The Ramayana

by Valmiki

  The Magical Beings of the Rāmāyaṇa

  Traditional Indian literatures are filled with magical beings, some benign, others malevolent. While the benign beings (for example, the siddhas and cāraṇas) are very like each other, the malevolent ones are usually more ambivalent and, therefore, more interesting. Malevolent and dangerous beings occur in a hierarchy which places asuras, daityas and dānavas at the very top and piśācas and yatudhānas at the very bottom. Rākṣasas, yakṣas, nāgas and the like fall in between these two. The closer the beings are to the top of the hierarchy, the more they resemble the gods and, therefore, the more ambivalent they are likely to be.

  Asuras, dānavas and daityas are ‘not good’ rather than being wicked or bad. They are classified as wicked mainly because they tend to oppose the gods. The asuras, especially, are defined only in opposition to the gods and spend much of their time and energy trying to conquer the kingdom of the gods and rulership of the worlds.15 Daityas and dānavas, on the other hand, the sons of Diti and Danu respectively, are divine and are rivals of the gods.16

  As we progress lower in the hierarchy, the wicked creatures become less ambiguously so. Most generally, rākṣasas appear in Indian stories as horrendous, vile, flesh-eating creatures. Prone to disrupting sacrifices and, therefore, to disrupting the universal order which is maintained by the careful performance of complex rituals, they are most powerful at night.

  The rākṣasas of the Rāmāyaṇa are unlike any others in the vast corpus of Indian literatures. Rāvaṇa and most of his followers do not fit the general description of these creatures at all. On the contrary, they are magnificent and regal. Hanumān notices that Lankā even has rākṣasas who are virtuous about performing Vedic rituals. Rāvaṇa and his siblings are the children of the mighty sage Pulastya who is a son of Brahmā. Rāvaṇa himself is so handsome and majestic that when Hanumān sees him for the first time, he is awed by his beauty and power and moved to remark that had Rāvaṇa not been so unrighteous, he was worthy of ruling over even the gods. Even though Rāvaṇa has ten heads, twenty arms and blazing red eyes, he clearly possesses compelling charisma. The women in his palace, each of them incomparably beautiful, have come to him of their own accord out of love. Rāvaṇa’s chief queen is so beautiful that Hanumān thinks she might even be Sītā. Rāvaṇa’s brother, Vibhīṣaṇa, is righteous and honourable like his grandfather Mālyavān. Rāvaṇa’s sons are all excellent warriors and, except for Indrajit, fight ethically and honourably. There are also good and virtuous rākṣasīs like Mandodarī, Trijaṭā and Saramā.

  At the same time, Rāvaṇa’s sister Śūrpanakhā, whose lust for Rāma moves the story towards its climax, is ugly and crude. Likewise, Kumbhakarṇa, Rāvaṇa’s gigantic brother, is terrifying and malformed. These two are more like rākṣasas are supposed to be—appetitive, gross and undesirable in every way. The lesser rākṣasas, like the ones who serve Rāvaṇa and the rākṣasīs who serve Sītā, fit the common description of rākṣasas far more closely. Almost without exception, they are greedy, ugly and deformed and eager to eat human flesh.

  One of the defining features of the Rāmāyaṇa’s rākṣasas is that they are kāmarūpī, i.e., they can change their forms at will. This is amply borne out by Mārīca who takes on the form of a jewelled deer to lure Rāma away from his forest settlement. During the war, Rāvaṇa’s spies infiltrate Rāma’s army by taking on the form of monkeys.

  The counterparts of the rākṣasas are the monkeys of Kiṣkindha who come to Rāma’s aid and fight on his side during the war. Equally magical, they, too, can change their shapes at will, as Hanumān does when he searches for Sītā in Lankā. Like Rāvaṇa and his family, each of the important monkeys has a divine father. Even the lesser monkeys were fathered by celestial beings. In this lies the secret of all their magical powers.

  The magical animals of the forest, Sugrīva and his monkeys, Hanumān, Jaṭāyu and Sampāti, have often been likened to the animals that appear in folk and fairy tales. They share the same characteristics of being able to speak human language as well as being able to do uncanny things. Hanumān’s character and actions fit the mode of the animal helper in fairy tales who aids the hero in his enterprise, without whom, in fact, the enterprise could not succeed.

