From the Ramayana to the Ramakien: how the Indian epic became Siamese

On the walls of Wat Phra Kaew, as on the stages of the *khon*, Phra Ram has been doing battle with Thotsakan for more than two centuries. Their story comes from India: it is that of the Ramayana, the epic of Prince Rama and his wife Sita. Yet the Thai Ramakien is neither a translation nor a copy of it. Arriving by routes still debated, reconstructed after the destruction of Ayutthaya and rewritten by several kings, it changed its names, its characters, its tone and its values. This is the story of a slow appropriation, in which literature, painting, the stage and the monarchy moved forward together.

An epic that travels

The starting point is well known. The Ramayana, attributed to the poet Valmiki and composed in Sanskrit, tells of the exile of Prince Rama, the abduction of his wife Sita by Ravana, the demon king of Lanka, and the war waged to rescue her with the help of an army of monkeys. The tale left the Indian subcontinent very early. In Southeast Asia it was carved, painted, performed and rewritten in several languages. Laos and the Malay world have their own versions, each with its own logic.

The Khmer neighbour offers the oldest reference points. According to the Asia Society, scenes from the Ramayana were carved on Khmer temples as early as the tenth century. A Khmer literary text, the Reamker, is dated for its part to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The epic was therefore present in the region, in the form of images, long before Siam set down a written version that can still be read today.

By what route did it reach the Thai courts? The question remains open. Prince Dhani Nivat, one of the great Siamese scholars of the twentieth century, argued for transmission through a Khmer intermediary between the eighth and thirteenth centuries. This thesis fits with the antiquity of Ramayana imagery in Khmer art. It nonetheless remains a scholar's hypothesis, not a demonstration. Other avenues are sometimes put forward: shadow theatre, versions from southern India, Malay or Javanese relays. None is currently established by the serious sources consulted for this article. A cautious conclusion is therefore called for: the Ramakien probably does not derive directly from Valmiki's text, but from a tradition already transformed along the way.

1767: reconstructing a lost text

In the Ayutthaya period, the Ramakien lived first and foremost on stage. The khon, its danced and masked version, was a court spectacle, linked to the lakhon nai, the theatre ‘of the inside’ of the palace. A European account from the late seventeenth century is sometimes associated with the French diplomat Simon de La Loubère, who was on embassy in Siam in 1687. This connection deserves to be checked against his narrative before being taken for granted.

In 1767, a Burmese army destroyed Ayutthaya. Along with the capital, libraries, manuscripts and part of the court repertoires vanished. The Ramakien of Ayutthaya, as it was performed at the palace, has not come down to us in its entirety.

Reconstruction began almost at once. King Taksin, who reigned from Thonburi from 1767 to 1782, composed episodes of the Ramakien in klon verse, a Thai metrical form. A Thai university journal notes that the fragments inherited from Ayutthaya were gathered into four parts. A telling detail: the first, the episode of Phra Mongkut, belongs to the end of the story. One does not rebuild an epic from beginning to end; one saves what can be saved.

The great work of 1797

In 1782, the first king of the Chakri dynasty, known today as Rama I, founded the present capital. According to the study published by Cambridge University Press on the reception of the Indian epic in Siam, he added ‘Ayutthaya’ to the full name of the city and ‘Ramathibodi’ to his royal title. The complete version of the Ramakien, conceived as a bot lakhon (theatre libretto), dates from 1797 (B.E. 2340) according to the Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre; some accounts speak of a version ‘completed in 1798’. The whole is considerable: more than 53,300 lines according to one study, a figure that would need to be cross-checked.

Who wrote it? The answer depends on what is meant by author. Prince Damrong, the court historian, describes a collective work: the palace scholars composed the text together on the basis of the Ramakien performed at Ayutthaya, then presented it to the king. He corrected it until he was satisfied and had it sealed as a royal work. The Ramakien of 1797 is thus at once a workshop text and a sovereign utterance. The Fine Arts Department publishes a reference edition of it, reissued many times.

A political reading

It is tempting to connect these dates. A new king, emerging from a rupture, reasserts continuity with Ayutthaya in the very name of his capital, bears a title in which the name of Rama resonates, and at the same time has the epic of Rama set down. The sources establish these facts; linking them is a matter of interpretation. It is nonetheless illuminating: gathering the literary memory of the destroyed kingdom was also a way of asserting that the new dynasty was its legitimate heir.

What Siam changed

To compare the Ramayana and the Ramakien is to measure a gap. The plot remains Valmiki's: the abduction, the quest, the war. But the tone and the characters, as the introduction published by the Academy of American Poets points out, differ markedly.

