Who is Rama?

In the Bala Kanda, the first book of the Ramayana, the sage Valmiki asks a simple question of the wandering seer Narada. Is there, he asks, a man alive who is perfect, who holds every virtue at once, brave and learned and grateful and true, master of himself and kind to all beings? It is the kind of question that usually has no answer. Narada gives one. There is such a man, he says, and his name is Rama.

That exchange opens the first poem, the adikavya, and it sets the terms for everything that follows. The Ramayana is an adventure, a war story, a romance, and one of the most beloved tales ever told. But underneath all of that it is the working-out of a single question. What would it actually cost a man to be perfect? Rama is the tradition’s long, unflinching answer.

The descent of Vishnu

Rama is the seventh of the ten great descents of Vishnu, the avatara in which the preserver of the worlds takes a human birth. The age had fallen under the shadow of Ravana, the ten-headed rakshasa king of Lanka, who had won by penance a boon that no god or demon could kill him, and who had forgotten to guard against a mere man. So the Lord came down as a man. Rama is born to King Dasharatha of Ayodhya, of the solar dynasty of Ikshvaku, the eldest of four brothers, and for the first stretch of the story he is simply a prince, the finest of his line.

This is worth pausing on, because it is easily missed and it is the key to reading him well. In the oldest layer of Valmiki’s epic, the core books composed perhaps in the centuries around 500 BCE, Rama is largely presented as a human being, and may not fully know that he is divine. His identification with Vishnu is concentrated in the framing books, the first and the last, which most scholars since Hermann Jacobi have judged to be later additions. The devotional tradition reads this differently and beautifully: the Lord, having taken a human body, plays the part completely, and his apparent human limits are themselves his lila, his divine play. Both readings can be held at once. The man who weeps when his wife is taken is the same figure the tradition worships as God, and the tension between those two is exactly where the story does its deepest work.

The cost of a word

The turn that makes Rama who he is comes on the eve of his crowning. His father, bound by an old promise to his queen Kaikeyi, is forced to send Rama into the forest for fourteen years and to crown another son instead. Dasharatha is broken by it. Rama is not. He accepts the exile without a flicker of protest, because his father has given his word, and a son’s dharma is to make that word true. He lays down a kingdom to keep a promise that was not even his own.

He goes to the forest with his wife Sita and his devoted brother Lakshmana. There the story darkens. Ravana, by a trick, carries Sita away to Lanka across the sea. The middle of the epic is the long search for her, and it brings Rama his greatest allies, the vanaras, the forest people, and above all Hanuman, the wind-god’s son, who leaps the ocean to find Sita and becomes the model of all devotion. A great army is built, a bridge thrown across the water, and in the war that follows Ravana is killed and Sita recovered. Rama returns at last to Ayodhya, and the city lights itself with lamps to welcome the king home, the homecoming the tradition still keeps as Diwali.

That is the shape of it. But the meaning is in a single repeated note. At every turn Rama chooses dharma over his own happiness, and the choices only grow harder.

Dharma given a body

The tradition has a phrase for what Rama is. A celebrated line of the Ramayana, spoken by the demon Maricha who has every reason to fear him, names it exactly:

रामो विग्रहवान् धर्मः ।

Rāmo vigrahavān dharmaḥ. Rama is dharma given a body.

Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa 3.35.13 · Critical Edition; vulgate 3.37.13 #

It is an extraordinary thing to say of a person, that the abstract order of the world, the dharma that holds society and cosmos together, has walked into the story wearing a face. And the epic earns the claim not by making Rama’s life easy but by making it almost unbearably hard. His perfection is not serenity. It is the willingness to pay, again and again, the price that right conduct demands.

This is where Rama differs from the other great avatar, Krishna. Krishna is the divine as freedom, the cowherd and statesman who bends the rules and dances above them. Rama is the divine as limit, the king who binds himself inside the rules so completely that he becomes their living shape. The tradition needed both pictures of God, and it is no accident that the two most loved avatars are these two.