  The rākṣasas and the monkeys are essential to the story that has to be told. Rāma needs an opponent worthy of himself, someone who will challenge him to the fullest and yet be unrighteous enough to warrant the harshest treatment. Just as Rāma has to be human in order to kill Rāvaṇa, so Rāvaṇa has to be exceedingly powerful in order to be a threat to the worlds. Thus, his semi-divine parentage and his enormous powers are crucial aspects of his position as the rival to the hero.

  The narrative reason also applies to the fact that Rāma’s allies are monkeys. Rāvaṇa’s boon granted him immunity from all kinds of celestial and demonic beings, but in his self-assurance, he neglected to ask for invulnerability from mortals and the lower creatures. Thus, Rāma (or Viṣṇu) appears as a mortal aided by monkeys in order to vanquish Rāvaṇa. Over and above this, we have already discussed the possibility that these creatures function as shadows, counterparts and alternates for the human characters who are restricted by their mortality as well as by their morality from behaving in certain ways.

  A great deal of Rāmāyaṇa scholarship has turned its attention to extra-narrative explanations of who the monkeys and the rākṣasas really are. Several scholars have suggested that the monkeys and rākṣasas represent the non-Aryan tribes of India and that the defeat of the rākṣasas is, in fact, the story of Aryan expansion into India. This hypothesis, particularly the idea that the monkeys of the Rāmāyaṇa are the indigenous tribal peoples of the subcontinent, has had many supporters. Apart from the unpleasant racial overtones that such a notion elicits, the theory diminishes the power of the poetic imagination by insisting that meaning arises only from a reduction to mundane and identifiable reality.

  Other scholars have suggested that the rākṣasas represent the ‘other’ of Hindu society upon which all its fears and terrors can be located.17 This hypothesis, that the rākṣasas represent the innermost terrors of Hindu culture, is far more interesting because it attempts to analyse these creatures from within the mind of their creator(s). Besides that, it opens up yet another dimension, another aspect to the text, further enriching it for its audience.

  Rāma’s Divinity

  The Indian Rāma stories that come after Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa all take Rāma’s divinity as a starting point for their tale. However, in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, it is clear that for most of the story Rāma does not know that he is divine. It is precisely this fact that gives his trials and tribulations such poignancy—Rāma does not know why all these awful things are happening to him and why he has to suffer so much. It is at the very end of the war with the rākṣasas, after Rāvaṇa has been killed and Sītā has proved her chastity, that the gods appear and tell Rāma that he is Viṣṇu and not an ordinary mortal.

  Scholars unanimously hold that the first and last books of Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa (‘Childhood’ and ‘Epilogue’) are later additions to the central five books.18 In Vālmīki’s text as it is constituted today, the only places where Rāma’s divinity is unambiguously stated are the closing chapters of the sixth book (‘War’) and in the first and last books. In the first book, Daśaratha performs a sacrifice for the birth of a son. At the same time, the gods, who are being harassed by Rāvaṇa, plead with Viṣṇu to be born on earth as a mortal in order to kill the rākṣasa. A celestial being appears at Daśaratha’s sacrifice with heavenly food that will cause the queens to become pregnant. Rāma and his brothers are born as a result of this. In the last book, Viṣṇu is recalled to heaven by Brahmā and so Rāma has to give up his earthly life. When Brahmā’s messenger arrives, Rāma knows what is required of him and makes arrangements to leave his kingdom and ascend to heaven.

  In the middle books, then, the only direct mention of R�
�ma’s divinity is after the war. Nonetheless, arguing from within the narrative necessities of the text, Sheldon Pollock states firmly that Rāma has to be a god-man.19 Pollock holds that Rāma’s divinity is a ‘higher order narrative feature,’ i.e., that it is constitutive of the text itself. His argument is as follows: since Rāvaṇa had been made invulnerable to all kinds of creatures by his boon, the only kind of being that could kill him could be a mortal. But since he is so powerful and magnificent an enemy, this mortal could not be ordinary. Therefore, a god-man is the only possibility, a man who has the powers of the gods without actually being one himself.

