Legend says Sanskrit poetry began when Valmiki cursed a hunter who shot a crane
Hindu tradition hails Valmiki as the first poet. The story goes that grief at watching a hunter kill one of a pair of cranes forced a couplet out of him, the first shloka, and he then composed the whole Ramayana, about four times the length of the Iliad, in that same metre.
His name means from an anthill, and the legends explain it in different ways. One makes him the tenth son of the god Varuna. The Skanda Purana tells of a Brahmin named Lohajangha who turned to robbing travellers during a twelve-year drought to feed his family, tried to rob the seven great sages, and was given a mantra by one of them. He recited it so single-mindedly that anthills rose around him. Another tale says he began by chanting mara, meaning die, until years of repetition turned it into Rama.
The Ramayana credited to him runs to 24,000 verses in seven books, roughly a quarter the length of the Mahabharata. It follows Prince Rama of Ayodhya, whose wife Sita is carried off by Ravana, the demon-king of Lanka. Scholars place its earliest layer somewhere between the 8th and 4th centuries BCE, with additions continuing to perhaps the 3rd century CE; centuries of reworking make precise dating impossible.
Valmiki also appears inside his own story. In the final book, Sita, banished by Rama, shelters at his hermitage and bears twins, Lava and Kusha, who become his first pupils and learn the epic from him. Robert and Sally Goldman note that much of this last book centres on other figures and may not be his original work. The writer Aubrey Menen called him the first author in history to put himself into his own composition.
His cult reaches far beyond literature. The Balmiki sect honours him as patron saint under names including Lal Beg, and celebrates his birth at the full moon of Ashvin. Tamil tradition counts him among the 18 Siddhars, the Chennai district of Tiruvanmiyur is thought to be named after him, and a site in Nepal's Chitwan district is venerated as his original hermitage.
Source: Valmiki
