The Bow of Shiva

Mithila was the kingdom of Janaka — a king the tradition keeps as the type of the ruler who is also a sage, a man who governed and was unattached to governing, wise in the way the Gita would later praise. He had a daughter, and the manner of her coming is the first thing the epic tells about her, because it is the key to everything she is.

She had not been born. Janaka, ploughing a field himself in the course of a rite, had turned up a child in the furrow — given, it was understood, by the earth, Bhumi, the ground itself. He named her Sita, “the furrow,” and raised her as his own and loved her past the love most fathers manage. The epic plants this quietly and will not collect on it until its last book: the woman the whole poem turns on came from the earth and, at the very end, when one proof too many has been demanded of her, will ask the earth to take her back. Her first chapter and her last are the same gesture, and the Ramayana knows it on page one of her life.

Janaka had a bow. It was no ordinary weapon: the bow of Shiva himself, given to his line, so vast and so heavy that it was kept on an eight-wheeled cart and no king who came courting could so much as stir it. Janaka had made it the condition — Sita would be given to the man who could string that bow — not out of cruelty but because he wanted for that daughter not a rich suitor but one whose strength matched what she was, and the bow was his measure of it. Kings had come and failed and gone away the way the kings in the Mahabharata failed Draupadi’s mark, and the failures had become, for Janaka, a kind of grief: a daughter he could not place because no one was enough.

Vishvamitra brought Rama and Lakshmana into the court and asked, simply, that the boy be allowed to see the bow. Janaka, the epic implies, already half-knew, the way the watching elders in these poems always half-know. The bow was brought on its cart into the assembly. Rama went to it without ceremony — the Ramayana is spare here on purpose, refusing spectacle for the central act. He lifted it, which alone no one had done; he bent it to string it; and under the bending it broke, with a sound the epic compares to a mountain splitting and a thunderclap, heard across the kingdom, that made the assembly flinch and the earth seem to answer.

That sound is the one the poem will keep hearing under everything. In the moment it is pure triumph — the impossible thing done, Sita won, a court rejoicing. But the Ramayana has a long memory for its own noises. The breaking of Shiva’s bow is the act that wins Sita and the act that brings Parashurama down on the road in fury, and it is, more deeply, the first loud thing in a story that will become a story about loss: the note struck at the height of joy that the rest of the epic spends bending, slowly, into grief.

Janaka, overjoyed, sent messengers running to Ayodhya to bring Dasharatha, for there would not be one wedding but, it would turn out, four. The bow was broken, the condition met, the houses of the sun and of Mithila about to be joined. The epic lets the happiness stand at full height for one chapter more — and then puts on the road home a terrible figure with an axe, who has heard a bow break and come to find out who dared.