The summit of Rishyamuka, and down on the shore of Pampa two archers are walking. Sarga 2 of the Kishkindha Kanda gives Sugriva his first scene in the poem, and the scene is fear: “At the sight of the two heroic brothers, Rama and Lakshmana, bearing their splendid weapons, Sugriva was seized with suspicion.” “These two,” he tells his ministers, “are sent by Vali; there is no doubt in it.” He moves off that ridge onto another, because a monkey who has been hunted for years does not stay on the ridge where he was seen, and Hanuman says to him, “And how clearly the monkey shows in you, that out of a flighty mind you cannot settle on a single resolve and hold it.” Sugriva’s answer is a question, who would not be afraid at the sight of two such men, and an order: go down in a beggar’s shape and find out who they are. It is the first thing the poem shows of him, and it is the thing he has been doing for years: running when someone comes, and asking, before he runs, who it is.
The poem gives the feud in his own mouth, in sargas 9 and 10, told to Rama on a branch of sal. “My elder brother is named Vali, and he can wipe out any enemy.” When their father died the ministers made Vali king, “and I stood always at his side, bowed like a servant, and thought nothing of it.” One night the asura Mayavi roars at the gate; Vali follows him into a cavern in the earth and leaves the younger brother at its mouth. “More than a year went by while he was in that cave, and I stood at its mouth for all of it.” Blood comes out mixed with foam. Sugriva seals the cave with a rock, offers water to his brother’s spirit, goes home, and the ministers crown him. Then Vali comes back. “I had the power in that hour to hold that one in check, and my mind, bound by reverence for an elder brother, would not turn to it.” He gives the kingdom back, and his brother drives him out with cutting words: “He seized my wife, who was dearer to me than my own life.” In sarga 46 he will tell Rama how, with Vali behind him, he ran east and south and west and north until “the earth seemed to me small as the print of a cow’s hoof, clear as a mirror,” and how Hanuman remembered the curse of Matanga, whose ground Vali could not enter. “Fear puts every creature on its guard,” he says, “and it does not ask whether the guard is wise.”
Before the Fire, Then Before His Brother
In sarga 5 Hanuman brings the two brothers to the Malaya hill, and Sugriva takes on a comely form and comes to Rama. “Lord, it is my own honor and my great fortune that you, of all men, should seek the friendship of a monkey. If my friendship is welcome to you, here is my arm held out. Take my hand in yours, and let a firm bond be tied between us.” Hanuman kindles a fire from two sticks and sets it between them, and the two walk around it. “Now you are the dear friend of my heart, and from this hour our grief and our gladness are one thing and not two.” And in the same breath the thing that brought him there: “In my terror, give me safety from Vali.” Rama, “as though with a smile,” promises that Vali will die, and the promise is “spoken as easily as another man might promise a favor.” What Sugriva has to give in return lies in a cave: a woman writhing in Ravana‘s arms had let fall, over his head, an upper garment and her ornaments. “We gathered them up and we have kept them safe ever since.” He brings them, Rama presses them to his chest and goes down to the ground, and Lakshmana knows the anklets alone. Sugriva gives his own word, “Be she in Rasatala or in the sky I will find her and put her in your hands.” Still, he believes in Rama only when a single arrow goes through seven sal trees, the mountain behind them, and the earth.
In sarga 14, at the gate of Kishkindha, he says to Rama, “the vow you made before, to kill Vali: fulfill it now,” and Rama answers, “Sugriva, show me your enemy in the shape of a brother.” In sarga 16 Vali comes out. “This fist of mine is closed tight and its fingers are set just so. When I throw it, it will come back to me only after it has taken your life.” “Then let this fist of mine come down on your head and take yours in the same instant.” Hit first, Sugriva “spat blood in a stream and stood there like a mountain with a waterfall running down its face,” and then “he did what no one in Kishkindha had ever seen him do: he tore a sal tree out of the ground” and brought it down on his brother. His strength begins to drain, and he “threw a signal toward Rama that his strength was failing, and went on fighting while he waited for it to be answered.” The arrow comes from the trees, “out of a direction he was not fighting in, from a hand he had never seen.” Vali, on the ground, questions Rama, accepts his answer, and in his last words names the brother he was fighting: “Set the very best understanding between Sugriva and Angada.” “And manage it so that Sugriva does not treat poor Tara with disrespect; her only guilt is that I persecuted him.” Tara comes running with Angada behind her, and “a bitter despair came down on him in the very hour of his victory.” It is Sugriva who gives the order, “Let the last rites for my noble elder brother be done exactly as the scriptures lay down,” who lifts the body onto the pyre with Angada, and who comes back to Rama in wet clothes. Rama will not enter the city, “I keep my father’s command, and for fourteen years I will not enter a village, let alone a town”; in sarga 26 Sugriva goes into his brother’s inner apartments, is bathed with the water of every sea, and at Rama’s word installs Angada as prince regent. “When the month of Kartika comes, make your effort to be rid of Ravana.”
