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HinduEarly Historic

Kaikasī

Also known as —

Kaikasī is the rākṣasī mother of Rāvaṇa, Kumbhakarṇa, Śūrpaṇakhā and Vibhīṣaṇa in the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book, sent by her father to a sage at an inauspicious hour and told what kind of children would follow.

In the story

Kaikasī belongs to the seventh book alone. She is the daughter of the rākṣasa lord Sumālin, whose line had been driven out of Laṅkā, and who sends her to the brahmin sage Viśravas to obtain sons who might restore the family's fortunes.

She approaches him at twilight, which is the wrong hour, and the sage tells her what will follow from it: her children will be fierce. She bears the ten-headed Rāvaṇa, the enormous Kumbhakarṇa and the daughter Śūrpaṇakhā — and then, pleading for one child of a different kind, the righteous Vibhīṣaṇa.

Her second intervention is the consequential one. Seeing the splendour of Viśravas's other son, Kubera, lord of wealth, riding in the flying chariot Puṣpaka, she is stung by the comparison and goads Rāvaṇa to equal his half-brother. That is what sends him to the austerities that win him his boon, and so, ultimately, everything else.

What she is for

Kaikasī supplies the seventh book with a cause. Rāvaṇa is not born a monster in this account; he is made one by a mother's ambition and a brahmin father's indifference, and by the ordinary comparison of one son's fortune with another's. It is a domestic explanation for a cosmic catastrophe, and it is characteristic of the Uttara Kāṇḍa's interest in tracing everything back to a family quarrel.

The goad

Kaikasī's decisive act is not bearing Rāvaṇa but comparing him to someone else. Seeing Kubera pass in the Puṣpaka in full splendour, she tells her son that this is his half-brother, that he has nothing like it, and asks what he intends to do about it.

The seventh book makes that remark the origin of the austerities, the boon, the seizure of Laṅkā and eventually the war. It is a domestic explanation for a cosmic catastrophe, and the Uttara Kāṇḍa specializes in them.

The hour

The sage Viśravas tells her at the outset what the twilight approach will produce: children of a fierce and dark nature. She accepts it, and only afterwards asks for one child of a different kind — which is how Vibhīṣaṇa comes to exist.

The epic thus has the rākṣasa household's whole moral range specified in advance, by its father, as a consequence of the time of day.

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

  • Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
  • Viśravas — Viśravas is the brahmin sage of the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book who fathered both Kubera, the lord of wealth, and Rāvaṇa — making the epic's antagonist a sage's son and Kubera's half-brother.
  • Kumbhakarṇa — Kumbhakarṇa is Rāvaṇa's giant brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, cursed to sleep for half the year, who woke to tell his brother the war was unjust and then went out and fought it for him.
  • Vibhīṣaṇa — Vibhīṣaṇa is Rāvaṇa's youngest brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, who told him in open council to return Sītā, was repudiated for it, defected to Rāma, and was crowned king of Laṅkā before the war began.
  • Śūrpaṇakhā — Śūrpaṇakhā is Rāvaṇa's sister in the Rāmāyaṇa, who desired Rāma in the forest, was mocked and then mutilated by Lakṣmaṇa, and turned her humiliation into the abduction of Sītā.
  • Uttara Kāṇḍa — The Uttara Kāṇḍa is the seventh book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāvaṇa's ancestry, the banishment of the pregnant Sītā, the birth of Lava and Kuśa and Sītā's return into the earth — generally held with the first book to be a later addition.
  • Laṅkā — Laṅkā is Rāvaṇa's island city in the Rāmāyaṇa, taken from his half-brother Kubera, burned by Hanumān and besieged by Rāma — traditionally identified with Sri Lanka, though the epic does not settle the question.

This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.