For 10 years, Rāma and his companions live relatively peacefully in the forest, notwithstanding the various ogres wandering about intent on mischief. Trouble really starts when the ogress Śūrpaṇakhā, Ravaṇa's sister, espies Rāma and tries unsuccessfully to seduce him. She fails similarly with Lakṣmaṇa. Infuriated by the brothers’ mockery, she attacks Sītā, and Rāma instructs his brother to cut off Śūrpaṇakhā’s nose and ears in punishment. The humiliated and enraged ogress seeks revenge, in due course getting Ravaṇa to agree to abduct Sītā and leave the hapless Rāma to face this grievous loss. To accomplish this end, Rāvaṇa persuades an ogre, Mārīca, to lure Rāma away from Sītā in the form of a beautiful deer. At Sītā’s behest, Rāma hunts the deer and pierces Mārīca with an arrow; thus stricken, with his last gasp Mārīca imitates Rāma's voice. Lakṣmaṇa sets out to investigate, leaving Sītā alone to be carried off by Ravaṇa.
Rāvaṇa is described in fearsome terms in the epic. In some passages he is given ten heads and twenty arms. But as Brockington points out: ‘The inconsistency between allusions to one or ten heads, two or twenty arms appears present throughout [the epic]’ (1984:15). Perhaps this was a way of referring metaphorically to great strength, fierceness and acumen. The ogre-king imprisons Sītā in a grove of aśoka trees in his island stronghold of Lakā. There she is given a year to decide whether to submit to Rāvaṇa or die. Meanwhile Rāma, utterly bereft at Sītā’s loss, is advised to seek an alliance with Sugrīva, the banished brother of the monkey-king Vālin. They make a pact: Rāma will assist Sugrīva to kill Vālin, and Sugrīva will help Rāma to find Sītā. Rāma controversially ambushes Vālin while the latter is engaged in mortal combat with Sugrīva (another much discussed episode), and in return Sugrīva, now king in Vālin's place, sends search parties to locate Sītā.
Hanumān, a heroic monkey in Sugrīva's camp, leads the party that eventually discovers that Sītā is being held on the island of Lakā. He has been given Rāma's ring as a token for Sītā. Hanumān agrees to cross over to Lakā to investigate. He reaches Lakā in marvellous fashion (by becoming immense and leaping over the sea), finds Sītā in her secluded grove, and reassures her by showing her Rāma's ring. Sītā refuses to return surreptitiously with him; as a faithful wife, she wants her husband to rescue her himself. So, after various adventures on the island (which include torching Lakā with his flaming tail which Ravaṇa had set on fire as a punishment – another well-loved episode), Hanumān returns to the mainland and to Rāma. There is not much time to effect the rescue, for Sītā had informed Hanumān that there were only two months left before Ravaṇa was due to carry out his threat.
By this time, we have reached the sixth book of the poem, which describes the great battle between the monkey-armies of Rāma and the ogre-armies of Rāvaṇa. Apprised of Sītā’s whereabouts, Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa and their allies come to land's end before Lakā. Here Vibhīṣaṇa, Ravaṇa's brother, defects and joins them as the side upholding dharma. They cross over to Lakā (the monkeys throw boulders into the sea to make a causeway), and prepare for battle. Meanwhile Ravaṇa tries one last ploy to overcome Sītā: he shows her the illusion of Rāma's severed head, but this trick fails.
A terrific battle follows, in which great warriors take part and terrible deeds are done on both sides. During the course of the battle, where first one side and then the other seems to be winning, both Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa are laid low. Hanumān speeds to a mountain to procure a rare healing herb, which he cannot find. So he returns with the whole mountain, thus enabling Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa to be revived. After many duels between various combatants (including one in which Rāma dispatches Kumbhakarṇa, a brother of Rāvaṇa, after he had been woken from a long sleep to wreak destruction on the monkey-army), Rāma kills Rāvaṇa in single combat and the battle is won. Vibhīṣaṇa is installed as king of Lakā and Sītā and Rāma meet again. But Rāma greets her coldly and is reluctant to accept her because she has lived under another male's protection. Adding insult to injury, he tells her that he has fought this battle to uphold the honour of his house. Sītā’s innocence is proved through an ordeal by fire, and this induces Rāma to take her back. The period of exile being over, Rāma and his party return speedily to Ayodhyā by an aerial device. There a delighted Bharata restores the kingdom to his brother and Rāma is crowned king in glorious fashion, ready to initiate a 10000 year period of righteous rule or Rāma-rājya.
