In the story
Rumā is Sugrīva's wife, seized by Vālī and kept in his household after Sugrīva was driven out of Kiṣkindhā. She has no scene of her own; her importance is entirely in what is said about her.
When the dying Vālī cross-examines Rāma about the arrow that killed him, Rāma's second and strongest justification is Rumā: Vālī took his younger brother's wife while the brother lived, and in the law Rāma cites a younger brother's wife stands to a man as a daughter-in-law does, so that the act is one for which death is the ordained penalty. She is restored to Sugrīva with the kingdom.
The uncomfortable symmetry
The argument is undercut by what happens next. Vālī's own widow Tārā passes to Sugrīva after his death, and the poem records it without comment or condemnation. What is a capital offence in the first case is unremarked in the second, and the epic offers no distinction between them.
This is one of the places where the Rāmāyaṇa's moral reasoning is visibly serving its plot rather than the other way round, and readers have noticed for a long time. Rumā's function is to supply Rāma with a justification he needs, and the poem gives her nothing else — not a speech, not a reaction, not a scene.
What the epic does not give her
Rumā has no speech, no scene and no reaction. She is taken, she is cited in an argument about whether a killing was lawful, and she is restored. The whole of her existence in the poem is as a term in someone else's justification.
That is worth stating plainly, because the argument she features in is the epic's most closely reasoned, and the person at the centre of it is never asked anything.
The asymmetry
Rāma tells the dying Vālī that taking a younger brother's wife is a capital offence, since in law she stands as a daughter to him. A few chapters later Vālī's widow Tārā becomes Sugrīva's consort, and the epic records it in a clause.
Whatever principle was invoked over Rumā is not applied to Tārā, and the poem offers no distinction. It is one of the clearest places where the Rāmāyaṇa's reasoning is visibly shaped to fit its plot.
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
- Sugrīva — Sugrīva is the vānara king of Kiṣkindhā in the Rāmāyaṇa, driven out by his brother Vālī over a misunderstanding, restored by Rāma's arrow, and the ally whose army wins the war after he has nearly forgotten his promise.
- Vālī — Vālī is the vānara king of Kiṣkindhā in the Rāmāyaṇa, the strongest of his kind, who drove out his brother Sugrīva and was killed by an arrow Rāma loosed from concealment — the epic's most argued-over act.
- The killing of Vālī — Rāma's killing of the vānara king Vālī from behind cover, during a wrestling match with his brother, is the most argued-over act in the Rāmāyaṇa — and the poem lets the dying man say so.
- Tārā of Kiṣkindhā — Tārā is the queen of Vālī in the Rāmāyaṇa, the shrewdest counsellor in Kiṣkindhā, who warned her husband against the fight that killed him and later talked Lakṣmaṇa out of destroying the city.
- Kiṣkindhā — Kiṣkindhā is the vānara kingdom of the Rāmāyaṇa, ruled by Vālī and then by Sugrīva, where Rāma made the alliance that won him the war.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.