The story
Daśaratha tells it on the night he dies, to Kausalyā, having never told anyone.
As a young man he had the skill of shooting at sound alone. Hunting by night at the Sarayū, he heard what he took for an elephant filling itself at the water and loosed. What he had hit was a young hermit filling a pitcher for his blind and aged parents. The dying youth — who says of himself that he is not a brahmin, being born of a vaiśya father and a śūdra mother — asks the king to go to his parents, who are waiting and cannot fetch water for themselves.
Daśaratha goes and tells them. The father's curse is exact: that the king shall die as they are dying, grieving for a son. Then the two ask to be taken to the body, have a pyre built, and enter it.
Why the story is where it is
Daśaratha remembers this at the moment the curse comes true, and the placement gives the epic's opening catastrophe a second and older cause. Kaikeyī's boons are the mechanism; the arrow at the river is the reason. The poem does not choose between them.
It is also one of the few places where the Rāmāyaṇa allows an ordinary person outside the story's world to pass judgement on a king, and the judgement sticks.
The name
Vālmīki leaves the youth unnamed. The name Śravaṇa Kumāra, and the familiar image of him carrying his blind parents on a pilgrimage in baskets slung from a pole across his shoulders — which is how he is depicted in calendar art and taught to children as the model of filial devotion — belong to later and folk tradition. The pilgrimage is not in the epic at all: in Vālmīki he is simply a young man fetching water.
The unnamed
Vālmīki gives the youth no name, and gives him one striking line of self-description: he tells the king not to fear the sin of killing a brahmin, because he is not one — his father is a vaiśya and his mother a śūdra. The detail is offered to console the killer.
The epic then has the blind father's curse fall on a king anyway, with full force, and the curse is what eventually destroys the house of Ikṣvāku's peace. The poem does not comment on the arrangement.
The name and the baskets
Śravaṇa Kumāra, and the image of a son carrying his blind parents on pilgrimage in baskets slung from a pole, belong to later and folk tradition. That version is taught to children across northern India as the model of filial duty, and it is what most people mean by the story.
In Vālmīki he is simply a young man fetching water at night for parents who cannot fetch it themselves, and the whole episode lasts a few dozen verses.
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
- Daśaratha — Daśaratha is the king of Ayodhyā and father of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, destroyed by two boons he had granted his favourite queen decades earlier and could neither refuse nor survive.
- 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.
- Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa — The Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa is the second book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Kaikeyī's two boons send Rāma into exile, Daśaratha dies of grief, and Bharata refuses the throne — the most human and least supernatural stretch of the epic.
- The exile of Rāma — The exile of Rāma is the departure of the prince, his wife and his brother from Ayodhyā for fourteen years in the Rāmāyaṇa, accepted without argument on the day he was to have been consecrated.
- Kausalyā — Kausalyā is the senior queen of Daśaratha and the mother of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, whose position at court had long been eclipsed by Kaikeyī and who nearly refused to let her son go.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.