Four meanings of when

A reader sees that the Ramayana’s numbers do not sit together, and that very stumble opens four kinds of time. When has four different meanings. The date when the text arrived in its form. The older oral stream behind it. The time inside the story, which the tale itself counts. And the tradition’s cosmic yuga-time. These answer different questions, and they do not convert into one another.

The numbers inside

The numbers inside the story are plain and startling. Rama’s reign: दशवर्षसहस्राणि दशवर्षशतानि च (dasavarsasahasrani dasavarsasatani ca), ten thousand years and a thousand more, that is, eleven thousand years (Bala Kanda 1.97, and a shorter ten thousand in Yuddha Kanda 128.106). Dasharatha, in the Bala Kanda, calls himself sixty thousand years old when Vishvamitra comes asking for Rama. Yet Sita, at the start of the exile, gives their ages, Rama twenty-five and herself eighteen (Aranya Kanda), and the poem treats a human life of a hundred years as ordinary (Sundara Kanda, जीवेत् शरदः शतम्, jivet saradah satam, may one live a hundred autumns). Even inside the poem, the numbers do not make a calendar.

The yuga frame, and the gap between

The Ramayana sits in the Treta yuga, and the Mahabharata war at the joint of Dvapara and Kali, where Krishna’s departure marks the start of Kali, 3102 BCE by the Surya Siddhanta’s reckoning. The lengths of the yugas in human years, from the Manusmriti (1.68-71) and the Puranas, run in the ratio 4:3:2:1: Satya 1,728,000, Treta 1,296,000, Dvapara 864,000, Kali 432,000, and one mahayuga 4,320,000. The distance between the two epics is the remainder of Treta plus all of Dvapara, that is, on the scale of hundreds of thousands of years.

The story has its bridges too. Hanuman explains the difference of the yugas to Bhima (Mahabharata, Vana Parva). Parashurama stands in both epics at the Treta-Dvapara joint. And the Mahabharata itself recites the Ramayana to the Pandavas in their exile. Scholars add one fine point: seating the epics in named yugas is itself a later arrangement, which became standard with the Puranas after about 500 CE (Devdutt Pattanaik).

The theory of lifespan

One Puranic scheme cuts lifespan tenfold with each yuga: a hundred thousand years in Satya, ten thousand in Treta, a thousand in Dvapara, a hundred in Kali. By this count, long life is Treta’s ordinary scale, and a hundred years is Kali’s figure, that is, ours. Rama’s reign of eleven thousand years sits at Treta’s level. There is one wrinkle: Dasharatha’s sixty thousand leaps past Treta toward Satya. Nor is this scheme unanimous, because the Manusmriti (1.83) gives a shorter ladder, four hundred years in the Krita yuga, a hundred fewer in each yuga after, which would put Treta at three hundred and would not carry these big numbers.

Now how to hold it

Right here is the heart of this page. The hundred-years line is mostly an idiom for a full life, so it may not be a rival number to the eleven thousand at all, and the two can rest in different registers. Which reading is older, as far as that question can be settled, is settled by manuscripts, by the Baroda critical edition (G. H. Bhatt and others) and the known variants and interpolations, not by which reading moves us. Reading for wonder is an honest and old way to read.

An open eye asks what each number is doing. Eleven thousand says: an age in which dharma’s rule was complete, time made generous. A hundred says: even a full human life, lived rightly, is enough. The two can be held together, and the wonder survives, without calling either one a mistake. One more thing: the modern astronomical-dating effort (Pushkar Bhatnagar, Nilesh Oak) reads the planetary descriptions and draws a date around the fifth to seventh millennium BCE, which is disputed, stands outside mainstream philology, and does not land anywhere near the yuga numbers either.