The Forgotten Promise
The rains pass and the sky clears, and in sarga 29 Hanuman reads the season “the way a minister reads a debt coming due.” “Sugriva, his own purpose achieved, had sunk into pleasure, had grown slack in the gathering of dharma and of wealth.” “Having won back his beloved wife Ruma and the coveted Tara, Sugriva took his ease by day and night.” Hanuman tells him that the search for Vaidehi “is falling behind through neglect,” and Sugriva gives Nila the order on the spot: the whole army within fifteen nights, and “any vanara who comes here after fifteen nights have passed will be put to death.” Then he goes back into his house. “The order was hard enough to hang a monkey for lateness. It did not occur to the king that he himself was already late.” In sargas 31 to 33 Lakshmana walks into Kishkindha in a rage. “Sugriva left his golden seat and rose, like a tall, ornamented flag raised in honor of Indra,” and came near with joined palms, “his eyes red with wine.” Lakshmana calls him an ingrate, “a snake that speaks with the voice of a frog,” and gives him his brother’s message: “The road by which Vali was killed and departed is not closed. Sugriva, keep to your promise; do not walk in Vali’s path.” The one who answers is Tara, Vali’s widow and now his queen: “Sugriva lost count of the hour, as the sage Vishvamitra once did,” and the armies are already summoned. “Then Sugriva broke and threw down the strange, rich, great garland that hung at his neck, and the wine went out of him.” “He who pierced seven great trees, a mountain, and the earth with a single arrow, what need has he of a helper?” “If through trust or affection any overstep of mine, a servant’s, has taken place, forgive it; there is no one who never commits a fault.” Lakshmana asks his pardon in turn and calls him friend. That same day Sugriva sends for every monkey on earth and “went forth for the first time in royal state”; the exile who had once hidden on Rishyamuka is carried up the same country under a white parasol. Rama embraces him and gives him a lesson on kings: the king who serves pleasure alone “is like a man asleep on a treetop who wakes only in his fall.” In sargas 40 to 43 Sugriva sends the armies out by every mountain and river of the four quarters, and when Rama asks how he knows the whole round of the earth, the answer is the old flight: “Every mountain and river he had set before those four armies that morning, he had learned by running past it with his brother behind him.”
On This Side of the Sea
In Yuddha Kanda 17 a rakshasa halts in the air over the shore and asks for refuge, and the first doubt is Sugriva’s: a spy of Ravana’s, to be seized. When Rama says he will forsake no one who comes in friendship, Sugriva says the sharpest thing said on that beach all day, “One who has left his own brother in such a plight, whom would he not leave?” and it comes, the poem notes, “from a man whose brother had taken his wife and driven him up a mountain.” Rama smiles toward Lakshmana and answers with his own family, “Not all brothers are like Bharata, nor all sons like me, nor all friends like you,” and Sugriva yields: “My own inmost heart holds Vibhishana pure.” In sarga 40, from the top of Suvela, he sees Ravana for the first time, seated on a gate of Lanka. “The instant Sugriva saw Ravana, with the monkey chiefs and Raghava himself looking on, he was on his feet. No one had ordered anything.” He leaps straight to the gate. “Rakshasa, I am a friend and a servant of Rama, lord of the world. You will not get away from me today, because the strength of that king of kings is in me.” He tears the crown from Ravana’s head: “The crown of the king of Lanka lay in the dust, and the king of the monkeys stood over it.” The two kings wrestle on the roof of the gate, fall together into the gap between the wall and the moat, and rise again; when Ravana reaches for his magic, Sugriva springs into the sky and lands at Rama’s side, and Rama holds him close: “You did this reckless thing without a word of counsel with me.” The rakshasa he has just wrestled is the one who, in Uttara Kanda 34, after Vali carried him round the four seas under one arm, lived at Kishkindha “for a month, as much at home as Sugriva.” At Ayodhya Bharata embraces him: “Sugriva, you are the fifth of us four brothers; friendship is made by kindness, and a friend is as a brother.” And at the end of the poem, when Rama turns toward the Sarayu, Sugriva comes forward: “I have crowned Angada, Vali’s son, upon the throne and come here; know me, king, as one resolved to follow you.” Rama answers, “Listen, friend Sugriva; I will not go without you, neither to the world of the gods nor to that supreme abode.” At the river the monkeys return each to the god he came from, “and Sugriva entered the orb of the sun, which is to say that the monkey king went home into his own father.”
