Nightelf,

I believe we are talking about Mahabharata, and not Ramayana.

Ramayana is another epic, but was written earlier than Mahabharata. There are two brief tenuous connections between these two epics. Hanuman is the first one, who agreed to sit on the pennant of Arjun's chariot. It is claimed that Hanuman was immortal, clearly a far fetched assertion. Perhaps they wanted to commemorate Ramayana during the wartime, and put a monkey emblem in their pennant. Besides Hanuman, a tangible connection is  Dronacharya, the guru of both Kaurava and Pandava in Mahabharata, who is curiously connected with Ramayana. Dronacharya is a son of Bharadwaj Rishi, who was a pupil of Balmiki who wrote Ramayana.

As an aside, a Nepali intellectual once told me that Kangada fort was made by Trigarta king Susharma during Mahabharata era. So, it was the reason why Amar Singh Thapa really wanted to get it. It is said to be about 3000 years old, and the king of Trigarta (or Katoch dynasty king Sansar Chanda who ruled Kangada at the time) resisted it with valor.So, Amar Singh Thapa sieged the fort for 3 years, from 1806-1809. We eventually had to fight with Punjabi king Ranajit Singh at the final stage of the siege, and we had to retreat. It was a body blow to the celebrated general Amar Singh Thapa's dream of expanding Nepal's boundary to Kashmir and beyond. There are actually lots of evidence from Mahabharata era, and historians are quite aware of it.

All stories are embellished to make it acceptable to winning side, but to say that the fabrication is beyond recognizable from fact is wrong. Intellectuals have always been fearless, and by their own nature have found a way to fool the rulers and yet transfer the knowledge to their progenies, and men of South Asia always desired to leave a legacy of truthfulness. Even in Nepal, the cruelty of Rana rulers, Shah kings are well documented. Nepali communists are often lazy, and in their anger, rather than reading what is in the history, or what our great historians have done so far, they just claim that "they don't believe the history as it is written" and dismiss it in a wholesale. Those who dismiss these histories often then tell the bullshits about Chinese leader named Mao and Russian leader named Lenin:) I personally believe truth is indestructible, it is in some form there, we just need to find a way to get around the "official version", but the way to do so is not via wholesale rejection of existing literature, but via critical (mimansa) reinterpretation of existing texts and via searching other alternative available. Ditto applies regarding Mahabharata.