In the epic
Citrakūṭa is where the exiles build their first hut and where the second book's climax takes place. Rāma is described as happy there — the poem gives one of its most affectionate landscape passages to the hill, its streams, its flowering trees and its animals — and Sītā more so.
It is here that Bharata arrives with the court, the army and the widowed queens, and here that the long argument between the brothers takes place and Rāma refuses. Bharata takes the sandals and goes; the exiles, knowing the place is now known and will be visited, move on, stopping at Atri's hermitage before entering the Daṇḍaka.
The Bāla and Uttara books add the incident of a crow that troubled Sītā at Citrakūṭa and was blinded in one eye by a blade of grass Rāma turned into a weapon. Sītā gives that private memory to Hanumān as the token no one else could know.
The place
Chitrakoot, on the border of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh, is identified with the epic's hill, and is a major pilgrimage centre. The Kāmadgiri hill is circumambulated by pilgrims; the Mandākinī river runs below it; and sites associated with the exile — Rāma's hut, Bharata's meeting place, Atri's hermitage, the Gupt Godavari caves — are shown throughout the area.
Tulsīdās is closely associated with Chitrakoot and lived there, which has added a substantial layer of Rāmcaritmānas-related sanctity to the older epic association.
The happiest passage in the poem
The Rāmāyaṇa is not a cheerful book, and Citrakūṭa is the exception. The description of the hill — its streams, its flowering trees, its birds and deer, the caves, the coloured rock that gives it its name — runs for pages, and Rāma tells Sītā more than once that he does not miss Ayodhyā and would not exchange this.
The poem is careful about why. They are together, the term has barely begun, no one has died yet, and nothing is being demanded of anyone. Everything after Citrakūṭa is loss.
Why they leave
The exiles move on immediately after Bharata's visit, and the reason given is practical and rather sad: the place is now known, people will keep coming, and the hill is full of reminders of the army that has just left. They go to Atri, and from Atri into the Daṇḍaka.
It is the only time in the poem that Rāma abandons somewhere he is happy for a reason that is not a promise.
The site today
Chitrakoot straddles the Uttar Pradesh–Madhya Pradesh border and is a substantial pilgrimage centre. The Kāmadgiri hill is circumambulated; the Mandākinī runs below; and a set of sites is shown — Rāma's hut at Rāmghāṭ, Bharata's meeting place at Bharatkūp, the Gupt Godavari caves, Sphatik Shila, and Anasūyā's hermitage a few miles off.
Tulsīdās lived at Chitrakoot and the association has added a heavy Rāmcaritmānas layer to the older epic one; several of the shown sites are attached to incidents in his poem rather than to Vālmīki's.
Further reading
- Bakker, Hans. Ayodhya. Egbert Forsten, 1986
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- 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
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Bharadvāja — Bharadvāja is the sage of Prayāga in the Rāmāyaṇa, who received the exiles at the confluence and sent them on to Citrakūṭa, and who later entertained Bharata's whole army by ascetic power.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.