What happens
The book opens backward. Sages come to the newly crowned Rāma and recount the ancestry of the enemy he has just killed: Rāvaṇa's descent from Brahmā through Pulastya and Viśravas, his mother Kaikasī, his brothers Kumbhakarṇa and Vibhīṣaṇa and his sister Śūrpaṇakhā, the austerities by which he won his boon, his seizure of Laṅkā and the Puṣpaka from his half-brother Kubera, and a long record of his violences — including the rape of Rambhā and the curse that follows it, which is why he does not force Sītā. Hanumān's childhood is told here too: the leap at the sun mistaken for fruit, the blow that broke his jaw and gave him his name, and the curse that made him forget his own strength until someone reminded him of it.
Then the book moves forward into the reign, and darkens. A washerman, quarrelling with his wife, says that he is not Rāma, to take back a woman who has lived in another man's house. The remark reaches the king through the informers he keeps to know what is said of him. Rāma judges that a ruler cannot govern under such talk, and has the pregnant Sītā taken to the forest on the pretext of a visit she had asked for, and abandoned there. Lakṣmaṇa carries out the order and cannot bring himself to tell her why until the boat has landed. She is received at Vālmīki's hermitage and bears twin sons, Lava and Kuśa, who are raised there and taught the poem their father's life has become.
Years later Rāma performs a horse sacrifice, with a golden image of Sītā in place of the wife the rite requires, having refused to take another. The boys sing the Rāmāyaṇa at the assembly, twenty sections a day, and the king recognizes first the poem and then the singers. He sends for Sītā and asks her to swear her innocence once more before the gathering. She comes, and instead of swearing calls on the earth, her mother, to take her back if she has been true to Rāma in thought; the earth opens, a throne rises, and she is received and does not return. Rāma is left standing.
He rules on alone for a long time. Lakṣmaṇa, caught by an impossible arrangement of vows, is dismissed and dies. At the end Rāma divides the kingdom between his sons, walks into the Sarayū with the city following him, and resumes his celestial form.
The book also carries the killing of Śambūka, a śūdra performing austerities, whose practice is held to be out of order for his birth and whose death restores a dead brahmin child to life; and the story of Nṛga, of Nimi, and other embedded tales.
Textual status and reception
The Uttara Kāṇḍa is generally held, with the Bāla Kāṇḍa, to be later than the five books between them. The sixth book ends with a formal conclusion and a statement of the merit of hearing the poem; the seventh reopens a story that had been closed. Its Sanskrit differs, its interests are genealogical and theological where the core is dramatic, and it treats Rāma's divinity as settled fact rather than as something disclosed at the end.
No part of the epic has been more fought over. The banishment and the killing of Śambūka have been read as the point at which the poem's own ideal turns on itself: the king who accepted an unjust exile to keep his father's word now inflicts one to keep his reputation. Both episodes are central to modern anti-caste and feminist readings of the tradition, and to a long line of retellings — in Bengali, Telugu, Kannada, Hindi and English — that give Sītā the last word.
Many regional versions simply leave the book off. Kamban ends at the coronation. Tulsīdās includes an Uttara Kāṇḍa but fills it with discourse and devotion rather than the banishment. What the tradition has never done is ignore it: the argument about the seventh book is one of the longest-running arguments in Indian letters.
Further reading
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Sundarakanda. Princeton University Press, 1996
- Hart, George L. The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan. University of California Press, 1988
- Pollock, Sheldon. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Aranyakanda. Princeton University Press, 1991
- Sattar, Arshia. Valmiki's Ramayana. Harper Collins, 1996
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- Bāla Kāṇḍa — The Bāla Kāṇḍa is the first book of the Rāmāyaṇa, covering Rāma's birth, his first expedition with the sage Viśvāmitra and his marriage to Sītā, and generally held with the seventh to be a later addition to the poem's core.
- The banishment of Sītā — The banishment of Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book is Rāma's decision, on hearing that his subjects doubt her, to have his pregnant wife taken to the forest and abandoned there.
- Lava and Kuśa — Lava and Kuśa are the twin sons of Rāma and Sītā in the Rāmāyaṇa, born at Vālmīki's hermitage after their mother's banishment and raised there, who sang their father's story to him at his horse sacrifice without knowing whose sons they were.
- Śambūka — Śambūka is the śūdra ascetic in the Rāmāyaṇa's seventh book whom Rāma beheads for performing austerities forbidden to his birth — the poem's most contested killing.
- Rāma's departure — Rāma's departure at the end of the Rāmāyaṇa is his walk into the river Sarayū, with the population of Ayodhyā following him, after dividing the kingdom between his sons.
- Sītā's ordeal and the epic's own doubts — Sītā's treatment after the war — the public repudiation, the fire, the banishment and her final refusal — is the Rāmāyaṇa's most contested material, and the subject of more counter-writing than any other episode in Indian literature.
- 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.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.