Name: Ramayana: The Complete Edition (Ramayana #1-8)
Rating: 4.48 (6 reviews)

6,833 reviews369 followers

July 4, 2025

Ashok K. Banker’s Ramayana: The Complete Edition—volumes 1 through 8—is not a mere retelling; it is an immersive reawakening of one of India’s most beloved and complex epics. My relationship with this colossal series has been anything but linear.

I first encountered it in 2012, dipping into scattered volumes like a careless yet curious wanderer—plucking Prince of Ayodhya here, Siege of Mithila there, sometimes skipping forward to Bridge of Rama, then inexplicably flipping back to Demons of Chitrakut.

It was chaotic, perhaps even blasphemous to the purist. But that's what these books did to me: they invited deviation, not just from tradition, but from the idea of time itself.

And yet, it was only much later—during the hushed, curfewed stillness of the Covid lockdown—that I found myself revisiting them with the attention, surrender, and monastic rhythm they deserved. When the world retreated, Banker's world unfurled.

There is something staggering about the very ambition of this series: more than 36,000 pages across eight mammoth volumes, each an intricate fresco of mythology, politics, psychology, magic, and war. But to speak of length alone is to miss the heart of it.

Banker’s Ramayana is lush, dramatic, cinematic—and yet deeply reverent. It neither apologizes for its liberties nor pretends to be a scholarly exegesis. It is unapologetically literary, gorgeously overwrought in places, and dazzlingly sincere. What made it memorable for me—what made me finally sit down and read it from start to finish—wasn't the grandeur. It was the intimacy.

I remember reading Prince of Ayodhya late one night on a spring-thawed rooftop in South Kolkata during the first lockdown. Silence blanketed the city like a benediction. The sky was starless, the world ghosted with fear. But inside Banker's pages, Ayodhya was burning with life: court intrigues, sacred rituals, Vasishtha’s cryptic wisdom, the young Rama—sharp, brooding, and already carrying the weight of dharma like a yoke on his spine. It felt curiously familiar. This wasn’t the doe-eyed god of calendar art. This was someone who might just crack beneath pressure. And yet he didn’t. Neither did we.

Each volume felt like a chapter of its own world, a shifting architecture of style and tempo. Siege of Mithila read like a political thriller; Demons of Chitrakut throbbed with gothic anxiety; Bridge of Rama was an orchestral crescendo. What astonished me most was Banker's ability to blend emotion with spectacle.

When Lakshmana loses control, his anger a burning whip against cosmic injustice, you don’t just read it—you flinch. When Sita chooses exile, she isn’t just a paragon of wifely virtue—she is a philosophical force, a moral tornado cloaked in silk. Ravana, meanwhile, isn’t simply a monstrous asura. He is Nietzschean, eloquent, wounded by pride, terrifying in his conviction. You hate him. You pity him. Sometimes, secretly, you admire him.

Unlike Valmiki’s spare elegance or Krittibas’s devotional lyricism, Banker writes in the voice of a novelist steeped in genre fiction—fantasy, noir, romance. He isn’t afraid to build scenes from scratch, give characters entire interior lives that the original epics only hint at. Some critics have balked at this: the magical realism, the invented dialogues, the flourishes of sorcery and violence. But I’d argue that this is the whole point.

The Ramayana has never been one fixed tale. It is retold, refracted, reshaped with each age—and this version is distinctly postmodern in its scope yet emotionally primal. A maximalist text for a maximalist age.

Volume after volume, the story ripples outward—kingdoms rise and fall, alliances shift, gods intervene, sages conspire. And yet, beneath all this tumult, the series never loses its human pulse. There is the ache of exile, the unbearable pauses of doubt, the whispered betrayals, the moments when love itself begins to feel like a weapon.

Sita’s trials are handled with exquisite tenderness. Banker walks a fine line between her strength and her suffering, never letting her become a passive symbol. She speaks. She rages. She chooses.

Reading it in 2020 felt oddly like a parallel journey. The pandemic, in its cruel isolation, had turned us all into accidental ascetics. Like Rama in the forest, we navigated an unfamiliar landscape of shadows and silences. The rituals of daily life fell away. What remained was longing—for connection, for resolution, for some kind of cosmic justice. In Banker’s epic, I found not escape but resonance.

The world of Lanka and Ayodhya, of vanaras and rakshasas, wasn’t alien—it was allegorical. A mirror, mythic yet immediate.

I recall finishing King of Ayodhya, the final volume, in the dead of night with a strange sense of grief. Not just because the story had ended, but because it hadn’t. That’s the thing with the Ramayana. It loops, it lingers. You carry it in you, even as it carries you. And Banker's telling, for all its embellishments, somehow made the oldest story feel newly alive. The war was over, but the cost of victory had never felt more bitter, more real. Sita’s departure. Rama’s silence. The ghost of what could never be undone.

Of course, the physical books themselves were stunning. Each volume gorgeously produced, bound like a relic. The paper was thick, the font regal, the covers ablaze with fierce, near-baroque illustrations. They felt like artifacts, talismans of a time when stories were not just consumed but revered. Holding them was a sensory experience. Reading them, a rite.

And yet the real power lay not in the ink but in the invocation—the breath that rises when you say “Rama” not as a name but as a prayer, a question, a lament. This was the first Ramayana that felt vast enough to hold all my contradictions: faith and doubt, anger and awe, tradition and rebellion. It made me cry. It made me argue. It made me want to write again.

Looking back, I realize the reason this retelling worked for me wasn’t because it was definitive, but because it was radically open. Banker invites you into the story not as a worshipper, but as a witness. He doesn’t demand submission. He demands attention. And in an age drowning in distractions, that is no small thing.

The Ramayana: Complete Edition is no easy undertaking. It demands stamina, suspension of disbelief, and a willingness to let go of what you think you know. But for those willing to make the journey, it rewards you with wonder.

It re-teaches you devotion—not to gods, necessarily, but to story. To the quiet, painful art of listening. And in a time when the world itself seemed to unravel, Banker’s sprawling, burning, thunderous Ramayana stitched together something in me that I hadn’t even known was torn.

And so here I am, years later, still haunted by its rhythms. Still hearing Hanuman’s chant in moments of despair. Still seeing Sita’s quiet, unspeakable rage. Still wondering, not who Rama was—but who we are when we walk his path.

And whether we, too, are willing to cross a bridge we cannot return from.

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Ramayana #1-8

Ramayana: The Complete Edition

Ashok K. Banker

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Ashok K. Banker

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