Timeline of the Ramayanaरामायण कालक्रम

The king of Ayodhya is old and childless. On his ministers’ advice he calls the sage Rishyashringa to perform the putrakameshti, the rite undertaken for the sake of a son.

Kausalya bears Rama, Kaikeyi bears Bharata, and Sumitra alone bears two — Lakshmana and Shatrughna. Which queen bore whom is stated precisely here, and the whole of the next book turns on it.

The sage asks Dasharatha for the boy — not as a student but as a guard for his own sacrifice, which the rakshasas keep defiling. Dasharatha refuses, and is talked round.

His first killing, and the text does not pass over the difficulty of it: Vishvamitra has to argue him past his reluctance to raise a weapon against a woman.

Rama holds the ritual ground for six days and nights. Maricha is flung far out to sea rather than killed — which is why he is alive to become a golden deer three books later.

On the road to Mithila they pass an empty hermitage where Gautama’s wife has been left invisible and stone-still. Rama’s arrival ends it.

Janaka has set it as the condition for Sita’s hand and no one has been able to string it. Rama does not merely bend it — he snaps it, with a noise the assembly takes for thunder.

Rama to Sita and Lakshmana to Urmila, both Janaka’s daughters; Bharata to Mandavi and Shatrughna to Shrutakirti, both daughters of his brother Kushadhwaja.

The king puts it to the assembly and the assembly agrees at once. Preparations begin for a consecration set for the following morning.

Kaikeyi’s first response to the news is delight — she rewards the messenger. It takes Manthara two full sargas of argument to turn her.

Boons granted years earlier and never spent. She asks that Bharata be crowned in Rama’s place, and that Rama go to the Dandaka forest as an ascetic in bark and matted hair.

He is told by Kaikeyi rather than by his father, who cannot bring himself to say it. He agrees on the spot, and the text makes a point of his face not changing.

Rama argues the forest is no place for her and loses the argument. Lakshmana simply comes.

The Nishada chief — a hunter, outside the varna order — receives them as a friend and takes them across himself. Ayodhya is now behind them.

By way of Bharadwaja’s hermitage, who names the route. They build a leaf hut on the mountain and, for a while, the exile is almost pastoral.

Of grief, six days after Rama leaves, calling his name. Bharata is away at his grandfather’s and knows nothing of any of it.

Not to take the throne but to give it back. He brings the army, the ministers and the widowed queens with him, and Guha ferries him over as he ferried Rama.

Rama will not return before the fourteen years are out. Bharata carries Rama’s sandals back on his head, sets them on the throne, and governs from Nandigrama as their regent rather than as king.

The ascetics living there come out to meet them and to ask for protection. The request is what shapes the next ten years.

The first rakshasa of the forest years. He cannot be killed by weapons, so they bury him alive — and he rises from the pit as a gandharva freed from a curse.

With an inexhaustible pair of quivers and a sword, and the advice to settle at Panchavati. Rama is being armed for something the text has not named yet.

On the Godavari, with Jatayu the vulture — an old friend of Dasharatha — keeping watch nearby. This is where the exile is spent.

She proposes to Rama, is deflected to Lakshmana, is deflected back, and turns on Sita. Lakshmana cuts off her nose and ears. Every later disaster runs back to this.

Her brother comes with fourteen thousand rakshasas. Rama fights them alone and none survive — which is the news that finally reaches Lanka.

The same Maricha thrown into the sea in the first book, pressed into service by Ravana against his own judgement. Dying, he cries out in Rama’s voice — which is what draws Lakshmana away.

He comes as a mendicant to a hut with no one left guarding it.

The old vulture attacks the chariot and is cut down. He lives long enough to tell Rama who took her and in which direction — the only witness there was.

Twelve months to consent, after which, he tells her, the cooks will have her for his morning meal. The commentary reads it against an old convention allowing a defeated king a year to win his queens back.

Kabandha, burnt and released, tells them to seek an alliance with Sugriva. Shabari, who has waited her whole life to see Rama, receives him and then enters the fire. The road now points to Kishkindha.

Sent by Sugriva to find out who the two armed strangers are, he comes disguised as an ascetic. Rama’s first remark about him is on the quality of his Sanskrit.

Sworn before fire. Rama will recover Sugriva’s kingdom from his brother Vali; Sugriva will find Sita. Sugriva produces the ornaments she dropped as she was carried overhead.

