In the story
Atri is one of the oldest of the seers and very old by the time Rāma reaches him at the close of the second book. He receives the three exiles with honour and commends Sītā to his wife's care, telling Rāma what Anasūyā's austerity has accomplished: that when the world went ten years without rain she brought forth fruit and roots by her own power and made the river flow.
Anasūyā receives Sītā alone. She instructs her in the duty a wife owes a husband — a passage that has been quoted for two thousand years, approvingly and otherwise — and then asks how the marriage came about, and hears the story of the bow from Sītā's own mouth, which is the only place in the epic where Sītā narrates her own life. At the end she gives her garments that will not fade or soil, ornaments, and a fragrant ointment, and sends her back to Rāma.
At daybreak the ascetics show the three the path used for gathering fruit, and by it they pass out of the settled world into the Daṇḍaka forest. The visit closes the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa.
Why the scene is there
Nothing happens at Atri's hermitage — no weapon changes hands, no enemy appears — and Vālmīki gives it a full and unhurried telling anyway. It is the last ordinary evening in the poem, the last time the three are guests in a settled household, and the epic marks the threshold by slowing down.
The famous later story in which Anasūyā, tested by the three great gods, reduces them to infants, and from which Dattātreya is born, is purāṇic and has no place in Vālmīki.
The one time Sītā tells her own story
Anasūyā asks Sītā how her marriage came about, and Sītā answers at length — the furrow, Janaka's vow, the bow, the four weddings. It is the only place in the epic where she narrates her own life, and it is placed just before she leaves the settled world.
The passage is also where she receives the unfading garments and ornaments that she is still wearing when Rāvaṇa takes her, and which she drops from the air for Sugrīva's people to find.
The instruction
Anasūyā's discourse on a wife's duty to her husband is one of the most quoted and most argued-over passages in the epic, and it is delivered woman to woman rather than by a man. It states the position the tradition would build on for two thousand years, in its strongest form.
The epic gives it to an ascetic of formidable independent power — a woman who ended a drought by her own austerity — which is either a considerable endorsement or a considerable irony, and readers have taken it both ways.
Further reading
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Nagar, Shanti Lal. Genesis and Evolution of the Rama Katha in Indian Art, Thought, Literature and Culture. B.R. Publishing, 2005
- Ramanujan, A. K. The Collected Essays of A. K. Ramanujan. Oxford University Press, 1999
- Richman, Paula. Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. University of California Press, 1991
See also
- Citrakūṭa — Citrakūṭa is the hill in the Rāmāyaṇa where the exiles settled first, where Daśaratha's death reached them, and where Bharata came with an army to ask his brother to come home.
- Sītā — Sītā is the wife of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, found by King Janaka in a furrow, carried off by Rāvaṇa and held for a year in Laṅkā without yielding, and vindicated by fire only to be abandoned by her husband in the epic's last book.
- Rāma — Rāma is the prince of Ayodhyā at the centre of the Rāmāyaṇa, exiled for fourteen years by his father's promise, and worshipped across the Hindu world as an incarnation of Viṣṇu and the model of righteous conduct.
- The Daṇḍaka forest — The Daṇḍaka is the great forest south of the Vindhyas in the Rāmāyaṇa, where the exiles spent most of their fourteen years and where the rākṣasas ruled — the epic's frontier between the settled world and everything else.
- Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa — The Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa is the second book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Kaikeyī's two boons send Rāma into exile, Daśaratha dies of grief, and Bharata refuses the throne — the most human and least supernatural stretch of the epic.
- Bharadvāja — Bharadvāja is the sage of Prayāga in the Rāmāyaṇa, who received the exiles at the confluence and sent them on to Citrakūṭa, and who later entertained Bharata's whole army by ascetic power.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.