Rama and the Price of Being the Ideal Man

On the morning Rama was to be crowned king of Ayodhya, the city was already dressed for it. Banners hung over the streets, lamps waited to be lit, and the crowds had gathered to honor the prince nearly everyone agreed was the finest man alive. By nightfall the coronation was cancelled, and Rama was calmly preparing to leave the city for fourteen years.

That reversal, and the way Rama meets it, is a large part of why a civilization has spent more than two thousand years calling him maryada purushottam: the ideal man, the one who holds to the bounds of right conduct whatever it costs him. The Ramayana, composed in Sanskrit by the sage Valmiki around the fifth century BCE, is the story of that man. It is also, read honestly, the story of everything the ideal asked him to surrender.

The prince everyone agreed was perfect

Rama is the eldest son of Dasharatha, king of Ayodhya, and his queen Kaushalya. He has three brothers, Bharata, Lakshmana, and Shatrughna, and from boyhood he is the one held up as the standard against which the others are measured.

Tradition holds that he is more than a gifted prince. He is the seventh avatar of Vishnu, the great preserver god, who takes human birth in order to rid the world of the demon king Ravana. That is the paradox the epic runs on. Rama is divinity walking the earth, yet the story keeps him bound by human duty and human grief, and it is the human choices that readers remember.

He wins his wife, Sita, by stringing a divine bow that no other suitor can so much as lift. His devotion to her is total, and hers to him. Around them the epic gathers the figures every reader of the Ramayana knows: Lakshmana, the brother who will not leave his side, and later Hanuman, the mighty devotee whose loyalty to Rama has become its own object of worship.

A promise older than the crisis

The exile is not born of any failing of Rama’s. It is born of a promise.

Years before, Dasharatha’s second wife, Kaikeyi, had once saved the king’s life, and he had granted her two boons to claim whenever she wished. She had never used them. Then, on the very eve of the coronation, her maid Manthara worked on her fears, warning that once Rama was king, Kaikeyi and her own son Bharata would count for nothing.

Kaikeyi called in the two boons. She asked that Bharata be crowned in Rama’s place, and that Rama be sent into the forest for fourteen years.

Dasharatha was broken by it. He had given his word, and in the moral universe of the epic a king cannot take his word back, yet he could not bring himself to pronounce the sentence on the son he loved.

Rama pronounced it for him.

He accepted the exile at once, without argument and without bitterness, because his father had made a promise and a son honors his father’s word. He set aside the royal robes, put on bark and deerskin, and made ready to go. Sita refused to remain behind in comfort and chose the forest with him. So did Lakshmana. The three of them walked out through a city that had assembled to crown Rama and now watched him leave with nothing.

This is the first and plainest portrait of what the ideal means in the Ramayana. Rama takes the harder, humbler road not because he is forced onto it but because duty points that way, and he never once suggests that duty ought to bend for him. Admirers across the centuries have found this sublime. Some modern readers find it harder to love, and ask why the perfect son must also be so obedient a one. The epic lets both responses stand.

Fourteen years, and the abduction that started a war

The forest years are not idle. Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana live as ascetics, and Rama defends the hermitages of sages against the demons who prey on them. His reputation as a protector grows, and it is that reputation, in part, that draws the enemy the whole story has been pointing toward.

Ravana, the ten-headed king of Lanka, contrives to lure Rama and Lakshmana away from their forest home, and carries Sita off through the sky to his island kingdom. The abduction turns a tale of exile into a tale of war. Rama, the avatar sent to end Ravana, now has the most personal of reasons to face him.

An alliance, and a killing readers still argue about

Searching for Sita, Rama makes a pact with Sugriva, an exiled monkey king who has been driven out and stripped of his wife by his own brother, Vali (also called Bali). Rama promises to help Sugriva regain his throne. In return Sugriva lends Rama his armies, and his greatest warrior, Hanuman.

The way Rama keeps that promise has been debated for as long as the epic has been read. In the story he kills Vali with an arrow shot from concealment while Vali is locked in single combat with Sugriva. A dying Vali accuses Rama of striking dishonorably, from hiding, in a fight that was not his own.

