Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa

About this site

This is a static reading site for the Valmiki Ramayana as stored in the project verse index. It has two layers: the full Sanskrit text, arranged by kanda and sarga, and ten character articles that cite that text.

What you will find

How citations work

Articles cite verses as [VR-CE 3.8.25] or [VR-S 6.106.1+1]. Each citation is a link to verse/<kanda>/<sarga>.html#<verse-id>, for example verse/3/8.html#VR-CE.3.8.25. Hovering a citation (or tapping it on a phone) loads a short preview from data/sarga/<kanda>/<sarga>.json without leaving the article. On a phone, use Open verse to go to the sarga page.

All paths in the HTML are relative to the page that contains them, so the folder can live at the domain root or in a subdirectory. Opening files directly from disk will show the pages, but browser security often blocks the JSON preview; use a local web server or nginx for the popups.

Sources

Critical Edition (VR-CE)

The Baroda Critical Edition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa (Oriental Institute, Baroda, 1960–1975). The electronic text used here is the Tokunaga / John D. Smith Unicode edition, read from the project database. The per-kanda text files are published at indology.info. A GRETIL plaintext transformation of the same e-text is also on record as a derived witness (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 as stated by GRETIL).

Southern-only passages (VR-S)

Verses attested in the Southern transmission that are not part of the Critical Edition core. The primary Southern witness in this project is the IIT Kanpur Heritage reproduction of the Tirupati digital edition of the Srimad Valmiki Ramayanam (heritage.iitk.ac.in/VRAM), coordinated as a Rashtriya Sanskrit Vidyapeetham, Tirupati project and hosted by IIT Kanpur. valmikiramayan.net is a second public Sanskrit witness for many of the same Southern-attested passages (six kandas; no Uttara Kanda on that site). Only the Sanskrit of those sites is used here. Their English notes, summaries, and translations are not.

Character articles

The ten articles were compiled from machine-extracted, then validated, verse-level notes on the Valmiki text. They are source-only: a claim about a character is supposed to carry a citation to a verse in this index. Contradictory statements in the poem are left side by side. The notes behind the articles, where exported, sit in data/verses.sqlite as extraction_notes and are labelled there as machine-extracted staging material, not a human edition.

What this site does not include

A note on rights

The Valmiki Ramayana is an ancient work. The classical Sanskrit itself is in the public domain. Digital editions and website presentations may still carry their own terms. The Smith / Tokunaga e-text was made freely available in its source notice, without an explicit modern redistribution licence stated there. The Heritage / Tirupati presentation does not publish a clear reuse licence in the records used for this project; only the classical Sanskrit was taken from it. valmikiramayan.net likewise has no standard redistribution licence on file here. If you host this folder publicly, keep the source credits visible on this page and do not add copyrighted translations.

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