Kausalyā

In the story

Kausalyā is the first of Daśaratha's three queens and the mother of his eldest son, and the poem is careful to establish that neither fact has bought her much. Her husband's affection rests with Kaikeyī, and she says so herself, at length, on the night everything is decided — that she has waited out her rival's ascendancy for years on the expectation of her son's accession, and that with that gone she has nothing left.

Her collapse when Rāma comes to tell her is the most human passage in the second book. She begs him not to go; when that fails, she tells him that if he goes she will fast to death; when that fails, she says she will come with him into the forest. Rāma answers that a wife who abandons a living husband commits a sin, that his father needs her, and that she must stay. She yields, and then does the thing the tradition remembers: she performs the rites for a departing warrior over her son, ties protective charms on him, and blesses the journey she has just tried to prevent.

She then spends fourteen years as the widow of a king who died of grief, in a palace run by the woman who caused it, and receives her son back at the end.

Her place

Kausalyā is the epic's portrait of dignity under a permanent slight, and Vālmīki gives her more interiority than her rank in the story requires. She is capable of bitterness and expresses it — she reproaches Daśaratha directly for what his indulgence has cost — and the poem does not treat this as a failing.

She is also one of the few figures whose relation to Rāma is presented purely as love rather than as duty. The passage in which she blesses him is used in ritual, and her instructions to him are quoted in the way Sumitrā's are, as a model of what a mother says to a son who is leaving.

In the seventh book she is present at the horse sacrifice; in devotional tradition she is honoured chiefly as Rāma's mother, and her birthplace and household are treated as sites in the Ayodhyā landscape.

What she is given

The poem gives Kausalyā a full emotional range and very little power, and the combination is the point. She reproaches her husband to his face for what his indulgence has cost. She tells her son that she has waited out a rival's ascendancy for years for this day. She threatens to fast to death, and then to follow him into the forest. And then she performs the rites for a departing warrior over him and lets him go.

The scene has been used ritually — her benediction is recited — and it is one of the few passages in the epic in which a mother is allowed to be furious and dignified at once.

The fourteen years

Vālmīki does not follow Kausalyā through the exile in any detail. What he establishes is the shape of it: the senior queen, widowed by the act of the junior queen, living in the same household as the woman who caused it, with her son gone and no prospect of his return for over a decade.

Her reunion with Rāma at the coronation is brief, and the seventh book has her present at the horse sacrifice. The epic's interest in her ends when its interest in Ayodhyā does.