This paper examines how the colonial classroom reconfigured the Rāmāyaṇa as an educational “textbook” (pāṭhya pustaka) in nineteenth-century Bengal. I argue that the religious neutrality clause in East India Company educational policy, implemented through institutions such as the Calcutta Schoolbook Society, introduced a new pedagogical framework that separated the moral from the religious. Within this framework, epic narratives were adapted to extract universalizable ethical lessons while bracketing divine explanatory structures. Focusing on textbook retellings of Sītā’s life, the paper shows how authors in the second half of the nineteenth century such as Nilmani Basak and Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar reworked miraculous elements—particularly Sītā’s divine disappearance into the earth—into narratives of feminine resilience and female suffering. These adaptations reveal how colonial educational discourse transformed divine exegesis into moral criticism, producing a new interpretive grammar through which the Rāmāyaṇa would later be morally evaluated in colonial and postcolonial contexts.