In the story
Tārā is the daughter of the vānara physician Suṣeṇa and the wife of Vālī. She appears three times, and each time she is right.
When Sugrīva returns to challenge Vālī a second time, having been beaten badly the first, Tārā reads the situation correctly: a defeated man does not come back the next day unless he has found a protector, and she has heard that the protector is an Ikṣvāku prince of formidable reputation. She begs her husband not to go out, and proposes that he make peace with his brother and acknowledge Aṅgada as heir. Vālī dismisses it and is killed.
Her lament over his body is among the great passages of grief in the poem — long, formal, and specific, addressing the corpse, the kingdom, her son and Rāma in turn. She asks Rāma to kill her too, since he has taken what she lived for and left the rest.
Her third appearance is the most consequential. When Lakṣmaṇa comes to Kiṣkindhā in a fury at Sugrīva's failure to keep his oath, with the streets emptying before him, it is Tārā who goes out to meet him. She does not deny the fault; she takes it on the household, points out that a man long deprived is not quickly satisfied, reminds him that Rāma himself is not immune to desire, and gets him to the point of hearing an apology. The army is summoned within days.
Her position
Tārā passes to Sugrīva as his consort after Vālī's death, and the poem records this without comment or justification. That silence is one of the places where the epic's world is furthest from a modern reader's, and it sits oddly beside the fact that Vālī's taking of Sugrīva's wife is cited by Rāma as a capital offence.
Later tradition counts her among the five women named in the verse recited for the removal of sin. Her inclusion, like Ahalyā's and Mandodarī's, is a deliberate assertion that a woman's merit is not determined by the regularity of her marriages — and the grouping itself is later than Vālmīki.
The three interventions
Tārā's function in the fourth book is to be right when nobody wants her to be. She reads Sugrīva's second challenge correctly and is ignored. She laments over the consequence. And she then prevents a second catastrophe by talking Lakṣmaṇa out of destroying Kiṣkindhā — the only diplomatic success in the book.
Her method with Lakṣmaṇa is worth noting: she does not deny the fault or plead, she reframes it. A man long deprived is not quickly satisfied; Rāma himself has known desire; the delay is a household's failure and not a betrayal; and the army can be summoned now.
The lament
Her speech over Vālī's body is one of the epic's set-piece laments and is constructed with some formality — addressing the corpse, then the kingdom, then her son, then Rāma, whom she asks to kill her as well, since he has taken the thing she lived for and left the rest.
Vālmīki gives comparable speeches to Mandodarī and to Kausalyā. Together they are the poem's most sustained attention to what a war costs the women left standing over the bodies.
What is not said
Tārā passes to Sugrīva after Vālī's death and the poem records it without comment — no ceremony, no reaction from her, no justification. Given that Vālī's taking of Sugrīva's wife is the offence Rāma cites to justify killing him, the silence is conspicuous, and readers have been pointing at it for a long time.
Further reading
- Bose, Mandakranta. The Ramayana Revisited. Oxford University Press, 2004
- Bose, Mandakranta. A Woman's Ramayana: Candravati's Bengali Epic. Routledge, 2013
- 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
See also
- 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.
- 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.
- Aṅgada — Aṅgada is the son of Vālī and Tārā in the Rāmāyaṇa, made crown prince of Kiṣkindhā at his father's dying request, who led the southern search and went as Rāma's envoy to Rāvaṇa's court.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Suṣeṇa — Suṣeṇa is the vānara physician in the Rāmāyaṇa, father of Tārā, who identified the healing herbs of the northern mountain and revived Lakṣmaṇa when Rāvaṇa's spear had felled him.
- Kiṣkindhā Kāṇḍa — The Kiṣkindhā Kāṇḍa is the fourth book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Rāma allies with the exiled monkey king Sugrīva, kills his brother Vālī from concealment, and the search parties are sent out to find Sītā.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.