Where to Start With the Ramayana: Begin With Hanuman

Most of us can name four characters and describe about two scenes.

Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Ravana. The bridge. The fire. After that it thins out fast, and when a seven-year-old asks who Sugriva is, or why exactly Rama had to leave, what usually happens is a pause and then a change of subject.

This isn't a failing. Most of us picked up the Ramayana in fragments, from a grandmother or a Sunday morning serial, at an age when nobody was taking notes. The gaps were always there. They only become obvious when a child starts asking.

And it's the real reason this gets postponed. Not the schedule. You put it off because it feels like you'd need to go and learn the whole thing first.

You don't.

Start with Hanuman, not Rama

Chronologically wrong. For a small child, right.

Rama's story opens with palace politics, a stepmother calling in an old favour, and a father who dies of grief over it. That's the Ayodhya Kanda, and it's difficult material for a six-year-old, because the antagonist is a parent and the tragedy is a domestic one. Plenty of adults find it uncomfortable.

Hanuman turns up much later, in the fourth of the seven books, and almost everything about him is built for a child. He flies. He carries a mountain. As a baby he leapt at the sun because he thought it was a fruit. The fifth book is more or less entirely his.

Start there and a child is invested in the world long before you have to explain Kaikeyi to them.

Teach people, not plot

Children hold on to characters. Sequence comes later, if it comes at all, and honestly it matters less than we think.

So don't run the story in order. Take one person, tell one thing they did, stop.

Sugriva lost his kingdom to his own brother over a misunderstanding at the mouth of a cave that neither of them ever cleared up. Jatayu was an old bird who took on Ravana single-handed to stop him carrying Sita away, and lost. Lakshmana followed his brother into fourteen years of exile without being asked. Sita argued her way into that exile too, against Rama's objections, which is a better thing for a child to know about her than that she was patient.

Four people, four evenings. A child now has a map, and the plot can hang on it later.

You'll hit two places where you have to decide

Nobody warns you about this, so here it is.

The first is the agni pariksha, when Sita is asked to prove herself by fire after the war is won. The second is what happens to her afterwards, in the last book, which is bleaker still.

Most parents put both off for a few years, and I think that's a defensible call rather than a cowardly one. What's worth avoiding is inventing a cheerful version and having your child find out at fourteen that you softened it. "There's more to that part and I'll tell you when you're older" is a perfectly good sentence. Children accept it far more easily than we expect.

Ten minutes is genuinely enough

One character, one story, one question at the end. The whole method, really.

The question matters more than the story does. What would you have done there? Was he right? A child who has to answer stays with you. A child who only listens has drifted off somewhere by the third minute and you won't know until you ask.

Do that four nights a week and in a year your child knows the Ramayana better than you did at twenty. It's the same ten minutes we've written about getting back from a screen, pointed at one subject.

Where our cards come in

We make a set called Bodh Falak Ramayana. Twenty-four cards, one character each, in Hindi or English.

Hanuman isn't one of them. Neither is Rama, nor Sita, and that's deliberate. These cards are built to be handled by children, which means they get dropped, sat on, shuffled across a floor and occasionally stepped on. We didn't want to make an object that puts a deity in that position. So the deck covers the people around them instead: Dasharatha, Bharata, Vishwamitra and the rest.

Which suits the method above better than we planned. The characters at the edges of the story are exactly the ones a parent can't remember, and exactly where a child's questions go.

Nothing cleverer than that. The method above works just as well with a library book and a decent memory.

Start anywhere

There's no correct entry point, whatever anyone tells you. A child who knows one thing about Hanuman is ahead of a child who knows nothing about all of it.

Pick a character tonight. You can look up the details after they've gone to sleep, which is what the rest of us are doing.