Ahalyā

The episode

Viśvāmitra, leading the two princes towards Mithilā, brings them to a deserted and beautiful hermitage and tells them whose it was. Indra came to Ahalyā in her husband's shape; and Vālmīki says plainly that she recognized the god and consented, out of curiosity at being desired by him. Gautama, returning, cursed Indra to lose his testicles and condemned his wife to remain in the hermitage unseen by any living creature, subsisting on air and lying in ashes, until Rāma should pass that way — at which point she would be received back.

Rāma enters the grove. Ahalyā becomes visible; the brothers touch her feet; Gautama returns from his penance in the Himālaya and takes her back without further reproach.

Reading it

The episode is short and it has been argued about for two thousand years, because the critical text does something the tradition largely could not accept: it makes Ahalyā a knowing participant rather than a victim of deception. Later versions systematically remove this. In the purāṇas and in Tulsīdās she is turned to stone, and is restored by the dust of Rāma's foot — which converts a story about a woman's choice and a husband's punishment into a story about divine grace falling on inert matter. The stone is the version most Indians know; it is not Vālmīki's.

Ahalyā is counted among the five women of the verse recited daily for the removal of sin, alongside Draupadī, Tārā, Sītā or Kuntī, and Mandodarī — a grouping whose whole point is that these are women whose sexual histories were irregular and whose standing the tradition insisted upon anyway.

The episode's placement matters too. It is the first thing Rāma does that is not killing, and it comes immediately before his marriage.

The placement

The episode is the last thing that happens before Mithilā, and the epic puts it there deliberately. Rāma's first act on the road to his marriage is to release a woman punished for a sexual transgression by a husband who then left her lying in ashes for an age. The reader meets the theme of a wife's fidelity and a husband's judgement at the outset, in a case where the husband's conduct is not admirable, and will meet it again twice at the epic's end.

What later versions could not accept

The critical text's Ahalyā knows it is Indra and consents. Every major later version removes this. In the purāṇas and in Tulsīdās she is deceived and then turned to stone, and revived by the dust of Rāma's foot — which converts a story about a woman's choice into a story about inert matter receiving grace.

The stone version is now the standard one, reproduced in calendar art, in television and in almost every popular retelling. It is worth knowing that the oldest text says something else, and says it without apology.