Rāma

The life

Rāma is the eldest son of Daśaratha of Ayodhyā by his senior queen Kausalyā, born after a sacrifice performed to end the king's childlessness. He is raised to rule. As a boy he is taken by the sage Viśvāmitra into the forest to protect a sacrifice, kills the rākṣasī Tāṭakā, receives a store of divine weapons, and at Mithilā strings and breaks the bow of Śiva that no suitor has managed to lift, winning Sītā.

On the eve of his consecration as heir, the second queen Kaikeyī calls in two old boons: her own son Bharata to be crowned, and Rāma to go to the forest for fourteen years. He accepts within moments of being told, and the poem is careful to record that his face does not change. Sītā and his brother Lakṣmaṇa go with him.

In the forest the exile becomes a war. Rāma protects the hermitages of the Daṇḍaka against rākṣasas; his brother mutilates Rāvaṇa's sister Śūrpaṇakhā after she is refused and turns on Sītā; Rāma alone destroys the army sent in reprisal; and Rāvaṇa, provoked and enticed, carries Sītā off. Rāma searches, allies himself with the dispossessed monkey king Sugrīva, kills Sugrīva's brother Vālī, and sends the monkey hosts to look for her. Hanumān finds her. An army crosses the sea on a causeway, Laṅkā is besieged, and Rāma kills Rāvaṇa in single combat with the weapon of Brahmā.

What follows is the hardest passage in the poem. Sītā is brought before the army and Rāma tells her, in public, that he fought to wipe out an insult to his house and not for her sake, and that she may go where she likes. She walks into fire and is given back unburnt. They return, the fourteen years having ended to the day, and he is crowned.

In the seventh book, hearing that his subjects doubt his wife, he has the pregnant Sītā abandoned in the forest, rules alone, and at the end walks into the Sarayū and leaves the world.

The man in the poem

In the five central books Rāma is chiefly a human being. He grieves loudly and at length when Sītā is taken, and the poem does not present the grief as a failure. He is capable of rage — he threatens to destroy the ocean when it will not answer him — and of error, and of arguments he cannot win. His divinity is not the frame the story is told in. After the fire ordeal, Brahmā tells him plainly that he is Viṣṇu, and this is in the critical text of the sixth book; but the sustained treatment of him as God belongs to the first and seventh books, which are later, and to the whole devotional tradition after them.

What the core poem is interested in is his fidelity to a given word, at a cost the poem tallies precisely. He accepts an exile that everyone around him — his mother, his brother, the brahmin Jābāli, the citizens of Ayodhyā, Bharata himself — tells him is unjust and revocable. His answer is that a word does not stop binding because the man who gave it has died or because keeping it is expensive.

The same principle produces the epic's two great scandals. He shoots Vālī from concealment during a fight he is not part of, and Vālī, dying, tells him exactly what is wrong with it; the defence Rāma offers has never satisfied anyone. He repudiates Sītā in public and later abandons her, and the justification in both cases is what a king owes his subjects' opinion of him. The poem gives its hero the best case available and then lets his victims answer, at length, in their own voices. That is unusual, and it is why the Rāmāyaṇa has remained arguable for two thousand years rather than settling into a moral lesson.

Maryādā-puruṣottama

The title by which Rāma is best known is maryādā-puruṣottama — the supreme person of the boundary, the man who keeps within limits. It contrasts him deliberately with Kṛṣṇa, the other great Vaiṣṇava incarnation, whose whole significance is the crossing of limits. Rāma's greatness is not that he transcends the rules but that he does not, ever, even when transcending them would be kinder.

The tradition has always understood this as a serious claim about what an ideal is for. A model who is admirable because he breaks no rule is also a model who can be measured, and the epic measures him.

Rāma as God

Rāma's worship as a distinct and supreme deity is not as old as the poem. He appears in the classical lists of Viṣṇu's ten descents, but the great flowering of Rāma devotion belongs to the medieval period — the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, the Rāmānandī order, Kamban in Tamil, Tulsīdās in Awadhi — after which Rāma temples, the recitation of his name, and the figure of Hanumān as the model devotee become central to North Indian religion in particular.

In that devotion the human difficulties of the epic are largely resolved. The shadow-Sītā device removes the problem of the abduction; the fire ordeal becomes a mechanism of restoration rather than a test; the banishment is often simply not told. The Rāma most Indians know is this Rāma, and he is not quite the one in the Sanskrit.

Beyond the text

Rāma's name is one of the most widely used words in Indian religious life: as a greeting, as a form of address to the dead, as the syllables of continuous repetition in a dozen traditions, and as the constituent of countless personal names. Rāma-rājya, his reign, became and remains the standard Indian phrase for good government — used by Gandhi to mean a just and self-governing order, and by others since to mean other things.

The arc of the character

The Rāmāyaṇa does not present a man who changes. Rāma at the end holds the same principle he held on the night of the exile, and applies it in the same way, and that consistency is the point: he is the fixed thing against which everyone else's compromises are measured. What changes is the cost. In the second book the principle costs him a kingdom; in the sixth it costs him his marriage; in the seventh it costs him his wife.

The poem is unusually attentive to his grief, which is not the conventional restraint of an epic hero. When Sītā is taken he is nearly unmanageable — he searches, questions trees, threatens to destroy the world, and has to be talked down by his brother at length. When he is told that Lakṣmaṇa is dead he says he can find another wife but not another brother. These passages are not weaknesses the poem apologizes for; they are what makes the fidelity worth admiring, because it is exercised by someone with a great deal to lose.

What he is not

Two habits distort him in popular accounts. The first is to read the devotional Rāma back into the epic — the God who is only pretending to suffer, for whom the exile is a performance and the ordeal a formality. That figure is real and important, but he belongs to the Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa and to Tulsīdās, and reading him into Vālmīki empties the poem of its difficulty.

The second is to treat Rāma as a straightforward patriarchal ideal, endorsed without reservation by the text. The epic that gave the tradition its model husband also gave it Sītā's answer to him, Vālī's accusation, Jābāli's argument that the whole moral framework is a fiction, and a seventh book in which the ideal king destroys his own family. The Rāmāyaṇa is not a brief for its hero; it is a case file.