic belongs to the Treta Yuga, one of the four eons of Hindu chronology and is attributed to Valmiki, an active participant in the story.
It is composed in Epic Sanskrit, an early variant of Classical Sanskrit, so that in principle the core of the work may date to as early as the 5th century BCE. Since in its current form, after hundreds of years of transmission through recitations and in manuscript form, the epic has gone thorough numerous variations, it cannot be dated by linguistic analysis as a whole, and should be considered to have emerged over a long process, spanning from the 5th to 1st centuries BC.
The core events told in the epic may well be of even greater age, the names of the characters, Rama, Sita, Dasharata, Janaka, Vasishta and Vishwamitra are all known in the Vedic literature such as the Brahmanas which are older than the Valmiki Ramayana.However, nowhere in the surviving Vedic poetry is a story similar to the Ramayana of Valmiki. Brahma, one of the main characters of Ramayana, and Vishnu, who according to Bala Kanda was incarnated as Rama are not Vedic deities, and come first into prominence with the epics themselves and further during the 'Puranic' period of the later 1st millennium AD. There is also a version of Ramayana, known as Ramopakhyana, found in the epic Mahabharata. This version, depicted as a narration to Yudhishtra, is devoid of any divine characteristics to Rama.
There is general consensus that books two to six form the oldest portion of the epic while the first book Bala Kanda and the last the Uttara Kanda are later additions. The author or authors of Bala Kanda and Ayodhya Kanda appear to be familiar with the eastern Gangetic basin region of northern India and the Kosala and Magadha region during the period of the sixteen janapadas as the geographical and geopolitical data is in keeping with what is known about the region. However, when the story moves to the Aranya Kanda and beyond, it seems to turn abruptly into fantasy with its demon-slaying hero and fantastic creatures. The geography of central and south India is increasingly vaguely described. The knowledge of the location of the island of Sri Lanka also lacks detail. Basing his assumption on these features, the historian H.D. Sankalia has proposed a date of the 4th century BC for the composition of the text. A. L. Basham, however, is of the opinion that Rama may have been a minor chief who lived in the 8th or the 7th century BC.
The events of the epic have also been dated to as early as 6000 BC by adherents of archaeoastronomy.
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