What happens
Rāma keeps informers to know what is said of him in the city. One reports a washerman who, quarrelling with his wife, said that he was not Rāma, to take back a woman who had lived in another man's house.
Rāma calls his brothers, tells them what has been said, and states his decision: a king cannot govern under such talk, and Sītā must go. She is pregnant, and has asked to visit the hermitages by the Gaṅgā; Lakṣmaṇa is ordered to take her there on that pretext and leave her. He does it, and cannot bring himself to tell her why until the boat has landed on the far bank.
She does not go back. Vālmīki takes her in, and she bears twin sons at his hermitage.
Reading it
The banishment is the point at which the Rāmāyaṇa's ideal turns on itself. The man who accepted an unjust exile rather than let his father's word be broken now inflicts one to protect his own reputation; the public opinion that made his exile a tragedy is now the instrument of his wife's. The poem gives him a reason — that a king's standing is the kingdom's — and does not conceal what it costs or who pays.
It also gives Sītā nothing. She is not consulted, not told, and not accused to her face, and the whole thing is done by a stratagem.
Stratum and reception
The episode belongs to the Uttara Kāṇḍa, which is generally held to be a later addition. Its presence there rather than in the core poem is not a defence — it has been part of the Rāmāyaṇa for a very long time — but it is a fact worth knowing.
No episode in Indian literature has generated more counter-writing. It is refused outright by Kamban and by much of the southern tradition, which end at the coronation; handled evasively by Tulsīdās; reversed in Jain versions, where Sītā declines to return and takes vows instead; and made the subject of a very large modern literature, much of it by women, in Telugu, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Hindi and English. Bhavabhūti's eighth-century play Uttararāmacarita is the most celebrated early treatment and gives Rāma a grief the epic does not.
The informers
The detail that Rāma keeps spies to report what is said of him in the city is stated flatly and is essential to the episode. He is not told by an official or confronted by a delegation; a paid listener brings back a remark made in a domestic quarrel by a man washing clothes.
The epic's political world takes public opinion seriously enough to be governed by it, and here the mechanism runs the other way: a king who monitors what is said becomes the prisoner of it.
Lakṣmaṇa's part
The order is given to the brother who has spent fourteen years protecting her. He takes her across the Ganges on the pretext of a visit she had herself asked for, and only on the far bank, having landed, does he tell her — and the epic says he cannot get the words out, weeps, and falls at her feet.
Her response is not to reproach him. She sends a message back to Rāma, tells Lakṣmaṇa to go, and says she will not kill herself because she is carrying the dynasty's heirs.
Vālmīki's arrival
She is found by the poet's pupils and taken in. The author of the poem shelters the woman his hero has abandoned, and raises the sons who will sing the poem back at him. The epic's frame closes here rather than at the end.
Further reading
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Bose, Mandakranta. A Woman's Ramayana: Candravati's Bengali Epic. Routledge, 2013
- Doniger, Wendy. The Hindus: An Alternative History. Penguin, 2009
- 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
See also
- 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.
- Lakṣmaṇa — Lakṣmaṇa is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, who follows him into exile and serves fourteen years as guard and companion, mutilates Śūrpaṇakhā, kills Indrajit, and carries out the order to abandon Sītā.
- Uttara Kāṇḍa — The Uttara Kāṇḍa is the seventh book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāvaṇa's ancestry, the banishment of the pregnant Sītā, the birth of Lava and Kuśa and Sītā's return into the earth — generally held with the first book to be a later addition.
- Vālmīki — Vālmīki is the sage to whom the Rāmāyaṇa is attributed, called the ādi-kavi or first poet, and who appears inside his own poem as the hermit who shelters the banished Sītā and raises her sons.
- Lava and Kuśa — Lava and Kuśa are the twin sons of Rāma and Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa, born at Vālmīki's hermitage after their mother's banishment and raised there, who sang their father's story to him at his horse sacrifice without knowing whose sons they were.
- Sītā's ordeal and the epic's own doubts — Sītā's treatment after the war — the public repudiation, the fire, the banishment and her final refusal — is the Rāmāyaṇa's most contested material, and the subject of more counter-writing than any other episode in Indian literature.
- The aśvamedha and the singing of the poem — At Rāma's horse sacrifice in the Rāmāyaṇa's last book, two boys raised at Vālmīki's hermitage sing the epic to the king — who recognizes his own life, and then his own sons.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.