Valmiki

Valmiki (वाल्मीकि) is the Adi Kavi, the “first poet” of Sanskrit, and the author of the Ramayana. He is both the teller of Rama’s story and a figure within it, for in the final book he gives shelter to Sita and raises her twin sons. His own life, from highwayman to seer, is one of the great tales of transformation in Hindu tradition.

From Ratnakara to Valmiki

Tradition tells that Valmiki was once a hunter or highwayman named Ratnakara who waylaid travellers to feed his family. A meeting with the sage Narada turned him inward: shown that his family would not share the burden of his sins, he sat down to meditate. He repeated the sacred name so long and so still that an anthill, valmika, grew over his body; when he at last emerged, he was called Valmiki, “he of the anthill.”

Grief that became the first verse

The Ramayana itself tells how poetry was born. Seeing a hunter shoot down one of a pair of mating krauncha birds, Valmiki cried out in sorrow, and his cry fell into perfect metre, shoka (grief) becoming shloka (verse). The god Brahma then appeared and charged him to compose, in that new metre, the whole life of Rama, granting him the vision to see all that had happened and all that was to come.

Sita’s refuge and the singing of the Ramayana

In the Uttara Kanda, when Rama sends the pregnant Sita away, it is Valmiki’s hermitage that receives her. There she gives birth to the twins Lava and Kusha, and Valmiki raises them and teaches them the Ramayana he has composed. The boys sing the epic aloud and are at last recognised by their father, as told in the story of Lava and Kusha. So the poet who wrote Rama’s story becomes the guardian of Rama’s own sons.

The first poet

For this, Valmiki is honoured as the Adi Kavi and the Ramayana as the Adi Kavya, the first poem. Every later telling of Rama’s life, including Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, flows from the river he opened. He is remembered not as a god but as the human sage through whom the story first reached the world.