The wound that will not close

No honest account of Rama can skip the episode that troubles every reader, and the tradition has never pretended it is simple. After the war, Sita’s long captivity raises a question of her purity, and she enters fire to prove herself; the fire-god Agni gives her back unharmed. Later, as king, hearing his subjects murmur, Rama sends the pregnant Sita away into exile to silence the doubt against the throne.

This is hard, and it should be left hard. Several things can be said, and the article that flattens them into one tidy defence has failed the story. The historical-critical reading notes that the final book in which the banishment occurs is among the latest additions to the epic, and that some scholars judge the fire-ordeal itself a later insertion, so that the oldest Rama may not have done these things at all. The devotional reading holds that Sita is vindicated, not condemned, by the fire, and that Rama as king is crushed between his love and the iron demands of raja-dharma, the duty of a ruler to be above even the appearance of favour. The modern reader feels, rightly, the injustice done to Sita, and the tradition itself has long felt it, which is why later poets and regional retellings return to the wound and worry at it. The point for a newcomer is to see what it reveals, rather than to resolve it. Rama is the man for whom dharma costs everything, including, in the end, the one he loves most. That is the terrible edge of perfection, and the epic does not hide it.

The Name above the man

There is a second Rama, and he is in some ways larger than the prince. Over the centuries the name of Rama acquired a power of its own, beyond the events of any one life. To say Ram became, for vast numbers of Hindus, the simplest and surest way of saying God.

This second Rama belongs above all to the devotional poets. In the sixteenth century Tulsidas retold the whole epic in Awadhi, the spoken language of the north, as the Ramcharitmanas, so that the story could live in every mouth and not only in Sanskrit; it remains the most beloved scripture of northern India, and its devotion turns on the saving power of the Name. The poet-saint Kabir went further, and used “Ram” for the formless absolute that has no story and no city at all, the God beyond every image. The composer Tyagaraja poured his whole life of music into Rama as his chosen deity. And in our own age Gandhi made Ramanama, the repetition of the Name, his daily discipline, took Rama-rajya, the reign of Rama, as his word for a just society, and is said to have died with “Hey Ram” on his lips. For all of them the Name had become a mantra, a thing to be repeated until the sayer and the said draw close. The prince of Ayodhya had become, without ceasing to be himself, a way of reaching the formless.

How he is shown and served

In the sanctum and the painting Rama is recognisable at once. He stands dark-complexioned like Vishnu, princely and calm, holding the great bow Kodanda that is his emblem, the protector’s weapon ready in a peaceful hand. Around him stands his family, the Rama parivar: Sita at his side, Lakshmana behind, and Hanuman kneeling before him with folded hands, devotion itself given a form. To learn to read this group is part of learning to read any murti at all.

His great day is Rama Navami, the ninth of the bright fortnight of Chaitra, kept as his birthday with fasting and the recitation of his story, grandest at Ayodhya and at the southern shrines of Bhadrachalam and Rameshwaram. Across the north the autumn brings the Ramlila, the month-long acting-out of the epic in town after town, ending at Dussehra with the burning of giant effigies of Ravana, a yearly enactment of what the whole story means: that however vast the wrong, the right at last brings it down.

It is worth adding, plainly and without taking sides, that Ayodhya, held by tradition to be Rama’s birthplace, has been a site of bitter modern contention. That is part of his story in our time. It is not the measure of who he is in the tradition that made him.

The man who paid

Set the prince and the Name side by side and the figure comes whole. Rama is the descent of God who chose to live inside the limits of a human life and keep its every obligation, and he is the Name that lets a person reach the God beyond all limits. He is loved for something other than a happy life, which he did not have. He is loved because he never once bought his own happiness at the price of his duty.

Narada was asked whether a perfect man could exist. The whole of the Ramayana is the answer, and the answer is not a boast. It is a reckoning of the cost.

The bow rests easy in his hand. The weight was always somewhere else.