The story of Rama is one of the most widely diffused narratives in human history, carried across South and Southeast Asia and taking root in cultures with no other connection to Hinduism.
In mainland Southeast Asia it became a court and temple epic. Thailand's Ramakien is a national classic, its scenes carved along the galleries of the royal temple in Bangkok and performed in masked khon dance; Cambodia has the Reamker, Laos the Phra Lak Phra Lam, and Myanmar its own tradition. In Muslim-majority Indonesia the Rama story survives in the Old Javanese Kakawin Ramayana and lives on in the wayang shadow-puppet theatre and the dance-dramas of Java and Bali, a Hindu epic held as cultural heritage in the world's largest Muslim nation.
In India the telling is inseparable from performance and festival. Ramlila, the popular dramatisation staged over successive nights and culminating in the burning of giant effigies of the demon Ravana, is enacted across the north each autumn and is inscribed on UNESCO's list of intangible cultural heritage. Diwali, the festival of lights, is understood in much of India to mark Rama's return to Ayodhya after his victory, the lamps lit to guide the exiled king home.
Paula Richman's studies of the "many Ramayanas" underline the point that there is no single authorised text behind all this, the epic lives as a tradition of retellings, each community's Rama shaped by its own language, faith and stage.