Ayodhya has given itself over to celebration, and Kaikeyi is lying on her bed. Sarga 7 of the Ayodhya Kanda brings her hunchbacked maid Manthara down from the palace roof and straight into the bedchamber. “Get up, you deluded woman. How can you lie there?” The queen answers in a sweet voice: “Manthara, is something wrong? Your face is so downcast, and you look sick with grief.” The maid tells her that Rama is to be consecrated Prince Regent in the morning, and calls it the beginning of her undoing. Kaikeyi rises from her bed, takes a wonderful ornament from her own jewels, and presses it into the hunchback’s hands. “Between Rama and Bharata I see no difference at all.” “No sweeter words than these could have been spoken to me, no words more like nectar. So I give you another boon, a better one. Ask for whatever you want.” This is Kaikeyi’s first scene in the poem, and in it she is granting a boon to a maidservant. Nearly every word the poem records from her mouth belongs to this one day and the night that follows it.
Before that day she is a name and a share. In Bala Kanda 15 Brahma asks Vishnu to be born through Dasharatha‘s three queens, “Kausalya, Sumitra, and Kaikeyi, who are as Hri, Shri, and Kirti themselves, the goddesses of modesty, fortune, and fame.” In sarga 16 the king portions out the payasa the gods have made, and gives “half of what was left to Kaikeyi,” and in sarga 18 “from the womb of Kaikeyi, the youngest of the king’s wives, was born Bharata, a prince of true valor, who carried a quarter of Vishnu in him.” In the house of her brother Yudhajit Bharata grows up. The two old boons are told in sarga 9 by Manthara: in the war of the gods and the demons Dasharatha was cut to pieces by the weapons of Shambara’s host, and Kaikeyi carried him senseless out of the fighting. He offered her two boons. “And you said to him, ‘My lord, I will claim them when I choose.’ The king answered, ‘So be it.’” The boons lay unclaimed for years.
Three Blows, and a Mind Turned Over
Manthara flings the ornament to the floor and strikes a second time: tomorrow Kausalya will hold the earth, and “you, with your palms joined, will stand and wait upon her like a maidservant.” Kaikeyi answers with praise of Rama. “As Bharata is worthy of my honor, so is Rama, and more so. He serves me more than he serves Kausalya herself.” The third blow opens Bharata’s future, a boy sent “out of the country, or out of this world,” and then the maid reaches for an old wound. “In the pride of your good fortune, in the days when you were the favorite, you slighted Kausalya. Do you imagine that Rama’s mother, your co-wife, will not pay back that grudge?” Here something in Kaikeyi gives way. Her face flushes dark. “This very day I will send Rama out of here to the forest, and I will have Bharata installed as Prince Regent without delay.” The means are the two boons, and the room is the chamber of anger. “Do it today, daughter of Ashvapati.” The poem writes its verdict in a single sentence: “She was a woman of great intelligence, and at a servant’s words she went astray like an inexperienced girl.” The queen throws down her pearl necklace and lies on the bare floor. “If Rama is consecrated, this is the end of my life.”
In sargas 10 to 13 the king comes in and begins to give before he has heard: “I swear by every good deed I have ever done that I will do what pleases you.” Kaikeyi tightens the knot. “If you mean to do it, swear it first. Then I will tell you what I am asking.” He swears by Rama, and she calls her witnesses, “let the thirty-three gods hear it.” “Those two boons, which you offered and I left in trust with you, I claim today.” “With the very preparations that have been made for Rama‘s consecration, let my Bharata be consecrated Prince Regent,” and “let Rama, dressed in bark and deerskin, live the life of a hermit in the Dandaka forest for fourteen years.” “And let me see Rama setting out for the forest today, with my own eyes.” Behind the demand comes its argument, and the argument is the king’s own virtue: “You are known as the king of kings. Be true to your promise.” The king calls her a serpent brought into his house in the guise of a princess and touches her feet with his head. Her answer hardens. “Now you repent them. How will you ever again speak of your righteousness before the earth?” “The ocean, once it has given its word, never oversteps its shore.” And the last sentence: “I swear by Bharata and by myself: nothing will content me except the banishment of Rama.” Having said that much, she falls silent. All night the king begs the night not to turn into dawn, and “the hard-hearted queen of malicious intent, hearing every word of it, would not grant his prayer.”
