Volume Two tells the story of the Great War, and of how Ravana was vanquished by the great Rama with imagination, power and beauty. Modern scholars claim that the Ramayana was first composed around 300 BC.

The epic is called the Adi Kavya, the world's first poem. Ramesh Menon's The Ramayana is a novelist's lush, imaginative rendering, rather than a scholar's translation.