In the final book, which is a sort of epilogue, we are given a miscellany of information; we are told of Ravaṇa's depredations before he met Rāma, of Hanumān's early career, and what happened after Rāma becomes king. For some time Rāma and Sītā live happily together, but then rumours spread casting doubt on Sītā’s fidelity while she was in Lakā. Rāma, the symbol of dharma, cannot allow the reputation of his reign to be tarnished, so he reluctantly exiles his pregnant wife, and she takes refuge in the hermitage of Vālmīki (the author of the poem itself). There she gives birth to twin sons, Kuśa and Lava.
Eventually Rāma seeks to reinstate Sītā who again protests her innocence by calling upon the earth to swallow her. The earth takes back its own (remember that Sītā was found in a furrow), and Sītā is finally lost to Rāma. Rāma, once again bereft, uses a golden statue of his wife as a replacement during various rituals that require her presence. The glorious rule of Rāma (Rāma-rājya) continues but not without further personal tragedy for Rāma: his beloved brother Lakṣmaṇa sacrifices himself in the river Sarayū which flows near the city of Ayodhyā. Finally, burdened by grief, Rāma leaves his sons in charge of the kingdom and gives up his life in the waters of the Sarayū, and returns to heaven to resume his identity as Viṣṇu.7
Here, in summary, are the colourful, exuberant, and sometimes sombre episodes of a great story beloved of Hindus across sectarian boundaries for generations and generations: a tale of heroes and villains (including ogres and talking animals), of war and passion, devotion and duty, enchanted domains, wondrous feats, and fell deeds. And at the centre of it all is the figure of Rāma, hailed from ancient times as a model of dharma in its various facets: dutiful king (even to the point of great personal sacrifice), protector of the vulnerable, avenger of the wronged, obedient son, faithful husband, loving brother, magnanimous enemy. His compassion and friendship extend to the disadvantaged, to animals, and even to conciliatory ogres. Thus, at the beginning of his exile, he accepts the assistance of and embraces Guha, the low-caste chief of the Niṣādas; in the forest, on the way to meet with Sugrīva, he is gracious to Śabarī, a low-caste woman ascetic; he befriends the monkeys in his journey southwards towards Lakā; and he welcomes the ogre Vibhīṣaṇa who acknowledges his righteous cause. Even on the battlefield, before the climax of the battle, he once spares Rāvaṇa's life.
So Rāma is the model of dharma – a dharma that cannot but be regarded as orthodox, i.e. ratified by Vedic authority. For both in the story, and with the passage of time outside it, has not his brand of dharma been approved by the Brahmins, the official guardians of the bastion of Vedic orthodoxy? Does he not endorse Veda-based sacrifice by protecting the sages who practise it in their hermitages? Has he not married according to caste requirements and behaved with dharmic propriety towards his wife? Is he not respectful towards Brahmins and does he not enact his Kṣatriya dharma by championing a righteous cause? Does not his rule from Ayodhyā establish a righteous and therefore prosperous kingdom?
Yes, to all these and further questions. But Rāma also expands, even subverts on occasion, the traditional orthodox understanding of dharma. For he fraternizes with those on the edges of Vedic society: the low or marginal castes, ‘talking animals’ and ‘friendly ogres’ (tribes outside the ‘Aryan’ pale?) – thereby humanizing them. But the crowning ‘subversion’ of all is that, in his person, Rāma so takes over the religious concern of the epic that he becomes the focus of the numerous bhakti religions or faiths of saving devotion that subsequently spring up in his name. In other words, in the Rāmā
yaṇa the seeds are sown for a devotional faith which, in effect, acts as an alternative to traditional, yajña-based Vedic religion. Viewed religiously, the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa is a platform of transition to this new religious mentality.
This is where the last strata of the epic, which include most of the material in the first and last books, become relevant. Scholars affirm that books 2–5 emphasize a human Rāma and that it is only in later strata of the epic's composition that Rāma's divine origin and status are clearly attested. But religiously this is not the point, for Hindus have traditionally regarded the epic as a unitary text and seen the references to Rāma as an embodiment or descent of the Supreme Being (in those portions of the text identified by scholars as later additions) as theological clarifications of Rama's divine status in the epic as a whole.
