In the story
Trijaṭā is one of the rākṣasīs set to watch Sītā in the aśoka grove and to wear her down. When the others are threatening to eat her, Trijaṭā stops them by telling a dream: Rāma coming radiant on a white elephant, Sītā seated on a white mountain, Rāvaṇa smeared with oil and hung with red garlands, dragged southward in a cart drawn by donkeys, and Laṅkā fallen into the sea. She advises the guards to beg Sītā's pardon while there is still time to be worth pardoning.
The scene is dramatically necessary. Hanumān is in the tree above, and Trijaṭā's dream is what allows Sītā to be left alone long enough for him to speak to her.
She appears again later, when Rāvaṇa parades Sītā in a chariot to show her the bodies of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa felled by serpent-weapons, and Sītā believes them dead. Trijaṭā tells her they are alive and shows her the signs — the army still ordered, the horses unstartled, her own face still bright.
Why she is there
Trijaṭā is the epic's insistence that kindness is not distributed by species or allegiance. She is a rākṣasī of Laṅkā with no reason to help her king's prisoner, and she helps her twice, at some risk, on the strength of nothing but decency. The poem puts her in the same book as Vibhīṣaṇa and makes the same point twice.
Tulsīdās expanded her greatly, making her a devotee and giving her a much larger part in the Sundar Kāṇḍ; some later versions make her Vibhīṣaṇa's daughter. Neither is in Vālmīki.
The dream
Trijaṭā's dream is reported in detail, and it uses the conventional Indian vocabulary of ill omen with some care: Rāvaṇa smeared with oil, garlanded in red, drunk, dragged southward — the direction of death — in a cart drawn by donkeys, falling into mud; Laṅkā burnt and sunk in the sea; and against that Rāma on a white elephant and Sītā on a white mountain.
Its function in the scene is mechanical as well as moral. The guards are frightened into silence, and the silence is what allows Hanumān, watching from the tree, to approach Sītā at all.
The second intervention
Later, when Rāvaṇa parades Sītā past what appear to be the bodies of Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, felled by serpent-weapons, it is Trijaṭā who tells her they are alive and shows her how to read the field: the army still in formation, the horses unstartled, the standards up, and her own face still bright, which the epic treats as a reliable sign.
She is thus twice the reason Sītā does not give up, and neither time does she have anything to gain by it.
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
- Sītā — Sītā is the wife of Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa, found by King Janaka in a furrow, carried off by Rāvaṇa and held for a year in Laṅkā without yielding, and vindicated by fire only to be abandoned by her husband in the epic's last book.
- The aśoka grove — The aśoka grove is the garden in Laṅkā where Sītā was held for a year in the Rāmāyaṇa, guarded by rākṣasīs, refusing Rāvaṇa, and where Hanumān found her.
- Laṅkā — Laṅkā is Rāvaṇa's island city in the Rāmāyaṇa, taken from his half-brother Kubera, burned by Hanumān and besieged by Rāma — traditionally identified with Sri Lanka, though the epic does not settle the question.
- Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
- Sundara Kāṇḍa — The Sundara Kāṇḍa is the fifth book of the Rāmāyaṇa, in which Hanumān leaps the ocean, finds Sītā alive in the aśoka grove of Laṅkā and burns the city — the one book recited on its own as a devotional text in households that know little of the rest.
- Hanumān — Hanumān is the vānara minister of Sugrīva in the Rāmāyaṇa who leaps the ocean to find Sītā in Laṅkā and burns the city, and who became in later devotion the model of service and one of the most widely worshipped deities in India.
- Saramā — Saramā is the rākṣasī of the Rāmāyaṇa who befriended Sītā in captivity, exposed Rāvaṇa's illusion of Rāma's severed head, and carried her news of the war outside.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.