A book awarded the Saraswati Samman, Ramakathaiyum Iramayanankalum (2005) is an ambitious work by the Thamizh scholar AA Manavalan, a comparative study of forty-eight Ramakathas (though it references more) from the 5th century BCE to the 19th century CE, written in twenty-two languages—Pali, Sanskrit, Prakrit, Tibetan, Tamil, Old Javanese, Japanese, Telugu, Assamese, Malayalam, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi, Odia, Persian, Malay, Burmese, Filipino, Thai, Laotian and Kashmiri. We are fortunate now to have a meticulously done translation in English by CT Indra and Prema Jagannathan, one that is extremely readable without losing out on the scholarship and the research that has gone into both the Thamizh work and the translation.
It must be stated at the outset that this work was meant to be the first volume. In it, Manavalan makes a comparative study of three kaandams—Bala Kaandam, Ayodhya Kaandam, and Aranya Kaandam—as delineated in the various versions of the Ramakathas. Manavalan first gives us the origin and development of Rama’s story, showing us how various versions of the story were circulating well before Valmiki’s Ramayana and how later versions may have had an impact on the earlier versions as well—since they would have shared time and space and the story-tellers of earlier versions would have been influenced by later versions. Thus interpolations may exist in both written and spoken versions.