When the celestial or ‘god’ Brahmā addresses Rāma (in 6.105.13–28) as ‘the imperishable Brāhmaṇ, the Truth ... beyond the (created) worlds ... the Supreme Person (puruṣottama) ... Protector and Refuge ... the essence of the Vedas (vedātmā) ... the One whose origin and end no one knows’; as the One who appears in all beings, in Brahmins and in cows; as the One whose body the whole world is (jagat sarvaṃ śarīraṃ te); as the God whose devotees will never see defeat – then he but voices the sentiments of later generations of Hindus who follow the story with religious fervour. This is the Vālmīki -Rāmāyaṇa of religious devotion, the setting of the Rāma that we must come to terms with, and this is the Rāma who appears in numerous later versions of the epic, developing in theological stature in the minds and hearts of Hindu devotees. I shall have more to say about later versions of the Rāma-story further on in this chapter, but to make my point about the theological development of Rāma from the divine status he is accorded in the epic taken as a whole and its power to change lives, let me here recount the following story, based on a perception of Rāma from a sixteenth-century vernacular version of the story, i.e. the famous Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsīdās. In his Themes in Hinduism and Christianity (1989), Roger Hooker narrates how:
Once, when out for a boating-trip on the Ganges, I asked the boatman if he and his caste-fellows were well-treated by the higher castes. ‘Of course,’ he replied proudly. ‘Was it not we who took Rāma across the river?’ That laconic sentence contains a wealth of meaning. The story of Rāma was first told in the Sanskrit epic, the Rāmāyaṇa. It has been adapted and retold in many different versions, of which the best-known and most influential is the Ramacaritamanasa . . . More than any other work, this great poem has informed and nourished the devotional life of North Indian Hindus. Many people, not least the illiterate, can quote large tracts of it by heart ...
In the incident to which our boatman referred, Rāma has arrived at the banks of the Ganges; he wants to get across but this is not easy, for word has spread that the touch of his feet has turned a rock into a beautiful woman ... So Rāma calls for a boat, but the boatman refuses to bring it.
‘I know your hidden power,’ he says. ‘All say that the dust of your lotus feet is a kind of magic charm for making man. A rock touched it and became a beautiful woman; and wood is no harder than stone! If my boat becomes a hermit's wife, I shall lose my boat and my livelihood too! If, my lord, you really want to cross the river, then bid me wash your lotus feet.’
Rāma agrees, and after washing his feet and then drinking the water, the boatman takes him across the river.
(Hooker 1989:19–20)
So much for the Rāmāyaṇa for the time being. Let us now turn to its colleague, the Mahābhārata.
According to the mythic conception of time in Hinduism, the story of the Ramayaṇa is supposed to have occurred in the Dvāpara Yuga, or third of the four great ages of the world cycle (we shall review this concept of time in Chapter 13). In the Dvāpara Yuga, dharma is more firmly established than its opposite, adharma, as it manifests itself in the lives of heroic beings; at the conjunction of the Dvāpara and Kali (or last and most degenerate) Yugas, when the main action of the Mahābhārata is believed to have happened, dharma is in full decline (before it is restored at the beginning of the next world cycle), and evil is in the ascendant.
Traditionally reckoned to be about four times the length of its counterpart, the Mbh. is an even more exuberant example of the story-teller's art – it is divided into eighteen Books or parvans – and we shall have to exercise a corresponding ruthlessness in summarizing its main plot and characters.8
The Mahābhārata is the Great, i.e. Enlarged (mahā) Tale of the Bhāratas,9 a clan, this time of the lunar dynasty, which derived its name from Bharata (no relation to the Bharata of the Rā.), a descendant of Pūru whose line is traced to Yayāti, descendant of Purūravas, descendant of Soma, the celestial who manifests distinctively as the moon. The story is as follows.
