In the story
The twins belong to the seventh book, with the frame anticipated in the first. Sītā, abandoned pregnant in the forest, is taken in by Vālmīki and bears two sons at his hermitage. They are raised there as ascetics' children, and the poet teaches them the epic he has composed about their father — the whole of it, by heart, to be sung in twenty sections.
Years later Rāma performs a horse sacrifice. The boys come to the assembly and sing, section by section over successive days, in the presence of the king and his court. Rāma, hearing his own life recited, sees the resemblance and asks the poet, who confirms it, stakes his own austerities on Sītā's innocence, and produces her.
The sons are acknowledged. After Sītā's descent into the earth they remain Rāma's heirs, and at the end of his reign he divides the Kosala country between them — Kuśa at Kuśāvatī, Lava at Śrāvastī.
What the episode is doing
The device is extraordinary and entirely deliberate. The epic ends by having itself performed inside itself, by the children of the woman its hero has wronged, to that hero, who does not recognize it until it is too late. The poem is the instrument of judgement on its own protagonist, and the author is a character standing beside the singers.
Almost every later retelling in performance has taken up the Lava-Kuśa episode, because it is the one place where the story's moral accounting is done out loud.
Later additions
The much-loved episode in which the twins capture the sacrificial horse, defeat Rāma's army, and fight Lakṣmaṇa, Bharata, Śatrughna and finally Rāma himself to a standstill without knowing who he is, is not in Vālmīki. It comes from the Jaimini tradition, the Padma Purāṇa and later retellings, and it is the version most Indians know, largely through film and theatre. Vālmīki's twins are singers, not soldiers.
Taught the poem
What Vālmīki teaches the twins is not a story about their father; it is the Rāmāyaṇa, the finished composition, in twenty sections, to be sung with instruments and in the correct metre. The epic is explicit that they are trained as performers and that they do not know whose sons they are.
The poem thus contains its own transmission: an author, a text, trained reciters, and a first audience. It is the closest thing early Indian literature has to a description of how such a work was actually carried.
The recitation
The performance at the horse sacrifice is staged with care. The boys sing before an assembly of kings, sages and citizens; the audience is captivated; Rāma asks who they are and is told they are Vālmīki's pupils; and he listens to his own life, day after day, until the narrative reaches the banishment.
The epic does not describe his reaction to that section. It moves to his sending for Sītā.
The battle that is not in Vālmīki
The version most Indians know has the twins capture the sacrificial horse, defeat Śatrughna, Lakṣmaṇa and Bharata in turn, and fight Rāma himself without knowing who he is. It is a magnificent story and it is not in the Rāmāyaṇa; it comes from the Jaimini tradition and the Padma Purāṇa, and it reached a mass audience through theatre and through the Telugu and Hindi films of Lava Kusha.
Vālmīki's twins are singers. Their weapon is the poem.
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
- 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.
- Vālmīki — Vālmīki is the sage to whom the Rāmāyaṇa is attributed, called the ādi-kavi or first poet, and who appears inside his own poem as the hermit who shelters the banished Sītā and raises her sons.
- The banishment of Sītā — The banishment of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book is Rāma's decision, on hearing that his subjects doubt her, to have his pregnant wife taken to the forest and abandoned there.
- The aśvamedha and the singing of the poem — At Rāma's horse sacrifice in the Rāmāyaṇa's last book, two boys raised at Vālmīki's hermitage sing the epic to the king — who recognizes his own life, and then his own sons.
- 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.
- 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.
- Rāma's departure — Rāma's departure at the end of the Rāmāyaṇa is his walk into the river Sarayū, with the population of Ayodhyā following him, after dividing the kingdom between his sons.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.