Why valmiki wrote ramayanam book in sanskrit
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Explanation:
No answers yet, so let me give a stop-gap answer, hopefully an expert will provide a detailed and solid one!
I'm an expert neither in Ramayana nor in Ashtadhyayi. But to the question of 'Was Valmiki Ramayana written in Vedic Sanskrit?' I would like to point out an interesting thing as answer (of course an adhoc one!)
Ramayana is called as the 'Aadikaavyam' and Valmiki the 'Aadikavi'. Valmiki is considered to be the first 'kavi' of Sanskrit (which one? That's the question right!)
Now, present versions of Ramayana begins with the story of the story. A story on how Valmiki conceived the 'plan' to write the story of Rama (which is eternal and is passed on celestially was given to Valmiki to make humans aware of this story!)
Valmiki was musing about this question of how to 'put down' the story and was going along with this day-to-day works. One such day, while he was taking a bath in a river, he saw a pair of Krouncha birds involved in playing and mating. Suddenly, a hunter appears and kills the male of the birds. This agitates the great saint and he utters a sentence, scolding that ill-fated hunter. This sentence he utters keep ringing in his mind. It echoes itself in his thoughts. He cannot get rid of it. Later, he was told (by Brahma) that this sentence he uttered will serve as the basis for a metrical composition and he have to follow this pattern to compose the entire Ramayana. He did so with 24000 such verses!
Here is that very famous and most celebrated verse:
मा निषाद प्रतिष्ठाम्त्व | मगमः शाश्वतीः समाः |
यत् क्रौङ्च मिथुनात् एक | मवधीः काम मोहितम् || १-२-१५
Coming to my point, you can see that this verse appears as the 15th one in the second chapter (Sarga) of the First Book, Balakaandam, of Ramayana. But this is named as the first verse composed by humans, Vedic hymns (rigs) being of celestial origin (or simply of different grammatical composition)
This clearly tells us that the Ramayana of Valmiki was written with a newly invented metrical system (which later developed many variations, but retaining the basic pattern of having four quarters of equal lengths)
This is the reason why Valmiki was known as 'AadiKavi', the first poet (of Sanskrit)
Even a cursory reading (or listening) would reveal a lot of differences between Vedic texts and Classical Sanskrit literature (which again is not a single entity!)
So, Ramayana is the boundary line between Vedic and Literature Sanskrit.