Kālidāsa and Vimalasūri mark some of the earliest and most consequential landmarks in the expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. I might argue that these two poets were the first to widen the boundaries of Rāmāyaṇa tradition as we know it today—boundaries that encompass an extensive amount of variability and adaptability as the epic enters new contexts. Through their poems, each demonstrated techniques on how to receive a narrative, push the limits of its messaging, and introduce a new take on an old story. Their respective presentations of the Śambūka episode are prime examples of such poetic dynamism. These two pioneering poets helped imbue the Rāma narrative with a flexibility by which others could cater the Rāmāyaṇa to their own audiences.

In the centuries leading up to and immediately following the turn of the first millennium CE, poets wrote several new Rāmāyaṇas. The current chapter focuses on this late classical and early medieval period of development in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. With the various ways of handling the Śambūka episode acting as our gauge, it becomes clear that the Rāmāyaṇa tradition has many vectors of influence that are deeply intertwined with prevailing socioreligious trends, geography, and language. The pathways of that influence, however, are not always what one might expect. A dogmatic adherence to a specific way of telling the Rāmāyaṇa based on religious affiliation, for instance, does not seem to reflect the reality of how the Rāmāyaṇa traveled across India. By way of example, narratives originating in the Jain tradition went on to find their place in the Hindu tradition and it becomes increasingly clear that we should take geographic proximity and the influence of literary communities therein just as seriously as poets’ potential desire to stick close to a narrative produced in their own religious community.

Here, I will chart a course through the various modes of telling the Śambūka story moving into medieval India. Some older modes of presenting the episode have survived deep into this period, though almost always with some sort of modification to better reflect the sentiments of the intended audience. There are also some new ways of dealing with the issue of Śambūka that originate in this period.