A hero who goes by the book
Amish Tripathi's Ram Chandra series tells the same years three times over, from three sides, and what kept me reading was Ram, a hero who reads the rules and then actually follows them, even when it costs him everything.
The Ramayana is one of the two great epics of India. Ram, a prince of Ayodhya, is sent into exile for fourteen years. His wife Sita is carried off by Raavan, the king of Lanka, and Ram crosses the country to fight a war and bring her home. Most Indians grow up knowing it the way most people know their own family stories, and Ram is usually the dullest person in any retelling of it. He’s the one who’s already correct, with nothing to find out and nothing to watch him become. He turns up perfect and leaves perfect, and everyone standing around him has to do the work of being interesting.
Amish Tripathi’s four books tell the story as if it had actually happened, in India around 3400 BCE, with the gods as titles that living people earn rather than beings who come down from the sky. What I really liked in these four books is the studiousness of Ram, who always wants to do the right thing, and by the textbook, at every point in his life. The books take that exact quality, the correctness, and make it the thing worth watching.
Table of contents
The studious one
The books mean Ram’s studiousness more literally than I expected.
His first real job is chief of police, when he’d wanted the army, and he’s disappointed but doesn’t say so to anyone. Then he looks at the job properly and finds that the problem is a reading problem. A Smriti is one of the old books of law, and Ayodhya has too many of them (the Manu Smriti, the BrihadManu, the Yajnavalkya, Narad, Aapastamb, Atri, Yam, Vyas), centuries of them piled up and contradicting each other. The police arrest people under one and the judge sentences them from another, and guilty men walk out through the gaps, while innocent ones rot in overcrowded jails because nobody ever told them what the law was.
So he reads the lot. He goes through every Smriti, pulls out the laws he judges fair and still fit for the times, and writes a single code to replace all of them, which he then has cut into stone tablets and put up in every temple in the city. One line sits at the end of the last tablet, ignorance of the law is not a legitimate excuse. Town criers read it aloud every morning until the whole city knows it.
People start calling him Ram, the Law Giver, and he’s a young man with a hated name and a job he didn’t want. (The name is hated because he was born on the day Ayodhya lost a war to Raavan, and the city blamed the baby.)
Then he does the harder half, which is applying it to himself. One night he rides back after the city gates have closed, and the gatekeeper opens them because he’s a prince. Ram tells him off, since the law says the gates don’t open after dark, and sleeps outside the walls till morning. The common people talk about it for months, and the nobles studiously don’t.
They stop finding him funny when he takes back the land one of General Mrigasya’s men had helped himself to from some villagers, and fines him for it. Mrigasya is the most powerful man in Ayodhya and the only noble still on his family’s side. His mother calls him in and tells him to ease off, and Ram’s answer is “The rule of law cannot be selective, Maa.” She tries the practical argument - do you want to be king or not? He tells her, “I want to be a good king. Or else, believe me, I’d rather not be one.”
Then his own law starts costing him. Roshni is a doctor and family to all four brothers, and she’s raped and murdered. The men who did it are caught, and the judges kill them savagely, in front of a city that wants exactly that. Ram says flatly that they should have been executed, because that’s the law, and what he objects to is that it was done in anger and outside the process. Some people had decided this particular crime was foul enough that the rules could be suspended for an afternoon. This was one of the two chapters that landed hardest for me, and it’s worth saying why: it’s the point where Ram stops being a paragon and becomes a person with a position that costs him something.
The crisis is Dhenuka, who was the worst of them and a minor when he did it, and Ram’s own new code says minors can’t be executed. So he’s alive in a cell, eating at the expense of the royal treasury, and Ram won’t have him touched.
Ram wrote the law himself, hence he could reread his own clause generously, and Bharat is begging him to. Roshni was family, and he still leaves the clause precisely where it stands.
