A text that has such life, age after age, is certainly a many-stranded thing; each gen-
eration and class brings its own preoccupations to the narrative. Gandhi used the sym-
bolism of Ram rajya, Rama’s reign, to mobilize Indians around a vision of a new golden
age of an independent India, using a hymn to Rama as a nationalist rallying song.
However, during the era when the Ramayana was composed and had its first
audiences—sometime between 750 and 500 B.C.E.—it was surely addressing differ-
ent social concerns. As we know from all the epics that describe life in those times
(the Ramayana, the Mahabharata, and the Harivamsa), it was a violent era of bloody
succession fights and conflict between small kingdoms. Kingdoms built by strength
of arms had not found ways to “moralize” the exercise of power. The other great epic
from this period, the Mahabharata, is the most pessimistic of all, describing a war of
apocalyptic proportions with horrible weapons of destruction that ends with eigh-
teen million corpses and the death of every principal character. King Dhritarashtra, in
This sixteenth-century painting
portrays the most famous epi-
sode in the Mahabharata in
which Prince Arjuna (in chariot
on right, aiming his arrow) is
urged into battle against his
cousins by his charioteer, who
is Krishna in disguise. The
gods watch from on high.