Rama shoots him from concealment during his duel with Sugriva. Vali, dying, puts the charge to Rama directly, and the epic gives him the argument rather than skipping it.

With Vali’s son Angada made heir apparent.

Four months in which nothing can move, spent by Rama on a hillside and by Sugriva in his new palace. It takes a furious Lakshmana at the gates to restart the search.

East, south, west and north, each with a month to return. Hanuman goes south, and Rama gives him his signet ring before he leaves.

Jatayu’s brother, wingless on the southern shore, can see across a hundred yojanas. He tells them Sita is in Ravana’s ashoka grove — the first hard confirmation anyone has.

The party reaches the sea and stops. Each says how far he could jump and none can jump a hundred yojanas. Jambavan has to remind Hanuman what he is.

A hundred yojanas in one bound, against a mountain rising to offer rest, a sea-serpent, and a rakshasi who swallows him. The whole book takes its name — the beautiful one — from what follows.

Shrunk to the size of a cat, over the wall after dark, through a city he searches house by house — including Ravana’s own bedchamber.

Thin, in one soiled garment, under a tree, guarded by rakshasis. He watches from the branches for a long time before he risks a word.

Ravana comes to press her and says it plainly: two months are left of the term. Ten have already gone — this is how the epic tells you how long she has been here.

She takes him for another of Ravana’s illusions until he gives her Rama’s ring. She sends back her hair ornament and a memory only Rama could know.

Deliberately, to force a reaction and see the city’s defences answer. It works: guards, then commanders, then Ravana’s own sons.

With the brahmastra, the one weapon he cannot resist — and he lets the ropes stay on after it lapses, because being dragged before Ravana is how he gets to speak to him.

They set his tail alight as a punishment. He goes across the rooftops with it and leaves the city in flames, then panics that Sita may have burned with it.

Back across the sea, and the first words he says to the waiting party are that he has seen her. The war can now be planned.

Ravana’s youngest brother, having argued for returning Sita and been kicked out of the assembly for it, comes to Rama with four companions. Rama accepts him over his own commanders’ objections.

Rama fasts three days on the shore for passage; when the sea does not answer he takes up his bow, and the sea-god appears to propose the causeway instead. Nala builds it in five days.

From the mountain they look down on Lanka — and on Ravana in the middle of it, seen at a distance for the first time.

The last offer: return Sita and live. It is refused, and the siege begins.

Woken early from his curse of sleep, he tells Ravana to his face that the war is unjust, and then goes out to fight it anyway because he is his brother.

Ravana’s eldest and by far his most dangerous — he had twice put Rama and Lakshmana down with weapons no one could counter. Rama sends Lakshmana after him and the duel runs three days. Ravana learns of it in sarga 92.

The heads regrow as fast as they are cut away, until Rama uses the brahmastra Agastya gave him. Vibhishana performs his brother’s funeral rites.

Rama takes nothing from the kingdom he has just won and puts Ravana’s brother on the throne.

Rama receives her coldly and in public, and she asks Lakshmana to build the pyre herself. Agni rises out of it carrying her unburnt and tells Rama plainly that she is blameless.

Ravana’s own aerial car, flown north over the whole route of the exile, with Rama naming the places to Sita as they pass. The fourteen years are all but out.

Bharata hands back a kingdom he has held on a pair of sandals. The sarga closes with the phala-shruti — the fruits promised to those who recite the poem.

The seventh book opens after the victory, and its first business is the past: how Ravana came to be what he was. Ravana’s entire genealogy is here and nowhere else.

He asks his friends what is being said of him and is told — a washerman’s remark about a wife who lived in another man’s house has gone around Ayodhya.

Rama orders it and will not see her. Lakshmana takes her out on the pretext of a visit to the hermitages, and tells her only when they arrive. She is pregnant.

The poet who is telling this story becomes a character inside it, and gives her his protection.

In the ashram. Valmiki names them from a blade of kusha grass cut in two, and raises them on his own poem.

Rama performs it with a golden image of Sita beside him, having refused to take another wife.

Valmiki sends them to chant it at the sacrifice. Rama listens to his own life sung back to him by singers he does not recognise as his sons.

Summoned to swear her innocence once more in public, she calls instead on the earth to take her back if she has been true. The ground opens and she is gone. Rama never sees her again.

The mahaprasthana — the great departure. He gives the kingdom to Kusha and Lava and goes into the river, and the city follows him in.