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Kishkindha Kand · Episode 2
To secure an ally, Rama kills the unbeatable Vali with an arrow from hiding — and must answer for it.
The story of Vali and Sugriva is the story of brotherhood unmade -- and it contains one of the most fiercely debated moral moments in all of Sanskrit literature. Scholars have argued about it for two thousand years. They have not finished.
Vali, the elder brother, was king of Kishkindha and warrior without peer. He possessed a boon that made him nearly invincible: in any face-to-face combat, half his opponent's strength would flow into him. The stronger the challenger, the stronger Vali became. He had defeated demons, shaken mountains, and once dragged the rakshasa Ravana himself through the sky by his tail. No creature alive could best Vali in open battle.
And yet here was his younger brother Sugriva, hiding on Rishyamukha, sworn to destroy him. The wound between them was a woman and a misunderstanding -- which is to say, the oldest wound there is.
It began with a cave. Vali had pursued a demon named Mayavi into a deep cavern, ordering Sugriva to guard the entrance. Months passed. Then blood flowed from the cave mouth, and a terrible roar echoed from within. Sugriva, believing his brother dead and the demon victorious, sealed the entrance with a boulder to protect Kishkindha from whatever emerged. He returned to the city and was crowned king in Vali's absence.
But Vali was not dead. He had slain the demon and clawed his way out through the rock, only to find his brother sitting on his throne, wearing his crown, wed to his wife Tara. He did not pause to hear explanations. He beat Sugriva nearly to death, took everything back, and claimed Sugriva's own wife Ruma as his queen. Sugriva fled to the one place Vali could not follow -- Rishyamukha, sheltered by a sage's curse -- and nursed his humiliation into something harder than grief.
This was the feud that Rama walked into. And the solution he offered was clean in theory and agonizing in practice.
The first attempt failed. Sugriva challenged Vali to single combat, and Rama positioned himself in the trees with his bow drawn, ready to strike. But when the brothers clashed, they were so alike -- the same build, the same tawny fur, the same furious grace -- that Rama could not tell them apart. He held his arrow. Sugriva was beaten badly and dragged himself back to Rishyamukha, bloodied and bitter.
"You swore to help me," he gasped. "Why did you not shoot?"
"I could not distinguish you," Rama said simply. "Would you have me kill you by mistake?"
They tried again. This time, Lakshmana wove a garland of gaj flowers and hung it around Sugriva's neck -- a bright band of color that would mark him in the chaos of combat.
Sugriva descended to the gates of Kishkindha and roared his challenge. Vali heard it and laughed, rising from his throne. Tara -- wise, perceptive Tara -- placed her hand on his arm.
"My lord, think. He comes again so soon after his defeat. He must have found a powerful ally. I have heard that two princes of Ayodhya wander these forests. Do not go."
Vali shook her off. "No warrior born can stand against me. His ally will learn this." He strode out to meet his brother.
The second duel was as ferocious as the first. The brothers circled and struck, grappled and broke apart, their blows sending tremors through the earth. Sugriva fought with the desperate strength of a being who knew this was his last chance. But Vali was stronger -- always stronger -- and slowly, inevitably, Sugriva began to weaken.
Then came the arrow.
It struck Vali in the chest like a thunderbolt wrapped in silence. He staggered. He looked down at the shaft protruding from his body, at the golden fletching of a royal weapon, and he understood. He fell to his knees, and as his great strength poured out of him like water from a cracked vessel, he turned toward the trees.
Rama stepped forward.
Vali's eyes found him, and even dying, the vanara king's voice carried the authority of one who had never been defeated by any force that faced him honestly.
"Rama," he said, and the word was an accusation. "You are famed as a prince of dharma. You are the son of Dasharatha, heir to the Solar Dynasty. And you shot me from behind a tree while I fought another. What righteousness is this? What honor? I had no quarrel with you. I never harmed you. If you had faced me openly, I would have found Sita for you within a day -- I who humbled Ravana himself. Instead, you struck like a hunter kills a beast."
The forest went silent. Even the wind held still.
Rama's answer came measured and deliberate, each word placed with the care of a man who had considered this moment long before it arrived.
"You are a king, Vali, and a king who takes his brother's wife commits a crime that any righteous ruler may punish. Sugriva's wife was not yours to claim. A king who persecutes his own brother without hearing his explanation fails his dharma. And this forest belongs to the kingdom of Kishkindha's sovereign allies -- I act here with the authority of a kshatriya enforcing justice. As for shooting from concealment: a hunter may take a wild creature by any means, and you, in your treatment of Sugriva, descended to the law of beasts."
Vali heard him. Whether the answer satisfied him, the epic does not entirely say. Some tellings show Vali accepting, recognizing his own failures. Others show a dying king whose last emotion is the bitter knowledge that even dharma can wear a mask. The Ramayana, at its most honest, leaves room for both.
What is certain is what happened next. Tara came running from the city, her hair unbound, her face a landscape of devastation. She threw herself across Vali's body as his breathing slowed. Her lamentation is one of the great passages of grief in world literature -- not theatrical, but geological, the sound of a woman watching the ground open beneath her life.
"What use is Kishkindha to me now?" she wept. "What use is a kingdom, a crown, a world without you in it?"
Vali, with his last strength, took her hand. He asked Rama to protect his son Angada. He asked Sugriva to treat Tara and Angada with the honor owed to a brother's family. Then he died, and the mountain itself seemed to groan.
Sugriva stood over the body of the brother he had feared, hated, loved, and mourned in a single afternoon. He was king of Kishkindha now. The crown had come to him over a corpse. He did not celebrate.
Rama walked away from the clearing with something new in his expression. Not doubt -- Rama rarely doubted -- but the particular weight that settles on a man who has done what he believed was right and knows that the world will argue about it forever.
They were correct. We still do.
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