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STORIES · THE RĀMĀYAṆA · Ayodhyā
Kaikeyi's two boons
Classical
The boons were a thank-you gift from a battlefield, cashed in decades later.
This is the scene where the Ramayana turns. Everything before it is preparation for Rama's crowning; everything after it is exile, and it takes about a page.
Dasharatha has come to Kaikeyi's room, overcome with desire for her, and she speaks to him sharply. No one has insulted or looked down on her, she says; she has a wish that only he can grant. She asks him to promise first, and then she will tell him.
He smiles, runs his hand through her hair, and tells her she is dearer to him than anyone except Rama. He swears by Rama, whom he cannot bear to be away from even for a moment. For Rama's sake, he says, he would give up his own life or the lives of his other sons. Do not doubt me, he tells her; I will do whatever you want.
Kaikeyi has what she came for. Her mind fixed on Bharata's coronation and Rama's exile, she speaks with delighted bias, and Valmiki compares the news she is about to give to hearing of a sudden death. She first calls on witnesses: the thirty-three gods led by Agni, the sun, the moon, the planets, the directions, spirits and household gods, so that all will hear the king's promise. She praises him as truthful, righteous and steady.
Then she reminds him of an old debt. In a battle between gods and demons, the enemy had wounded him so badly that only his life was left, and she had saved him. Grateful, he had given her two boons. She had never used them, and they remained in his keeping. If he refuses her now, she says, she will end her life right away.
Valmiki says Dasharatha, bound by her words, walked into the trap like a deer going toward its own death.
The first boon: let Bharata be crowned at the ceremony that is already being prepared for Rama. Then she says the time has come for the second: Rama is to live as an ascetic in the Dandaka forest for fourteen years, wearing bark and deerskin, with matted hair. She wants Bharata to have the kingdom without any rival, and says this is her greatest wish. And she wants to see Rama leave for the forest that very day.
The sarga ends there, with the king caught between his oath and his love for his son, and Kaikeyi unmoved. She presses him to keep his word and protect his name and lineage, and says that ascetics hold truthfulness to be the greatest good.
What gives the scene its force is that Kaikeyi uses the king's own virtues against him. He has just promised on his love for Rama, and she holds him to the promise; she asks for witnesses, so that backing out would be a public failure; and she reminds him that truth is the thing he lives by. The Ramayana is a poem about people who keep their word at terrible cost, and this is where the cost is first presented.
The same two boons come up again at the very start of the epic, in Narada's brief summary of Rama's life, which gives them in two sentences: exile for fourteen years, and the crown for Bharata. Valmiki's own fuller version here shows how those two sentences came to pass.
Many later tellings bring in Kaikeyi's maid Manthara as the one who turns her mind, but she does not appear in this chapter, which gives only the demand and the oath.
Who: Kaikeyi, Dasharatha, Rama, Bharata
Bound to
Dasharatha's night hunt and the blind parents' curse curse→payoff
Jabali's materialist argument to Rama causes
Places: Ayodhya
Where this comes from
- valmiki · Valmiki Ramayana, Ayodhya Kanda (valmikiramayan.net translation) sarga 11
- read for this telling · valmikiramayan.net Valmiki Ramayana Ayodhya Kanda sarga 11
- read for this telling · valmikiramayan.net Valmiki Ramayana Bala Kanda sarga 1