The work
Rāma stories reached the Thai world early and by several routes, and were long established at Ayutthaya, the capital named for Ayodhyā, before its destruction in 1767 took most of the written literature with it. The Ramakien as it now exists is largely a reconstruction: a full version compiled under the direction of King Rama I and completed in 1797, with a shorter and more performable version by Rama II.
The names are Thai — Phra Ram, Nang Sida, Phra Lak, Thotsakan for Rāvaṇa, whose name means ten-necked — and so is much of the substance. The demon king is given a full biography, a court, and a family whose entanglements occupy a great deal of the text. Hanuman is transformed: still the peerless servant, but amorous, mischievous and married, with adventures of his own that have no Indian source.
Its place in Thailand
The Ramakien is not treated as a foreign import. Thai kings from 1782 have taken the reign-name Rama; the old capital was Ayutthaya and the Grand Palace at Bangkok is decorated along its cloister with a painted Ramakien cycle running for more than a kilometre; the khon masked dance-drama, the most prestigious form of Thai classical performance, takes its repertoire almost entirely from it.
The frame is Buddhist rather than Vaiṣṇava. Phra Ram is a virtuous king and an incarnation of Viṣṇu in name, but the moral world the poem operates in is the Buddhist one of merit, kingship and impermanence, and the epic functions as a charter for royal authority rather than as devotional literature.
Rāvaṇa's epic
The most striking difference from the Sanskrit is the weight given to Thotsakan. His birth, his austerities, his family, his wives, his sons and his repeated attempts to save Laṅkā by stratagem occupy a very large share of the text, and his death is treated as a tragedy rather than a deliverance. Thai audiences have often found him the more interesting figure, and khon performance gives him the most demanding choreography.
The Ramakien also introduces a long sequence of episodes with no Indian source at all, chiefly involving Hanuman, whose exploits — amorous, martial and comic in turn — sustain much of the second half.
The palace murals
Around the cloister of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha in Bangkok runs a painted Ramakien in one hundred and seventy-eight panels, begun under Rama I and repainted repeatedly since, so that the cycle is at once an eighteenth-century monument and a continuously renewed one. It is the most complete visual telling of the epic anywhere, and it functions as the reference text for costume, gesture and character identification in Thai performance.
Hanuman in Thailand
The Thai Hanuman is a substantially different character: still the peerless servant, but amorous, boastful and mischievous, with wives, love affairs and adventures that have no Indian source at all. He is the audience's favourite and carries much of the second half.
The transformation is a good measure of how thoroughly the epic was localized rather than translated.
Further reading
- Cadet, J. M. The Ramakien: The Thai Epic. Kodansha International, 1971
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Raghavan, V. The Ramayana Tradition in Asia. Sahitya Akademi, 1980
- Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1999
- Whaling, Frank. The Rise of the Religious Significance of Rama. Motilal Banarsidass, 1980
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- Reamker — The Reamker is the Khmer Rāmāyaṇa, known from manuscripts of the sixteenth century onward and from far older reliefs at Angkor, and the basis of Cambodia's classical dance and shadow theatre.
- Phra Lak Phra Lam — Phra Lak Phra Lam is the Lao Rāmāyaṇa, named for Lakṣmaṇa before Rāma, told as a birth-story of the Buddha and set in the Mekong valley.
- Yama Zatdaw — The Yama Zatdaw is the Burmese version of the Rāmāyaṇa, established in its present form after Burmese contact with Thai court culture in the eighteenth century, and performed as dance-drama and marionette theatre.
- Hikayat Seri Rama — The Hikayat Seri Rama is the Malay prose Rāmāyaṇa, known from manuscripts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, in which the story is retold within an Islamic frame.
- Hanumān — Hanumān is the vānara minister of Sugrīva in the Rāmāyaṇa who leaps the ocean to find Sītā in Laṅkā and burns the city, and who became in later devotion the model of service and one of the most widely worshipped deities in India.
- The Rāmāyaṇa in dance and mask-drama — The Rāmāyaṇa is the central repertoire of classical and folk performance across South and Southeast Asia — Kathakali, Kūṭiyāṭṭam, khon, wayang, lkhon khol, kecak — and in most of these forms it is the story that defines the tradition.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.