Everything after that follows from it, which is the part I didn’t see coming. In the epic everyone knows, Ram’s exile happens because his stepmother Kaikeyi calls in two favours his father owed her. The books keep that and explain where her hold over the king came from. Roshni’s mother Manthara is rich enough to buy the entire nobility and she wants blood. Since Ram won’t give her that, she goes elsewhere and hands Kaikeyi a promissory note worth more than ten years of the kingdom’s revenue. Kaikeyi works on Bharat, Ram’s brother and her son, until he has Dhenuka broken out of prison and killed. Sometimes you have to break the law to do justice, he tells himself, and I can follow the reasoning. And Kaikeyi, now richer than the king, calls in the two old debts Dashrath owed her from the battlefield: banish Ram for fourteen years and make Bharat crown prince.
Ram’s exile gets bought with money his own law shook loose, and the book builds that brick by brick.
The bit that made me stop reading and sit back is why it’s fourteen, which isn’t a number Kaikeyi picked to be cruel. In this world there are divine weapons, weapons of mass destruction that a previous god-king, Lord Rudra, banned centuries ago, with a fixed punishment for using one. Ram had fired one, the Asuraastra, a gas weapon that paralyses everyone under its cloud, to save the city of Mithila, and the punishment Lord Rudra set down for using one is exile for fourteen years. So Kaikeyi asks for exactly the sentence already on the books, which is why it’s publicly defensible and why Ram has nothing to say against it. There’s even a technical defence available (the thing incapacitates rather than destroys, and arguably falls outside the ban), but he doesn’t reach for it, and he takes the sentence for the law he broke, having refused to bend the law he wrote.
Lakshman loves him and is going into the forest with him, and he explains his brother to his own wife in one line: “Ram Dada is not the most practical of men. He thinks everyone in the world is as ethical as he is.”
This comes up one last time three books later, before the duel with Raavan, where Ram gets to choose the weapon. He’s the finest archer alive and Raavan’s left arm is injured, so a bow would end it early. He picks swords instead and then adds that neither man wears armour. Raavan’s second leans across and tells his king that the man opposite is a moralising moron and this’ll be easy.
Ram wins anyway, and I liked that the book puts the sneer on the page and then simply answers it.
Three books, the same years
The shape of the series is the best argument for it. The first three books cover the same stretch of time, each from one person’s side (Scion of Ikshvaku is Ram’s, Sita: Warrior of Mithila is hers, and Raavan: Enemy of Aryavarta is his), and all three arrive at the same afternoon by the Godavari river, where Sita is taken. The author calls this a multilinear narrative, and the effect is that you meet the same scene up to three times and understand it a little differently each time. The fourth book, War of Lanka, is where the strands finally come together.
All three books pass through the swayamvar, which is the old custom of a contest for a princess’s hand, in this case Sita’s.
In Ram’s book it reads as a trap. Vishwamitra is the sage who has taken charge of Ram and Lakshman, and he has entered Ram’s name as a suitor without asking him or his father, and then shuts the door with a rule (a guru may decide a child’s marriage, and pulling out now would break two separate Smritis). Ram stands there shaking with fury and goes anyway. Then he sees her in the marketplace, breaking a man’s ribs with a tent pole to stop a mob lynching a boy who stole fruit, and he bows his head before he can stop himself.
In Sita’s book it’s her operation. She’s the one who talked her father into holding a swayamvar at all, and who asked Vishwamitra to produce Ram, because an invitation from tiny Mithila would have been ignored and one from the Malayaputras couldn’t be. The Malayaputras are Vishwamitra’s tribe, the people left behind by the last Vishnu, and in these books Vishnu isn’t a god in the sky but a title, given to the greatest leader of an age, the one who propagates good, and the Malayaputras exist to find and raise the next one. She’s had reports on Ram for years through a friend from her old gurukul, the school where a guru’s pupils live and learn. She brings him Lord Rudra’s bow the night before so he can practise, and is delighted when he refuses to touch it. Then she works out that her own guru means to wreck Ram at the contest rather than crown him, and she stops it the only way she can, telling Arishtanemi, Vishwamitra’s second in command, that she may not hold Ram’s life in her hands, but she holds her own.