The Order the King Could Not Give
At first light, in sarga 14, the king is tossing on the floor, and she stands over him. “You promised me a boon, and now you lie on the floor as if you had committed some sin.” He answers with the one thing a husband can still take back: he disowns the hand he took before the fire, and Bharata with it. Her voice does not change. When Sumantra comes in to sing the king awake, it is Kaikeyi, “well versed in the ways of state,” who answers for him: “The king was awake all night for joy over Rama.” In sarga 18 he finds his father on a couch with Kaikeyi beside him, bows at his father’s feet and then at hers, and the king manages one word, “Rama,” and nothing more. So Rama puts his questions to her, and she has “put shame behind her.” “The king is not angry, Rama, and no anguish troubles him.” Before Rama the king will not open his lips. Rama gives his word, “Rama does not speak twice,” and then she tells him: the arrow she drew from his father’s body in the war of the gods and the demons, the two boons, Bharata’s consecration and his own fourteen years in the Dandaka forest. “Vindicate his truth, which has never once failed, and get him out of this.” Rama says, “So be it,” and “the wicked Kaikeyi was overjoyed to hear it.” She hurries him now, to his face, “the way a horse leaps when the whip comes down,” and his reply gives her a standing she never asked for: “You must see no good in me at all, princess of Kekaya, that you had to go to my father over a thing so small. You have more authority over me than he has.” To Lakshmana he says that fate put the idea into Kaikeyi’s mind, that she is his mother too, and that she never made a difference between her own son and him.
On the day of the parting, in sargas 34 to 37, three speeches fall on Kaikeyi, and she answers none of them. Sumantra, in the king’s court, calls her a woman who has betrayed her own husband and tells the story of her mother, “honey does not drip from a neem.” “And the queen was neither shaken nor grieved, and no one could see the smallest change in the color of her face.” The king orders an army and the treasury to go with Rama, and then, for the first time, “fear took hold of Kaikeyi. Her mouth went dry and her voice caught in her throat.” Bharata will not take a kingdom with its wealth gone, she says. “In your own dynasty, Sagara cast off his eldest son, the one they called Asamanja.” The king says one word, “Shame!” Rama asks for bark, “and then Kaikeyi herself brought the bark. She carried it to Rama and the others with her own hands, in front of that whole crowd, without a trace of shame, and said, ‘Put these on.’” Lakshmana puts his on. Sita takes two pieces of kusha bark from Kaikeyi’s hand and does not know how they are worn. Vasishtha turns on her, “Witless Kaikeyi, disgrace of your house, you have gone too far,” and inside the anger there is a plain point of law: “What you asked for, princess of Kekaya, was the exile of Rama alone.” The king adds his one prohibition, “Kaikeyi, Sita does not deserve to go in a robe of kusha bark.” In sarga 40, when the dust of the chariot is gone from sight and the king drops in the road, Kausalya comes to his right side and Kaikeyi to his left. “Kaikeyi, you of the sinful resolve. Do not touch my limbs.” She is no wife of his and no kin. “Kaikeyi, your wish is fulfilled. Enjoy the kingdom as a widow.” On the sixth night the king dies crying, “Oh Kaikeyi, cruel Kaikeyi, my enemy, the shame of my house,” with two of his three queens beside him, “and the third nowhere in the room.”
“All of This I Arranged for Your Sake”
In sarga 72 Bharata comes home to a silent palace and goes to her rooms. In her delight Kaikeyi “sprang up from her seat of gold,” draws his head to her and smells it, sets him on her lap, and begins, quite calmly, to ask about the road. He asks why his father’s couch is empty, and she tells “her unknowing son the whole terrible, unwelcome thing in the voice of a woman with good news to share. ‘Your father, that great-hearted and glorious king, who was given to sacrifice and was the refuge of the good, has gone the way that is the destined end of every creature that lives.’” Bharata drops to the floor. She lifts him, gives him his father’s last words exactly, “and in this at least she kept strictly to the facts,” and when he asks what crime Rama can have committed, she tells her own doing “with real cheerfulness”: “My son, the moment I heard that Rama was to be installed as regent, I asked your father for the sovereignty of Ayodhya for you, and for the banishment of Rama.” “All of this I arranged for your sake.” In sargas 73 and 74 the son says what the husband could not: “Fall from your kingdom, Kaikeyi, cruel woman of vicious conduct!” And in the middle of it one sentence that governs everything after: “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.” In sarga 78 Shatrughna drags Manthara across the floor, and Kaikeyi comes to save her maid; his rebuke terrifies her, and “she fled for protection to her own son.” Bharata says, “Women are not to be killed by any man alive. Forgive her.” Manthara falls at Kaikeyi’s feet, half-conscious, “and slowly, slowly” the queen calms her down. On that day she is comforting the one who brought her here.
At Bharadvaja’s hermitage, in sarga 92, the poem looks inside her for the first time. “Kaikeyi too, whom the whole world condemned because her ambition to see her son made regent had come to nothing, took his feet, with shame in her for the banishment of Rama that she had brought about.” Bharata presents her: “And this one, angry, unthinking, proud, sure of her own beauty, greedy for power, noble in her looks and base underneath, is Kaikeyi, my mother.” The sage answers him, “Bharata, you must not hold Kaikeyi guilty. This banishment of Rama is going to turn to the happiness of all.” At Chitrakuta, with his brother in his lap, Rama asks after the kingdom clause by clause, and in the list of his questions there is this one: “And is the noble queen Kaikeyi rejoicing?” In sarga 107 Rama tells Bharata an older thing than the boons: when their father married Kaikeyi, he promised her father that the kingdom of Ayodhya would go to her son. Before the sandals he says, “Whether your mother did this for your sake out of love, my child, or out of greed for the throne, do not take it to heart. Treat her as your mother.” And at the parting, with his eyes full of tears: “Take care of mother Kaikeyi. Do not be angry with her. Sita and I both put you on your oath to do it.” The mothers’ throats are so choked that they cannot manage a single word of farewell.
