
There are elaborate accounts of lovers courting, making love, fighting, drinking toddy, and having a good time getting high. He compares dancers’ breasts to “soaring peaks which press so close together they could crush a single thread” and women’s “love-mounds” to cobras’ hoods and chariot daises. His descriptions are often lush with sexuality. He claims that in the land of Videha, women’s eyes resemble fish, prompting herons to peck at their reflections as they pluck weeds in flooded rice fields. Instead, he says, “No enemies challenge the land in war, so bravery is never clear, lies are never told, so the value of truth is never plain.” Kampan’s metaphors are equally elaborate and interesting. He does not laud Ayodhya’s citizens as brave and truthful. “Is there anything more foolish than a woman, sweet words like ambrosia, long eyes like poison?” he declares. Since everyone possesses every treasured wealth no one goes without, and there is no class of owners.” Yet, this egalitarianism does not extend to women. “Since no one is singled out as unlearned,” he writes, “there are no masters of knowledge, and no one there to judge them. Kampan’s utopia is remarkably egalitarian. Reading between these hyperbolic lines gives insights into how people lived, the land they inhabited, what they ate, and what they idealised.

It begins with a rhapsody on Kosala kingdom’s rural idyll, where fertile fields, fresh produce, ponds, vegetation, and animals abound.Īn account of Ayodhya’s grandeur follows: its “soaring mansions and turrets that scrape the clouds”, “golden walls higher than a snowy mountain range, firm as the truth”, and residents with “blooming smiles” and “endless joy”.

The epic’s first section is as much about the common folk and landscapes as the Ramayana’s protagonists or mythological tales. Besides, as a North Indian, I have mostly encountered Valmiki and Tulsidas’ versions of the epic, so Kampan’s rendition is a revelation. While stories from the Ramayana have permeated pop-culture through folk retellings, plays, TV, schoolbooks, etc., reading source texts is a remarkably different experience. He notes that the text was so influential that it transcended religious lines, serving as a model for Muslim poet Umaruppulavar’s 17th-century epic Cirappuranam (The Prophet’s Holy Life). If the poem is not read with the Tamil political landscape in mind, we cannot appreciate all that Kampan achieved.” Blake Wentworth, who has translated the epic’s first section Balakandam into English as Youth, writes: “Kampan was the first to compose a Ramayana in an Indian vernacular.