In Raavan’s book it’s neither, and he’s there because he arranged his own invitation through Sita’s uncle Kushadhwaj, whose debts to Lanka he wrote off in exchange. He doesn’t especially want a wife. He wants Mithila’s council of sages to declare him a living god while he’s still breathing. Mithila is the city everyone believes about holiness, so if Mithila builds him a temple the rest will follow, and that’s his route to immortality. The marriage is a bonus humiliation for the Sapt Sindhu, the land of the seven rivers, which is what the books call the kingdoms of the north that Lanka has been squeezing for years.
The second time the trick works, it works harder - Ram fires the banned weapon at Mithila, and his whole life turns on that. His own book shows a young man cornered by his guru: will you, as a husband, protect your wife or not? Then come fifteen minutes of watching green gas settle over ten thousand paralysed men, and then one tear.
Sita’s book turns the same scene into a con. The Malayaputras had the weapon. They could have fired it themselves and Vishwamitra could have fired it himself, and the Vayuputras, the other old tribe, the one that guards the ban, would probably have let it go. They needed Ram to do it, so that the punishment would disqualify him as a candidate for Vishnu and leave the role to her. She works this out afterwards and says so to Arishtanemi’s face, and then tells him his clever plan has misfired - the man they meant to disqualify has just become the first person in a generation to beat Raavan, and the country adores him for it.
Raavan’s book is on the receiving end of the same minute. He refuses to believe the Malayaputras have the thing at all. Vishwamitra is bluffing. His brother Kumbhakarna can’t shift him, and when the flaming arrow goes up, Kumbhakarna sprints for the flying machine and knocks Raavan bodily through the door. Then he stands in the gap while the hatch grinds shut, so that his own body takes the green light, and he never fully recovers. Guilt makes Raavan promise him three wishes, any three, redeemable whenever he likes. Thirteen years later Kumbhakarna spends the first one to keep his brother out of a fight.
Some of the setups take a long time to pay off. Early in the third book a workman is trampled to pulp under the hooves of Raavan’s raiders, fleeing a robbery, and a hundred pages later Raavan is eating lunch with villagers who describe that day to his face. When two elephants fight the grass gets trampled, one of them says, and we were the grass. He nods along and says nothing.
Another one starts with a four-year-old who pegs a live hare to the ground to open it up and watch the heart beat, and a girl who unties it. Decades later she sends him a message about a hare and some ants, and he understands that she has known who he is the whole time.
Then there’s the big one, which the author cheerfully admits he buried in the last paragraph of book one. The second book opens on a childless couple finding an abandoned baby in a furrow, guarded against a wolf pack by a vulture that dies of its wounds. That baby is Sita. The third book ends with Raavan looking at the face of the woman his men have just dragged onto his flying machine, and working out whose daughter she is.
The structure has a cost, which is that a lot of it is literally the same text, and reading the books back to back makes that obvious. The swayamvar, the wedding dinner where he asks for salt, the battle at Mithila, and the whole Panchavati episode (the forest home where Sita is taken from) run for pages in both the first and the second book, with barely a word altered and only the interior monologue swapped over. Spread across seven years of publication, that’s a gift to the reader who half-remembers, but read in a fortnight, there are stretches where the second book is the first book with annotations.
Each one stands up alone, though, and I could hand somebody the Sita volume first and it would work.
The idea underneath it
Vashishtha is the other great sage of the books, the one who teaches the four princes of Ayodhya when they’re boys, and the framework he teaches them has stuck with me longer than the plot has. There are two ways to run a society. The masculine way is built on truth, duty and law. At its best it’s orderly and fair, but as it rots it goes rigid, then fanatical, then cruel to whoever is weakest. The feminine way is built on freedom and passion, and it’s creative and tolerant until it slides into decadence and drift. Neither is the answer, each is the correction for the other’s decline, and the wheel turns. In the books Ram stands for the masculine way, Raavan’s Lanka is the feminine way in freefall, and Sita is the balance between them.
What lifts it above a neat diagram is that the books keep testing it and keep letting the other side win rounds.
Ram gets there first, talking to a Malayaputra on a boat. The Asuras are an old tribe he has just spared instead of destroying, and theirs was a masculine society that failed. He thinks he knows why - their founder built it on faith instead of law. When the world changed they couldn’t change with it, because you can amend a law and you cannot amend a faith. Hard times make people hold a faith tighter. Build the masculine way on law, he says, and it stays repairable.