New names

First of all, the characters change their names. Ravana becomes Thotsakan, literally ‘he who has ten necks’, sometimes called Rapphanasun. His followers are referred to as asura, kumphan or yaksa, three terms for demonic beings. Rama becomes Phra Ram, presented as an incarnation of Phra Narai, the Thai name for Vishnu. Vibhishana, Ravana's brother who joins Rama's side, becomes Phiphek. These forms are not faulty corruptions. They show that the names were absorbed by the Thai language, to the point of becoming proper names in their own right.

Hanuman, a different hero

The most striking change concerns Hanuman. In the Ramayana, the monkey general is a chaste devotee, wholly dedicated to Rama. In the Ramakien, according to an Indian university module devoted to the Thai version, he becomes a hero with numerous love affairs. The character remains loyal and prodigious, but he gains a sensuality and a freedom that bring him closer to the court audience. The pious servant becomes a romantic figure.

Added episodes

Rama I's text does not merely translate. It adds episodes absent from the Indian epic. The best known is that of the ‘Floating Maiden’, Nang Loi: a demoness takes on the appearance of the dead Sita and drifts down the river to deceive Phra Ram. Another episode imagines a second marriage of Rama and Sita, presided over by Shiva on Mount Kailash. These additions may have come from the oral or theatrical tradition inherited from Ayutthaya; the sources consulted do not allow the question to be settled.

Values brought to the fore

A study of the Ramakien as ‘living literature’ identifies the values it extols: loyalty, obedience, respect for hierarchy and patron–client relations. UNESCO, in its file on the khon, also stresses its educational function: respect for age and rank, mutual dependence between leaders and followers, the triumph of good over evil. The Indian tale thus becomes a mirror of the Siamese social order. From it one learns how a prince commands, how an ally serves, how a kingdom holds together.

Rama VI, or the philologist's eye

The Ramakien has never ceased to be rewritten. King Rama II recomposed many episodes for the stage; the precise date of this version remains to be established. But it was under Rama VI, who reigned from 1910 to 1925, that the perspective truly changed.

The king was probably the first to study the sources of the Ramakien comparatively, setting it against Valmiki's Ramayana. From this he produced a work, Bo Koet Ramakien, ‘The Sources of the Ramakien’. Some accounts credit him with identifying three Indian sources: Valmiki's Ramayana, the Vishnu Purana and the Hanuman Nataka. This list deserves to be verified in the work itself.

Rama VI also composed his own episodes, closer to Valmiki. In them he used the Sanskrit names rather than the Thai forms, in order to acquaint his subjects with the ‘correct’ names. It is reported that he may have mixed with Sanskritists during his studies at Oxford, though this has not been confirmed. The gesture is remarkable: a century after Rama I, the court no longer sought merely to transmit the Ramakien, but to place it within the history of its sources. Siam was now looking at its epic with the tools of European philology.

This moment also had a theatrical dimension. According to Srisurang Poolthupya, Rama VI actively supported the khon and the theatre in general. After his death this support ceased for financial reasons, before resuming later. The vitality of the epic then depended directly on royal patronage.

Reading the Ramakien on the walls of Wat Phra Kaew

Construction of Wat Phra Kaew, the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, began in 1783 within the precincts of the Grand Palace. Under Rama I, the galleries of its cloister received a painted cycle of the Ramakien. Royal text and royal image were thus born almost together.

What you see

The cycle comprises 178 panels set along the galleries. The story reads anticlockwise. It begins near the Phra Wihan Yot and opens with the Hindu deities and the avatars of Vishnu, before moving on to the birth of Rama and his brothers. According to Khaosod English, the whole comprises 258 scenes and images, including 80 character figures. The visitor following the galleries travels through the epic as one turns the pages of a book, from one episode to the next, among palaces, forests and battlefields.

What you are really looking at

Yet one should know what one has before one's eyes. Bangkok's humid climate quickly damages mural painting. According to Smarthistory, the murals have been restored or repainted roughly every fifty years. The last complete repainting dates from the 1970s, in preparation for the bicentenary of the Chakri dynasty, celebrated in 1982. The painter Jamnong Rod-ari took part in it, among others. Since then the murals have been conserved, but no longer repainted.

The distinction is crucial. The iconographic programme goes back to Rama I, but the painted surface one contemplates is, for the most part, that of the 1970s. This is not a flaw: it is the way this heritage has been maintained, through renewal rather than frozen conservation. Srisurang Poolthupya also mentions poems, 4,984 lines in all, describing these murals; the reign in which they were composed remains to be clarified. Text, image and versified commentary thus form a single whole.