The tradition offers several answers, and Valmiki gives Vali’s protest and Rama’s reply real space on the page. Rama argues that Vali broke dharma by seizing his brother’s wife, that as an heir of the royal Ikshvaku line he holds the authority to punish such a wrong, and that a hunter may fairly strike a beast. Devotional readers accept the reasoning. Others read the episode as one of the moments where the epic itself seems to test its hero, forcing the question of whether the ideal man is truly above reproach. The Ramayana does not smooth the difficulty away, which is one reason it has stayed alive as an argument as well as a scripture.

The bridge, the war, and the fire

With his allies Rama crosses to Lanka, besieges Ravana’s city, and in a long war destroys the demon king and his host. It is the climax the whole poem has promised, and in devotional terms it is the reason the avatar came at all.

Then comes one of the most discussed passages in all of Indian literature. Reunited with Sita after the victory, Rama, in the epic, does not simply embrace her. He speaks coldly, saying he cannot take her back while doubt hangs over her time in another man’s house. Sita, wounded, walks into a fire to prove her purity. The fire god Agni himself returns her unharmed, testifying that she is faultless. This is the agni pariksha, the ordeal by fire.

Readers have wrestled with it for centuries. In one traditional reading, Rama never truly doubts Sita. He stages the ordeal for the sake of a watching world, so that no subject could ever question his queen, and Agni’s verdict is the proof. Many scholars read it differently, seeing the episode as reflecting the patriarchal expectations of the society that shaped the text, and some regard it as belonging to a later layer of the poem rather than its oldest core. The tradition holds Sita’s dignity through it; the reverence for her purity has never dimmed. The unease has never fully settled either.

Ram Rajya, and the hardest chapter of all

The fourteen years end. Rama returns to Ayodhya, Bharata gladly hands back the throne he had only ever kept in his brother’s name, and Rama is at last crowned. His reign becomes the byword for a just and prosperous kingdom, remembered as Ram Rajya, the rule of Rama, an ideal of good government still invoked in India today.

The story could end there, and in its earliest form some scholars believe it very nearly did. The seventh and final book, the Uttara Kanda, along with the first book, is widely regarded by scholars as a later addition to Valmiki’s original poem, composed after the central story had taken shape. It is worth naming that scholarly view plainly, because the Uttara Kanda contains the episode that troubles readers most.

In it, gossip spreads through Ayodhya questioning whether a queen who lived in Ravana’s Lanka can be above suspicion. To protect the trust between a king and his people, Rama banishes Sita, who is by then pregnant, sending her from the palace though he does not stop loving her. She is taken in by the sage Valmiki, and in his hermitage she raises Rama’s twin sons, Lava and Kusha. It is those boys whom Valmiki teaches to recite the Ramayana itself. Years later, father and sons are reunited, but the reconciliation with Sita does not hold in the way a listener hopes, and she asks the earth, her mother, to receive her, and is taken back into the ground.

Here the ideal and its price stand closest together. A king who places his people’s trust above his own heart, and a wife who has done nothing wrong and pays for it twice. Devotees read Rama’s choice as the ultimate sacrifice of personal happiness to public duty. Critics, including many across India’s own long tradition of retellings, have read it as the ideal turned cruel, and have rewritten the ending to give Sita her due. Both readings are old, and both are still spoken.

What the ideal demanded

Strip the epic down and a hard shape remains. Rama gives up a crown without a word, spends fourteen years in exile, wins his wife back through war, and then, in the story’s later telling, loses her to the very code that made him great.

That is what maryada purushottam means when you follow it to the end. Not a man untouched by loss, but a man who accepts loss again and again rather than break the bounds he lives by. Hundreds of millions worship him as god, and find in his steadiness a model for how to bear a life. Others read the same story and ask what a standard of perfection should be allowed to cost the people around it, above all Sita.

The Ramayana is large enough to hold both, and has for more than two thousand years. That may be the truest measure of the ideal it describes. It has never stopped asking to be questioned, and it has never stopped being loved.