Re-figuring the Ramayana as Theology: A History of Reception in Premodern India

The Rāmāyana of Vālmīki is considered by many contemporary Hindus to be a foundational religious text. But this understanding is in part the result of a transformation of the epic’s receptive history, a hermeneutic project which challenged one characterization of the genre of the text, as a work of literary culture, and replaced it with another, as a work of remembered tradition.

This book examines Rāmāyana commentaries, poetic retellings, and praise-poems produced by intellectuals within t...