Rama Avatar

At a Glance

Central figures: Rama, prince of Ayodhya and seventh avatar of Vishnu; Sita, his wife; Lakshmana, his devoted brother; Ravana, the demon king of Lanka; and Hanuman, the monkey warrior who bridges the two armies.
Setting: The kingdom of Ayodhya and the forests and Lanka beyond it; the story is told in the Ramayana, one of the two great Sanskrit epics of the Indian tradition.
The turn: Ravana kidnaps Sita while Rama is lured away by a demon disguised as a golden deer, forcing a war between Ayodhya’s prince and the lord of Lanka.
The outcome: Rama kills Ravana with a divine arrow, recovers Sita, and returns to Ayodhya to be crowned king, establishing the reign remembered as Rama Rajya.
The legacy: Rama’s return to Ayodhya after his fourteen years of exile is celebrated as the festival of Diwali, when lamps are lit across the land in welcome.

Vishnu descended as Rama because dharma - the right ordering of the world - had tilted. Ravana, king of Lanka, had accumulated such power and committed such violations that the gods could not correct the balance themselves. A god would need to enter the world as a man, subject to its losses and obligations, and win the correction by living through it.

Rama was born in Ayodhya, eldest son of King Dasharatha and his queen Kaushalya, into a household that already knew something had arrived. He was the kind of child who made other children calmer, who listened before he spoke, who did not need to be told twice. His brother Lakshmana, the second closest in age, attached himself to Rama the way a shadow attaches - not out of weakness but out of recognition.

Vishwamitra’s Yagna

The sage Vishwamitra came to Dasharatha’s court with a request that was, in practice, a demand. Rakshasas - creatures of the night orders - were disrupting his rituals, polluting the sacred fires, and Vishwamitra wanted Rama and Lakshmana to accompany him as protection. Dasharatha blanched. Rama was a boy, and these were powerful adversaries. But refusing Vishwamitra would have been its own violation of dharma, and Dasharatha knew it. The brothers went.

In the forests near the sage’s ashram, they fought and killed several of the rakshasas. Vishwamitra taught them celestial weapons in return - mantras and techniques that would serve them later in ways none of them could anticipate then. When the rituals were complete, he took them on to Mithila, the kingdom of King Janaka, where a gathering of princes had assembled for a swayamvara.

The Bow of Shiva

Janaka’s daughter Sita was to choose her husband by the ancient ceremony. The condition: the suitor must string the bow of Shiva, a weapon so massive and charged with divine force that no man in the gathered assembly had been able to so much as move it from the floor. Princes from across the subcontinent had tried and stepped back empty-handed.

Rama walked to it, lifted it without visible effort, bent it to the string - and broke it in half. The sound was like a crack of thunder. Sita placed the marriage garland around his neck, and the two were married. They returned to Ayodhya together, Lakshmana beside them, and for a time everything held.

Kaikeyi’s Boons

Dasharatha, aging and knowing it, decided to crown Rama as his successor. The kingdom celebrated. Then Kaikeyi - the king’s second wife and mother of his son Bharata - was visited by her maid Manthara, who framed Rama’s coronation as a threat to Bharata’s future. Kaikeyi had always been Dasharatha’s favorite, and years before, in a moment of gratitude on a battlefield, he had promised her two boons - whatever she asked, whenever she asked it.

She asked for them now. Send Rama into exile for fourteen years. Crown Bharata in his place.

Dasharatha was destroyed by the demand but could not refuse a promise made on his word as king. Rama did not rage. He did not argue. He changed into forest clothes, and Sita and Lakshmana changed into forest clothes beside him, because neither of them would hear of staying behind. Bharata, returning later to find his father dead of grief and himself on a throne he had not wanted, refused to rule in his own name. He placed Rama’s sandals on the throne and administered the kingdom as a regent, waiting.

The Golden Deer

The three of them - Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana - moved through several forests over the years, living simply. Word of them traveled. Shurpanakha, sister of Ravana, found Rama in the forest and was drawn to him. When she moved against Sita out of jealousy, Lakshmana drove her off, leaving her disfigured. She went to Lanka and told her brother.

Ravana heard also of Sita’s beauty. He devised a plan. His ally Maricha took the form of a golden deer - dazzling, impossible - and drew Rama deep into the forest in pursuit. While Rama was gone and then Lakshmana after him, Ravana appeared at the cottage in the disguise of an old ascetic. Sita, not recognizing him, came forward. He seized her and carried her to Lanka.

Hanuman Crosses the Ocean

Rama and Lakshmana searched south. At the shores of the ocean they encountered Hanuman, warrior of the Vanara armies, and their alliance with the monkey king Sugriva was formed. Hanuman alone could make the crossing to Lanka - he leapt the ocean and landed in Ravana’s city, found Sita imprisoned in a garden called Ashoka Vatika, and sat with her long enough to deliver Rama’s promise that he was coming.

He set fire to the city before he left. He returned to Rama with precise news.

The Battle of Lanka

The Vanara army built a bridge of stone across the sea. They crossed it. The war that followed consumed both armies across many days - Ravana’s brothers fell, his sons fell, his greatest champions fell. Rama faced Ravana at last in single combat. Ravana regenerated, his many heads and arms making him almost impossible to kill by ordinary means. It was a divine arrow, given to Rama by the sage Agastya, that finally ended him - striking Ravana in the chest with the force of Brahma’s breath behind it.

Sita was found in the garden. The exile had run its full course. Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana flew back to Ayodhya by celestial chariot, arriving exactly as the fourteen years ended. The city lit every lamp it had. Rama was crowned, and Rama Rajya began - a reign that became, in memory, the measure of what governance could be at its best.

It did not last without cost. The duties of a king would bring Rama to choices as painful as anything Kaikeyi had once forced on Dasharatha. Dharma cuts in all directions. That, too, is part of what the Ramayana holds.