Sugrīva

In the story

Sugrīva is the younger of the two vānara brothers of Kiṣkindhā. The quarrel that drives him out begins in loyalty: Vālī pursues an asura into a cave, tells his brother to wait, and does not come out; after a long vigil Sugrīva sees blood at the mouth of the cave, concludes his brother is dead, blocks the entrance to keep the demon in, and returns to be made king. Vālī comes back, reads all of this as usurpation, drives him out and takes his wife Rumā. Sugrīva shelters on the hill of Ṛṣyamūka, which an old curse prevents Vālī from entering, with four companions.

There he meets Rāma. The alliance is sworn before a fire and is exactly symmetrical: each has lost a wife and a position, and each undertakes to recover the other's. Sugrīva produces the bundle of ornaments that a woman being carried overhead had let fall on the hill, and Rāma identifies them. He challenges Vālī, is beaten the first time because Rāma cannot tell the brothers apart, and wins the second when Rāma shoots his brother from cover.

Crowned, he then does nothing at all. Through the four months of the rains and into the autumn he stays in the palace in drink and pleasure, and the search he swore to mount does not begin. Lakṣmaṇa comes to Kiṣkindhā in a rage that clears the streets; Tārā, Vālī's widow and now Sugrīva's queen, meets him and talks him down; and Sugrīva, roused, summons the hosts within days and sends them to the four quarters. Thereafter he is a competent and committed commander, fights at Laṅkā, and rules Kiṣkindhā after the war.

What he is for

Sugrīva is the epic's portrait of an ordinary man among heroes, and the poem is not sentimental about him. He is loyal but not steady, brave but not disciplined, and grateful in a way that lasts exactly as long as his comfort is threatened. He does not betray Rāma; he simply forgets, which the poem treats as worse in a way, because there is no drama in it.

The comparison the epic invites is with Rāma himself, who keeps a promise made by someone else, at enormous cost, for fourteen years. Sugrīva cannot keep his own for four months. That contrast is the reason the Kiṣkindhā Kāṇḍa spends as long as it does on a monkey king's holiday.

He is also the mechanism by which the war becomes possible. Without the vānara army there is no crossing, no siege and no victory, and the alliance that produces it is not a matter of virtue on either side but of two dispossessed parties finding each other useful.

The pact

The alliance at Ṛṣyamūka is one of the epic's most precisely drawn political arrangements. Neither party is doing the other a favour. Sugrīva needs a kingdom and a wife back and has no means of getting them; Rāma needs troops and search capacity and has none. Each has exactly what the other lacks, and the oath is sworn at a fire with a formula that makes the exchange explicit.

The poem is unsentimental about this. The vānara army that wins the war is not raised by devotion or by the recognition of Rāma's divinity; it is raised by a bargain, and it very nearly fails when one party's need is satisfied first.

The recovery

What redeems Sugrīva is what happens after Lakṣmaṇa's fury. He does not make excuses or negotiate. He accepts the reproach, admits the fault, and produces an army within days — and the epic notes the scale of it, hosts summoned from every direction and arriving on time.

Thereafter he is faultless. He fights at Laṅkā, is nearly killed by Kumbhakarṇa, takes his part in the war's decisions, and survives it. The poem's judgement on him is that a man may be weak without being worthless, which is a more forgiving position than it takes with anyone else.