What happens
After Sumantra returns with the empty chariot and repeats everything Rāma said, Daśaratha does not recover. He asks to be turned towards Kausalyā, and in the night tells her something he has never told anyone.
As a young man he had the skill of shooting at sound alone. Hunting by night at the Sarayū, he heard what he took for an elephant at the water and loosed. He had killed a young hermit filling a pitcher for his blind parents. He went and told them; the father's curse was that the king would die as they were dying, grieving for a son; and the two then had a pyre built and entered it.
Daśaratha understands his own death as that curse arriving, says so, and dies calling for Rāma. It is the sixth night after the exiles left. Bharata is at Kekaya and knows nothing.
The two causes
The epic gives the death two explanations and does not choose between them. One is immediate: grief, and a promise he could not survive keeping. The other reaches back forty years to an accident with a bow at a river.
This doubling is characteristic. The Rāmāyaṇa habitually supplies both a human cause and a fated one for its disasters, and lets them stand together — Kaikeyī's own decision and a divine plan, Rāma's judgement and Rāvaṇa's boon, a washerman's remark and the exhaustion of an avatar's work.
Afterwards
The body is preserved in oil until Bharata can be fetched, and the funeral is his first act on returning — after which he refuses the throne. The kingdom is left without a king for fourteen years, governed from a village by a regent in bark cloth on behalf of a pair of sandals.
What he says to Kausalyā
The confession is delivered to the wife he has neglected for years, in the dark, when he can no longer see. He tells her the story of the arrow, says the curse is arriving, and asks her to touch him because he cannot make her out. He also says the thing the epic has been building to since the second chapter: that he cannot see because his sight has gone with Rāma.
Vālmīki gives the death no drama beyond this. There is no vision, no reconciliation and no message; he calls his son's name and stops.
The body
Because Bharata is a week's ride away and the rites require a son, the body is preserved in oil in a vat until he arrives. The detail is grim and practical, and it is the epic's way of measuring the distance to Kekaya in something other than miles: a kingdom with its king unburied, waiting.
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
- Daśaratha — Daśaratha is the king of Ayodhyā and father of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, destroyed by two boons he had granted his favourite queen decades earlier and could neither refuse nor survive.
- The ascetic's son — The ascetic's son is the youth in the Rāmāyaṇa whom the young Daśaratha killed by shooting at a sound in the dark, and whose blind father's curse determined that the king would die grieving for a son.
- Kausalyā — Kausalyā is the senior queen of Daśaratha and the mother of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, whose position at court had long been eclipsed by Kaikeyī and who nearly refused to let her son go.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Sumantra — Sumantra is Daśaratha's charioteer and chief counsellor in the Rāmāyaṇa, who drove Rāma out of Ayodhyā into exile and came back with an empty chariot to a king who could not be consoled.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.