Rāma Wins Sītā’s Hand

They came at last to Mithilā, and the city was full. From every kingdom of the earth the mighty had gathered, kings and princes and famous warriors, drawn by Janaka’s proclamation and the prize it offered. The streets thronged with retinues and banners; the inns overflowed; the whole capital hummed with the particular excitement of a great contest whose outcome no one could foresee. And at the centre of it all, in the courtyard of the palace, waited the bow.

It rested on an eight-wheeled iron cart, and the cart alone was a thing to marvel at, for it took five hundred strong men to drag it into place. The bow itself lay upon it like a sleeping thing, immense, ancient, radiating a sacred weight that made men lower their voices near it. This was Shiva’s bow, and every king in that courtyard knew its history and knew the vow attached to it: lift it, string it, and win the hand of the princess Sītā; fail, and go home shamed before the assembled world.

When Vishvāmitra came into the court leading two young men in the simple garments of forest travellers, no one paid them much attention. The great ones were there, the celebrated strong men, the kings whose names were sung. Who were these two boys walking behind an old sage? Janaka received Vishvāmitra with deep respect, as was due to so great a rishi, and the sage asked, almost mildly, whether the young prince with him might be permitted to look upon the famous bow.

Janaka, courteous and a little sorrowful, agreed, though one imagines he expected nothing. He had watched so many strong men fail. He had begun, we know, to fear that his vow had shut his daughter away from any possible husband.

For the contest had already been going badly, and for a long time. One after another the mighty had come forward to try the bow, and one after another they had been humbled. Great kings, proud of a lifetime’s strength, had set their hands to it and strained until the veins stood out on their necks and could not stir it in its rest. Whole teams of warriors had heaved at it together and failed to lift it a finger’s breadth. The thing simply would not be moved by ordinary might, however great.

And with each failure a kind of gloom had settled deeper over the court, and over Janaka most of all, for every failure seemed to seal his daughter’s solitude more firmly.

Let us understand what made this moment so heavy, for it was not only about strength. Janaka had made a vow, and a king’s vow cannot be unmade, and he had begun to see that his vow, made in love and in awe of his daughter’s nature, might have become a wall around her that no one on earth could pass. This is a thing that happens to good intentions: they harden into conditions, and the conditions outlast the love that made them, and we find ourselves imprisoned by our own high standards.

Janaka loved Sītā and wanted her happy, and he had bound her happiness to a feat that seemed beyond the reach of the whole world. He watched the young forest prince walk toward the bow with, one supposes, more courtesy than hope.

Rāma came before the great bow and bowed to it, for it was a sacred thing and he honoured sacred things. Then, with no display, no visible summoning of effort, no straining, he set his hand to it.

The court had grown silent. Every eye was on the slight young figure and the enormous weapon.

Rāma lifted the bow.

He lifted it as easily as a man lifts a walking-staff, raised that immensity that five hundred men had labored to drag, raised it smoothly into the air, and the silence in the court became the silence of held breath. And then, to string it, he bent it, drew the great arc of it toward himself to fasten the cord.

And the bow broke.

It could not bear the strength that bent it. With a sound like a thunderclap directly overhead, a sound that split the air and rolled out across the whole city and shook the ground, the ancient bow of Shiva snapped in two in Rāma’s hands. Men cried out and clapped their hands to their ears. Birds burst up from every roof in Mithilā.

And in the ringing silence that followed the enormous crack, the whole assembly understood at once that they had witnessed something they would tell their grandchildren, that the impossible condition had been met, and met not with grunting effort but with an ease that was somehow more astonishing than any struggle could have been.

Janaka rose from his seat with his face transformed. The gloom of the long failed contest fell from him in an instant. His daughter’s long solitude was over; and better than that, far better, she was won not by some brute of mere muscle but by this, this young prince of grace and gentleness and quiet overwhelming strength, exactly the union of power and goodness that Janaka in his deepest hope had wanted for her and had almost stopped believing existed. He came down to Rāma with tears in his eyes.

And Sītā. The tellers say she had watched from among the women of the court, and that when the bow broke and she understood who had broken it, something in her that had been waiting as long as Rāma’s own destiny had waited quietly came home. She had lifted that bow’s pedestal herself, as a child, with one hand; she of all people knew what strength lay sleeping in it; and here was the one being on earth whose strength answered hers.

When she came forward, at the proper time, to place the garland of victory around the neck of the man who had won her, it was not the shy submission of a girl handed to a stranger. It was a meeting. Two who had come into the world from strange doors, the furrow and the fire, the earth and the flame, recognizing one another at last. The garland settled on Rāma’s shoulders, and a thing that had been prepared since before either of them was born was accomplished.

Messengers rode north at once to Ayodhyā, and Dasharatha came, overjoyed, with his whole court and his other three sons, to celebrate his eldest boy’s marriage. And Janaka, whose generosity now overflowed as his sorrow had once weighed him down, offered not one union but four. For he had a second daughter, Ūrmilā, and his brother had two daughters besides, Māṇḍavī and Shrutakīrti, and it was arranged, in the joy of that great meeting of families, that all four princes of Ayodhyā should be wed to the four princesses of Mithilā together.

Ūrmilā to Lakshmaṇa, Māṇḍavī to Bharata, Shrutakīrti to Shatrughna, and Sītā to Rāma.

And so there was a wedding such as the world had rarely seen. For days Mithilā was a single festival, the sacred fires kindled, the mantras chanted, the four young couples circling the flame that makes a marriage, the streets running with music and light and the scattering of flowers.

Two royal houses were joined; four brothers who were one soul in four bodies were wedded on the same day; and the whole of it was crowned by the union at its centre, Rāma and Sītā, the descent of Nārāyaṇa and the descent of the Goddess, come together in human form to walk a human road that neither of them yet knew would run through such long darkness before it came home to the light.

But on that day there was no darkness, only the fire and the flowers and the joined hands and the enormous gladness of two families and two kingdoms. Dasharatha wept for happiness. Janaka, who had feared his daughter would never be given, gave her with a full heart. And the four couples turned about the sacred flame while the city sang. It was, all agreed, the most auspicious of beginnings.

The road home to Ayodhyā still held one more trial, one last shadow to cross before they reached the city. But the wedding itself was pure joy, unshadowed, complete, and it is right to let it stand so, bright and whole, before the story asks its people to begin paying the long price of their greatness. · · ·