Kiṣkindhā Kāṇḍa

What happens

Searching southward, Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa come to the hill of Ṛṣyamūka above Lake Pampā, where Sugrīva lives in exile from his brother Vālī, who has taken his kingdom and his wife and cannot follow him onto that hill because of an old curse. Hanumān, Sugrīva's minister, approaches the two armed strangers in the disguise of a mendicant and questions them, and Rāma remarks afterwards that no one could speak so well who had not studied grammar. Satisfied, Hanumān carries them to his master, and an alliance is sworn at a fire between two dispossessed parties, each pledged to recover the other's loss. Sugrīva produces a bundle of ornaments that a woman being carried through the air had let fall over the hill, and Rāma, unable to look at them steadily, identifies the anklets alone, because those were all of her he had ever looked at.

Rāma undertakes to kill Vālī. Sugrīva challenges his brother and is beaten badly the first time, because Rāma cannot tell the two apart; a garland is put on Sugrīva and the challenge repeated. While they wrestle, Rāma shoots Vālī from behind cover.

Vālī, dying, reproaches him at length. He was no enemy of Rāma's; the quarrel was not Rāma's; he would have fetched Sītā back himself in a day if he had been asked; and a kṣatriya does not shoot from concealment at a fight he is not part of. Rāma answers that the earth belongs to the Ikṣvākus and Bharata rules it, so that he was punishing a subject; that Vālī had taken his younger brother's wife, which is a capital fault; and that a hunter may shoot an animal from cover whether or not the animal is looking. The answers have never fully satisfied readers, and the exchange is the most-argued passage in the epic. Vālī accepts them, commends his son Aṅgada to Rāma, and dies. His widow Tārā laments over him in one of the poem's great speeches.

Sugrīva is installed at Kiṣkindhā with Aṅgada as heir, and then, through the four months of the rains, forgets his oath entirely in drink and pleasure. Lakṣmaṇa comes to the city in a fury that empties the streets, and is met and defused by Tārā, who takes the blame on the household and reminds him that a man long deprived is not quickly satisfied. Sugrīva is recalled to himself and the hosts are summoned from every direction and sent out to the four quarters with a month's limit.

The southern party, Hanumān and Aṅgada and the bear Jāmbavān among them, is trapped in an underground cavern belonging to the ascetic Svayamprabhā, who sends them out by her own power; they emerge to find their month expired, and sit down on the shore to starve rather than go back and be executed for failure. Aṅgada rehearses the search aloud, and at the name of Jaṭāyu the old vulture Sampāti, the dead bird's brother, comes down the cliff. Wingless, he can still see a hundred leagues, and he tells them what he sees: Sītā alive in Laṅkā, across a hundred yojanas of open water. Jāmbavān then reminds Hanumān, who has forgotten it under a curse, of what he is capable of.

The book's difficulty

The killing of Vālī is the ethical crux of the Rāmāyaṇa, and the poem knows it. It does not smooth the objection over; it puts the strongest form of it into the mouth of the dying man and lets Rāma answer at length and not quite adequately. Later tradition worked hard on the problem, and the commentators supply defences the text does not — most often that Vālī had a boon draining half the strength of any opponent who faced him, so that an open fight was impossible. That boon is not in the critical text.

The book's other subject is the failure of an ally. Sugrīva does not betray Rāma; he simply forgets, in comfort, what he swore in need, and has to be frightened back into keeping his word. Set beside Rāma's own conduct in the previous two books, the contrast is plainly the point.