The
Ramayana, the older of the two major
Sanskrit poems (the
Mahabharata being the other) is a 50,000 line poem written by
Sage Valmiki. The poem is separated into 7 different sections which are called
khands.
Rama becomes
king of the
solar race and reigns at Ayodhya. Rama is the seventh incarnation of
Vishnu.
King Dasaratha was childless until the gods saw his devotion to his kingdom and gave him a
son. They decide to reincarnate
Vishnu as
Rama just for the purpose of killing the
Ravana (
demon).
Rama has three brothers;
Lakshman, Bharatha and
Shatrugan. While the four brothers were very young, a
sage came to Rama and asked for his help in killing a
rakshahas (demon). Rama kills the female demon and obtains
flowers and greater powers from the sage. The sage takes Rama to the court of a King in a another
kingdom, who gives Rama the
opportunity to
marry his young daughter
Sita. To be
permitted to marry, he has to bend a
bow that supposedly belonged to
Shiva. Rama not only bends the bow, he breaks it and thus is able to marry
Sita.
Dasaratha's second wife orders
Bharatha to be king and Rama to be sent into exile for 14 years. When
Dasaratha dies,
Bharatha sets out to bring Rama back. Bharatha returns to Ayodhyah and puts Rama's
sandals on the
throne as a symbol that Rama should be the king. During his banishment, Rama meets a sage who advises him to go live near the base of the
Panchavati Mountains because there were demons there. One demon,
Surpanakha, falls in love with
Rama but he always ignores her
flirting. She then tries to kill
Sita. This enrages
Lakshman so much that he cuts of the demon's
ears and
nose. The demon then gets a whole band of her cousins, also demons, to try to kill
Rama and
Lakshman.
All of them are destroyed.
Surpanakha convinces
Ravana, the chief of the
demons, to visit
Sita by describing how
beautiful she is. He kidnaps
Sita, enraging both
Rama and
Lakshman. The brothers track down
Ravana and on their way to his
village, they kill another demon known as
Kabandha. The king of the
monkeys is very afraid of this demon and offers the services of
Hunuman the monkey. Together, the three leaders,
Rama,
Lakshman and
Hunuman, fight along with
Hunuman's
soldiers and kill
Ravana and
Rama's wife is returned to him..
Source: http://www.rochester.edu/College/REL/rel249/rama/rama_history.html