Rama

Deity

Rama · राम

Rama is the seventh avatar of Vishnu and, in the tradition, the maryada purushottam — the man who keeps the boundary. What is honoured in him is not power but the accepting of limits: the exile taken rather than contested, the kingdom returned rather than held.

His story is told twice over, and the two tellings are read differently. Valmiki's Ramayana is the Sanskrit epic; Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, written in Awadhi in the sixteenth century, is the one recited at home and performed as Ramlila through the nine nights before Dussehra.

Rama Navami, in Chaitra, marks his birth at noon — the reading of the Balkand, a fast broken at midday, and in many houses a cradle set out with an image in it. Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman are worshipped beside him rather than separately, and an image of Rama alone is uncommon.

His name is used as a greeting across north India, and as the two syllables repeated at a cremation. It is the same name in both places, and the tradition makes nothing of the distance between them.

The Ramayana is told in seven kandas, from the childhood at Ayodhya to the return and the years after it, and the sixth — the war at Lanka — is the longest. Ramlila performs the whole of it over the nine nights before Dussehra, ending with the burning of Ravana's effigy on the tenth.

The episode most often cited is not a battle. Bharata, offered the throne, refuses it and rules for fourteen years with Rama's sandals set on the seat in his place — the image behind the phrase Ram Rajya, which in the tradition means government held in trust rather than a golden age.