Dasharatha

The mechanism that destroys Dasharatha is set years earlier and forgotten. In a battle against the asuras, Kaikeyi accompanied him as his charioteer and saved his life, and he granted her two boons to be named whenever she chose. She named neither, and the debt sat unpaid.

On the eve of Rama's installation as heir, her attendant Manthara persuades her that the elevation of Kausalya's son will reduce her and her own son to servitude. Kaikeyi goes to the anger chamber, and when the king comes she asks for the two boons: that Bharata be installed instead, and that Rama be exiled to the forest for fourteen years.

Dasharatha's reaction occupies a long stretch of the poem and it is all refusal without any means of refusing. He argues, he offers her anything else, he pleads, he collapses, he threatens to disown her, and he cannot simply say no, because a king's given word is the ground on which the entire order of obligation in the epic stands. If his promise can be broken because keeping it is unbearable, nothing else in the poem holds.

Rama, told of it, agrees immediately and without argument, which is how the Ramayana establishes him. He does not need to be persuaded, and his father's ruin is complete the moment his son shows how easy the obedience is.

The king dies within days of the departure, calling for Rama. The exile has fourteen years to run and the man whose word imposed it does not survive the first week of it.

Dying, Dasharatha tells Kausalya a story he has kept to himself for a lifetime, and the epic gives it to him as the explanation of his death.

As a young man he had the skill of shooting at a sound without seeing the target. Hunting by a river at night he heard water being drawn and shot, taking it for an elephant drinking, and found he had hit a boy who had come to fill a pot. The boy told him that his parents, both blind, were waiting in the forest for the water, and asked him to go to them. Dasharatha carried the water and the news. The father, when he understood, told him that he too would die grieving for a son, and added that the curse was not vengeance but the simple statement of what such an act returns.

The framing is deliberate. The Ramayana has already given the exile a full and sufficient cause in the two boons and in Manthara's persuasion, and it then supplies a second cause running underneath the first, so that the calamity is at once a piece of court politics and the maturing of a debt incurred by accident decades before.

His four sons, in the same design, were born from a sacrifice performed to end his childlessness, in which the offering was divided among his three queens. A man who obtained his children by ritual loses them by a curse, and the poem sets the two events at opposite ends of his life without ever stating the symmetry.