The End of the War

Rāvaṇa was dead, and the war was won, and now came the aftermath, and it held both the fulfillment of a promise, the recovery of Sītā, and a moment so painful and so troubling that it has been debated for as long as the story has been told, the Agni Parīkshā, the ordeal of fire. This chapter holds the joy of victory and the shadow that fell across it, and the tellers render both without flinching.

First there was justice to be done and order to be restored, and Rāma did it. Vibhīshaṇa, the righteous brother who had left Lankā for the sake of dharma and served Rāma’s cause so faithfully, was crowned king of Lankā, exactly as Rāma had promised on the shore before the war began.

The evil reign of Rāvaṇa was replaced with the righteous reign of Vibhīshaṇa; the throne that had been held in lust and pride passed to one who would hold it in dharma; and the war’s true purpose, not the destruction of the demons but the replacement of evil rule with good, was fulfilled in the crowning of the righteous brother over the golden city. Lankā, which had been the seat of terror, would now be the seat of justice, and the demon race, no longer led into evil by a tyrant’s crimes, might live henceforth in peace under a righteous king.

And then Sītā was sent for, brought from the Ashokavana where she had endured her long captivity, bathed and adorned and arrayed once more as a queen, and brought before Rāma at last, after all the long separation, the abduction and the search and the war, the husband and wife who had been torn apart in the forest so long ago now to be reunited in the hour of victory.

And Sītā came to Rāma with a joy beyond words, her long ordeal ended, her faith vindicated, her husband victorious, the rescue she had defiantly promised Rāvaṇa and faithfully awaited now accomplished, coming to Rāma with her whole heart, expecting the reunion that all her endurance had earned.

And Rāma received her coldly.

This is the moment that has troubled every reader and every teller of this story, and the tellers do not soften it, for it is one of the hardest things in the whole epic. Rāma, instead of embracing the wife he had crossed a sea and fought a war to recover, looked upon her coldly, and would not take her simply back, and spoke to her harsh words that fell upon her and upon the whole assembly like a blow.

I have done what honour required, he said in effect; I have avenged the insult to my house and destroyed the demon who took you; but you have dwelt for a long time in the house of another man, in Rāvaṇa’s Lankā, and I cannot simply take you back as though nothing had happened, for the world would question your purity and mine, and I cannot take back a wife who has lived so long in another’s power without the world’s doubt falling upon us both.

He spoke as though he doubted her, as though her long captivity had stained her, as though he could not receive her without proof of the purity she had guarded so fiercely through all her ordeal; and the coldness and the cruelty of it, after all she had endured, after all her faithfulness, struck the whole assembly with shock and struck Sītā to the heart.

And Sītā, wounded beyond anything the demons had been able to do to her, wounded now by the very husband for whom she had endured everything, responded not with pleading but with a terrible dignity, and her response is the true greatness of the scene. If Rāma doubted her, if the world doubted her, then she would prove her purity in the only way that could not be questioned, by the ordeal of fire.

She turned to Lakshmaṇa and asked him to build a pyre, a great fire, and Lakshmaṇa, grief-stricken, unwilling, obeyed, for Sītā commanded it with a dignity that would not be refused. And when the pyre was built and blazing, Sītā spoke, calling upon Agni, the god of fire, to be her witness: if she had been faithful, if her heart had never wavered from Rāma through all her captivity, if she was pure in thought and word and deed, then let the fire not harm her; and if she was not, let it consume her.

And with these words, before the whole horrified assembly, Sītā walked into the blazing fire.

And the fire did not harm her. For Sītā was pure, her fidelity absolute, her purity perfect, and the fire-god himself, Agni, would not touch her, could not harm so faithful a soul; and out of the flames Agni himself rose, bearing Sītā unharmed, presenting her back to Rāma, attesting before the whole assembly and the whole world to her absolute purity, declaring that she was faultless, faithful, unstained, that the fire had found in her nothing to burn, that her virtue was perfect and proven beyond any possibility of doubt.

Sītā came forth from the fire unharmed, vindicated, her purity established by the god of fire himself before all the worlds.

