Ramayana, Epic of Rama, Prince of India

Epilogue by the Translator - 168
‘“For my mother often taught me and my father often spake,
That her home the wedded woman doth beside her husband make,
As the shadow to the substance, to her lord is faithful wife,
And she part, not from her consort till she parts with fleeting life!
Therefore bid me seek the jungle and in pathless forests roam,
Where the wild deer freely ranges and the tiger makes his home,
Happier than in father’s mansions in the woods will Sita rove,
Waste no thought on home or kindred, nestling in her husband’s love!’’
The ideal of life was joy and beauty and gladness in ancient Greece; the ideal of
life was piety and endurance and devotion in ancient India. The tale of Helen
was a tale of womanly beauty and loveliness which charmed the western world.
The tale of Sita was a tale of womanly faith and self-abnegation which charmed
and fascinated the Hindu world. Repeated trials bring out in brighter relief the
unfaltering truth of Sita’s character; she goes to a second banishment in the
woods with the same trust and devotion to her lord as before, and she returns
once more, and sinks into the busom of her Mother Earth, true in death as she
had been true in life. The creative imagination of the Hindus has conceived no
loftier and holier character than Sita; the literature of the world has not
produced a higher ideal of womanly love, womanly truth, and womanly
devotion.
The modern reader will now comprehend why India produced, and has
preserved for well-nigh three thousand years, two Epics instead of one national
Epic. No work of the imagination abides long unless it is animated by some
sparks of imperishable truth, unless it truly embodies some portion of our
human feelings, human faith and human life. The Maha-bharata depicts the
political life of [189] ancient India, with all its valour and heroism, ambition and
lofty chivalry. The Ramayana embodies the domestic and religious life of
ancient India, with all its tenderness and sweetness, its endurance and devotion.
The one picture without the other were incomplete; and we should know but
little of the ancient Hindus if we did not comprehend their inner life and faith as
well as their political life and their warlike virtues. The two together give us a
true and graphic picture of ancient Indian life and civilisation; and no nation on
earth has preserved a more faithful picture of its glorious past.
In condensing the Ramayana with its more than 24,000 Sanscrit couplets into
2000 English couplets I have followed the same plan which was adopted in my
translation of the Maha-bharata. I have selected those sections or cantos which
tell the leading incidents of the Epic, and have translated the whole or main
portions of them, and these selected passages are linked together by short notes.
The plan, as was explained before, has this advantage, that the story is told not
by the translator in his own way, but by the poet himself; the passages placed
before the reader are not the translator’s abridgment of a long poem, but
selected passages from the poem itself. It is the ancient poet of India, and not the
translator, who narrates the old story; but he narrates only such portions of it as