The Night of a Million Lamps: Rama Returns Home

Rama’s homecoming to Ayodhya is the closing movement of the Rāmāyaṇa’s great war story. After fourteen years of exile in the forest and the war in Lanka against Ravana, the demon king who had carried off his wife Sita, Rama returns with Sita and his brother Lakshmana to the city of his birth and is at last crowned king. For many Hindus the scene is also bound up with Diwali, the festival of lamps. This article tells the story in order, explains who is who, and is careful about what the old texts say and what later tradition added.

Where the story stands

A quick orientation for readers new to the epic. Rama is the eldest son of King Dasharatha of Ayodhya and is revered as an avatar — a “descent,” or earthly form — of the god Vishnu. On the eve of his coronation, his stepmother Kaikeyi used two boons Dasharatha owed her to demand that Rama be sent into the forest for fourteen years and that her own son, Bharata, be made king instead. Rama went without protest, with Sita and Lakshmana beside him. Dasharatha died of grief soon after.

Bharata refused to profit from his mother’s scheme. He followed Rama into the forest and begged him to come back. When Rama would not break his father’s word, Bharata asked for his brother’s sandals (pādukā), carried them home, placed them on the throne, and ruled only as their caretaker. He promised that if Rama did not return by the day the fourteen years ended, he would enter the fire.

Much later in the exile, Ravana abducted Sita. Rama, Lakshmana and their allies — among them Hanuman and the monkey (vānara) army — crossed to Lanka and fought the war that ended with Ravana’s death. The story of the homecoming begins there.

After the war

With Ravana dead on the battlefield of Lanka, Rama had Vibhishana crowned king in his place. Vibhishana was Ravana’s own younger brother, who had left his brother’s court after pleading with him to return Sita, and had fought on Rama’s side.

Then came the reunion with Sita — and with it the most painful episode of the whole epic. Before the assembled army, Rama spoke to her coldly, saying that a wife who had lived in another man’s house could not simply be taken back. Sita, wounded, asked Lakshmana to build a fire and entered it. Agni, the god of fire, rose from the flames carrying her unharmed and declared her pure. This is the agni-parīkṣā, the “ordeal by fire.” Readers, devotees and poets have argued over this scene for centuries, and retellings handle it differently: in Tulsidas’s Hindi Rāmcharitmānas, for example, the Sita who was abducted is a shadow or illusory Sita, and the fire restores the real one. However it is read, the text does not hide how much the moment costs both of them.

The journey home

Rama was anxious to return quickly, because he knew Bharata was waiting and remembered his vow. Vibhishana offered him the Pushpaka (Puṣpaka vimāna), a flying chariot that had once belonged to the god of wealth, Kubera, and had been seized by Ravana. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana boarded it, and Vibhishana, Sugriva (the monkey king) and many of their companions came too.

In Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa the flight becomes a journey back through the whole story. As they pass over the land, Rama points out to Sita the places where things happened: the battlefield, the bridge to Lanka, the forests where he searched for her. The exile is replayed in reverse, as memory.

They came down at the hermitage of the sage Bharadvaja near Prayaga, where the rivers meet, the same place Rama had visited at the start of his exile. From there Rama sent Hanuman ahead. Vālmīki gives Rama a very human reason: he asks Hanuman to go first to his old friend Guha, the chief of the boatmen at Shringaverapura, and then to Bharata, and to watch Bharata’s face as he hears the news. If fourteen years of rule have made Bharata want to keep the kingdom, Rama says, let him keep it.

Bharata waiting

This is a moment the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa lingers over, and it reveals what the epic thinks is important. Bharata had not been living in the palace at all. He had set up his court at Nandigrama, a village outside Ayodhya, wearing bark cloth and matted hair like a forest hermit and eating the same simple forest food his brother ate in exile. For fourteen years he had refused every comfort Rama was denied — a living act of solidarity that kept the exile from ever being forgotten.

When Hanuman reached him and told him that Rama was alive, Sita was free and they were coming home, Bharata fell to the ground, overcome by a joy so complete he could not immediately rise. When he recovered, he embraced Hanuman and wanted to hear everything that had happened.

So Hanuman’s question was answered without a word being spoken. Bharata had never wanted the throne.

Preparing the city

Then Bharata went to prepare the city. His brother Shatrughna ordered the roads levelled and sprinkled with water, the streets strewn with flowers, and the city decorated with banners. Musicians, priests, ministers and the queens set out to meet the returning prince. Bharata himself walked at the head of the procession carrying Rama’s sandals.

The people of Ayodhya had spent fourteen years without their prince. They had lived under a good and conscientious ruler, but they had known all along that Bharata was keeping the seat for someone else. The city had functioned, but in some essential way it had been incomplete. Now the word spread through every street and market: he is coming home.

