In the epic
The bow was Śiva's, and by the account Janaka gives it came to his ancestors after Śiva had used it to threaten the gods at Dakṣa's sacrifice and then given it up. It is kept in Mithilā in a chest on an eight-wheeled cart that several hundred men move.
Janaka has vowed his daughter to whoever can string it, and no suitor has managed to lift it. Rāma lifts it, strings it, and draws it until it breaks in the middle with a noise that knocks the onlookers down.
The second bow
Paraśurāma appears on the road home, furious that Śiva's bow has been broken, and produces its counterpart — the bow of Viṣṇu, which he says was made by the same craftsman for the contest between the two gods. He challenges Rāma to string that one, and Rāma does, which ends the encounter and, in the epic's terms, transfers something from the older avatar to the newer.
Agastya later gives Rāma a bow of Viṣṇu in the forest, and the tradition has generally treated it as the same weapon.
The bow as a test
Marriage by a test of the bow is an old and widely distributed narrative type — the Mahābhārata has one, and so does the Odyssey — and its function here is to establish Rāma's standing before the plot proper begins. The epic uses the same object to link Rāma to Śiva, to Viṣṇu and to the house of Videha in a single episode.
Two bows and a handover
The Bāla Kāṇḍa produces a matched pair of divine bows within a few chapters. Śiva's, kept at Mithilā, breaks; Viṣṇu's, produced by Paraśurāma on the road home, is strung. The tradition reads the sequence as a transfer: Rāma proves himself against the Śaiva weapon and is then revealed by the Vaiṣṇava one.
The bow Agastya gives him in the forest is generally taken to be the same Viṣṇu bow, which makes the weapon that kills Rāvaṇa a possession he acquires in the epic's first book and does not use until its sixth.
The cart
The physical staging of the Mithilā scene is worth keeping: the bow arrives in an iron chest on an eight-wheeled cart pushed by several hundred men, and Rāma asks permission before touching it. The epic gets its effect from the logistics rather than from adjectives.
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
- The breaking of Śiva's bow — The breaking of Śiva's bow at Mithilā is the episode in the Rāmāyaṇa by which Rāma wins Sītā, stringing a weapon no other suitor had been able to lift.
- Janaka — Janaka is the king of Videha and the father of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa, who found her as an infant in a ploughed furrow and set the bow of Śiva as the test for her hand.
- 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.
- 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.
- Videha and Mithilā — Videha is the kingdom of Janaka in the Rāmāyaṇa, north of the Ganges, ruled from Mithilā — the country Sītā comes from, and a centre of early philosophical debate.
- Bāla Kāṇḍa — The Bāla Kāṇḍa is the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāma's birth, his first expedition with the sage Viśvāmitra and his marriage to Sītā, and generally held with the seventh to be a later addition to the poem's core.
- The astras — The astras of the Rāmāyaṇa are weapons belonging to particular gods, invoked and recalled by spells, which Rāma receives from Viśvāmitra as a boy and uses to end the war.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.