The work
Rāma was in Cambodia long before the Reamker's surviving texts. The galleries of Angkor Wat, built in the twelfth century, carry an extended relief of the battle of Laṅkā, and earlier Khmer inscriptions refer to recitation of the Rāmāyaṇa; the epic was part of the Khmer court's Sanskritic inheritance from the first centuries of the state. The Reamker as a Khmer-language text is known from a later period, in two incomplete portions usually dated from the sixteenth or seventeenth century onward.
The telling is Buddhist in frame, and Preah Ream is understood as a bodhisatta. The best-known Khmer addition is the episode of Hanuman and Sovann Maccha, the golden mermaid sent to undo the causeway, whom he defeats and then falls in love with — a scene that is a staple of Cambodian dance and appears in no Indian version.
Its place in Cambodia
The Reamker supplies the repertoire of lkhon khol, the masked male dance-drama, and of sbek thom, the large shadow-puppet theatre whose leather panels can be a metre and a half high. Both were nearly extinguished under the Khmer Rouge, when performers were killed and puppets destroyed, and both have been rebuilt since from the memory of survivors. The epic's role in Cambodian cultural recovery after 1979 is a substantial part of its modern meaning.
Angkor and after
The Angkor Wat relief of the battle of Laṅkā, on the west gallery, is among the largest narrative reliefs of the epic ever carved, and it is six centuries older than any surviving Khmer text of the story. Reliefs at Banteay Srei and elsewhere show other episodes. This gap between the visual record and the written one is the central fact about the Reamker's history: the story was demonstrably in Cambodia and demonstrably important long before the texts that now carry it were composed.
Character and register
Preah Ream is a bodhisatta and the story is read as an account of merit and its consequences, but the Khmer telling keeps a strong flavour of the older Sanskritic material. The demon king is a figure of some grandeur; Hanuman is a trickster as well as a warrior; and the reunion of Ream and Seda is troubled in Khmer versions in ways that recall the Sanskrit — she is repudiated, and their reconciliation is not straightforward.
The Reamker also functions as a manual of proper conduct for rulers, and Khmer kings were routinely represented in its terms.
After the Khmer Rouge
Both of the Reamker's principal performance traditions — lkhon khol and the sbek thom shadow theatre — were close to extinguished between 1975 and 1979, with performers killed and puppets destroyed. Both were rebuilt from the memory of the few who survived.
The epic's part in Cambodian cultural recovery is a substantial and recent chapter of its history, and it is why UNESCO recognition of lkhon khol was sought and given.
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
- Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. University of California Press, 1991
See also
- Ramakien — The Ramakien is the Thai national version of the Rāmāyaṇa, whose fullest text was composed under Rama I in 1797, and the source of Thailand's khon masked dance-drama and much of its royal iconography.
- 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.
- 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.
- Angkor Wat — Angkor Wat is a 12th-century temple complex near Siem Reap, Cambodia, built by the Khmer king Suryavarman II as a state temple dedicated to Vishnu and now the largest religious monument in the world by area.
- 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 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.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.