When the Pushpaka landed, Rama and Bharata embraced. Rama bowed to his mothers — Kausalya, Sumitra and Kaikeyi — and Bharata placed the sandals back on his brother’s feet, returning the kingdom he had held in trust.

The lamps

It is worth being exact about what the sources support here. Vālmīki describes a city decorated and lit for a coronation; the identification of that homecoming with Dīpāvalī as it is now kept develops in later devotional literature and practice rather than in the epic itself. It is also only one of several traditions gathered under the festival — the others are set out in Diwali and Lakshmi Puja.

In the form the story is most often told today, the people of Ayodhya welcomed Rama by lighting oil lamps (diyā, or dīpa in Sanskrit). Not as a planned civic celebration, but household by household, each family reaching for the same answer to the same question: how do we make the end of the darkness visible? Lamps were set in windows, on rooftops and along paths until the whole city glowed.

This popular telling is why many Hindus, especially in North India, understand the rows of lamps lit at Diwali on the new moon of the month of Kārtika as a remembrance of that welcome. The lamps are read not only as decoration but as a re-enactment: lighting the way home for the righteous after a long exile. Other communities connect Diwali mainly with Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, with Krishna’s victory over the demon Narakasura, or with other stories, and many households hold several of these meanings at once.

The coronation

The coronation was the culmination of everything — the resolution of the grand arc of the Rāmāyaṇa and, in the tradition’s view, of the purpose for which Vishnu took birth as Rama. Rama put off his hermit’s matted hair and bark clothes. The family priest, the sage Vasishtha, performed the rites, and Rama was consecrated king of Ayodhya with Sita beside him. Dasharatha, who had died of grief during the exile, was not there to see it. Kaikeyi, whose demand had caused the exile, was; Rama treated her with the same respect he showed his other mothers, and the epic does not dwell on what she felt.

One small scene is much loved. Rama gave Sita a precious pearl necklace, and she, looking around the gathering, gave it to Hanuman — the one whose loyalty and courage had found her in Lanka.

Rama Rajya

The Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa ends its war book with a picture of Rama’s reign, called Rāma Rājya, “the rule of Rama.” During it, the text says, no one died before their time, no widow mourned, the rain fell when it should and the crops grew as they should, and justice was delivered so evenly that even the most vulnerable had no cause for complaint.

This is best read as an ideal rather than a historical report. Across Indian history, and into modern politics, “Rama Rajya” has been used as shorthand for just and humane government — Mahatma Gandhi used the phrase for his own vision of a good society. The Rāmāyaṇa’s story does not end here either: its final book, the Uttara Kāṇḍa, goes on to tell of Sita’s later banishment and much else, which is why the homecoming is felt as a moment of joy rather than the whole of the story.

Where the story comes from

• Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. The Sanskrit epic attributed to the poet Vālmīki is the oldest full telling. The war, the fire ordeal, the flight in the Pushpaka, Hanuman’s mission to Bharata, the coronation and the description of Rama Rajya all come at the end of its sixth book, the Yuddha Kāṇḍa (Book of War).
• Later retellings. The story was retold in many languages — among the best known are Tulsidas’s Hindi Rāmcharitmānas and Kamban’s Tamil Rāmāvatāram — and details, emphasis and emotional tone vary between them.
• Festival tradition. As noted above, the link between the homecoming and Diwali lamps belongs to later devotional literature and living practice rather than to Vālmīki’s text.

What the story is often taken to mean

Within the tradition the homecoming is read on several levels at once.

• Light after darkness. The lamps are commonly understood as the assurance, repeated every year, that a long exile ends — that darkness is a season, not a conclusion.
• Bharata’s devotion. Many teachers hold up Bharata, not Rama, as the quiet hero of this part of the epic: someone who had power in his hands for fourteen years and held it only in trust.
• The return of right order. Rama’s coronation is read as the world coming back into alignment with dharma — right conduct, duty and cosmic order — rather than simply as a king regaining a throne.
• A homecoming that is not simple. The fire ordeal just before it reminds readers that the epic does not pretend victory erases suffering, and many modern readers find the story more honest for that.

Read on AdiVeda

• Fourteen Years in the Forest: The Exile of Rama — how the exile began, and Bharata’s visit to the forest.
• The Bridge That Should Not Exist: Building Ram Setu — the crossing to Lanka before the war.
• Diwali and Lakshmi Puja: What Is Observed and What Is Recited — the festival and its several traditions.
• Nama Ramayanam — the whole Rāmāyaṇa retold as a chant of Rama’s names.
• Rama reading texts — hymns, ashtakams and mantras for Rama.