Art and Culture

The story of Rama, Sita, Lakshmana, Hanuman and Ravana did not remain confined to the Indian subcontinent. Through merchants, scholars, priests, artists and maritime networks, the Ramayana crossed the Bay of Bengal and reached the Khmer world. There it was lovingly adapted into Cambodian language, dance, sculpture and courtly tradition. The result was not a simple copy of the Indian epic, but a living Khmer expression of dharma, kingship, loyalty, moral duty and cosmic order.

The most important literary form of the Indonesian Ramayana is the Kakawin Ramayana, an Old Javanese rendering of the epic composed in the refined kakawin poetic style. Academic work on the Old Javanese Ramayana treats it as a major classical text of Java’s Hindu-Buddhist literary world, and OAPEN lists C. Hooykaas’s scholarly edition The Old-Javanese Rāmāyaṇa Kakawin, showing the importance of the text in global Ramayana studies.

Phra Lak Phra Lam is the Lao adaptation of Valmiki’s Ramayana. Luang Prabang cultural documentation describes it as a Lao version of the Indian literary epic, with the central figures of Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana transformed into Phra Lam, Nang Sida, and Phra Lak within a Lao cultural setting.

Vadakkumkur was not the story of one king alone. It was the story of a royal line, a regional state, and a cultural territory that shaped central Kerala before its absorption into the rising kingdom of Travancore under Marthanda Varma in the 18th century. Historical records connect Vadakkumkur with the old Vempolinad region, which split into Vadakkumkur and Thekkumkur around the medieval period.

In a positive Akhand Bharat sense, Malaysia shows the beauty of Brihattar Bharat — the larger civilisational world shaped by Indian stories, maritime trade, Sanskritic vocabulary, Hindu-Buddhist ideas, temple culture, and shared epics. This was a cultural Akhand Bharat: a sacred network of ideas crossing seas, ports, kingdoms, and languages. The Malay world received these influences with creativity and gave the Ramayana a local soul.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, some writers tried to connect Māori origins directly with India, Sanskrit and so-called Aryan ancestry. Te Ara records that Edward Tregear argued in the 1880s that Māori language, mythology and customs contained signs of Aryan-Indian heritage, and Te Ara also notes that older theories placed Māori origins in many places, including India, Greece, Egypt, Palestine and the Americas.