The Slaying of Vāli

The plan was simple in its outline. Sugrīva would go to Kishkindhā and challenge Vāli to single combat, and while the brothers fought, Rāma, hidden nearby, would loose the arrow that would slay Vāli, and so Sugrīva would be freed of his terrible brother and restored to his kingdom. But the carrying-out of it went wrong the first time, and the going-wrong, and the setting-right, and above all the deep moral question that the whole episode raises, make this one of the most debated chapters in the entire epic.

Sugrīva went and challenged Vāli, and Vāli came out, and the two brothers fought, and they fought with such fury and such likeness that Rāma, watching from his hiding place, bow drawn, could not tell them apart. For the two vānara brothers were so alike in form, grappling and wheeling in the dust of their combat, that Rāma dared not loose his arrow for fear of striking Sugrīva instead of Vāli.

And so he held his hand, and the fight went on, and Vāli, far the stronger, beat Sugrīva badly, and Sugrīva, wounded and bewildered that his ally had not struck, broke off and fled back to Rāma in dismay.

Why did you not shoot, Sugrīva demanded, wounded and reproachful. You promised, and I trusted you, and I went against my brother on the strength of that promise, and he nearly killed me, and your arrow never came. And Rāma explained: I could not tell you apart. You are so alike that I feared to strike you instead of him. Go again, but this time wear something to distinguish yourself, some token, some garland, so that I may know you in the fight and strike the right brother.

And so it was arranged; Hanumān, or another, placed a garland of flowers about Sugrīva’s neck, so that in the second combat Rāma could tell the brothers apart.

Sugrīva went again, and challenged Vāli again, and again the brothers fought, and this time Rāma, watching, could see the garland and know his friend, and when the moment came he drew his bow and loosed his arrow from his hiding place, and the shaft flew true and struck Vāli in the chest, and the mightiest of the vānaras fell.

And now comes the moment that has troubled thoughtful readers for as long as this story has been told, for Vāli, lying mortally wounded, did not die quietly, but turned upon Rāma with a bitter and a powerful accusation, and the accusation was not easy to answer. Rāma came out from his hiding place, and Vāli, dying, looked up at him and challenged his righteousness to his face.

You are Rāma, Vāli said, or such was the sense of his dying words, prince of the great house of Ikshvāku, renowned through all the world for your justice, your virtue, your unfailing dharma. Men speak your name as the very measure of righteousness. And how have you used that righteousness against me? You have shot me from hiding, from ambush, while I was engaged in combat with another and had no quarrel with you and did not even see you. I had done you no wrong. I had never harmed you or yours. You had no cause against me.

And yet you, the mirror of dharma, struck me down from concealment, like a hunter shooting a beast at a watering-place, without warning, without challenge, without giving me any chance to face you. Where is your vaunted righteousness in this? What law of the warrior, what code of honour, permits a king to shoot from ambush a creature that has done him no wrong? You have stained your great name with a coward’s deed, and I, dying, demand to know how you justify it.

It was a formidable accusation, and its force is real, and the story does not pretend it is not. Rāma had killed from hiding a being who had no quarrel with him; on its face, it looks exactly like the injustice Vāli names. And Rāma’s answer, the justification he gives, is one of the most searching passages of moral reasoning in the whole epic, and it repays close attention, for it is Rāma reasoning his way through a genuine hard case, as he always does, refusing to let the matter rest on mere power or mere assertion.

Rāma knelt beside the dying Vāli and answered him. Hear me, he said, for you deserve an answer, and I will give you a true one. You accuse me of injustice, but consider what you have done, and what my duty is. You have committed a grave sin, a sin against the very order of dharma, for you drove out your own brother and, while he yet lived, you took his wife to yourself.

To take a brother’s wife while the brother lives is among the gravest of transgressions; by the law it is a monstrous thing, a violation of the moral order at its root, and by that act you reduced yourself, king though you were, to the level of a beast that knows no such law. Now I am of the house of Ikshvāku, and it is the ancient duty of our line to uphold dharma across the earth, to punish transgression wherever it is found, even in kingdoms not our own, for the kings of my line are the appointed guardians of the moral order.

You had committed a sin that merited punishment, and it fell to me, as the upholder of dharma, to punish it. That is the first answer: I struck you not without cause but as the just punishment of a real and grievous wrong.

And as for the manner of it, the shooting from hiding, Rāma went on, consider this too. You are not a man, bound by the codes of combat between warriors; you are a vānara, one of the forest creatures, and men hunt the creatures of the forest, and it is no violation of dharma to take such a creature by whatever means, from hiding or in the open, as hunters have always done. But more than that: your strength is such that no one could stand against you in open combat; that is the whole reason your brother fled you and could not face you.

Had I challenged you openly, you would simply have overpowered me or fled, and the punishment your sin required would never have been accomplished. To punish a transgressor too mighty to be taken in open fight, the just may use the means that will serve, as the hunter uses concealment against the strong beast. The end was just, and the means were such as the case allowed.

Now we must be honest, as the story is honest, that not every reader has found Rāma’s answer wholly satisfying, and the debate over the killing of Vāli has never entirely been settled, and perhaps is not meant to be. There is a discomfort in it that the reasoning does not entirely dissolve, and the story seems to want us to feel that discomfort, to wrestle with it, rather than to accept a pat resolution.

For here is one of the deep purposes of the episode: it shows us that even Rāma, even the very measure of righteousness, operates in a world where dharma is not always simple, where the right course is not always clean, where the upholding of the moral order may require acts that trouble the conscience even as they serve justice. The world is not tidy. Even the best of men, doing his genuine best to serve the right, may act in ways that a good conscience can question.

And the story, by giving Vāli so strong an accusation and Rāma so reasoned but not wholly comfortable an answer, refuses to pretend that righteousness is ever easy or that the servant of dharma escapes the hard ambiguities of action in a fallen world. This is not a flaw in the story; it is its honesty, its refusal to make Rāma a figure of easy perfection rather than a soul genuinely wrestling, as we all must, with the terrible difficulty of doing right.

And Vāli himself, in the end, was satisfied, and this matters, for the one who had most cause to condemn Rāma came, in his dying, to accept the justice of what had been done. Hearing Rāma’s answer, understanding at last the gravity of his own sin and the justice of his punishment, the deeper truth of the moral order he had violated, Vāli’s bitterness left him.

He acknowledged the rightness of Rāma’s words, begged forgiveness for his own transgression and for his hard accusation, and, dying, entrusted to Rāma’s care the thing he loved most in the world, his son Angada, asking that the boy be protected and cherished. And so Vāli died reconciled, his enmity dissolved into understanding, commending his son to the very one whose arrow had slain him, at peace at the last with the justice that had brought him down.

And Rāma received the charge of Angada, and honoured it, and the mightiest of the vānaras passed from the world, leaving his kingdom to the brother he had wronged and his son to the guardianship of the Lord who had judged him.