कैकेय्याः तीव्रगर्हणं सुरभ्युपाख्यानं च

In the previous sarga Bharata had reproached Kaikeyī and vowed to bring Rāma back. In this one his anger burns hotter still. Having rebuked her so, he was seized again by a great fury and spoke once more, and the poet makes clear that the earlier reproach had not ended; this is a fresh surge of rage. First he spoke almost as if pronouncing a curse: “Fall from the kingship, Kaikeyī, cruel woman of evil ways! Righteousness has abandoned you. Do not weep for me as one dead” — or, as the words may also mean, count me as dead and weep for me all your life. Then he asked: “What harm did the king ever do you, or Rāma, so devoted to righteousness, that through you death and exile should fall on the two of them together?” Death and exile, he implies, sprang from one and the same root. Then he charged her with a sin as grave as killing an unborn child: “By destroying this house you have incurred that guilt. Go to hell, and never share my father's world!” That a son should say “go to hell” to his mother is almost unheard of, and it shows how violent his feeling was.

“By this dreadful deed you have done such evil, casting out Rāma, whom the whole world loves, that you have brought danger on me as well.” The danger he meant was that people would take him for a man greedy for the kingdom, the one who had set it all in motion. “Because of you my father is dead and Rāma has taken to the forest, and you have made me a byword for dishonour among the living.” Then he said the harshest thing of all: “You wear a mother's shape but you are my enemy — cruel, lusting for the kingdom, wicked, the killer of your husband. You ought not even to speak to me.” She was a mother in name only and in truth an enemy, and with these words he declared the bond between them cut at the root. Last he thought of his mothers: “Kausalyā and Sumitrā and all my other mothers are overwhelmed with grief at having you, the disgrace of this house, among them.” In calling them all his mothers, Bharata plainly takes every one of Daśaratha's queens as a mother.

Then Bharata disowned her very birth: “You are no daughter of wise Aśvapati, that righteous king. Some demoness was born there to ruin your father's line.” This was the fiercest charge of all, for no daughter of a noble house could do such a thing; birth in a royal family, he implies, had not changed her nature. He set out the reason: “You sent the righteous, ever-truthful, heroic Rāma into the forest, and my father has gone to heaven. I have been left fatherless, forsaken by my two brothers and made hateful to the whole world, and all the guilt of it is yours, for you were the prime mover” — among all the causes she was the chief. Last he asked: “You have torn Kausalyā, who is joined to righteousness, from husband and son. What world will you reach now, woman of wicked resolve, bound as you are for hell?” That final question raises the fear of the world to come, the one fear left to her.

Then, to make her feel the depth of Kausalyā's grief, Bharata set out a truth everyone knows. First he asked: “Cruel woman, do you not understand that Rāma is the sure refuge of all his kin, the eldest, the equal of a father, Kausalyā's own son?” Then came the common truth: “A son is born of his mother's limbs and of her very heart; so he is dearer to her than anyone. Other kin are dear, but not so dear as that.” He gives the son's birth from his mother's body as the reason, and in speaking of her heart he means not only the bond of flesh but the bond of love. In this way he establishes both that Kausalyā had only one son and that her grief had no limit, and the saying prepares the story of Surabhī, which follows as an illustration.

Here the poet brings in an old tale. Once, it is said, Surabhī, the divine cow who knows what is right and is honoured by the gods, saw two of her sons on the earth below, hauling a load and fainting under it. Seeing them on the ground, worn out by half a day's labour, she wept in grief for them, her eyes brimming with tears. Fine drops, fragrant with her scent, fell on the body of the great-souled king of the gods as he passed beneath her. Looking up, Śakra saw her standing in the sky, wretched, weeping, utterly stricken. Seeing that glorious one consumed with grief, Indra, the wielder of the thunderbolt, was alarmed, and with folded hands he said, “Is some great danger threatening us from somewhere? What is the cause of your grief? Tell me, you who wish all beings well.” The humility of the king of the gods shows how great Surabhī is. And here is the heart of the tale: though even the gods revere her, as a mother she weeps like any ordinary mother. By telling how her tears fell on Indra's body, the poet shows grief rising upward until it touches even the king of the gods.

Thus addressed by the wise king of the gods, Surabhī, steady and skilled in speech, replied: “May evil be averted! There is nothing at all for you to fear from anywhere, lord of the immortals. I grieve for my own two sons, sunk in hardship. Look at them, two bullocks, thin and wretched, scorched by the sun, being beaten by a cruel ploughman. They were born of my body, they are suffering, crushed by their load, and seeing them I burn with pain. There is nothing so dear as a son.” She first spoke a word of blessing for the gods' welfare and only then told her own sorrow, and that shows her generosity. “There is nothing so dear as a son” is the thread at the centre of this sarga. Seeing her weep — she whose thousands of sons fill the whole world — Śakra understood that nothing is dearer than one's children, and seeing her holy-scented tears fallen on his own body, the lord held Surabhī greater than all. His change of mind is itself the proof that a mother of thousands still loves each son alike. Bharata drew the conclusion: “She whose conduct is the same to all and beyond compare, glorious and first among her kind, whose every act is meant to sustain the world, the cow of plenty with thousands of sons — even she grieves. How then will Kausalyā, who has only one, live on without Rāma?”

“She had one son and she was a faithful wife, and you have made her childless. For that you will find sorrow without end, in this world and the next,” Bharata said, almost as a curse. Then he declared his own duty. “But I will repay in full what I owe my brother and my father, and add to their glory; of that there is no doubt.” He saw his task as paying off a debt. “I will bring back the mighty, long-armed lord of Kosala, and then I myself will go into the forest where the sages live. Wicked woman of wicked designs, I cannot bear the burden of what you have done, with the townspeople watching me, tears choking their throats.” It was the shame he could not bear, and the feeling of the city itself added to his grief. Last he pointed her to her end: “So walk into the fire, or go yourself to the Daṇḍaka forest, or tie a rope round your neck; there is no other refuge for you. As for me, when Rāma of true valour sets foot on this earth again, I will have done what I had to do, and my stain will be washed away.” Fire, the Daṇḍaka forest, the noose — all three are ways of dying, which says that for her there is no atonement.

With these words Bharata fell to the ground in fury, like an elephant in the forest goaded with lance and hook, and lay hissing like a snake. The two images join: the falling elephant shows the weight of his body, the hissing snake the anger within. His eyes red, his clothes loosened, all his ornaments shaken off, that scourge of his enemies, that son of a king, lay fallen on the earth like Indra's banner lowered when the festival is over. The image is very apt: the banner stands tall and splendid during the festival and is laid on the ground when it ends; so the prince who had been summoned for consecration now lay fallen. In shaking off all his ornaments he has, without meaning to, cast away every sign of royalty that a prince to be crowned would wear. With this scene the sarga ends. At its close Bharata is neither victor nor king, only a son and a brother struck down by grief; and in the next sarga Kausalyā will come to see him lying there.