What happens
Janaka of Videha keeps an enormous bow of Śiva's, entrusted to his ancestors, that no man has been able to string. He has vowed his daughter to whoever can, and suitors have come, failed, and — humiliated — besieged Mithilā for it.
Viśvāmitra brings the two Ikṣvāku princes and asks to see the bow. It is brought in on an eight-wheeled cart by several hundred men. Rāma lifts it, strings it, and draws; it snaps in the middle with a noise like thunder that knocks the onlookers down.
Sītā is given to him. Janaka sends messengers to Ayodhyā, Daśaratha comes with his court, and four marriages are performed at once: Sītā to Rāma, Ūrmilā to Lakṣmaṇa, and Kuśadhvaja's daughters Māṇḍavī and Śrutakīrti to Bharata and Śatrughna.
The aftermath
On the road home the wedding party is confronted by Paraśurāma, the brahmin who had destroyed the kṣatriyas twenty-one times over, furious that Śiva's bow has been broken. He produces a second and greater bow, Viṣṇu's, and challenges Rāma to string that. Rāma does, and asks where he should discharge the arrow, since it cannot be recalled unspent; Paraśurāma offers his own accumulated merit as the target, and it is destroyed. He withdraws.
Reading the episode
The bow-test is a marriage by contest of strength, a form found across early Indian literature and beyond it, and the Rāmāyaṇa uses it to establish Rāma's standing before anything else has happened. In Kamban's Tamil version, and in much of the devotional tradition, the emphasis shifts: Rāma and Sītā see and love each other before the test, so that the bow ratifies a choice already made rather than producing it.
The episode belongs to the Bāla Kāṇḍa, the poem's later first book. The bow itself is treated in the entry on Pināka.
The bow as an instrument of state
Janaka's arrangement is a political device before it is a romance. A bow no one can string, vowed to a daughter, is a way of guaranteeing that Videha's alliance goes to the strongest available house — and it has already produced one war, since a king named Sudhanvan demanded both the bow and Sītā and was killed for it.
The epic reports this without emphasis, and it changes the temperature of the scene. Rāma is not winning a bride by a feat of arms in a vacuum; he is settling a succession question that has been open long enough to have a body count.
Paraśurāma
The encounter on the road home is the epic's handover between avatars, and the tradition has read it that way. Paraśurāma, the brahmin who cleared the earth of kṣatriyas twenty-one times, arrives furious that Śiva's bow is broken, produces Viṣṇu's, and challenges Rāma to string it.
Rāma does, and then asks where the arrow should go, since it cannot be unspent. Paraśurāma offers his own accumulated merit, and it is destroyed. He withdraws to the mountains, and the older incarnation gives way to the newer without a fight.
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
- Janaka — Janaka is the king of Videha and the father of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa, who found her as an infant in a ploughed furrow and set the bow of Śiva as the test for her hand.
- 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.
- Pināka — Pināka is the bow of Śiva in the Rāmāyaṇa, kept by the kings of Videha, which no suitor could string and which broke when Rāma bent it — winning him Sītā.
- Videha and Mithilā — Videha is the kingdom of Janaka in the Rāmāyaṇa, north of the Ganges, ruled from Mithilā — the country Sītā comes from, and a centre of early philosophical debate.
- Bāla Kāṇḍa — The Bāla Kāṇḍa is the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāma's birth, his first expedition with the sage Viśvāmitra and his marriage to Sītā, and generally held with the seventh to be a later addition to the poem's core.
- Viśvāmitra — Viśvāmitra is the sage in the Rāmāyaṇa who took the boy Rāma from his father's house to guard a sacrifice, gave him the divine weapons, and led him to Mithilā and the bow — a kṣatriya king who became a brahmin by austerity.
- Ūrmilā — Ūrmilā is Sītā's sister and the wife of Lakṣmaṇa in the Rāmāyaṇa, left in Ayodhyā for fourteen years and passed over almost in silence by Vālmīki — a silence later poets have made her subject.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.