Dilipa: The King Who Served a Cow

The story

The poet Kalidasa opens his Raghuvamsha, the great Sanskrit poem on Ram's dynasty, with King Dilipa. He describes him as a ruler who took taxes from his people only to return them a thousandfold in welfare, as the sun draws up water to give it back as rain.

Dilipa and Queen Sudakshina had no child. Guru Vasishtha explained the cause: the king had once, in haste, passed by the divine cow Surabhi without paying respect. The remedy was to serve her daughter Nandini, who lived in Vasishtha's ashram.

So the king of Ayodhya became a cowherd. For twenty-one days he followed Nandini into the forest, stood when she stood, sat when she sat, drank only after she had drunk, and guarded her through the night. On the twenty-second day a lion sprang on her in a Himalayan cave. Dilipa reached for an arrow and found his arm frozen. The lion spoke: it was a servant of Shiva and the cow was its lawful food. Dilipa offered his own body in her place. The lion argued that a king's life was worth more than one cow. Dilipa answered that a king who cannot protect what is entrusted to him has no claim to his title, and lay down before it.

No lion struck. Flowers fell instead. Nandini had created the illusion to test him, and she granted the boon of a son. That son was Raghu.

What we learn

A king served an animal with his own hands and found no loss of dignity in it. The test was not whether he could fight, for his arm was stopped, but whether he would give himself up for someone under his protection. In the Ram Rajya ideal, power exists for the protected, not the protector.

Note that genealogies differ: the Valmiki Ramayana names a Dilipa as father of Bhagiratha, while Kalidasa's Dilipa is father of Raghu. Tradition honours both.

Next in the line: Raghu.