Then his brother takes the argument apart. Bharat believes in freedom the way Ram believes in rules, and he points out to Sita that a free society can repair itself. When it starts to rot somebody is still allowed to say so out loud, and the argument starts and things correct. A code-bound society can’t do that, because the first thing it surrenders is the right to ask. Then he adds the sharp bit. The Mahadevs are the other title in this world, the destroyers of evil, who appear when a society has rotted past repair, and Bharat asks: have you noticed that when the Mahadevs turn up to fix what nobody else can fix, they nearly always end up fighting the masculine side? Sita, who has an answer for everything, has no answer for that, and the book leaves it sitting there and moves on. I liked that a lot.
The clearest statement of the whole idea comes in the fourth book, where Ram is walked over to two sculptures facing each other across a gap. One is a rampaging bull (head down, nostrils flared), and the other is a small girl standing in front of it with her hands on her hips. Everyone shown these says the same thing: what a magnificent girl. Ram looks for a while and says, what a magnificent beast. She isn’t brave, he says, she’s certain. A bull like that would have killed her in a second, so the fact that she’s standing there means she knows it won’t. Then he points out the almost invisible thread running through the animal’s horns, and the way its body is twisting aside with its forefeet digging in to stop. It’s aggressive masculinity, wearing a bridle it put on itself.
The second book sharpens the framework into something I found uncomfortable, which is that angry, powerless young men get pulled towards the masculine way precisely because it’s simple and predictable. Somebody has already written the code, so they can follow it without having to think. That’s Sita, in 2017, and it hasn’t aged in the direction I’d have liked.
Then there’s the joke sitting under the whole series, which I didn’t see coming, and which was the other thing that landed hardest for me. Vishwamitra explains to his lieutenant that a Vishnu is only a hero people choose to follow, and a hero is nothing without a villain to be measured against, so the Malayaputras go shopping for one. They find a teenage smuggler with a growth on his navel that bleeds and will eventually kill him. They own the only medicine that keeps him alive, and they keep supplying it. They also sell him a mineral he needs for his ships (half a million gold coins a consignment, three consignments a year), and then they spend that money building the divine weapon they will one day hand to the hero. That smuggler is Raavan. In other words the villain of the Ramayana is, in these books, infrastructure - commissioned, funded out of the buyer’s own pocket, and scheduled for demolition on a date the buyer picked.
The ideas thin out at the solution. Vishwamitra’s fix for a soft, hereditary elite is a scheme he calls the Maika, where every child is surrendered to the state at birth and raised by the state. At fifteen they’re examined, sorted into a caste on the results, then handed to adoptive parents of that caste, with neither side ever learning who the other was. It’s meant to kill birth-based caste outright, and as a thought experiment it has teeth. The books raise the obvious objection exactly once, when a friend tells him only a man without children could imagine parents handing theirs over, and nobody answers her. Instead the idea gets picked up by the heroes, polished, and installed as the founding constitution of the empire they go on to build. The series clearly wants me to find this thrilling, but I found it chilling, and I’m fairly sure that wasn’t the intent.
One more habit I never stopped noticing is that Amish likes putting modern thinking into ancient mouths, and he doesn’t always do it smoothly. There’s a modern theory that societies run into trouble when they produce more would-be rulers than there are places to rule from, so that the surplus turns on the rest. A sage in the fourth book lays out exactly that theory and credits it to a nomad he met on the steppe called Lord Turchin, which is the surname of the living historian whose theory it is. Socrates, Schopenhauer, and Seneca all get quoted. It’s playful, and it’s also the thing most likely to pull me out of 3400 BCE.
Where it lost me
What didn’t land for me is Raavan’s death, in the fourth book. One thing to know first: Raavan’s whole life in these books turns on Vedavati, a woman he loved as a boy and who died young, and Sita turns out to be her daughter. I’d remembered the ending as him not fighting at all, that since he saw Vedavati in Sita, he just went soft and folded. So I went back and read the chapter properly, and that isn’t what’s on the page.
