In the story
Śatrughna is Sumitrā's second son and Lakṣmaṇa's twin, and the poem pairs the four brothers two by two: Lakṣmaṇa goes wherever Rāma goes, Śatrughna wherever Bharata goes. He is at Kekaya with Bharata when the exile is exacted, returns with him, and spends the fourteen years at Nandigrāma in the regency rather than in the forest.
His one memorable moment in the early books is violent. Seeing Mantharā decked in the finery Kaikeyī has given her, he seizes the hunchbacked servant, drags her by the hair and is on the point of killing her when Bharata stops him — on the grounds that Rāma would not approve of killing a woman, and that the fault is not finally hers. It is the only time the youngest brother acts on his own initiative in the core poem, and the poem treats it as an understandable failure rather than as a virtue.
His campaign comes in the seventh book. Sent against the rākṣasa Lavaṇa, who holds the country on the Yamunā and possesses an invincible trident, he waits until the weapon is out of Lavaṇa's hands, kills him, and founds the city of Madhurā on the site — the city later associated with Kṛṣṇa. He rules it for many years, and at the end installs his sons there and joins his brothers at the Sarayū.
His place
Śatrughna is the least drawn of the four and the tradition has noticed. His name means slayer of enemies, and he does relatively little slaying; his significance in the poem is structural, completing a pattern of four brothers who between them cover the possible relations to power — the one who loses it, the one who refuses it, the one who serves, and the one who follows. In temple images of the Rāma family he stands with Bharata, and he receives little independent worship.
The pattern of four
The four brothers are arranged as two pairs, and the arrangement carries the epic's argument about kinds of loyalty. Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa go; Bharata and Śatrughna stay. Lakṣmaṇa serves the brother who has lost everything; Śatrughna serves the brother who has been given everything and refused it. Each pair contains an elder who makes the decisions and a younger who executes them without question.
Śatrughna is the least individuated of the four because the structure needs a fourth term more than the story needs a fourth character. His single independent act — the attack on Mantharā — is the exception that establishes the rule, and it is immediately overruled.
Madhurā
The seventh book gives him the one campaign of his own. Sent against the rākṣasa Lavaṇa, who holds the country on the Yamunā with an invincible trident, Śatrughna waits until the weapon is out of his hands, kills him, and founds a city on the site.
The city is Madhurā — Mathura, which would become the centre of the Kṛṣṇa tradition. The epic's genealogy thus quietly connects the Rāmāyaṇa's youngest brother to the ground on which the other great Vaiṣṇava incarnation would be born, and later tradition has made a good deal of the link.
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
- 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.
- Lakṣmaṇa — Lakṣmaṇa is Rāma's younger brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, who follows him into exile and serves fourteen years as guard and companion, mutilates Śūrpaṇakhā, kills Indrajit, and carries out the order to abandon Sītā.
- Mantharā — Mantharā is the hunchbacked maidservant of Kaikeyī in the Rāmāyaṇa who persuades her mistress to demand the two boons, and whose speech alone sets the entire epic in motion.
- Sumitrā — Sumitrā is the middle queen of Daśaratha in the Rāmāyaṇa, mother of Lakṣmaṇa and Śatrughna, whose farewell to her departing son is remembered as the epic's model of maternal composure.
- 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.
- Māṇḍavī and Śrutakīrti — Māṇḍavī and Śrutakīrti are the daughters of Kuśadhvaja in the Rāmāyaṇa, cousins of Sītā, married to Bharata and Śatrughna in the fourfold wedding at Mithilā and then almost entirely absent from the poem.
- Nandigrāma — Nandigrāma is the village outside Ayodhyā in the Rāmāyaṇa from which Bharata governed Kosala for fourteen years, with Rāma's sandals on the throne, refusing to enter the capital.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.