The City That Followed

When Ayodhya understood what was happening — that the prince it had spent the previous day garlanding the streets for was leaving in bark cloth for fourteen years of forest — the city did not accept it. It poured out after him. Not a faction, not the court: the people, in their numbers, following the chariot on foot, weeping, refusing to turn back, declaring that a city is its king and they would make the forest Ayodhya rather than stay in an Ayodhya without him.

The epic spends a chapter on this for a reason, and it is not pathos for its own sake. It is the final, total proof of the legitimacy the rest of the poem will rest on. Rama has lost the throne by a lawful word; the Ramayana now shows, unmistakably, that he has lost nothing of the thing the throne is for. The people’s love is the kingship; the crown is only its sign. Bharata will be given the sign. Rama keeps the substance into the forest, and the epic wants that established beyond argument before Bharata ever reaches Chitrakuta, because Bharata’s whole position depends on it.

The problem this creates is real and the chapter is honest about it: Rama cannot go into exile trailing the population of his capital. The exile has to be an exile. So the poem gives one of its quietly characteristic scenes — Rama, unable to forbid their love or out-run it by day, slips away in the night while the exhausted city sleeps along the road, having the chariot turn and double its tracks so the people, waking, cannot follow. He escapes his own subjects the way a hunted man escapes pursuers, and the inversion is the point: the thing he must evade is not hatred but devotion, and the kindest act available to him is to deceive the people who love him for their own sakes.

It is worth holding this against the Mahabharata, because the two epics rhyme and differ here exactly. In the other poem the exiled are driven out by enemies and the court’s silence; here the exiled is driven out by a lawful word while the entire people try to come with him. The Ramayana is making its distinct claim: that the catastrophe of the good is not always that the world turns on them, but that the world’s love cannot save them from a wrong that wears the form of law — that a city weeping in the road is, in the end, as powerless against a king’s given word as Vidura’s warnings were against a blind king’s fondness.

They went on — Rama, Sita, Lakshmana — lighter by a kingdom and a city, toward the river that marked the edge of the settled world. Behind them, the people they had eluded straggled back to an Ayodhya the epic now calls a city without lamps. Ahead lay the Ganga, and a man waiting on its bank who was not a sage or a king of the old kind but a chieftain of forest folk, a hunter and boatman — and the way Rama meets him, the next chapter shows, is the first sign of what kind of king the forest is going to make of the one the palace lost.