He fights, and he starts it by charging first, quick enough that the book calls it preternatural for a man past sixty. He gets inside Ram’s guard and punches him in the face with the rim of his shield, which raises a bruise that’s still there at the end. Late on he baits a trap, dropping his shield to swing two-handed at what looks like a slip. Ram had faked the slip, and that’s how it finishes.
So I had the detail wrong, but I don’t think I had the feeling wrong, and now that I’ve checked, the real problem looks worse than the one I’d remembered.
He comes into the circle with one eye gone (not bandaged but removed, because it would have turned septic), two arrowheads cut out of his left bicep that morning and the arm strapped to his shield, and a bad right leg, at sixty years old. His brother Kumbhakarna died the previous afternoon and his son Indrajit died a few hours ago, and he comes to the duel straight from watching a physician pour plaster over the boy’s face for the death mask. On his way out, his wife Mandodari told him the only thing he’d be holding high was what he always held high, his ego. The fight is real, it just isn’t a contest - everything had already been taken off him before the swords came out.
The actual problem is the thing I hadn’t remembered at all. Weeks before the war, over breakfast in the garden where he’s keeping Sita prisoner, Raavan works out the entire plan that’s been run on him for forty years and then tells her so. He says his life hasn’t amounted to much and maybe his death can, and a quiet rescue won’t do, because India will never follow anyone it hasn’t watched win a spectacle. So he asks for the war, and for his own army to be destroyed in it too. He recruited those two hundred thousand men himself, for their appetite for damage, and they’re a standing threat to whatever peace comes after. Sita warns him that Ram will stop the moment he suspects his opponent is holding back, since striking a man who isn’t trying is adharma, which is the word for what’s against dharma, against the right way. Raavan promises he won’t hold back, and he doesn’t.
The trouble is that we know. By the time he swings that sword he has signed off on losing, and a villain who agreed to his own defeat can’t frighten anybody.
He says it himself while he’s bleeding out (his death will make the legend of Ram, light is the child of darkness, maybe that was the point of him), which is the plan working exactly as designed. I wanted him to refuse, and to go out still believing he could win, or at least still wanting to. Three books built a man whose defining quality is that he won’t be told anything by anyone, and in the final hundred pages he agrees.
The dying wishes are the same problem in miniature. The rules of the duel let the loser hand the winner a list of demands that must be honoured. Raavan’s runs to nine, including the burials, a hospital he’d promised to fund, his instruments to a musician who once took refuge with him, and his library to Ram’s bookish youngest brother. The eighth is that if anyone ever writes down the story of Ram and Sita, he is not to be left out of it. That’s the author speaking through the character. It’s charming, and it arrives at precisely the moment the scene needed us to forget there was an author.
A smaller problem is Vibhishan, Raavan’s half-brother and the traitor who sells Ayodhya the secret tunnels into the great river fort. He’s written as a preening fool throughout, which is fine and often funny. Then, mid-campaign, he mentions in passing that the mysterious plague which has been wasting Sigiriya, Lanka’s capital, for a decade is lead poisoning from water pipes he designed and built. He worked it out years ago and quietly moved his own family clear. The eight hundred thousand people still drinking it are, in his phrase, collateral damage, and he sniggers while he says it. He’s crowned king at the end (a smaller Lanka, secured by a lawyer’s trick, but crowned), because Ram had given his word in writing before he knew any of this. The books intend it as the last proof that Ram’s word is worth something, but it reads as the most contemptible man in four volumes walking off with a throne.
Anyway
The last thing Ram does, once the sword is in, is straighten the dying man’s legs so he isn’t left twisted. Then he kneels by his head and asks whether he’d like to hold his sword while he goes, because that’s how men who worship Indra prefer to leave.
Raavan says no - he’s already holding what he wants, a finger bone on a gold chain, pulled from a funeral pyre nearly forty years ago and belonging to the only woman who ever took his hand. The other bone is round Sita’s neck, since he gave it to her at breakfast weeks ago when he found out she was her mother’s daughter.
Then Ram waits to be told, and does it in one stroke. He goes by the book right to the end, and this time the book is a kind one.