The Weddings and the Axe-Bearer

Dasharatha came to Mithila with his sons and his priests, and Janaka, glad past measure, proposed not one marriage but four — and the symmetry the payasam had drawn was completed in a single day. Rama married Sita. Lakshmana married Sita’s sister Urmila. Bharata and Shatrughna married Janaka’s nieces, Mandavi and Shrutakirti. The four brothers who were one being in four bodies were now four households, and the epic lingers on the joy because it is the last full daylight in the poem; everything after Ayodhya’s next chapter is lived in some degree of shadow, and Valmiki wants this brightness banked.

On the road back to Ayodhya the sky went wrong, the birds cried, and out of the disturbance came Parashurama — Rama-with-the-axe, the brahmin who had, in a older age, cleared the earth of arrogant warrior-kings many times over, a figure of pure unspent wrath walking out of an older world into this one. He had heard the bow of Shiva break, and he had come bearing the other great bow, that of Vishnu, to find out who had dared, and to test him, and the court party froze, because against Parashurama’s kind of anger a kingdom’s army was nothing.

The confrontation reads, on its surface, as a clash; the epic means it as a handing-over. Parashurama challenged Rama to string the bow of Vishnu as he had strung the bow of Shiva. Rama, who had been mild to the point of silence while the older man raged, took the bow — and took it, the epic shows, easily, and set an arrow to it, and then asked the only question that mattered: this arrow, once drawn, cannot be drawn for nothing; where shall it go? Parashurama felt, in that instant, his own age end. His power, the heat that had cleared the earth of kings, passed out of him — drawn off, the epic says, by the very drawing of that bow — and he recognised what Rama was, and yielded the field and the era to him, and withdrew to his mountain, spent, the old avenging force giving way to the new dharma without a blow struck.

It is a strange, important scene, and worth seeing for what it is. The Ramayana has just shown its hero defeat the embodiment of righteous rage not by out-raging him but by being so completely without the need to display power that the power simply transferred. Parashurama was justice as fury. Rama is justice as restraint. The epic stages the meeting precisely so the reader sees the difference and knows which one this poem holds higher — the man who, with the bow of Vishnu strung and an arrow nocked, asks where it should go rather than where it can.

They came home to Ayodhya, four princes with four brides, into a city that received them the way the epic has been describing all along — a happy people made happier. For a stretch the poem simply lets them live: Rama and Sita together in a contentment Valmiki describes with unhurried tenderness, the kingdom secure, Dasharatha old and satisfied and ready, at last, to set the weight down. Here the Book of Childhood ends, on the last unshadowed page the Ramayana will give anyone. The next book opens with an old king deciding it is time to crown his eldest son — and with a hunchbacked servant watching from a window, and beginning to think.