Bharata

In Rajagriha, the capital of the Kekayas, a prince dreams an evil dream, and in the morning the circle of his friends cannot lift it off him. Sarga 69 of the Ayodhya Kanda is the first place the poem lets Bharata draw a long breath. He has seen his father with his hair loose about him, falling from the peak of a mountain into a filthy pool, the sea dried up and the moon fallen to the earth, and when he thinks of the king, “whom I now find I cannot picture ever seeing again, this great fear takes hold of my heart and will not go.” He is still telling it when messengers ride in on tired horses, men under orders to say nothing of what they know. Vasishtha and the ministers send their blessings; come at once; there is a matter that cannot wait. Bharata’s first question is for no kingdom. “Is my father, King Dasharatha, well?” Long before this, sarga 18 of the Bala Kanda has given him his birth, from the womb of Kaikeyi, a prince of true valor carrying a quarter of Vishnu in him, named on the eleventh day by Vasishtha; and Shatrughna, his twin in everything except blood, was dearer to him than his own life. At Mithila, in sarga 73, Janaka had said to him, “Take the hand of Mandavi in yours.” And on the morning Ayodhya hung its streets with flags for the consecration of Rama, Bharata was far away at his grandfather’s court with Shatrughna and knew nothing of any of it. Everything asked in his name was asked behind his back. That one fact is the key to his whole story.

Rama had sent him a message by Sumantra’s mouth on the road into exile, and in sarga 58 the charioteer repeats it to the king. Bharata is to deal fairly with all his mothers; seated in the office of Prince Regent, he is to go on serving the father who still holds the throne; and then, weeping again and again, Rama added one thing more: “My mother Kausalya, who loves me past all measure, is to be looked on as your own mother.” The message reaches Bharata when the father is already dead, and he keeps it for the rest of his life.

A Son in an Empty City

Seven nights on the road bring him to Ayodhya, and the city itself tells him before anyone speaks: no music, no traffic, men and women in soiled clothes with their eyes full of tears. His father’s palace has no father in it, and he goes to his mother’s. In sarga 72 Kaikeyi gives him the news of the king’s death in the tone of announcing something good, and Bharata falls to the floor. Then the second thing, that Rama has gone to Dandaka in the bark of trees with Sita and Lakshmana, and a doubt about his brother’s conduct passes through him, because he can think of no other reason for such a sentence: “I hope Rama did not seize the property of some Brahmin.” She tells him the rest, and ends by telling him to have himself consecrated king of the whole earth. His answer, in sarga 73, is the hardest thing a son says to a mother anywhere in the poem. “You came into my father’s house like the Night of Dissolution itself, to wipe out my whole line. My father clasped a live coal to his chest and never knew what it was.” He measures the kingdom he is being offered: “How, and with what strength, shall I, whose only strength is Rama, carry the burden of kingship, when a calf cannot stand under a load that a great bull carries with ease?” And then the sentence that holds all his restraint: “I would feel no reluctance at all in casting you off, woman of sinful resolve, if Rama did not always look on you as a mother.” The vow comes in the same breath. He will bring Rama back from the forest, and when he has brought him back he will live as his servant. Before the ministers he says it again: “I never wanted the kingdom. I never took counsel with my mother about it. I did not even know of the consecration the king had planned for Rama; I was in a far country with Shatrughna.”

In sarga 75 Kausalya has nothing for him except bitterness. “This wide kingdom, overflowing with wealth and grain, full of elephants and horses and chariots, has been handed to you by her, your mother.” The words go into a man who has done no wrong like a needle into an open wound, and he falls at her feet and begins to swear, oath after oath, every one loaded onto the same unnamed man, the man by whose consent Rama went into the forest: let his judgment never again follow the scriptures, let him bear the sin of the master who cheats a servant of his wages, let him bear the sin of the man who turns away someone dying of thirst with water at hand. He swears until he collapses, and Kausalya draws him into her lap: “You are true to your word, my child, and you will reach the worlds of the good.” The king’s body comes out of its vat of oil and goes to the fire. On the thirteenth day, gathering the bones, the two younger brothers roll on the ground like bulls whose horns have been broken, and that same morning Shatrughna drags Manthara, the hunchback, across the floor by force, her ornaments smashing around her. It is Bharata who stops him. “Women are not to be killed by any man alive.” And the stronger reason: “If Rama, whose mind is given to dharma, learned that we had killed even this hunchback, he would never speak to you or to me again.”

