The Ramayana

These files are revised versions of the digital files produced by Professor Muneo Tokunaga, Kyoto University, and copyrighted by him. The revisions have for the most part been made automatically by means of computer programs, and copyright on the revised files remains with Professor Tokunaga. I am grateful to Professor Tokunaga for his agreement to this use of his original files and for permitting the revised versions to be made publicly available.

These files contain the complete Sanskrit text of Valmiki's Ramayana. They are based on the versions typed up by Prof. Tokunaga: his original versions are still available. I have modified them in the following respects:

• The transcription used is not that adopted by Prof. Tokunaga (in which aa represents long a, T retroflex t, etc.) but instead is the eight-bit CSX encoding.
• Prof. Tokunaga presents his Sanskrit texts with vowel sandhi undone, in order to simplify word-searches. Similarly, compound-members are separated. I am unconvinced of the desirability of doing this, and have converted the text to a more conventional representation.
• I have slightly modified the format for the line-numbers. These eight-character numbers consist of: one digit representing the book number; three digits representing the chapter number; three digits representing the verse number; one letter specifying the pada -- this last is always "a", "c", "e" or "g", and refers to the first of the two padas appearing on the line. Thus "4033019a" is a line consisting of padas a and b of verse 19 of sarga 33 of the fourth kanda, the Kiskindhakanda. Non-anustubh lines have a semicolon between padas appearing on a single line.
• I have corrected errors wherever I happened to notice them. Since first making the text available I have not made any very systematic effort to eliminate errors, but I am grateful to Yves Codet for supplying a list of 120 corrections to Book 7, chapters 1-33. These were incorporated into the text on June 28, 2000. Thanks also to Phillip Ernest for supplying a significant number of corrections to parts of Book 6, to Krešimir Krnic for corrections to parts of Book 7, to Chrisopher Minkowski for corrections to parts of Book 3, and to James L. Fitzgerald for corrections to Books 1 and 3.

Programs are available to convert from CSX to other encodings; there is also a program (r2dn) to convert sections of Ramayana text into a form permitting them to be printed in good-quality Devanagari using TeX and Frans Velthuis's font.

I shall make minor corrections to the text as I go along, so that the files may change without warning from time to time.

Balakanda

Ayodhyakanda

Aranyakanda

Kiskindhakanda

Sundarakanda

Yuddhakanda

Uttarakanda

Please email any problems to jds10@cam.ac.uk.