While regretting my shortcomings in respect to the language of the bards who composed the Sanskrit epics, since I am thereby cut off from appreciating the beauty of their versification and the felicities of expression which no translation can possibly preserve, I derive consolation from the reflection, that with sufficiently accurate translations at hand--similar to our English versions of the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures--a knowledge of Sanskrit is certainly not essential for the production of a work with the moderate pretensions of this little volume. PART I THE RAMAYANA THE RAMAYANA OR ADVENTURES OF RAMA CHAPTER I INTRODUCTORY REMARKS Once every year, at the great festival known as the _Dasahra_, the story of the famous Hindu epic, the “Ramayana,” is, throughout Northern India, recalled to popular memory, by a great out-door dramatic representation of the principal and crowning events in the life of the hero, Rama. The “Ramayana” is not merely a popular story, it is an inspired poem, every detail of which is, in the belief of the great majority of the Indian people, strictly true. Although composed at least nineteen centuries ago, it still lives enshrined in the hearts of the children of Aryavarta and is as familiar to them to-day as it has been to their ancestors for fifty generations. Pious pilgrims even now retrace, step by step, the wanderings, as well as the triumphal progress, of Rama, from his birth-place in Oudh to the distant island of Ceylon. Millions believe in the efficacy of his name alone to insure them safety and salvation. For these reasons the poem is of especial value and interest to anyone desirous of understanding the people of India; affording, as it does, an insight into the thoughts and feelings of the bard or bards who composed it and of a race of men who, through two thousand eventful years, have not grown weary of it. In the following chapters I shall first give a brief summary of the leading events narrated in the “Ramayana” and then proceed to link, as it were, the past with the present, by describing the annual play as I have often witnessed it in Northern India.