On the fourteenth day the men who run the realm come at daybreak with the materials of consecration laid out and the argument ready: the kingdom has no master, the father himself named you, and no blame attaches to a man who takes what his elder brother was ordered to leave. Bharata walks around all of it clockwise, as one honors a thing one will not touch. “In our house the kingship has always gone to the eldest; that is the rule we hold to, and men as wise as you should not be asking such a thing of me. Rama is our eldest brother, and Rama will be lord of the earth.” He will live in the forest fourteen years in Rama’s place; let the army be readied and the road-makers go ahead. In the full council Vasishtha presses the same throne on him in gentler words, and the young prince’s answer comes in a voice like the call of a swan. “How can I, born of Dasharatha, who gave up his life when he heard that Rama had gone to the forest and would not return, become the robber of my elder brother’s throne, when the throne belongs to Rama, and so do I?” And if Rama will not come, “then I will stay there in the forest myself, as the noble Lakshmana is doing now.”

Two Suspicions on the Ganga

In sarga 84 Guha, the chief of the Nishadas, looks out at an army camped along the bank with the kovidara banner over it and tells his kinsmen that Kaikeyi’s son has come to kill Rama; if his heart is evil he will bind them in chains, because they are devoted to the eldest son of Dasharatha. He comes with gifts and an offer of hospitality, and then he asks the question straight: “This huge army of yours puts a doubt in me, I confess it.” Bharata, whose heart is as free of stain as the sky, answers in a gentle voice. “May that hour never come when such wickedness is found in me.” He is going to bring his elder brother back, a brother he holds as he held his father, and Guha, hearing it, says there is no one on the whole earth like him, who wants to give away a kingdom that came to him without effort. That night Guha tells him of the night he watched with his own eyes, Lakshmana awake with his bow while Rama slept on straw, and at the word that Rama has twisted his hair into an ascetic’s knot Bharata faints, with the fear in him that a man who has done that may never come home at all. Across the river at Prayaga, in sarga 90, the second suspicion belongs to a sage. Bharata halts his army a league away, lays aside his weapons and his ornaments, and walks to Bharadvaja’s hermitage in two silk garments, and the sage asks him why a man busy ruling Ayodhya has come so far, and whether he means some harm to the innocent Rama and Lakshmana so that he may enjoy their kingdom without a thorn in it. The tears run down Bharata’s face. If a man who knows everything can think this of him, he is undone; what his mother asked while he was away “is not to my liking, and I am not pleased with what she did, and I have never accepted her word that I should enjoy the throne.” He has come to bring Rama home and to bow his head at Rama’s feet. That night Bharadvaja calls down Vishvakarma and feeds a whole army on heaven’s food, and in the middle of that splendor the poem records one small gesture. Bharata walks clockwise around the royal throne that stands in the hall, and the whisk, and the umbrella, as if around a king. “He bowed low to Rama as if Rama sat on it, paid his homage to the throne itself, took up the whisk, and sat down in the seat that belongs to the chief minister.” In the morning the sage sends him off with one more thing: “Bharata, you must not hold Kaikeyi guilty,” because this exile will turn out to be for the good of every creature.