The khon, the epic in motion

If the Ramakien has remained alive, it is first and foremost because it is performed. UNESCO describes the khon as an art combining music, song, literature, dance, ritual and craftsmanship. It was once transmitted in royal or princely courts and in the homes of dance masters. Today it is passed on mainly in educational institutions. The move from palace to school says a great deal about the modern destiny of the epic: once reserved for an elite, it has become knowledge that is taught.

The libretti themselves bear witness to this layering. Between 2007 and 2018, Queen Sirikit's SUPPORT Foundation staged one episode each year, such as the building of the causeway to Lanka in 2012. According to the Bangkok Post, the 2018 production drew mainly on Rama I's edition, supplemented by passages from Rama II and dialogue from Rama VI's performing arts department. On stage, three reigns answer one another within a single performance.

International recognition

Thailand ratified the 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage on 10 June 2016. On 29 November 2018, at the 13th session of the committee held in Port Louis, the khon was inscribed on the Representative List. On the same day, Cambodia secured the inscription of Lkhon Khol Wat Svay Andet on the List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in Need of Urgent Safeguarding.

Khaosod English presented this twin decision as the settlement of a dispute over the ‘ownership’ of the khon. The phrase reflects a genuine debate in public opinion in both countries, but it needs to be qualified. The Convention's lists recognise practices carried by communities; they do not designate an exclusive owner. The history of the Ramakien points in the same direction: an epic that came from India, was present very early in Khmer art and was rewritten by the Siamese courts cannot be confined within a border.

An epic become Siamese

The Ramakien, then, did not become Siamese overnight. It did so in successive layers: an indirect transmission still poorly understood, a court repertoire at Ayutthaya, a reconstruction after 1767, a great royal and collective shaping in 1797, rewritings for the stage, and then a scholarly return to Valmiki under Rama VI. At each stage it changed its names, its heroes and its values, without ever losing its plot. To read the galleries of Wat Phra Kaew or to attend a khon performance is to see this work of appropriation in action: not a fixed borrowing, but a story endlessly taken up anew by those who tell it.

Sources and further reading

1. Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre, รามเกียรติ์, บทละคร (fiche TLD-001-211) – Thai Literature Directory, Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn Anthropology Centre (SAC), n.d..
2. non indiqué dans l'extrait consulté, Living Literature: Ramakien, the Thai Rendition of the Rama Epic, Academia.edu, n.d..
3. Srisurang Poolthupya, King Rama VI's Promotion of Khon and Drama in General, Journal of the Royal Institute of Thailand (via ThaiScience), n.d..
4. non indiqué dans l'extrait, วรรณกรรมรามเกียรติ์พระราชนิพนธ์ พระเจ้ากรุงธนบุรีสู่นาฏกรรม, Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences, Bansomdejchaopraya Rajabhat University (ThaiJO), n.d..
5. non indiqué dans l'extrait, The Reception of the Mahabharata in Siam: Evolving Conceptions of Kingship (ch. 9, The Mahabharata in Global Political and Social Thought), Cambridge University Press, n.d..
6. (petit-fils/petite-fille de Jamnong Rod-ari, nom non affiché dans l'extrait), Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha), Smarthistory, n.d..
7. UNESCO ; Department of Cultural Promotion, Ministry of Culture, Thailand, Khon, masked dance drama in Thailand (dossier n° 01385), UNESCO, 2018.
8. Bangkok Post, Unesco lists 'khon' as cultural heritage ; The khon spectacle is merrier than ever ; Return of Ramakien staged at the TCC, Bangkok Post, 2018.
9. Asia Society, Reamker: The Cambodian Version of the Ramayana, Asia Society, n.d..
10. non indiqué, 1.10. Rama Story in Thailand (Discovery of Sanskrit Treasures), Wisdom Library, n.d..
11. Khaosod English, Wat Phra Kaew's Ramakien murals: A masterpiece wrapped around Bangkok's sacred temple, Khaosod English, 2026.
12. non indiqué, Introduction to extracts from "Ramakien", Academy of American Poets (poets.org), n.d..
13. Contributeurs Wikipédia, Ramakien ; Thai literature, Wikipedia (EN), n.d..
14. กรมศิลปากร (Fine Arts Department), บทละครเรื่องรามเกียรติ์ พระราชนิพนธ์ในรัชกาลที่ 1, เล่ม 4, พิมพ์ครั้งที่ 9 (référence bibliographique relevée dans l'article ThaiJO « คำไทย-คำเทศ »), กองวรรณกรรมและประวัติศาสตร์, Bangkok, 1997.
15. non indiqué, South-Asian Ramakien (module e-PG Pathshala), INFLIBNET / UGC (Inde), n.d..
16. Khaosod English, Khon of Thailand, Khol of Cambodia Recognized by UNESCO, Khaosod English, 2018.