Mewar
The most celebrated illustrated Rāmāyaṇa is the series made at Udaipur for Rana Jagat Singh I in the middle of the seventeenth century, with the fourth and fifth books largely the work of the painter Sāhibdīn — one of the few Indian painters of the period whose name and hand can be securely identified.
The Mewar pages are large, densely populated, and organized by a device that suits the epic well: several moments of the narrative appear within a single frame, so that a page can carry a whole sequence. Sāhibdīn's battle scenes at Laṅkā are among the most complex compositions in Indian painting. Most of the series is now in the British Library.
Pahari
The eighteenth-century painting of the Punjab hill states produced Rāmāyaṇa sets in an entirely different register — smaller, quieter, with an emphasis on landscape and on the emotional relations between the figures. The Guler and Kangra workshops, associated with the family of Pandit Seu and his sons Manaku and Nainsukh, produced the finest of them, and the "Siege of Lanka" series is the best known.
Mughal and after
The Mughal atelier produced illustrated Persian translations of both epics — the Rāmāyaṇa alongside the Razmnāma, the Persian Mahābhārata — commissioned under Akbar as part of a deliberate programme of translation, and the results are among the most interesting objects of the period: a Sanskrit epic rendered in Persian and painted by artists trained in a Persianate idiom for a Muslim court.
Later traditions continued the subject in every regional idiom: Basohli, Bundi, Malwa, Mysore, Tanjore, Bengali paṭa scrolls, Odia palm-leaf manuscripts, Madhubani wall painting. The nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings and then the Ravi Varma oleographs carried Rāmāyaṇa imagery into mass production, and the calendar print descended from them is the form in which most Indians now picture the characters.
Sāhibdīn
The Mewar series is the one case in Indian painting where a Rāmāyaṇa cycle can be attributed to a named hand for substantial stretches. Sāhibdīn, a Muslim painter working for a Hindu court at Udaipur in the 1650s, painted the fourth and fifth books, and his compositions are among the most complex in Indian art — continuous narrative within a single frame, with the same figures recurring across a page as the story moves.
Most of the series is in the British Library, which has digitized it.
The Mughal translations
Akbar's atelier produced illustrated Persian versions of both epics, as part of a translation programme that also produced the Razmnāma. A Rāmāyaṇa was made for the emperor and another for his mother.
The results are a Sanskrit epic rendered into Persian and painted by artists trained in a Persianate idiom for a Muslim court, and they are among the most interesting objects of the period for reasons that have nothing to do with religion.
Into print
The nineteenth century moved Rāmāyaṇa imagery into mass production — Kalighat paintings in Calcutta, then the oleographs of Raja Ravi Varma's press, then the calendar print. Those images fixed the modern appearance of the characters more decisively than any manuscript tradition, and the television serial of 1987 took its visual language directly from them.
Further reading
- Dehejia, Vidya. The Legend of Rama: Artistic Visions. Marg Publications, 1994
- Flood, Gavin. An Introduction to Hinduism. Cambridge University Press, 1996
- Nagar, Shanti Lal. Genesis and Evolution of the Rama Katha in Indian Art, Thought, Literature and Culture. B.R. Publishing, 2005
- Sattar, Arshia. Lost Loves: Exploring Rama's Anguish. Penguin, 2011
- Whaling, Frank. The Rise of the Religious Significance of Rama. Motilal Banarsidass, 1980
See also
- The Rāmāyaṇa in temple relief — The Rāmāyaṇa is carved on temple walls from the Gupta period onward, and the great relief cycles — Deogarh, Prambanan, Angkor Wat, Hampi — are among the largest narrative sculpture programmes in Asia.
- 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.
- 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.
- Rāmcaritmānas — The Rāmcaritmānas is Tulsīdās's retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa in Awadhi, begun at Ayodhyā in 1574, and the most widely recited work of North Indian devotional literature.
- Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
- 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.
- Rāmlīlā — Rāmlīlā is the annual public staging of the Rāmāyaṇa across northern India, played over days or weeks in streets and open grounds, and ending with the burning of Rāvaṇa's effigy.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.