Augmenting The Past: Historical And Political Consciousness In Valmiki'S Uttarakanda

The Ramayana of Valmiki, although widely renowned as a kavya, and, indeed, as the very origin and inspiration of the entire genre of poetry, is also understood to be an itihasa, a history. It shares, in fact, both non-mutually exclusive genre designations with its sister epic, the Mahabharata. Nonetheless, the central books of the work, particularly kandas two through six, in large measure read as much like a romance as they do an account of human military and political history. In this article, I argue that the lack of such history in these books was a concern of the authors of the epic's seventh and final kandas, the Uttarakanda, and that one of the several functions of this important but generally understudied, frequently criticized and often excised book is to remedy this perceived lack. In support of this argument, I compare the treatment of history in the Ramayana and the Mahabharata and examine a series of largely ignored Uttarakanda passages in which the authors appear to revise and extend the military and political history of the earlier kandas in ways suggestive of their reading of the Mahabharata.