Bharata Becomes Rāma’s Deputy

When the grief for their father had been given its due, Bharata came to the true purpose of his long journey, and he made his plea, and it was a plea made with his whole heart.

Return, brother, he begged. Come home. The throne is yours; it was always yours; it is yours now more than ever, for our father is dead and the kingdom has no king. The exile was our mother’s crime, extracted by trickery from a broken old man, and it need bind you no longer. Our father is gone; the vow died with him; there is no one now to hold you to those cruel fourteen years. Come home and be crowned, and let me serve you as I have always longed to serve you, and let this whole nightmare be undone.

I do not want the throne; I have never wanted it; I reject it utterly; it is a torment to me even to be offered it. Only you can lift this burden from me. Come and take what is yours, and set everything right, and let Ayodhyā have back the king it loves. I beg you. The whole court begs you. Our mothers beg you. Come home.

It was a powerful plea, and it was made by love, and it was reinforced by everyone present, for the ministers added their voices, and the elders, and even the sages, urging Rāma that the circumstances had changed, that his father’s death released him, that the good of the kingdom now required him to return and rule. It would have been so easy, and so plausibly right, for Rāma to yield. His father, who had imposed the exile, was dead. The brother who was to have replaced him refused the crown.

The kingdom needed a king and Rāma was that king by every right. Every argument of convenience, of duty to the state, of love for his grieving brother, pulled him toward saying yes.

And Rāma said no.

He said it gently, and he said it with love, and he said it with sorrow, for it grieved him to refuse Bharata’s plea and to prolong his brother’s pain. But he said it, and his reasons are the moral heart of the chapter, and they show us again the iron beneath his gentleness.

I cannot come, he said. Do not think it is because I do not love you, or because I do not long for home, or because I do not feel the weight of the kingdom’s need. I feel all of it. But consider what you are asking. Our father gave his word. He bound himself by a sacred oath to send me into the forest for fourteen years, and he kept that word though it broke his heart and cost him his life. Shall I now make his sacrifice meaningless? Shall I say that his word, for which he died, was worth nothing, to be set aside the moment he was gone?

His death does not release me from his vow; it consecrates it. He paid for that word with his life. I will not cheapen what he bought so dearly by breaking it the instant convenience allows. To return now would be to dishonour the very father we have just wept for, to trample on the truth for which he died. I must complete the fourteen years. Not because anyone can now compel me, but because his honour and mine require it, and because a vow does not become void merely because keeping it has grown inconvenient.

This is my duty, Bharata, and I will not evade it, however much my heart aches to come home with you.

And there was more, for Rāma saw the situation whole, as he always did. And you must return and rule, he told Bharata. The kingdom cannot be left headless for fourteen years; that would be to punish the innocent people of Ayodhyā for a crime they did not commit. You must go back, and you must govern, and you must hold the kingdom in trust until I return. This is your duty, as completing the exile is mine. We each have our appointed task, and neither is lighter than the other, and neither may be laid down.

Go home, Bharata, and be strong, and rule well, and I will come to you when the years are accomplished, and not one day before.

Bharata saw that Rāma’s resolve was granite, that no plea would move him, that the same unshakable fidelity to duty that had carried Rāma into exile without a murmur now held him there against every argument of love and convenience. And Bharata, being who he was, did not rage against it or resent it; he bowed to it, though it broke his heart, for he recognized in his brother’s refusal the very rightness that made Rāma worthy of the throne he would not seize.

But if he could not bring Rāma home, Bharata would not simply return and rule as king in his place, for that his conscience would not allow. He found instead a third way, and it is one of the most beautiful gestures in all the epic.

Give me your sandals, Bharata said. Your pādukas. If you will not come, then let your sandals come in your place, and let them be the true king. I will set them upon the throne of Ayodhyā, and they shall reign, and I will rule only as their servant, as your deputy, holding the kingdom not as king but as steward, in your name and by your authority, until you come to claim it. I will not sit upon the throne. I will not wear the crown. I will not be king.

I will place your sandals in the seat of power and govern in their shadow, and every act of rule I perform, I will perform as your regent and not as your replacement. Let the kingdom know that Rāma reigns, even in exile, and that Bharata is only the keeper of his throne.

And Rāma, moved, consented, and gave his brother his sandals, and Bharata received them as one receives a sacred trust, and placed them reverently upon his own head. And he made a further vow, and it was a terrible and a binding one. I will wait, he said, the full fourteen years, and I will not wait in comfort. I will not live in the palace.

I will live outside the city, at Nandigrāma, as an ascetic, in bark and matted hair, exactly as you live, sharing your exile from afar, ruling the kingdom from that humble place through your sandals, taking no pleasure and no ease while you suffer in the forest. And on the day the fourteen years are complete, I will look for your return. And if that day comes and you have not come, if the fourteenth year ends and I do not see you, then I will build a fire and enter it, for I will not live one day beyond the term without you.

Come on the appointed day, brother, or you will come to find me ashes.

It was a vow of absolute devotion, binding Rāma’s return to Bharata’s very life, and Rāma heard it and understood its weight, and embraced his brother with deep emotion, and promised to return on the appointed day. And so the strange, sorrowful settlement was made: Rāma would complete his exile; Bharata would rule as his deputy through the sandals; and the two brothers, each holding fast to his own hard duty, would keep faith with one another across the fourteen years and the many miles, bound by love and by sandals and by a vow of fire.

Bharata took the pādukas and turned homeward, and his great host turned with him, and they made their sorrowful way back out of the forest and across the river and up to Ayodhyā. And there Bharata did exactly as he had sworn.

He set Rāma’s sandals upon the throne, and bowed to them, and ruled the kingdom as their servant, and he did not enter the city or the palace but lived at Nandigrāma in ascetic poverty, sharing his brother’s hardship from afar, governing in his brother’s name, and counting, one by one, with a longing that never eased, the long days of the fourteen years until Rāma should come home.

And so the Ayodhyā Kāṇḍa draws toward its close, on this image of two brothers divided by duty and united by love: one in the forest, keeping his father’s word; one at Nandigrāma, keeping his brother’s throne; and between them, a pair of wooden sandals upon a throne, reigning in the place of a king who would not break his vow. The kingdom was safe. The wrong, though not undone, was contained by goodness on every side.

And the three exiles turned at last from the affairs of Ayodhyā back to the forest that was now their world, and set their faces toward the deeper wilderness, toward the great southern forests where the true trials of the exile, and the dark turning of the whole story, still waited. · · ·