  The gods may never in such circumstances actually grant immortality itself … Yet like so many others Rāvaṇa seeks to achieve the same result by a gambit widely familiar in folklore, by attempting to frame the perfect wish. The sheer impossibility of an exhaustive catalogue, however (in this case over-determined by Rāvaṇa’s scornfully discounting man altogether), immediately implies that a solution is assured; the very provisions of the boon make it inevitable that some proxy will be found. Not a god, since the gods have become, so to speak, contractually impotent; nor yet a man, men being constitutionally impotent … Instead, it must be some fusion of the two, a god-man.20

  Despite these hypotheses and all the other extra-textual reasons for Rāma being considered divine (like the suggestion that the Indian conception of kingship demanded that the king be divine), within the story Rāma must act as a human hero even though he is Viṣṇu. How else would the tale find its dramatic tension, its pathos, its tragedy? And perhaps most important, how could Rāma be seen as the ideal man, a model for human behaviour and a paragon of virtue?

  Imagine if the story had, from the outset, two equally matched protagonists, Rāma and Rāvaṇa. Imagine if Rāma had known that his banishment served a larger and far more significant purpose than the petty ambitions of his step-mother. Imagine if he had known all along that the monkeys would help him rescue Sītā and that the throne of Kosalā would be restored to him. As it is, Rāma displays an almost unnatural equanimity in the face of all that happens to him. But because he functions as a human hero, he has his moments of torment. He regrets the fact that he was exiled because of his father’s infatuation with a selfish and flighty woman. He is insane with grief when Sītā is abducted and vows to show the gods the extent of his wrath if she is not returned to him unharmed. He is pathetic and miserable without her and turns his anger on Sugrīva who seems to have forgotten the terms of their alliance. It is moments like these that grasp the readers imagination for they make Rāma real, accessible and utterly human.

  At the same time, Rāma must transcend his human limitations and restrictions if he is going to vanquish the king of the rākṣasas, the most powerful creature on earth. On an entirely mundane level, Rāma inverts the patterns of his father’s life, rising above the temptations of anger, desire and greed that Daśaratha was subject to. Daśaratha unknowingly kills an ascetic in his youth, Rāma actively protects the ascetics, first on his journey with Viśvāmitra and then later when he is exiled into the forest. Daśaratha succumbed to desire (kāma) by agreeing to Kaikeyī’s wishes, Rāma upholds dharma by publicly humiliating and then punishing his innocent and chaste wife. Both Rāma and Daśaratha as kings obtain their sons at sacrifices: Daśaratha’s sons are born because of the efficacy of his sacrifice and Rāma is united with his unknown sons at his horse sacrifice.

  As a human hero, Rāma does all he can to avoid repeating the mistakes of his father. As an avatāra of Viṣṇu (and as a human king), it is his job on earth to uphold dharma and protect the brahmins and the ascetics. As a human, Rāma sacrifices everything, his kingdom and his wife, to uphold dharma. As a god, he plays along with a cosmic plan. It is the tension between his mortal limitations and the conceivably unlimited powers he enjoys as Viṣṇu that makes his dilemmas and his resolution of them compelling.

  The Rāmāyaṇa is the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself; or, one might say, of an identity obscured, and only occasionally, in brilliant and poignant flashes, revealed to its owner. The problem is one of forgetting and recovery, of anamnesis: the divine hero who fails to remember that he is god, comes to know himself, at least for brief moments, through hearing (always from others) his own story.21

  If we hold that the core Rāmāyaṇa includes the first and last books, where Rāma knows and understands his own divinity, the situation becomes even more complex and Rāma’s condition even more poignant. Imagine if Rāma knew he was god and was still constrained to act as a man would and should. This is, in fact, the situation in the Rāma stories that come after Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa. Rāma has to continue to act as a man precisely because he is a god and not in spite of his divinity.