And now Rāma received her, and embraced her, and his coldness fell away, and he explained himself, and his explanation is the key to the whole troubling scene, though it has never entirely satisfied those who love Sītā and grieve at what she was made to endure. I never doubted you, Rāma told her; I never doubted your purity for a single moment; I know your faithfulness as I know my own heart.

But I am not merely a husband; I am to be a king, and a king’s wife must be above not only fault but even the suspicion of fault, for the whole moral order of the kingdom rests upon the king’s household being beyond reproach. The world would have doubted you, having dwelt so long in Rāvaṇa’s power; the whisper would have spread; and that whisper would have stained not only you but the throne and the kingdom and the very order of dharma that I must uphold.

I subjected you to this ordeal not because I doubted you but so that the whole world should see your purity proven beyond any possibility of doubt, so that no whisper could ever touch you, so that you should be received and honoured by all as the faultless queen you are. It was not my doubt but the world’s that required this proof, and now it is given, and you are vindicated before all, and no one can ever question you again.

The tellers give us this explanation, and they give us also the deep unease that surrounds it, for it is one of the places where the story confronts the hardest tensions of dharma and does not pretend they are easily resolved. Was it just, what Rāma did? To subject the faithful Sītā, who had endured so much, to so cruel a public ordeal, for the sake of the world’s opinion?

The explanation, that it was the demands of kingship and public order rather than personal doubt, eases the scene but does not entirely dissolve its pain, and the story seems to intend that it should not, for here, as in the killing of Vāli, we are shown that the path of dharma, especially the dharma of a king, can require things that trouble the conscience even as they serve a larger order, that the demands of public duty and private love can come into a terrible conflict, and that even Rāma, the very measure of righteousness, is caught in tensions that admit no clean resolution.

The Agni Parīkshā is not presented as a simple triumph but as a painful necessity, or a painful choice, that reveals the hard cost of the kingly dharma and the terrible weight that falls, again and again in this story, upon Sītā, who must prove and prove again a purity that was never truly in doubt.

But for now, in the hour of victory, the ordeal was passed and the vindication complete, and Rāma and Sītā were reunited, and the long separation was ended, and the joy of it filled the whole host. The exile was nearly over; the fourteen years were nearly accomplished; and it was time to go home.

They boarded the Pushpaka Vimāna, the divine flying chariot that had been Rāvaṇa’s and was now Rāma’s by conquest, and they rose into the sky and turned north, toward home, toward Ayodhyā, and as they flew Rāma pointed out to Sītā the landmarks of their long ordeal passing below, the bridge over the sea, the shores where they had camped, Kishkindhā, the lake Pampā, Panchavaṭī where she had been taken, Chitrakūṭa where they had been happy, the whole long geography of their exile unrolling beneath them as they flew home, transforming the places of their suffering into a shared memory of a journey completed, a trial endured together and survived.

And they came to Ayodhyā, and the fourteen years were accomplished to the day, and Bharata, who had waited all that time at Nandigrāma with Rāma’s sandals upon the throne, ready to enter the fire if Rāma did not come on the appointed day, saw his brother return at last, and was saved from his vow, and the reunion of the brothers was a joy beyond telling.

And the whole city, which had mourned Rāma’s exile with such grief, now welcomed his return with a joy as great as its grief had been, and Ayodhyā was illuminated with countless lamps to celebrate the homecoming of its beloved prince, the city ablaze with light in welcome, and Rāma was crowned king at last, the coronation that had been prepared and prevented fourteen years before now accomplished, Rāma seated upon the throne of Ayodhyā with Sītā beside him, the rightful king come at last into his kingdom.

And so began Rāmarājya, the reign of Rāma, which the tellers hold up as the very ideal of righteous rule, an age of perfect justice and perfect peace and perfect prosperity, when the kingdom flourished under a king who was the measure of dharma, when there was no injustice and no suffering and no want, when the whole land lived in harmony under the rule of the perfect king. The long story of exile and abduction and war had come, it seemed, to its perfect ending: the evil destroyed, the queen recovered, the king enthroned, the golden age begun.

And here, in a simpler telling, the story might end, in the triumph and the joy of Rāmarājya. But there was a further sorrow still to come, a last and bitter testing, for the story does not end in simple triumph but goes on, into the Uttara Kāṇḍa, to show that even in the golden age, even for the perfect king, the path of dharma held one more terrible price to pay.