The Ramayana and Trade

The Ramayana and Trade

The Ramayana is an epic whose first written version was accomplished by Valmiki around 400 B .C . It spread within South East Asia and has had a profound impact on the cultures of different peoples , especially art and religion . Today there are various localized versions of the epic and trade has much to do with how it was popularized

The development of economic activities in India to include trade led to the utilization of major rivers as natural pathways or trade routes Traders had their own boats and

plied their wares alongside populated riverbanks . Land trade routes such as the Silk Road have also long been established

Along the coasts , the merchants of ancient Eastern India had also developed navigation and shipping , spending most of each year out at sea and reaching foreign lands such as Java . Thus , cultural exchange with other peoples was inevitable

The forms of the Ramayana are found not only in literature but also in theater and dance as probably its most popular form . Dance and theater artists performed the Ramayana in various places by conveniently traveling with traders and merchants . It is approximated that the Ramayana was introduced in Malaysia around the 6th century A .D . through migrants from Bengal (Garatt , 1937 ,

.39 . A few centuries later , it reached Indonesia and Thailand

Later , India was colonized by Britain , where the latter established a more advanced world maritime trading through the East India Company based in Calcutta . This precipitated the spread and influence of the Ramayana to other regions of the world including the West (Datta , 2004 br

.3

List of References

Datta , M .M (2004 . The slaying of Meghanada : A Ramayana from colonial Bengal . New

York : Oxford University Press

Garatt , G .T (1937 . The legacy of India . Oxford : Clarendon Press...