The anuṣṭubh and the first verse

The metre

The anuṣṭubh, commonly called the śloka, is a verse of four feet of eight syllables, usually written as two lines of sixteen. Its constraints are light — the pattern of long and short is fixed only towards the end of each foot, and the second and fourth feet are handled more strictly than the first and third — which makes it exceptionally serviceable for narrative at length. A poet can say almost anything in it without strain, and it can be recited, memorized and improvised on.

That flexibility made it the standard vehicle of nearly all subsequent Sanskrit that was not lyric: the epics, the purāṇas, the law books, and a great deal of technical literature from medicine to grammar. The Rāmāyaṇa is composed almost entirely in it, with longer and more elaborate lyric metres reserved for the closing verses of a chapter, where the poem changes gear to mark an ending.

The story of its origin

The Bāla Kāṇḍa tells how the metre came to be. Vālmīki, at his hermitage on the Tamasā, sees a hunter shoot one of a pair of krauñca birds in the act of mating; the surviving bird cries over the body; and the sage, in a shock of pity that turns to anger, speaks a curse at the hunter — that he shall not live long, having killed one of a pair at such a moment. What comes out of his mouth is metrical, in four feet of eight syllables, and he did not intend it and cannot account for it. He is disturbed enough that Brahmā appears to tell him it was no accident, that the goddess of speech spoke through him, and that he is to compose the whole life of Rāma in that measure.

The Sanskrit turns on a resemblance the tradition has never tired of: śoka, grief, and śloka, the verse. Poetry, on this account, begins in the grief of a witness at an act of violence that had nothing to do with him — not in praise, not in ritual, not in instruction.

Why the story is placed where it is

The episode is the Rāmāyaṇa's claim to be the ādi-kāvya, the first poem — not the oldest Sanskrit, which the Vedas are, but the first work of deliberate literary art with a human author, as against revealed or received text. The claim shaped the whole later history of Sanskrit poetics, which treats the Rāmāyaṇa as the beginning of its own tradition, Vālmīki as the first poet, and compassion as the emotion out of which art comes.

It sits in the Bāla Kāṇḍa, which is generally held to be a later addition to the poem. The epic's account of its own composition is therefore probably not the work of whoever composed the core. That does not lessen its importance; it means that the tradition's understanding of what poetry is and where it comes from was formulated after the poem existed, and attached to it — which is how such understandings usually arrive.