Watercolour painting of Rama and Lakshmana in Conference with Sugriva, the Monkey King, and other companions. Scene from the Story of the Burning of Lanka, Folio from a Ramayana (Story of Rama), Maharashtra, c.1850. The Ramayana is a story as old as time and - at least in the Indian subcontinent and across much of Southeast Asia - of unparalleled popularity. More than 2300 years ago the scholar-poet Valmiki sat down to write his definitive epic of love and war. The poem Valmiki composed is styled the Ramayana, or 'Romance of Rama' in Sanskrit. In its present form, the Sanskrit version consists of some 24,000 couplets divided into seven books.