Though his eldest son Rama, son of his queen Kausalya, is entitled to the throne, and Dasaratha is himself keen that Rama should ascend to the kingship, Dasaratha’s other queen Kaikeyi contrives to have Rama sent into exile for fourteen years, as well as have her own son, Bharatha, installed as king. The Koysala country, with Ayodhya as its capital, is presided over by Dasaratha. The main frame of the story of the Ramayana is exceedingly well-known in India, imbibed by every Indian with, so to speak, mother’s milk. The other kind of excess is to view him merely as a trope - as a sign of patriarchy, for example, or as an insignia of valiant and militant kshatriyahood, which is what the present generation of Hindutvavadis have turned him into. Whether in fact its hero Rama, who in Hindu mythology is an avatar of Vishnu but a principal deity in his own right, and who is also worshipped in parts of north India as a king, existed or not is scarcely of any importance. Though some right-wing ideologues in recent years, eager that the Ramayana should have the same kind of historicity attached to it as do the scriptures of Christianity and the Koran, have sought to date the Ramayana back to at least 6,000 years and even furnish an exact date for its composition, it by no means diminishes the importance of the text to suggest that the historicity of the Ramayana is the least interesting of the questions that can be raised about it and its characters. The Ramayana existed in the oral tradition perhaps as far back as 1,500 BCE, but the fourth century BCE is generally accepted as the date of its composition in Sanskrit by Valmiki. It is one of two epics, the other being the Mahabharata, which have had a decisive influence in shaping the nature of Indian civilization. The Ramayana belongs to a class of literature known in Sanskrit as kavya (poetry), though in the West it is considered to belong to the category of literature familiar to readers of Homer, namely the epic.
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