Bharata

In the story

Bharata is the son of Daśaratha by Kaikeyī, and he is not in Ayodhyā when the thing is done in his name. He is at his mother's family's court in Kekaya, and is recalled without being told why. He arrives to find his father dead, his brother in the forest, and himself king.

His response is the moral centre of the second book. He repudiates his mother in the harshest speech in the poem, telling her she has killed his father and destroyed her house and that he wants nothing she has got for him; he refuses the consecration outright; he performs Daśaratha's funeral rites; and then he marches to Citrakūṭa with the army, the court, the ministers and the widowed queens, to bring Rāma home. Rāma's own party, seeing an army approach, at first assume an attack, and Lakṣmaṇa has to be talked out of a fight.

The argument between the brothers is conducted at length and in public. Bharata's case is that the boons died with the man who gave them, that the kingdom is Rāma's by law and by the wish of every person in it, and that a refusal is not virtue but obstinacy. Rāma's answer is that a word binds after the death of the man who gave it, and that a son does not make his father a liar. Bharata cannot move him.

What he does then is the image the tradition kept. He takes Rāma's sandals, sets them on the throne as the sign of the true king, and rules as their regent — not from the palace but from the village of Nandigrāma outside the capital, wearing bark cloth and matted hair, living as an ascetic for fourteen years while governing a kingdom. He vows to enter fire if Rāma is not back on the day the term expires; when the day comes and Rāma has not appeared by morning, Hanumān is sent ahead precisely to prevent it.

What he means

Bharata is the epic's study of power refused. He is the mirror of Rāma: where his brother accepts an unjust loss, he refuses an unjust gain, and the two acts are the same act. The poem is explicit that this costs him as much as the exile costs Rāma, and that his fourteen years as an ascetic regent are a harder discipline than the forest, because he has the throne within reach at every moment.

He is also the only person in the epic who tells Kaikeyī the truth to her face and never takes it back, and the only one who governs well. The sandals on the throne became one of the most durable political images in Indian culture — authority held in trust, exercised by someone who does not claim it — and are still invoked in that sense.

The seventh book gives him a late campaign against the gandharvas, in which his sons are settled in the conquered country, and he follows Rāma into the Sarayū at the end.

The argument at Citrakūṭa

The exchange between the brothers is one of the longest sustained arguments in the epic, and Bharata's case is the stronger of the two on almost every legal ground he raises. The boons were extracted by a fraud on a dying man. The kingdom is Rāma's by primogeniture, by his father's own earlier declaration, and by the unanimous wish of the court and the citizens. A promise that destroys the kingdom it was made in cannot be the highest duty. And the man who gave it is dead, which in ordinary law ends the obligation.

Rāma answers none of this on its merits. His position is that a son does not make his father a liar, and that the term was fourteen years. The poem lets the better argument lose, and it lets everyone present see it lose — which is why Bharata's fourteen years at Nandigrāma are not a sulk but a protest maintained with perfect loyalty.

The regency

Bharata's government is described only briefly, and what the epic emphasizes is its scrupulousness. He takes no title, occupies no palace, wears the dress of an ascetic, and refers every decision to the sandals. When Rāma returns he gives back a kingdom in better condition than he received it, with the treasury full and the army intact, and asks for nothing.

Later Indian political thought has used the image constantly. A caretaker who governs well and hands power back on the day it is due is a rare enough figure in any tradition to be worth an emblem, and the sandals on the throne are that emblem.