His Path
Three Stops, Three Questions
Three places where Sugriva gives something, forgets something, or doubts someone. Pause at each one.
- The hand held out. In the meeting of Hanuman and Rama, and the pact with Sugriva, read Kishkindha Kanda 5, where an exiled monkey holds out his arm to an exiled prince and asks, in the same breath, for safety. Ask: before that fire, who gave the other more, and did the two of them ask for the same thing?
- The broken garland. In the rains, Sugriva’s delay, and the quarters of the search, stop at sargas 31 to 33, where Lakshmana calls him a snake, Tara calls him Vishvamitra, and he breaks the garland at his own neck. Ask: which of his names was the true one in that room, and who said it?
- “Whom would he not leave?” In the surrender of Vibhishana, read Yuddha Kanda 17 and 18, where the first and hardest doubt about a rakshasa who left his brother comes from the monkey whose own brother died by Rama‘s arrow. Ask: was that question about Vibhishana, or about himself?
At the end, return to the first scene, where a monkey is changing ridges at the sight of two strangers. Does that fear look like weakness now, or like the habit that taught him the four quarters of the earth and that he put down, in one leap, on Suvela?
The Slaying of Vali · Two fists described, a sal tree torn up, a signal that his strength was failing, and his own name in a dying brother’s mouth.
The Siege of Lanka, and the Opening Battles · One leap from Suvela to the gate, a crown torn off, and a wrestling match between two kings that a fall into the moat could not end.
The Departure of Rama to His Own Abode · A kingdom handed to Angada, Rama’s “I will not go without you,” and a monkey going home into the sun.
The Man Whom Fear Showed the Earth
Read whole, Valmiki’s Sugriva is moved by fear, and the poem never hides it. He ran from his brother across all four quarters, changed ridges on Rishyamuka at the sight of strangers, and made safety his first request before the fire. Out of that same fear the poem draws his greatest service: the one who saw the earth small as a cow’s hoofprint while he ran is the one who could send four armies out by every mountain and river. In the middle sits the scene where he forgets his word, and the poem gives him two names for it, a snake with a frog’s voice in Lakshmana’s mouth and a Vishvamitra who lost count of the hour in Tara’s; he argues with neither, breaks his garland, and asks pardon. On the shore it is he, who knows what leaving a brother means from closer than anyone, who raises the hardest doubt about Vibhishana, and Rama answers him by setting him on the measure of friends, “nor all friends like you.” On Suvela the same Sugriva leaps at Ravana without a word to anyone. The one who ran is shown at the last giving his brother’s kingdom to his brother’s son, walking behind Rama, and going home into his father’s orb; the hand held out on the Malaya hill is not let go before the Sarayu.
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 1 and 17; Kishkindhakanda 2 to 12, 14 to 16, 22 to 26, 29 to 33, and 38 to 46; Yuddhakanda 17 to 18, 40 to 41, 67, and 127 to 128; Uttarakanda 34 and 108 to 110
What this edition covers: A character portrait drawn from the Valmiki Ramayana from the Kishkindha Kanda to the Uttara Kanda, with three marked reading questions.
Limits and differences: The poem gives two accounts of Sugriva’s father, the sun-god in Bala Kanda 17 and Riksharaja in Kumbhakarna’s words at Yuddha Kanda 67; both are recorded here and not reconciled. The Sugriva 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 (Kishkindhakanda 5).