The common thread that we find in almost all the works in ancient India are the epics of Ramayana and Mahabharata. The Ramayana which is the older of the two was written in Sanskrit and believed to have
been committed to writing in 300 CE. Even at a very early stage it was translated into almost all existing Indian languages. In fact, its influence is not confined to just India but all of Southeast Asia. Valmiki’s text which is now considered the authentic one, is believed to be but one of the many Ramayanas that deal with the same story line. So the translations of the epic are also like free retellings. One other aspect could be that the concept of fidelity to the original was absent in India also, like the ancient west. Since literature was mainly orally transmitted, the idea of accuracy in conveying the literary work to another language could not be sustained. These retellings were often influenced by the world view of the group that was doing the translation/adaptation. The Indian historian Romila Thapar notes: “The appropriation of the story by a multiplicity of groups meant a multiplicity of versions through which the social aspirations and ideological concerns of each group were articulated. The story in these versions included significant variations which changed the conceptualization of character, event and meaning.” (qtd in Richman, 4).

Like translations of the Bible, the Ramayana translations also had the effect of enriching and standardizing regional languages that were still in the formative stage. Some of them are Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas in Hindi, Kamban’s Ramavataram in Tamil, Ezhuthachchan’s Adhyatma Ramayanam in Malayalam, and Krittivasa’s Ramayana in Bengali. The language of these regional variations is the common man’s language as opposed to Sanskrit which could be understood only by a few. The same is true of the other great epic the Mahabharata also .