"Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation" is an essay written by Indian writer A. K. Ramanujan for a Conference on Comparison of Civilizations at the University of Pittsburgh, February 1987.
The essay was a required reading on Delhi University's syllabus for history undergraduates from 2006–7 onward.
This action of the Academic Council attracted a lot of attention and several people viewed this as an act of unwarranted censorship.
It seeks to demonstrate factually how the story of Rama has undergone numerous variations while being transmitted across different languages, societies, geographical regions, religions, and historical periods.
Instead, it focuses on only five specific tellings of the Rāmāyaṇa from different languages, regions, cultures, and periods, which serve purely as indicators of a much larger range of actual variations.