Tārā’s Grief

Vāli was dead, and Kishkindhā, which had exulted under his mighty rule, was plunged into mourning, and at the centre of the mourning stood his widow, Tārā, and her grief is one of the great laments of the epic, and her character one of its most admirable.

Tārā was Vāli’s queen, and she was no ordinary consort. She was wise, wise beyond most of the counsellors of the kingdom, and it is said that she had warned Vāli against the very combat that killed him, had counselled him not to go out against Sugrīva a second time, for she had reasoned shrewdly that Sugrīva would not have dared to challenge his mighty brother again unless he had gained some powerful ally, and that the wise course was caution, not the headlong pride that sent Vāli out to his death. He had not listened.

The mighty seldom listen to the counsel of caution, and Vāli in his strength had scorned his wise wife’s warning and gone out and died, and now Tārā’s wisdom was vindicated in the bitterest way, by the death she had foreseen and failed to prevent.

She came to where Vāli lay dying, or dead, and she cast herself upon his body, and she wept, and her lament is long and moving in the telling, the grief of a wise woman for a husband she had loved and warned and lost. She did not rail against fate as a foolish woman might; her grief was deep but it was not without understanding; she saw the whole shape of the tragedy, her husband’s pride, her own unheeded warning, the working-out of a doom that wisdom had glimpsed and love had been unable to avert.

And she ignored, in her grief, the whole business of the kingdom that swirled around her, the questions of succession and power that Vāli’s death had thrown open; she cared nothing, in that hour, for who would rule; she cared only that her husband was dead, and she mourned him with her whole heart, with a dignity that commanded the respect even of those who had brought about his fall.

There is a particular poignancy in Tārā’s grief, and it is worth dwelling on, for it is the grief of the wise who could not save what they loved. There is a special anguish in having seen the danger clearly, in having spoken the warning, in having done all that wisdom could do, and in watching the loved one walk past the warning into the very doom you foresaw. Tārā had that anguish.

She had known; she had said; and it had not been enough; and now she must grieve not only for her husband but for the terrible uselessness of her own clear sight, for the warning that was true and was not heeded. It is among the hardest of human sorrows, to be right and to be helpless, to see the cliff and be unable to turn the beloved from it, and Tārā bore that sorrow, and the story honours her for the dignity with which she bore it.

And there was young Angada, Vāli’s son, the boy whom the dying Vāli had entrusted to Rāma’s care, and his grief too was terrible, the grief of a son suddenly fatherless, and the fear of a prince suddenly uncertain of his place in a kingdom passing to his uncle. The whole royal house of the vānaras was thrown into confusion and sorrow by the fall of its mighty king, and for a while it seemed that grief and uncertainty might tear the kingdom apart.

But order had to be restored, for a kingdom cannot mourn forever, and the living must arrange the affairs the dead leave behind. And here Rāma’s justice showed itself again, and his care for the proper order of things. Vāli was dead, and by right the kingdom now passed to Sugrīva, whom Vāli had wronged, and Sugrīva was crowned king of Kishkindhā at last, restored to the throne from which his brother had driven him, his long exile ended.

But Rāma was careful that the restoration should be just and complete, and that the innocent should not suffer for the quarrels of the mighty. And so it was arranged, at Rāma’s wise insistence, that young Angada, Vāli’s son, should not be cast aside or disinherited, but should be made the crown prince, the Yuvarāja, the heir apparent to Sugrīva’s throne.

So the boy who had lost his father did not also lose his future; the succession was secured for him; and the kingdom was reunited, Sugrīva as king and Angada as heir, the two branches of the royal house joined again rather than set at war.

This was a wise and a merciful settlement, and it is worth marking what it accomplished. Vāli’s death might have left a legacy of bitterness, a wronged widow, a disinherited son, a kingdom divided between the partisans of the dead king and the partisans of the new.

Instead, by honouring Vāli’s son, by securing Angada’s place, by treating the defeated house with justice and generosity rather than with the harshness that victory so often shows, Rāma and Sugrīva healed the division rather than deepening it, and bound the whole kingdom together in the new order rather than leaving it split.

It is the mark of true statecraft, and true righteousness, to be generous in victory, to secure the place of the defeated rather than to crush them, to heal rather than to punish; and this healing settlement, with the wronged widow honoured and the fatherless son made heir, is the fruit of Rāma’s insistence that even in the aftermath of a necessary death, justice and mercy should govern the arrangements of the living.

And Tārā herself, the wise widow, was honoured and given her due place, her wisdom respected, her dignity preserved. She would appear again in the story, her counsel still valued, her clear sight still serving the kingdom that had lost her husband; for a woman of such wisdom was too valuable to be set aside, and the new order had the sense to keep her honoured and near.

Her grief did not destroy her; she carried it, as the wise carry their sorrows, and went on, diminished but not broken, to lend her wisdom to the cause that her husband’s death had joined her to.

So the storm of Vāli’s death passed, and out of it came a new settlement: Sugrīva king, Angada his heir, Tārā honoured, the kingdom reunited and at peace, and, most important for our story, the whole vast power of the vānaras now pledged to Rāma’s cause. For this had been the purpose of the whole hard business, the reason Rāma had bound himself to Sugrīva and undertaken the troubling slaying of Vāli: to gain an ally who could command the hosts of the vānaras and send them across the earth in search of Sītā.

Now that ally was king, secure on his throne, in Rāma’s debt, bound by the pact of fire, and the way was open at last for the great search to begin.

Or so it should have been. But Sugrīva, restored to his throne and his kingdom and his pleasures after his long hard exile, was about to forget, in the sweetness of his recovered fortune, the debt he owed and the promise he had sworn, and the great search that should have begun at once would be delayed, and the delay would rouse a wrath that shook the palace of Kishkindhā to its foundations.