Who ruled Ayodhya for fourteen years?

The usual answer is that nobody did. Rama was sent into the forest for fourteen years, and the throne waited. The more accurate answer is that his younger brother Bharata ruled, from outside the capital, on terms he set for himself.

Valmiki, the sage-poet traditionally credited with the Ramayana, tells this in the Ayodhya Kanda (a Kanda is a book of the epic; this is the second), from about sarga (chapter) 72, where Bharata returns from his grandfather’s court, to sarga 115, where he settles at Nandigrama, a village near the city. It is one of the quietest stretches of the Ramayana. There is no battle in it.

It is also the part of the story most often reduced to a single picture: a pair of sandals on a seat. But the sandals only mean something once you know what Bharata turned down to put them there.

Bharata was away when it happened

When Kaikeyi, Bharata’s mother, asked King Dasharatha for her two boons (Bharata’s coronation, and Rama’s exile for fourteen years), Bharata was not in Ayodhya. He had gone to Kekaya, his mother’s father’s kingdom, with his brother Shatrughna. Messengers called him home without telling him why.

By the time he arrived, his father King Dasharatha was dead, and his elder brother Rama, Rama’s wife Sita and Rama’s brother Lakshmana had left the city. Bharata learned the whole of it from his own mother, who expected him to be pleased. He was not. In Valmiki, his anger at Kaikeyi is plain: he tells her the kingdom she has secured for him is one he does not want, and that she has dishonoured the family.

The court did not leave it there. Vasishtha, the family priest, and the counsellors urged Bharata to accept the crown, since the throne could not stay empty. He declined. His reasoning is the hinge of the whole story: in the Ikshvaku line, the royal family of Ayodhya, the eldest son is king, and Rama is the eldest. A coronation that rests on his brother’s exile was, to Bharata, a theft in which he had been made the beneficiary without being asked.

That is the first thing to notice about Bharata. He had a legal claim, a mother who had arranged it, and a court asking him to use it. He chose to treat the claim as something owed to someone else.

The road to Chitrakuta

Bharata decided to go to the forest and bring Rama back. He did not go alone. The citizens, the ministers, the mothers and an army set out with him, a procession large enough that its dust could be seen from far off.

Rama was living at Chitrakuta, a hill in the forest. When Lakshmana saw the approaching army, he took it for an attack: Bharata had the throne and had come to make sure Rama never returned for it. Valmiki records Lakshmana’s anger, and Rama’s calm answer that Bharata could not mean him harm. The epic does not hide that Lakshmana was ready to fight his own brother before he knew why Bharata had come.

Bharata, for his part, came to Rama in grief and humility. In the story, he bows, tells Rama that their father has died, and asks him to return and be crowned.

Why Rama would not come back

Bharata made the argument well. The boons, he said, were wrung out of a grieving old man under the pressure of a queen’s demand; no one could hold Rama to them. The kingdom needed him. The people wanted him. The man who made the promise was gone.

Rama’s answer is the centre of the Ramayana’s idea of dharma (duty, the right way to act). His father had given his word, and the word was not cancelled by his father’s death. It was made heavier by it. To undo the exile now would be to make his father’s promise false. Valmiki also records a counsellor named Jabali arguing the opposite, that obligations to the dead are an illusion, and Rama rebuking him for it. The epic wants the reader to see both positions and to see which one Rama takes.

Valmiki does not make Rama cold in this. He praises Bharata, tells him he is fit to rule, and says that Dasharatha’s command is that Bharata be king and Rama go to the forest.

Readers weigh it differently. Some take Rama’s refusal as the highest filial duty; others find it hard, since it costs Sita and Lakshmana as much as him. The Ramayana does not pretend it is easy.

The sandals: holding a kingdom you will not own

Bharata accepted that Rama would not return. He did not accept that Ayodhya would go on as if nothing had happened. He asked Rama for his paduka, his wooden sandals, and Rama gave them.

To place Rama’s sandals on the seat of a king is to say that someone else sits there, and that the person managing the kingdom does it as that person’s servant. Bharata carried them back to Ayodhya.

He did not settle in the palace. Valmiki has him go to Nandigrama, a village near the city, and set the sandals on the royal seat there. From Nandigrama he governed, and what he did there is recorded as a vow of simplicity: he wore the clothes of an ascetic, matted hair and bark garments, and lived as his brother was living in the forest. State business was carried out in Rama’s name.

He also set a date. At Chitrakuta, before he leaves with the sandals, Bharata tells Rama that if Rama does not return when the fourteen years are complete, he will enter the fire. It is a pledge about his own life, not a demand on Rama. That promise turns the sandals from a gesture into a deadline, and it is why the return matters so much to him.

• The sandals did not make Bharata king. They made him a steward: someone who holds authority on behalf of a person who is not present.
• They gave the city a visible reason to wait. A kingdom without a king can drift; a kingdom with a seat that is occupied by Rama’s sandals has a place for loyalty to point.
• They kept Bharata honest. Every decision was made before a symbol of the person he was refusing to replace.

The return, and where Diwali comes in

Fourteen years later, in the Yuddha Kanda, the sixth book, Rama’s journey home is in sight. He stops at the hermitage of the sage Bharadvaja and sends Hanuman ahead to Bharata. Valmiki gives a specific reason for that: Rama wants to know, from Bharata’s face, whether Bharata still wishes for the kingdom. Hanuman goes, meets Bharata at Nandigrama, and brings the news.

Bharata, in the epic, welcomes Rama at Nandigrama and gives the kingdom back. The sandals do what they were placed there to do: they are handed over, and the seat they held is Rama’s to take. That is the end of the long wait, and the point where the epic’s Ayodhya story reaches its close.

The lighting of lamps to welcome Rama home is, in many households, the tradition behind Diwali. It does not come from Valmiki’s text. What does come from Valmiki is the other half of the picture: a city and a brother who had spent fourteen years keeping the place ready. Our Diwali at home guide covers the festival’s five days and the stories different regions tell about them; in this reading, the lamps welcome Rama home, and Bharata’s fourteen years are the waiting that came before.

Different traditions tell the Diwali story in different ways, and some regions attach it to other events entirely. This guide describes the Rama-and-Ayodhya reading and does not claim it for every household that keeps the festival.

A story for children, and a question for adults

If you are telling this to a child, Bharata’s story is a good one to tell in order: a boy who is away, a mother who asks for the wrong thing, a brother who cannot take what he is given. Our picture-book series on the Stories shelf, “The Prince Who Would Not Be King”, follows the first part of that road for ages six to nine; its later parts take the road on to Chitrakuta and the sandals.

For adults, the story leaves a plain question. Most of us hold something in trust for someone else at some point: a family business, a parent’s home, a child’s future, a role someone else will return to. Bharata’s answer was to refuse the credit and keep the promise safe. He did not claim the work as his own, and he kept faith with the person it belonged to for as long as it took.

If you want to go further into the text, the Ramayana episode on Bharata’s sandals sits in our Ramayana library with the characters and themes alongside it. For the idea underneath it, our practical guide to dharma asks how duty is weighed when two good claims meet.

• Small practice (five minutes, tonight): name one thing you hold in trust and the person it belongs to.
• Write one thing you would do differently this week if that person were watching.
• Do that one thing.