MAHARISHI
VALMIKI - ART & CULTURE
News:
Ayodhya airport named after Valmiki
What's
in the news?
●
Prime Minister Narendra Modi inaugurated
the Maharishi Valmiki Airport in Ayodhya.
Valmiki:
●
Valmiki is referred to as Adi Kavi, which translates to the “first/original poet” in Sanskrit.
●
He is credited with composing the
Ramayana, one of the earliest and most revered epic poems in the Sanskrit
literary tradition.
●
Valmiki’s Ramayana is composed of 24,000 verses and is divided into 7 kandas
(books), each telling a different part of Lord Ram’s story.
●
Valmiki
himself makes an appearance in the Bala and Uttara Kandas.
●
Valmiki
Jayanti, also known as Pargat Diwas, is celebrated annually
to commemorate the birth anniversary of Maharishi Valmiki.
○
It is celebrated on the full moon day of
the Hindu month of Ashvin
(September-October).
Ramayana:
●
The epic, generally attributed to
Maharishi Valmiki, tells the story of Rama, a mythological prince of Ayodhya
city in the kingdom of Kosala, and was composed in Amritsar, Punjab.
●
The epic follows Rama's fourteen-year exile to the forest, urged by his father King
Dasharatha at the request of Rama's stepmother Kaikeyi.
●
His travels across forests in the Indian
subcontinent with his wife Sita and brother Lakshmana, the kidnapping of Sita
by Ravana – the king of Lanka, which resulted in war; and Rama's eventual
return to Ayodhya to be crowned.
●
The
Ramayana is one of the world's largest ancient epics.
●
It has about 24,000 verses (mainly in the Shloka/Anustubh metre), separated into
seven kas, the first and seventh of which are later additions.
●
It belongs to the Itihasa genre, which consists of accounts of previous occurrences
mixed with lectures on the purposes of human life. Scholars think that the book
was written between the 7th and 4th centuries BCE, with subsequent sections
stretching up to the 3rd century CE.
●
Aside from Buddhist, Sikh, and Jain
translations, there are several Ramayana variants in Indian languages.
Key
takeaways:
●
Ramayana was written in the Sanskrit Language.
●
Ramayana was written in Treta Yuga.
●
Ramayana is composed of seven chapters –
Balakandam, Ayodhyakandam, Aranyakandam, Kishkinda kandam, Sundara kandam,
Yuddha kandam and Uttara kandam.