In the story
Bharadvāja's hermitage stands at Prayāga, where the Yamunā joins the Gaṅgā. The exiles halt there on the first stage of the journey. He offers them a settled home on the spot, and when Rāma explains that he needs somewhere further from the traffic of Ayodhyā — because people will keep coming — the sage names Citrakūṭa and describes the road in detail.
When Bharata comes after with the court, the army and the widowed queens, Bharadvāja receives the whole force and feeds it. The passage is one of the epic's few extended pieces of fantasy: by ascetic power the sage produces a feast, drink, music, women and lodging for tens of thousands, and the army spends a night in a hospitality it can hardly credit in the morning. It is also a deliberate contrast — the ascetic's power to give, set against the king's power to take away.
The returning party stops with him again on the last day of the fourteenth year, and it is from Prayāga that Hanumān is sent ahead to Nandigrāma to tell Bharata that Rāma is coming.
The sage himself
Bharadvāja is one of the seers of the Ṛgveda's sixth book and one of the great names of the earliest Vedic layer, attached in later tradition to works on medicine and mechanics. The epic assumes his standing rather than establishing it, and uses him as the fixed point at Prayāga through which everyone passes.
Twice a host
Bharadvāja receives both parties in the second book — the three exiles going out, and then the army coming after them — and the contrast between the two receptions is the point. The first is a quiet evening and directions to Citrakūṭa. The second is a feast for tens of thousands produced out of nothing.
The epic is measuring two kinds of power against each other. A king can command an army; an ascetic can feed one.
The last stop
The returning party halts at Prayāga on the final day of the fourteenth year, and it is from Bharadvāja's hermitage that Hanumān is sent ahead to Nandigrāma to stop Bharata entering the fire.
The sage thus stands at both ends of the exile, and the epic's geography of the second book is effectively organized around his hermitage.
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
- Prayāga — Prayāga is the confluence of the Gaṅgā and the Yamunā in the Rāmāyaṇa, where the sage Bharadvāja's hermitage stood and where the exiles were sent on to Citrakūṭa.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Atri and Anasūyā — Atri and Anasūyā are the aged sage and his wife in the Rāmāyaṇa who received the exiles at the last hermitage of the settled world, where Anasūyā instructed Sītā and gave her unfading garments.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.