Chitrakuta: A Vigil, and a Pair of Sandals

Near Chitrakuta his first order is that no one is to crowd Rama’s hermitage, and the army camps a league and a half away while he goes into the forest on foot, in sarga 99, reading the trees for the strips of cloth Lakshmana tied to find the way back from the river. Then he sees his elder brother seated inside a hut of leafy branches, his hair in a great mass of matted locks, a black deerskin over his shoulder, and his composure goes. “Here is my elder brother, sitting among the wild deer, he who should be sitting in the royal assembly with the ministers waiting on him.” “Rama, who deserved every comfort, has come to this on my account. Shame on my life, cruel as I am, and cursed by the whole world.” He falls to the ground before he can lay hold of Rama’s feet and gets out one word, “Brother,” and nothing more. When he can speak again he tells of the father’s death and makes his plea: “I am your slave, and a disgraced one. Be gracious to me. Have yourself consecrated for the kingship of Ayodhya this very day, like Indra taking the throne of the gods.” Rama faints at the news; the four brothers offer water to their father at the Mandakini; and at the door of the leaf hut Rama takes Bharata by one hand and Lakshmana by the other and weeps aloud. The next day the plea begins again, and this time Bharata measures himself first: “Lord of the earth, I have no more power to match your way of ruling than a donkey has to match the pace of a horse, or a common bird the flight of Garuda.” His mother’s sin he lays out in the open, and the law that keeps a Kshatriya’s hand off a woman, and he ends on a condition: “And if you set my prayer aside and go on from here into the forest alone, then I will go with you.” In sarga 107 Rama tells the whole history of the two boons, the promise made at Kaikeyi’s wedding and the debt from the battlefield, and then says the sentence that fixes the two brothers in their places: “Be the king of men yourself, Bharata; I will be the emperor of the wild beasts.”

When argument fails, Bharata has one thing left. In sarga 111 he tells Sumantra to spread kusha grass on the level ground, and when the charioteer looks to Rama and waits, he spreads it with his own hands and sits. “I am going to sit at my noble brother’s door until he relents and grants my prayer.” Rama looks at him. “Bharata, my child, what wrong have I done you, that you sit at my door to force my hand? It is a Brahmin who is allowed to lie down at another man’s door and block his way when he has been wronged. For warriors, for men who have had the water of consecration sprinkled on their heads, there is no such custom.” Bharata turns to the people and asks why they do not plead with his brother, and they answer that he is right and that Rama cannot be moved. He rises, touches water, and makes the last offer he has: “I never asked my father for the kingdom, and I never told my mother to ask for it, and I never approved of this exile. But if our father’s word must be kept, and someone must live in the forest, then I will do it. I will live in the forest for fourteen years myself.” Rama is astonished at the sincerity of it, and the sages who have watched the two brothers argue at close quarters tell Bharata, with one voice, to obey Rama if he has any regard for his father at all. His limbs are trembling. Rama takes him onto his lap and answers in sarga 112: “The moon may lose its light; the Himalaya may shed its snow; the ocean may pass its shore; I will never break the pledge my father gave.” Then Bharata sets a pair of wooden sandals worked with gold on the ground in front of him. “Noble brother, stand on these sandals with your feet. These will provide for the needs of the whole world and keep it safe.” Rama stands on them, steps off at once, and gives them to him, and Bharata bows to the sandals and names his terms: fourteen years in matted hair and bark, on fruit and roots, outside the city; “And if, when the fourteenth year is complete, I do not see you home on the very next day, jewel among the Raghus, I will walk into the fire.” “So be it,” Rama says, and gives him, in the same embrace, the one charge no one else at Chitrakuta could carry: “Take care of mother Kaikeyi. Do not be angry with her. Sita and I both put you on your oath to do it.” Bharata walks around his brother with his right side toward him and sets the sandals on the head of a fine elephant. At Nandigrama, in sarga 115, he hands the kingdom over in the same words he will use for fourteen years: “This kingdom my elder brother has handed to me as a sacred trust, and with it these gold-worked sandals.” “Hold the royal parasol over these sandals at once.” Every matter of state, every gift that comes in, he lays before the sandals first and settles afterward.

