H. Places of the Ramayana

The story moves through a real landscape: named rivers, a direction of travel, a stated distance across water. Readers reasonably want to know whether they could go and stand in these places.

The honest answer needs three things kept apart, and most confusion about Ramayana geography comes from letting them run together.

1. What the text says. A river, a direction, a distance. This is firm, in the sense that we can read it.
2. What tradition identifies. A modern place long held to be the one meant, often with continuous worship and pilgrimage behind it.
3. What evidence establishes. Archaeology, geology, historical linguistics.

For most places in this book, the first two are rich and the third is empty. That is not a mark against the identifications. Archaeology can date a settlement layer; it cannot date the events of a poem, and no excavation anywhere could confirm that a particular prince walked out of a particular gate. A traditional identification is a different kind of thing from an archaeological one, and it is not a failed attempt at being one.

What the text gives

Ayodhya, capital of Kosala, on the river Sarayu. Mithila, Janaka's capital in the kingdom of Videha, reached after crossing the Ganga. Chitrakuta, the hill and hermitage country on the Mandakini where the exile begins. Panchavati, on the bank of the Godavari, in the region called Janasthana. Kishkindha, the vanara kingdom, with Pampa nearby and the hill Rishyamukha where Sugriva shelters. Naimisha, the forest where the horse sacrifice is held, on the Gomati. And Lanka, across water, at a distance the text gives as a hundred yojanas.

What tradition identifies

Ayodhya with the city of that name in Uttar Pradesh, on the Sarayu. Mithila with Janakpur in the Nepalese Terai, though other sites in Bihar have been proposed. Chitrakuta with Chitrakoot on the Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh border, where local features are mapped onto incidents in the story. Panchavati with Nashik in Maharashtra, on the Godavari. Kishkindha with Hampi in northern Karnataka, where the name Hampi itself descends from Pampa and a nearby hill is called Rishimukha. Naimisha with Nimsar in Sitapur district, on the Gomati.

All of these are active places of pilgrimage. None has been independently established by excavation as the site the poem means.

Lanka, and the distance problem

The identification of Lanka with the island now called Sri Lanka is very old and deeply embedded, in later texts, in devotional geography, and in the pilgrimage complex at Rameswaram on the Indian shore.

It also has a real difficulty in the text itself, and it is worth understanding rather than waving away. The poem says a hundred yojanas. A yojana is a distance measure this book deliberately does not convert (see the entry in the glossary), but the ranges usually proposed put a hundred of them somewhere in the high hundreds or low thousands of kilometres. The strait between the Indian mainland and Sri Lanka is well under a hundred kilometres at its narrowest. The stated distance and the actual one are not in the same range.

That gap is the substance of a long argument, and this project found no scholarly consensus resolving it in either direction. Some hold the number is epic scale rather than measurement, of a piece with the size of Kumbhakarna's hall. Others take it seriously and propose a Lanka elsewhere. The question is open, and a reader is entitled to be told that rather than handed a confident answer.

The bridge

The formation called Adam's Bridge, or Rama Setu, is a chain of limestone shoals running roughly fifty kilometres between Rameswaram on the Indian side and Mannar on the Sri Lankan side, in water often only a metre or two deep. Geological surveys describe it as a natural formation, sand accumulated and held by coral growth. Various ages have been reported for different materials in it, and those figures are inconsistent enough across sources that this book does not repeat a number.

The Archaeological Survey of India has stated that it found no evidence of the formation being anything other than natural.

Its status has also been the subject of legal and political controversy in India, in connection with a proposed shipping channel through the area. This book has nothing to add to that and takes no position in it.

One point of logic is worth making, because it is missed in both directions. Geology can describe how a shoal formed. It cannot confirm a narrative, and it cannot refute one either, any more than surveying the Thames would settle anything about a novel set on it. A reader who wants the bridge in this book to be the formation in the strait, and a reader who does not, are both asking geology a question it is not able to answer.

Ayodhya

The modern city on the Sarayu is a major pilgrimage centre, and its identification with the Ayodhya of this story is ancient.

Its principal site was also the subject of a long legal dispute in India, decided by the Supreme Court in November 2019. The judgment is a matter of public record and its substance was a question of title and possession. Courts settle ownership; they do not rule on whether a poem is history, and that judgment did not purport to. Readers who want to understand the case should go to accounts written for that purpose. It is outside what this book can usefully say, and nothing here should be read as a position on it.

What this section will not tell you

It will not tell you that any of these sites has been proven to be the place the poem means, because none has, and proof of that kind is not available for a text of this age. It will not tell you that Sri Lanka is or is not Lanka. And it will not treat the absence of archaeological confirmation as though it discredited anything: people have walked to Chitrakoot for a very long time, and the reasons they go are not waiting on an excavation report.