The poem touches her again. In sarga 119 of the Yuddha Kanda, on the aerial chariot above Lanka, Dasharatha tells his son, “The words Kaikeyi spoke to send you into the forest are still cut into my heart,” and the first thing Rama asks of him is for her: “Be gracious to Kaikeyi and to Bharata. That fearful word you once spoke, ‘I disown you with your son,’ let it not touch Kaikeyi and her son as a curse.” “So be it,” the great king says. At Nandigrama Rama salutes all his mothers, “and the woman who had sent him away was greeted like the rest.” In the last sargas of the Uttara Kanda Kausalya yields to the law of time, and “Sumitra and Kaikeyi followed her soon after, having done many acts of dharma, and took their place in heaven behind her,” where “Dasharatha, who had died of what she asked for, met all three of his wives as one household again.” The man who said she was no wife of his and no kin is the one the poem returns her to.
Her Path
Three Stops, Three Questions
Three places where Kaikeyi gives something, tells something, or makes someone else say it. Pause at each one.
- A boon given to a maidservant. In Manthara, Kaikeyi, and the two boons, read Ayodhya Kanda 7 to 9, where the queen first gives an ornament, twice sings Rama‘s praises, and turns over at the third blow. Ask: which of the three blows landed, the fear for Bharata, or the old memory of a slight to Kausalya?
- The order the father could not give. In the exile of Rama, stop at sargas 18 and 19, where Kaikeyi delivers the sentence and Rama tells her that she has more authority over him than his father has. Ask: what does that sentence give Kaikeyi, and is it the thing she asked for?
- “All of this I arranged for your sake.” In the coming of Bharata, and the sandals, read sarga 72, where a mother gives her son his father’s death and her own deed in the same voice. Ask: inside the story, whose sake was it done for, and does anyone in that room believe it?
At the end, return to the first scene, where a queen on her bed is granting a boon to a hunchbacked maid. Does that generosity now look like the same woman who will call thirty-three gods to witness in the chamber of anger, or like someone else?
The Death of Dasharatha · Kausalya’s reproach that only Bharata and Kaikeyi have their joy of it, and her name in the king’s last cry on the sixth night.
Bharata at Chitrakuta, and the Sandals · Shame at a sage’s feet, an old promise made at a wedding, and a parting oath that no one be angry with mother Kaikeyi.
The Ordeal of Fire, the Return, and the Coronation · Words still cut into a father’s heart on an aerial chariot, and a son’s first request, that the fearful word not touch Kaikeyi as a curse.
The Woman the Poem Kept Calling Mother
Read whole, Valmiki’s Kaikeyi is a woman of one day and one night. Nearly all her own words sit between sargas 7 and 19 of the Ayodhya Kanda, and the first of them are spoken in Rama’s favor. After that she is silent, and other people speak about her: Sumantra, Vasishtha, Dasharatha, the women of the city, and in the harshest voice of all her own son. The poem records that condemnation at full length and sets two things beside it. One is that Rama calls her mother every time and asks his father above Lanka for grace for her before anything else. The other is that the poem never writes a sentence of repentance for her; at Bharadvaja’s feet it shows her shame and gives her no words. Valmiki calls her ignoble and calls her noble, sometimes in the same sarga, and both epithets run to the end. Bharadvaja’s “you must not hold Kaikeyi guilty” stands on one side, “the shame of my house” on the other, and the poem chooses neither one to erase the other. The woman whose two boons killed a king arrives, in the last sargas, in heaven at that king’s side, and that sentence too is written with her old epithet intact.
Edition and source passage
Main edition: Gita Press Valmiki Ramayana, Sanskrit with Hindi translation, all seven kandas; quoted speech follows the English chapters of the Valmiki Ramayana in this library, which rest on the Gita Press English text.
Passage for this reading: Balakanda 15 to 18 and 73; Ayodhyakanda 7 to 19, 34 to 40, 46, 61 to 64, 72 to 74, 78, 92, 99 to 104, 107, and 112; Yuddhakanda 119 and 127 to 128; Uttarakanda 99
What this edition covers: A character portrait drawn from the Valmiki Ramayana from the Bala Kanda to the Uttara Kanda, with three marked reading questions.
Limits and differences: Kaikeyi’s service in the war of the gods and the demons is told three ways in the poem (Manthara: the senseless king carried out of the fighting; Kaikeyi to the king: a night kept awake guarding him; Kaikeyi to Rama: an arrow drawn from his body), and each is kept in its own scene. Her mother is unnamed in the text. The Kaikeyi of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas belongs to another telling and is named only; nothing from it is blended in.
Compare the sources: Gita Press edition (the kandas and sargas listed above); Sanskrit and independent English translation (Ayodhyakanda 9).