Uttara Kanda: Ram Rajya and After

The story

The Uttara Kanda opens with sages visiting the crowned king and telling him the earlier history of Ravana and of Hanuman's childhood. It then describes Ram Rajya, the reign that became India's measure of good rule.

The hardest episode follows. Ram learns that some citizens question whether a queen who lived in another man's city should sit on the throne. Though he knows Sita is blameless, he places the people's confidence in the throne above his own happiness, and Sita, then expecting a child, is taken to the forest. She finds shelter in the ashram of Maharishi Valmiki, where her twin sons Luv and Kush are born and raised. Ram never remarries; at every later ritual a golden image of Sita sits beside him.

Valmiki teaches the boys the Ramayana he has composed. Years later, during Ram's Ashwamedha yajna, two young singers perform the poem before the king, and he recognises his sons. Sita is asked to affirm her purity once more before the assembly. She calls on her mother, the Earth, to receive her if she has been true. The ground opens and she returns to it.

Ram rules for many more years. Shatrughna defeats Lavanasura and founds Mathura. When Ram's work is complete, he divides the kingdom between his sons, walks with the people of Ayodhya to the Saryu, and enters its waters at the place remembered as Guptar Ghat.

A note for readers

Many scholars think parts of the Uttara Kanda were added to Valmiki's poem at a later date, and Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas ends its story differently, with Ram Rajya. The episode of Sita's exile has been discussed and questioned in India for centuries. It is told here because it is part of the tradition, not because every reader must agree with every choice in it.

What it teaches

If the earlier books show what a person owes to parents, spouse and friends, this one asks what a ruler owes to the public, and how heavy that debt can be. It also gives Sita the last word: she does not plead, and she does not return on anyone else's terms. Read The dignity and strength of Sita and Ram Rajya: leadership as service.

In Ayodhya, Treta ke Thakur is associated with Ram's Ashwamedha yajna and Nageshwarnath Temple with Kush. Return to the beginning of the Ramayana.