Śaṃtanu, a descendant of Bharata, is king of the ancestral realm of Kurukṣetra, which is situated between the Ganges and Yamunā rivers in north India not far from the foothills of the Himalayas; he rules from his capital, Hāstinapura. Śaṃtanu's first-born son, Bhīṣma, cannot succeed him; he gave up his right to the throne (and took a vow of celibacy – hence'Bhīṣma’: ‘Awesome’) in favour of the male heirs of a late marriage of his father to Satyavatī, daughter of the chief of a fisher tribe. It was only on this condition that Satyavatī’s father agreed to the marriage. Śaṃtanu has two sons by Satyavatī: Citrāgada, who dies unmarried and childless, and Vicitravīrya, who marries two sisters, Ambikā and Ambālikā. Vicitravīrya also dies childless and leaves queen Satyavatī, who lost her husband before Vicitravīrya came of age, with something of a problem regarding the succession to the throne. But before marrying Śaṃtanu she had had a liaison with the sage Parāśara, which resulted in the birth of Dvaipāyana or Vyāsa (the original reciter of the epic who lives as a hermit). Since Bhīṣma is bound by his vow of celibacy, Satyavatī calls upon her son Dvaipāyana to father heirs to the throne by Ambikā and Ambālikā in the name of Vicitravīrya, their dead husband, according to the law of levirate that obtained at the time. Dvaipāyana agrees, since it is of vital importance for the kingdom to have heirs. By Ambikā he begets Dhṛtarāṣṭra who is born blind, since Ambikā shut her eyes during intercourse with Dvaipāyana because of the sage's awful appearance. By Ambālikā Dvaipāyana begets Pāṇḍu who is born pale (Pāṇḍu), because his mother blanched at the sight of the sage. For good measure the hermit fathers a third male child, Vidura, by a maidservant of the palace, and then goes his way.
Dhṛtarāṣṭra, though the eldest heir, must defer his right to the throne because he is born blind. He marries Gāndhārī and, in wondrous fashion, they have a hundred sons and one daughter. The eldest son, the leader of his siblings, is called Duryodhana who grows up to become power-hungry and arrogant in the extreme. He plays a big part in the story. Pāṇḍu, who becomes king, has two wives, Kuntī and Mādrī. But he dare not father any children by them because a sage has cursed him to die in the act of intercourse. So, giving up the throne to Dhṛtarāṣṭra as his regent, he goes off with his wives to live in the forest. Kuntī, however, had earlier received a boon of invoking any celestial or ‘god’ to do her bidding. Pāṇḍu is informed of this and, faced with the prospect of dying childless and his royal line becoming extinct, he instructs her to implement her boon and beget sons for him according to the law of levirate. So Kuntī invokes the celestials Dharma, Vāyu and Indra and they father three sons in Pāṇḍu's name: Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma and Arjuna respectively.
Mādrī, Kuntī’s junior co-wife, is loath to deny Pāṇḍu off spring by her, so she gets Kuntī to implement her boon once more, this time on her behalf. Mādrī chooses the Aśvins, a celestial pair, and they beget the twins Nakula and Sahadeva by her. Thus Pāṇḍu has five heirs, known as the Pāṇḍavas, and they become the potential rivals – for the throne of Kurukṣetra – of the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, who are called the Kauravas (a derivative of ‘Kuru’ who was a descendant of Bharata and a forbear of Śaṃtanu). Bu
t Pāṇḍu finally succumbs to the curse – the hapless Mādrī, who is the reluctant occasion for this, willingly commits suttee on his funeral pyre – and Kuntī and the five boys return to Hāstinapura where the boys are brought up with Dhṛtarāṣṭra's sons. Note, in passing, how the Vedic devas we encountered in earlier chapters: Indra, Vāyu, the Aśvins etc. – luminous projections of an underlying One – seem to have been reduced here to the role of celestial super-heroes, who retain some of their early Vedic attributes and continue to interact with earthly agents. A shift was taking place in the religion of the people towards devotion to a more defined personal Supreme Being, who may be characterized, depending on context, more or less as a Vaiṣṇava, Śaiva or Śākta deity.
In the Introduction to his rendering of the epic, J.D. Smith makes a further observation: that, as the first Book of the epic makes clear, the human contests of the Mbh. are a ‘transposition’ of the unending cosmic conflict between the celestials or ‘gods’ and their opponents, the titans or ‘demons’ of the supra-mundane realm, who nevertheless can interact with the human world. Most of the great heroes of the epic are supposed to be (partial) descents or avatāras of the celestials; they enact their extra-terrestrial conflict with their adversaries in the great earthly battle, and the ‘gods’ win in the end, but only just (see J.D. Smith 2009:xxxvi). There is one exception to this rule: Kṛṣṇa is the full avatāra of the supreme deity Viṣṇu, uniquely so in a particular section of the text, which we shall consider in due course. But back to the story. Now that genealogy is out of the way, and some of the principal dramatis personae have been introduced, the scene is set for the plot to thicken.
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