Lakshmana

When Rama is exiled, the Ramayana gives two people the chance to refuse and neither does. Sita insists on going because a wife belongs with her husband. Lakshmana simply goes, and the epic does not record anyone inviting him. He leaves his wife Urmila behind in the palace for fourteen years, a detail later retellings have made a great deal of and the Sanskrit text passes over quickly.

His function in the forest is service. He builds the shelters, gathers the food, keeps watch at night, and by later tradition does not sleep at all for the whole period, his share of sleep having been taken on by Urmila. The text presents this as devotion rather than subordination: he is a prince who has chosen to be a servant, and the choosing is the point.

He is also the brother with a temper, and the epic uses him for it. When Bharata comes to the forest with an army to beg Rama to return, it is Lakshmana who assumes an attack and has to be calmed. When Rama accepts the exile without complaint, it is Lakshmana who says the order was unjust and that they should fight. He voices what an ordinary person would feel, so that Rama can decline it, and the pairing is one of the things that keeps a story about a perfect man readable.

The two acts that turn the plot both belong to Lakshmana, and both are failures of a kind.

The first is the mutilation of Shurpanakha. The demon princess propositions Rama, is passed to Lakshmana, is mocked, attacks Sita, and Lakshmana cuts off her nose and ears. It is a brutal response that later commentators have argued about for centuries, and it is the direct cause of everything that follows, since she goes to her brother Ravana and describes Sita to him.

The second is the moment the abduction becomes possible. Rama goes after the golden deer, a cry is heard in his voice, and Sita orders Lakshmana to go and help. He refuses, knowing it is a trick, until she accuses him of wanting his brother dead so that he can have her, at which he goes, in fury and grief. Later versions of the story add the detail everyone remembers, a line drawn round the dwelling which Sita must not cross and which the disguised Ravana cannot, and which she steps over to give alms. That line is not in the oldest Sanskrit text; it belongs to the later regional retellings, and its popularity is a good example of a tradition supplying the safeguard the story feels as though it needs.

Tradition identifies him with Shesha, the cosmic serpent on whom Vishnu rests, which makes the brother who never sleeps the bed of the god who does.