सीतापरित्यागस्य आदेशः

As his brothers sat before him, all of them sad at heart, Kākutstha spoke to them, his mouth parched, for the grief within showed even in his body. "Listen, all of you," he said, "and may it go well with you; do not let your minds be shaken. Hear what the citizens are saying about me and about Sītā. There is a great outcry among the people of the city and the countryside too, and loathing and contempt for me, and it cuts me to the quick." Even in his sorrow he did not forget courtesy, and he began by reassuring his brothers. "I was born, as you know, in the line of the great-souled Ikṣvākus, and Sītā too was born in the noble line of the great-souled Janakas. You know, gentle Lakṣmaṇa, how Rāvaṇa carried Sītā off in the lonely forest of Daṇḍaka, and how I destroyed him." Rāma recalled the honour of both families: the slander was not his stain alone but a blot on two great houses, and the fame the Ikṣvākus had gathered over generations was his to protect. He turned to Lakṣmaṇa with "you know" because Lakṣmaṇa had been there in the Daṇḍaka forest as a witness.

"There," Rāma went on, "the thought arose in my mind: how can I bring Janaka's daughter back to the city when she has lived in this place? And so, to prove her purity, Sītā entered the fire before your very eyes, Lakṣmaṇa. Agni, who carries the offerings to the gods, and the Wind who ranges the sky declared Maithilī sinless. The Moon and the Sun too proclaimed her without sin, before all the gods and sages. Pure in her conduct, she was placed in my hands by great Indra himself on the island of Laṅkā, in the presence of gods and gandharvas. My own inner self knows glorious Sītā to be pure. So I took Vaidehī and came to Ayodhyā. But now there is this great outcry against me, and grief dwells in my heart." Here Rāma himself acknowledged that Sītā was wholly pure. The gods, the sages and his own heart were her witnesses, one after another: Fire, Wind, Moon, Sun and the sages, and above them Indra. Her abandonment, then, would spring not from doubt but solely from what the world was saying, and that contradiction is the root of the pathos of this whole episode. The ordeal by fire, told at length in the Yuddha Kāṇḍa, is recalled here in brief. "My inner self knows" outweighs every other proof, and Rāma's anguish is that what his heart knew, the world did not.

"The outcry among the citizens is very great," he said, "and in the countryside as well. When the ill fame of any being is sung abroad in the world, he falls to the lowest worlds for as long as the report of it goes on. Ill fame is condemned by the gods, and good fame is honoured in every world; everything the truly great undertake, they undertake for the sake of good fame. For fear of dishonour, bulls among men, I would give up my own life, or even you; how much more, then, the daughter of Janaka! So look at me now, fallen into an ocean of grief. I have never known any sorrow greater than this." Rāma's reasoning was this: a king is the guardian of good name, and ill fame brings a fall not only in this world but in the next. By saying that he was ready to give up his own life and his brothers, he showed how heavy his decision was: to him, giving up Sītā was no less than giving up himself. The image of an ocean of grief expresses how boundless his sorrow was. The hard message of the episode is that the king's duty overrides the duty of the private man. If he was ready to abandon even his brothers, how could he not abandon his wife? Good fame against ill fame runs through all of Vālmīki's picture of the ideal king.

Then he gave his order. "Tomorrow at daybreak, Lakṣmaṇa, take the chariot driven by Sumantra, set Sītā in it, and leave her at the border of the kingdom. On the far bank of the Gaṅgā, beside the Tamasā, lies the hermitage of the great-souled Vālmīki, heavenly to behold. Leave her there, in a lonely place, Raghunandana, and come back quickly. Do as I say. No one is to answer me back about Sītā in any way. So go, Lakṣmaṇa; there is nothing here to deliberate. It would displease me greatly if you tried to stop this. I bind you all by an oath, by my feet and by my life: whoever speaks up to dissuade me in any way shall be my enemy for ever, for thwarting what I wish. If you honour me and abide by my command, let Sītā be taken from here today." The harshness of the command is startling: Rāma binds his brothers with an oath so that none of them can stand in his way. Yet by naming Vālmīki's hermitage he shows that he was not casting Sītā out without any refuge; near the great sage she would be safe. He had thought about where she was to be left: far away, but in the shelter of dharma. And of all the brothers it was Lakṣmaṇa he chose, the one who had been Sītā's companion and guardian in the forest, a bitter irony of fate.

"Once," he said, "Sītā told me that she wished to see the hermitages on the bank of the Gaṅgā. Let this wish of hers be granted too." Her innocent wish became the cover for her abandonment: she would go gladly, not knowing she would never come back. Rāma wanted to fulfil her desire, even though the fulfilling was full of sorrow. Having said this, the righteous Kākutstha, his eyes veiled with tears, went into his own apartments with his brothers around him, and, his heart shaken with grief, he sighed like an elephant. As a captive elephant draws long breaths, so Rāma sighed, holding in his anguish. His tears show the price of his decision: he was giving up Sītā, but his heart was not. The poet still calls him "the righteous one", for in the poet's eyes the decision came from dharma itself. The sarga ends in grief, and in the next Lakṣmaṇa carries out the order.