What happens
Daśaratha, ageing, announces before his council that Rāma will be consecrated as heir apparent, and the city prepares in delight. The preparations are interrupted by Mantharā, a hunchbacked servant of the second queen Kaikeyī, who works on her mistress until she is persuaded that a son of Kausalyā on the throne means ruin for her own son Bharata and servitude for herself. Kaikeyī remembers two boons her husband granted her long before, when she saved his life on a battlefield, and asks now for both: that Bharata be consecrated, and that Rāma be sent to the forest for fourteen years, dressed in bark.
Daśaratha is destroyed by the demand. He pleads, threatens, offers her anything else, collapses on the floor of her apartments, and cannot refuse, because he has given his word and a king's word is the thing his kingdom stands on. He cannot even bring himself to say it to his son; Kaikeyī does that.
Rāma accepts at once and without argument, and the poem is careful to show that this is not indifference: he is described as showing no more change of face than a man told good news. Sītā insists on going with him, and when he describes the hardships of the forest at length she answers that a wife's place is not determined by comfort, and that a father who gave her to him would be ashamed if she stayed. Lakṣmaṇa will not be parted from his brother, and arms himself. Kausalyā, entitled to keep her son by every ordinary claim, releases him. The three leave in bark cloth, and the citizens of Ayodhyā follow them out of the city on foot and have to be given the slip in the night, the charioteer Sumantra doubling back to lay a false trail.
They cross the Gaṅgā at Śṛṅgaverapura with the help of the Niṣāda chief Guha, who is treated as a friend and an equal; Sumantra is sent back with a message and cannot deliver it without breaking down. They are received by Bharadvāja at Prayāga and settle at Citrakūṭa. In Ayodhyā, Daśaratha dies in the night, remembering as he goes an act of his own youth — the accidental killing of an ascetic's son at a watering place, and the father's curse that he too would die grieving for a son.
Bharata, away at his grandfather's court, is recalled without being told why, discovers what his mother has done, and repudiates her in the harshest speech in the book. He refuses the crown absolutely, performs his father's rites, and marches to Citrakūṭa with the army, the court and the widowed queens to bring his brother home. The two brothers argue: Bharata says the boons died with the man who gave them, and that the kingdom is Rāma's by right and by the wish of everyone in it. The brahmin Jābāli argues more radically still, telling Rāma that there is no next world, that a dead father is nothing to him, and that he should take the throne — and Rāma's angry rejection of this is one of the poem's few explicit pieces of doctrine. He will not come back. The word stands whether or not the man who gave it is alive.
Bharata takes his brother's sandals, sets them on the throne as the sign of the true king, and rules from the village of Nandigrāma outside the capital, in bark cloth himself, as a regent waiting.
Why it matters
Almost nothing supernatural happens in the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa, and it is the part of the epic most admired as literature. Its subject is a family destroyed by a promise, and everyone in it is given a case. Kaikeyī is not a villain by nature; she is the queen the king loved best, the one who rode into battle with him, acting on a fear that a mother in a polygamous court might reasonably have — and having asked, she cannot unask. Daśaratha's helplessness is presented as the necessary consequence of the principle that makes Rāma's obedience admirable: if a king's word binds when it is convenient, it does not bind. Bharata's refusal mirrors Rāma's acceptance, and the sandals on the throne are the book's summary image — authority held in trust by someone who does not want it.
The book also contains the epic's most sustained treatment of the relation between a ruler and the ruled. The citizens are a presence throughout: they follow Rāma out of the city, they reproach Daśaratha, and the king's fear of what they will say is a real constraint on him. That is the same force that, in the seventh book, will destroy Sītā.
Further reading
- Bakker, Hans. Ayodhya. Egbert Forsten, 1986
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Sundarakanda. Princeton University Press, 1996
- Pollock, Sheldon. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Aranyakanda. Princeton University Press, 1991
- Sattar, Arshia. Valmiki's Ramayana. Harper Collins, 1996
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- Kaikeyī — Kaikeyī is the second queen of Daśaratha in the Rāmāyaṇa, the wife he loved best, who called in two long-unclaimed boons to have her own son crowned and Rāma exiled, and destroyed her husband and her standing in a night.
- Mantharā — Mantharā is the hunchbacked maidservant of Kaikeyī in the Rāmāyaṇa who persuades her mistress to demand the two boons, and whose speech alone sets the entire epic in motion.
- Daśaratha — Daśaratha is the king of Ayodhyā and father of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, destroyed by two boons he had granted his favourite queen decades earlier and could neither refuse nor survive.
- Bharata — Bharata is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, whose mother Kaikeyī won him the throne and who refused it, ruling Kosala from a village outside the capital with his brother's sandals set on the seat of power.
- The exile of Rāma — The exile of Rāma is the departure of the prince, his wife and his brother from Ayodhyā for fourteen years in the Rāmāyaṇa, accepted without argument on the day he was to have been consecrated.
- Kaikeyī's two boons — Kaikeyī's two boons are the demand in the Rāmāyaṇa that sets the whole story in motion — that her son Bharata be crowned and Rāma exiled for fourteen years, called in from a promise Daśaratha had made years before.
- Bharata and the sandals — Bharata's taking of Rāma's sandals in the Rāmāyaṇa, after failing to bring his brother home from Citrakūṭa, is the epic's image of power held in trust — the shoes set on the throne and the regent living outside the capital.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.