62 SOCIAL SCIENTIST kavyas where Puranic mythology was laced with Islamic figures and legends. Other major differences include relationships. Thus as in the case with certain Indian versions such as the Adbhuta Ramayana, here too Sita is often the daughter of Ravana, generally unrecognised by him; or, Hanuman is the son of Rama. The Malayan-Polynesian touch to the story includes the description of Dasarata's wife emerging out of a bamboo bush rather than being born as a ksatriya princess. The narrative in the Hikayat Seri Rama is in many essentials different from the familiar versions in India. The depiction of the characters of the Rama legends in painting and sculpture in India, goes back to about the mid-first millennium AD. There are references to murals depicting the story and sculptured images at the Visnu temple at Deogarh are said to represent the characters from the story. The Vaisnava context remains dominant at this time. The worship of Rama as a deity in his own right, as it were, becomes more important in the second millennium AD and there are temples dedicated to Rama. Of the two temples in Indonesia under discussion in this study, the Rama reliefs at Lara Jongran appear to have a closer connection with the Malayan hikayats rather than the Javanese versions and the sculptural style is closer to the Indian. The reliefs at Panataran depict a variant in narrative and the stylistic difference is very noticeable. Stutterheim claims that these reliefs conform to the Old Javanese Ramayana Kakavin, but this does raise the question of whether a sculptor would stay so closely with the narrative. Given the flexibility of the oral tradition would there not have been much more of the contemporary vision incorporated into the reliefs? He further argues that 'magicism* took over from the formal Hindu style of art in Java and laid the foundation of a different style. The value of such today is not only that of the information which it provides on South-East Asian variants of the Rama legends, but also the fact that it points to the importance of these versions. Even within the tradition of these stories in India there are substantial differences between the literary versions in Sanskrit and those in the regional languages as again between the latter and the folk versions. Similarly there are differences between the Vaisnava, Buddhist, Jaina and Sakta readings of the same story. The significance of these differences lies in part in treating them as the dialogue between different categories of beliefs and of social groups. The South-East Asian versions enrich and extend this dialogue. The quality of this version would have been enhanced if the language of the English translation, and the captions of the photographers had been given a final revision. When the same picture is reproduced twice with completely different captions, one wonders about the reliability of the other captions. A map locating the sites would have been a useful addition. Given that the subject is discussed