  Kingship in the Rāmāyaṇa

  Since the dominant set of replications in the Rāmāyaṇa explores the theme of brothers and disputed thrones, one could argue that the central issue the Rāmāyaṇa tackles is that of rightful and the righteous kingship. Through the multiple variations on the theme of disputed kingship, we see that Rāma is clearly both the rightful and the righteous king while Rāvaṇa is not. Rāvaṇa is the rightful king of Lankā because he is the eldest of the brothers, but he is by no means the righteous king. After Rāvaṇa is killed, Vibhīṣaṇa becomes the righteous and rightful king of Lankā.

  It is the relationship between the monkey brothers, Vālī and Sugrīva, and the throne of Kiṣkindha that is the most complicated. Vālī is the elder brother and from all that we know about him, seems to be a good and righteous king. Sugrīva, on the other hand, takes over his brother’s throne claiming that he is probably dead. He also takes over his brother’s wife, a woman he should have treated as a mother. Sugrīva makes Rāma kill Vālī by saying that he was cruel and unrighteous. Once his older brother is dead, Sugrīva becomes the rightful king of Kiṣkindha. But once again, he takes Tārā, Vālī’s wife, as his own. Ironically, taking another’s wife is one of the unrighteous deeds for which Vālī is killed. Thus, Sugrīva’s righteousness would appear to devolve from the fact that he makes an alliance with righteous Rāma and not from any of his own actions.

  It is when he acts as the righteous king that Rāma commits the two deeds that appear incomprehensible for a man such as him—the killing of Vālī and the rejection of Sītā. Rāma forms an alliance with Sugrīva and takes his word that Vālī has wronged him and deserves to die. This expediency is compounded by the fact that Rāma kills Vālī while Vālī is fighting Sugrīva and Rāma himself is hidden behind a tree. As we learn more and more about Vālī, it would appear that he was a wise and just ruler, compassionate even towards his brother whom he could have killed on several occasions.

  As Vālī is dying, he excoriates Rāma for his unrighteous act and Rāma offers a series of arguments in his own defence. These include the fact that since Vālī was a low creature, a mere monkey, Rāma could kill him in any way he pleased because the ethics of battle did not apply. At the same time, Rāma says that Vālī deserves to die because he has violated dharma by taking his brother’s wife. The sophistry in this argument is clear: if Vālī belongs to a lower order of being and the ethics of battle do not apply to him, why, then, should he be judged by the stringent rules of human dharma in his personal life?

  The matter becomes somewhat clearer when Rāma states that he is acting on behalf of Bharata and the righteous Ikṣvāku kings who hold dominion over the earth. There can be no violations of dharma under their jurisdiction. The functions of a king include the meting out of punishments (danḍa), the nurturing of dharma and the righteous organization of society. Rāma is attempting to fulfil those functions in this case. He is compelled to act as a righteous king, no matter how specious his arguments may be for doing so.

  Rāma’s unjustified rejection of the chaste and virtuous Sītā, not once, but twice, is as problematic as the episode with Vālī. Through no fault of her own, Sītā is abducted and imprisoned by Rāvaṇa. When the war to r
eclaim her is over, Rāma humiliates Sītā, first by calling her out in public, and then by saying that he has no use for her any more, that the war was fought to salvage the honour of his clan. Sītā walks into the fire but is rescued by the fire god who vouches for her innocence and chastity. At this point, all the gods appear and tell Rāma who he really is. Rāma takes Sītā back because the gods tell him to and also, he says, because he had always believed in her innocence but wanted to prove it to the common people. Later, after they have lived happily in Ayodhyā for many years, Rāma hears that the people still doubt Sītā. He decides that he must banish her from the kingdom because he cannot allow gossip and scandal to tarnish his reputation.

  Once again, in both cases of rejection, Rāma plays the part of the righteous king who must always be above reproach. Anything or anyone connected with him must be equally so. Rāma has to sacrifice his personal feelings about Sītā in order to uphold dharma, as he had to do earlier when his father exiled him to the forest for fourteen years. It is here that the epic trope of the hero’s personal destiny being inextricably linked with the plan of the gods is most clearly visible. But Rāma as a human hero proves equal to the task. Even though he is not always aware of his divinity, he acts in accordance with a higher law, dharma, which is divinely sanctioned and it is his duty, as a king (albeit in waiting), to uphold.