From Nandigrama to the Sarayu

Sarga 126 of the Yuddha Kanda finds him fourteen years later exactly as he said he would be found: two miles from Ayodhya, worn thin, in bark and black deerskin, his hair matted, living on roots and fruit, radiant as a seer of Brahman, “ruling the earth with Rama’s sandals set before him on the throne and himself on the ground beside them.” Hanuman joins his hands and gives him the news, and Bharata faints for joy and falls; fourteen years of held breath go out of him at once. When he comes to, he promises the messenger a hundred thousand cows, a hundred villages, and sixteen brides, hears the whole story of the forest years, and says in a voice that gladdens everyone who hears it, “After so long, my heart’s wish has come true.” A city that has been in mourning for fourteen years comes awake in a night, and all of Ayodhya goes out to Nandigrama. Bharata carries his brother’s sandals on his head, and the white parasol and the gold-mounted fly-whisks he has never once used over himself. Rama rises, sets him on his lap, and for a while neither of them says anything. Bharata embraces Sugriva: “Sugriva, you are the fifth of us four brothers.” Then comes the moment, in sarga 127, for which this figure was written. He sets Rama’s sandals himself upon the king’s feet, the two pieces of wood that had been the throne of Kosala for fourteen years, and says with joined hands: “This is your whole kingdom, which I kept in trust; I give it back to you. Today my birth is fulfilled and my heart’s wish is complete, seeing the king returned to Ayodhya. Look at your treasury, your storehouses, your palace, and your army; by your own splendor I have made them all tenfold.” The monkeys weep, and Vibhishana with them; they have come from a Lanka where brothers did otherwise. At the consecration Bharata takes the reins as charioteer, and when Lakshmana will not accept the office of heir apparent, Rama consecrates Bharata in it.

In sargas 100 and 101 of the Uttara Kanda his uncle Yudhajit sends word of the gandharva country on both banks of the Sindhu, guarded by the three crores of sons of Shailusha, and Rama looks toward Bharata. He marches with his two sons, Taksha and Pushkala, looses the weapon of Death called Samvarta, and the gandharvas fall in a moment; he founds Takshashila in the gandharva country and Pushkalavata in the land of the Gandharas, settles them fully in five years, and comes home, and then goes out again as rear guard for Lakshmana’s son Chandraketu. The poem says that he and Lakshmana, bound with their whole hearts to Rama’s feet, lost all count of the passing time. The end comes by the same refusal with which the story began. In sarga 108, having given up Lakshmana, Rama says he will consecrate Bharata as lord of Ayodhya this very day and go to the forest, and Bharata, struck almost senseless, speaks harshly of kingship: “I swear by truth and by the joys of heaven, king of Raghu’s line, that I do not want the kingdom without you.” Rama consecrates Kusha and Lava and walks toward the Sarayu, and Bharata and Shatrughna, with the women of their households, go behind him with the Agnihotra fire. At Gopratara, the sacred ford, they all go down into the water and cast off their human bodies. The man who sat fourteen years outside the city waiting for Rama walked one step behind him at the last, as he had always walked.

His Path

The Death of Dasharatha · Rama’s message for Bharata in Sumantra’s mouth: deal fairly with all your mothers, and look on Kausalya as your own.

The Exile of Rama · The morning Ayodhya hung its streets with flags while Bharata was at his grandfather’s court, and the two boons asked behind his back.

The Departure of Rama to His Own Abode · The Samvarta loosed on three crores of gandharvas by the Sindhu, the founding of Takshashila and Pushkalavata, and a brother walking one step behind at the ford of the Sarayu.

The King of a Trust

Read whole, Valmiki’s Bharata has one word for the kingdom, and it is trust. Before Kaikeyi it is a load a calf cannot stand under; before the ministers it is the eldest brother’s right; before Vasishtha it is the thing he belongs to along with himself; at Nandigrama it is a sacred trust; and with the sandals on Rama’s feet it is everything that is being given back tenfold. No other figure in the poem receives so much and calls so little of it his own. His anger is unlike anyone else’s as well: it comes down on Kaikeyi with its full weight and stops inside the same sentence, because Rama looks on her as a mother, and for the same reason he takes Shatrughna’s hand off Manthara. Guha and Bharadvaja put one suspicion to him, and he gives them both one answer, that the hour never come. At Chitrakuta he has argument, tears, a vigil at the door, and at the last the offer of his own exile, and Rama’s word moves for none of them; so he sets down the sandals and goes home with the fire as his own forfeit. For fourteen years outside the city he does exactly what Rama asked of him there, no anger at Kaikeyi, and Kausalya for a mother. The son in whose name two boons were asked never enjoyed either of them for a day, and when Rama at the end meant in earnest to give him the kingdom, he said again what he had said in the council of Ayodhya on the fourteenth morning. At the ford of the Sarayu he went down one step behind his brother, as he had always walked.