In the epic
Prayāga is the second stage of the journey into exile. Bharadvāja receives the three at his hermitage at the confluence, offers them a home there, and — when Rāma explains that he needs somewhere further from the traffic of the capital — names Citrakūṭa and describes the route.
The place returns twice. Bharata's army halts there and is entertained by the sage's ascetic power in one of the epic's few extended pieces of marvel. And the returning party stops there on the last day of the fourteenth year, from which Hanumān is sent ahead to Nandigrāma with the news.
The place
Prayāga — the modern Prayagraj, called Allahabad from the Mughal period to 2018 — is the confluence of the Ganges and the Yamuna, and one of the most important sacred sites in India. Tradition adds an invisible third river, the Sarasvatī, meeting them underground.
It is the principal site of the Kumbh Mela, the largest periodic gathering of people anywhere in the world, and the confluence itself is a place of bathing and of immersion of ashes throughout the year. The Aśokan pillar at the fort there carries, among other inscriptions, the panegyric of the Gupta emperor Samudragupta.
The epic's Prayāga is a forest hermitage at a river junction. Everything else came later, but the sanctity of the confluence is assumed by the poem rather than explained by it.
The confluence
The meeting of a dark river and a pale one is visible at Prayāga, and the epic treats the place as already sacred when its characters arrive. Bharadvāja's hermitage stands there, the exiles halt, and the poem describes the crossing of the Yamunā on a raft of wood and bamboo with a certain amount of care.
Tradition adds a third river, the Sarasvatī, meeting the other two underground — a claim that connects the site to the lost river of the Vedic hymns and that cannot be tested. The confluence is called the Triveṇī, the triple braid, on that account.
The feast for an army
The one extended marvel in the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa happens here. Bharadvāja, receiving Bharata's army, entertains it by ascetic power: houses appear, food and drink in quantity, music, and attendants, and the whole force spends a night in a hospitality it cannot account for in the morning.
The passage is doing something specific. The book has spent chapters on a king who could not keep a promise and a prince who gave up a kingdom; it now shows an ascetic who can produce, out of nothing, more than a kingdom's worth of anything he likes. The comparison between the two kinds of power is the point.
The place afterwards
Prayāga became one of the principal sacred sites of India — a bathing place, a site for the immersion of ashes, the location of the Kumbh Mela, and the seat of an Aśokan pillar later inscribed with the Gupta emperor Samudragupta's panegyric. It was renamed Allahabad under the Mughals and Prayagraj in 2018.
Further reading
- Bakker, Hans. Ayodhya. Egbert Forsten, 1986
- Basham, A. L. The Wonder That Was India. Sidgwick & Jackson, 1954
- 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
- Thapar, Romila. Early India: From the Origins to AD 1300. Penguin, 2002
See also
- Bharadvāja — Bharadvāja is the sage of Prayāga in the Rāmāyaṇa, who received the exiles at the confluence and sent them on to Citrakūṭa, and who later entertained Bharata's whole army by ascetic power.
- Citrakūṭa — Citrakūṭa is the hill in the Rāmāyaṇa where the exiles settled first, where Daśaratha's death reached them, and where Bharata came with an army to ask his brother to come home.
- The exile of Rāma — The exile of Rāma is the departure of the prince, his wife and his brother from Ayodhyā for fourteen years in the Rāmāyaṇa, accepted without argument on the day he was to have been consecrated.
- Śṛṅgaverapura — Śṛṅgaverapura is the town of the Niṣāda chief Guha on the Gaṅgā in the Rāmāyaṇa, where the exiles spent their first night out of Ayodhyā and crossed the river.
- 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.
- Bharata — Bharata is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, whose mother Kaikeyī won him the throne and who refused it, ruling Kosala from a village outside the capital with his brother's sandals set on the seat of power.
- Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa — The Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa is the second book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Kaikeyī's two boons send Rāma into exile, Daśaratha dies of grief, and Bharata refuses the throne — the most human and least supernatural stretch of the epic.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.