The Agony of the Throne

Rāmarājya was a golden age, and for a time all was well, and Rāma and Sītā reigned in joy and the kingdom flourished; but the crown is a heavy burden, and a king’s life is not his own, and this chapter tells of the terrible price that the kingly dharma exacted from Rāma at the height of his reign, the banishment of Sītā, which is among the most painful and most debated episodes in the whole of the story.

For the golden age held within it, unseen at first, a shadow, and the shadow was this: that among the people of the kingdom there began to spread a whisper, a doubt, concerning Sītā.

She had dwelt, after all, for a long time in the house of Rāvaṇa, in the power of the demon king; and though she had passed through the fire and been vindicated by Agni himself, the memory of that vindication faded, and the whisper grew, among the common people, that the queen had lived in another man’s house and that her purity was therefore in question, that a king who took back a wife who had dwelt so long in a demon’s power set a poor example, that the royal household was not, in the people’s eyes, above the suspicion that a royal household must be above.

The whisper came to a head, the tellers say, in the words of a common man, a washerman, who in a quarrel with his own wife rejected her for having stayed in another man’s house, and declared that he was not like the king Rāma, who took back a wife who had lived in the house of Rāvaṇa.

And this saying, the harsh judgment of a common washerman upon his queen, came to Rāma’s ears through his spies and informers, who reported to the king what the people were saying, that the citizens doubted the queen’s purity, that the king’s example in taking her back was questioned, that the whisper had spread through the kingdom and touched the honour of the throne.

And Rāma was faced now with the most agonizing conflict of his whole life, and the tellers render it as an agony, not a simple decision, for it set against each other the two things he held most sacred, and allowed no way to honour both. On the one side was his love for Sītā, his knowledge of her absolute purity, his tenderness for the wife who had endured so much for him and with him, the wife he loved more than his own life.

On the other side was his dharma as a king, the duty he held to be above even his own happiness, the duty to a moral order that required the king’s household to be beyond not only fault but even the suspicion of fault, so that the whole moral authority of the throne, on which the order of the kingdom rested, should not be undermined by the people’s doubt.

If the king’s own wife were subject to public doubt, then the king’s moral authority was compromised, and if that authority was compromised, then the whole order of dharma that the king upheld was weakened, and the good of the whole kingdom was put at risk. And Rāma held, as the deepest principle of his life, that the king’s private happiness must always yield to the public good, that a king does not own his own life but holds it in trust for his people, that the ruler must sacrifice his own desire whenever the good of the ruled requires it.

And so Rāma made the terrible decision, and it broke his heart to make it: he would banish Sītā. For the sake of the people’s doubt, for the sake of the throne’s moral authority, for the sake of the dharma that required the king’s household to be above suspicion, he would send away the wife he loved and knew to be pure, sacrificing his own happiness and hers to the demands of his kingly duty.

It was a decision that cost him everything of his personal joy, that he made in an agony of grief, weeping in the privacy of his chambers, and that he made nonetheless, because his whole life was built on the principle that duty comes before desire, that the king’s own happiness is the first thing he must be willing to sacrifice, and that he would hold to that principle now though it broke his heart and though it fell, cruelly, upon the innocent Sītā who had already suffered so much.

Let us confront the terrible difficulty of this, for the story means us to, and it is perhaps the hardest thing in the whole epic, harder even than the Agni Parīkshā, and it has troubled and even angered readers for as long as the story has been told.

For here Rāma sacrifices not himself but Sītā; he banishes an innocent and faithful wife, whom he knows to be pure, whose purity was proven by fire, for the sake of the people’s unjust doubt; and no explanation of the kingly dharma entirely eases the injustice of what is done to Sītā, who is made, again, to pay the price of others’ suspicion, who is punished for a fault she never committed, who is cast out despite her proven innocence for the sake of a whisper.

The story does not hide this injustice; it presents Rāma’s decision as an agony precisely because it is not a clean or a satisfying choice but a genuine and terrible conflict between two goods, love and duty, in which the honouring of the one requires the wounding of the other, and in which the innocent Sītā bears the cost of a duty that is not even her own.

And the tellers, in rendering it, invite us into the deepest questions the story raises, questions it does not finally answer, for it is honest enough to leave them open. Was Rāma right? Was the kingly dharma truly worth so cruel a price, paid by so innocent a victim? Is a duty that requires the sacrifice of the innocent truly a duty, or is it a kind of tyranny of principle over love?

The story presents Rāma’s choice as the choice of the perfect king, holding to his terrible duty at the cost of his own heart; and it presents also, unmistakably, the injustice and the grief of it, the wrong done to Sītā, the agony of a love sacrificed to a principle.

It does not resolve the tension; it holds it open, as one of the places where the path of dharma runs through darkness that no light entirely dispels, where doing one’s duty and doing right seem to come apart, where the very perfection of Rāma’s fidelity to his kingly duty produces a result that the heart cannot help but call a wrong.

This is the agony of the throne, that it can require the perfect king to break his own heart and wound the innocent for the sake of an order he holds sacred, and the story lets us feel the full weight and the full darkness of that agony.

So the decision was made, and it fell to Lakshmaṇa, once again, to be the instrument of a grief he could not prevent, for Rāma charged Lakshmaṇa with the terrible task of carrying it out: to take Sītā, who was now with child, expecting, away from the palace, out to the forest, and to leave her there, near the hermitage of the sage Vālmīki, banished, without even, in some tellings, being told directly by Rāma of the banishment until it was done.

Lakshmaṇa, weeping, unable to refuse his brother and king, unable to bear what he was commanded to do, took Sītā out on the pretext of a journey, and carried her to the forest, to the region near Vālmīki’s ashram, and there, at last, broken with grief, he told her the truth: that she was banished, that Rāma had sent her away for the sake of the people’s doubt, that she was to be left here in the forest, cast out from the palace and the kingdom and her husband’s side, alone and with child, for a fault she had never committed.

And then, having delivered his cruel message and left the innocent queen alone in the wilderness, Lakshmaṇa returned, weeping, to Ayodhyā, and Sītā was left, banished and alone and pregnant, near the hermitage of the sage who would shelter her, to bear the last and bitterest of all her long sufferings.