What happened at Nashik in the Ramayana?

By the time Ram came to Agastya’s ashram he had been in the forest a long while. He had killed the rakshasa Viradha, he had gone from one rishi’s home to the next, and he had promised the rishis of the Dandaka forest that he would rid it of the rakshasas who ate them. Agastya knew all of it before Ram said a word. He blessed the three of them, and he said something to Ram about Sita that people still repeat — that she had come into the forest out of love for her husband when she was not made for hardship, and that wherever the three of them stayed, that place would be famous.

Ram asked him for a place with trees and water where they could live quietly. Agastya thought and said: Panchavati. Fruit, roots, deer, and it is close to the Godavari. Sita will be happy there. Go past the madhuka wood, past the fig grove, over the ridge, and you will see it.

On the way there they met a huge old vulture sitting in the trees, and the brothers, who took anything that size for a rakshasa in disguise, asked it who it was. I am your father’s friend, said the bird. His name was Jatayu. He was very old, he had known Dasharath, and he told Ram that if he liked he would live near them and watch over Sita whenever the two brothers were away. Ram had heard his father talk about Jatayu. He held him, and said yes.

At Panchavati Ram picked the spot himself, a flat place with trees round it and the river close by, and asked Lakshman to build there. Lakshman built a hut with mud walls on bamboo, a roof of shami branches and reeds and leaves, and a floor beaten level. Then he went and bathed in the Godavari, brought back lotuses and fruit, did the rites for a new house, and brought Ram to see it. Ram held him and said that as long as Lakshman was alive, with that much care in him, their father was not dead.

And they lived there. Autumn went, winter came. On winter mornings the three of them walked down to the Godavari before sunrise through the mist, Lakshman carrying the water pot, talking about Bharat back in Ayodhya bathing in the cold Sarayu for Ram’s sake. They bathed, gave water to the gods and the ancestors, and walked back. Rishis came and went. Jatayu was somewhere in the trees. It was a peaceful place.

One morning, after the bath, Ram was sitting inside the hut reciting when a woman walked up out of the forest. She was Shurpanakha, Ravan’s sister, and she took one look at Ram and wanted him. She asked him what he was doing in a rakshasa forest dressed like a sadhu with a bow and a wife. He told her the truth, all of it, and asked who she was. She told him — Ravan’s sister, Kumbhakarna’s sister, Khara and Dushan’s sister, stronger than any of them, able to take any shape. I want you as my husband, she said. What is this thin, plain woman to you? I will eat her right now, and your brother, and then you and I will have the whole forest.

Ram smiled and told her his brother was the better choice, young and handsome and without a wife here. Lakshman, playing along, said he was only Ram’s servant and she deserved the master. She did not hear the joke in either of them. What she heard was that the wife was the problem, and she went for Sita.

Ram caught her. He told Lakshman that you do not joke with cruel creatures, that Sita was in danger, and to cut her. Lakshman took his sword and cut off her nose and ears, and she ran howling to her brother Khara at Janasthan.

What that started is told whole on Tapovan. Khara sent fourteen rakshasas and Ram killed them. Khara came himself with fourteen thousand, and Lakshman took Sita to a cave in the hills while Ram fought alone, and when it was over there was nobody left of them. And Shurpanakha went to Lanka and stood in front of Ravan and told him about a woman by the Godavari with skin like gold and a face like the full moon, and said that a woman like that was wasted on a man in bark cloth.

Ravan went to an old rakshasa called Marich, who had met Ram once before and been nearly killed by him, and who told Ravan again and again that this was madness. Ravan did not listen. Marich came with him in his flying chariot, and near the hut Marich turned himself into a deer.

Not an ordinary deer. Its horns were tipped with jewels, its skin was dappled silver, its belly was blue like a sapphire, its hooves were green like emerald, and it walked in and out of the trees near the hut, sometimes close, sometimes far, always where Sita could see it. She was picking flowers. She saw it and called out for Ram and Lakshman to come quickly.

Lakshman looked at it once and said it was Marich. No deer like that exists, he said, it is a trick. Sita did not care. She said the deer had taken hold of her heart, that she wanted it alive to play with, and that if it could not be caught alive she wanted its skin to sit on. Ram looked at it too, and it took hold of him as well. He said that if it was Marich, then Marich had killed enough rishis and deserved to die, and if it was a deer, Sita would have it. He told Lakshman to stay at the hut with Sita and Jatayu and not to move, and went after it with his bow.

The deer led him a long way. It would let him get close, then leap away, then crouch in the grass as if tired, then vanish into the trees and show itself again far off. At last Ram lost patience and shot it. The arrow went through its heart, it leapt as high as a palm tree, and as it fell it turned back into Marich. And with his last breath Marich called out in Ram’s own voice, loud enough to carry all the way to the hut — O Sita! O Lakshman!

Ram stood there with his hair standing on end. He knew at once what the cry was for.

At the hut Sita heard it. Go, she told Lakshman. That is his voice. He is in trouble. Lakshman did not move. Ram had told him not to leave her, and he told her the voice was a trick, that no one on earth could beat Ram, that the rakshasas could copy anyone’s voice and did it to hurt good people.

Then Sita said the thing she should not have said. She said that Lakshman wanted Ram dead so that he could have her. She said perhaps Bharat had sent him for that. She said she would throw herself into the Godavari before she let another man near her.

Lakshman stood with his hands joined. He said she was like a goddess to him and he could not answer her back. He said her words went through him like burning arrows. He said, may I find you safe when I come back, and he bowed to her, and he walked off into the forest after his brother, looking back over his shoulder again and again.

He knew. That is the part of the story people find hardest. He knew it was a trick, he knew what leaving her meant, and he went anyway, because there was nothing else he could do with what she had said.

Ravan had been waiting for exactly that. He came to the hut as a wandering sadhu — matted hair, a saffron cloth, a staff, a begging bowl — in the last light of the evening. When he came into the clearing the wind stopped and the leaves stopped moving and the Godavari went quiet.

Sita was sitting on a carpet of leaves, crying, looking into the trees for the two of them. She saw a holy man and did what you do. She gave him a seat, water for his feet, fruit and roasted grain. He praised her — her skin like gold, her eyes, her waist — in a way no sadhu talks, and asked her who she was and why a woman like her was alone in a forest full of rakshasas.

She answered him honestly, as she had answered Shurpanakha. And then he told her who he was. He said he was the king of the rakshasas and that she should come and be his queen in Lanka, because Ram was a man who had thrown away a kingdom for a woman’s word and had nothing left. She refused him, and went on refusing him, and at last he struck one hand on the other and dropped the disguise, and there were ten heads and twenty arms and a robe the colour of blood.

He took her by the hair with one hand and by the legs with the other and lifted her into his chariot, and the chariot rose. She screamed for Ram, who was deep in the forest, and for Lakshman, who was on his way to him. She called on the trees to tell Ram what had happened. She called on the Godavari, with its cranes and its swans, to tell him. She called on every animal in the forest.

And then she saw Jatayu, asleep on a tree.

The old bird woke to her voice. He was very old — sixty thousand years, he said — and Ravan was young and armed and in a chariot, and Jatayu knew it. He spoke to Ravan first, quietly, the way an old man talks to a young one who is about to do something stupid. This is Ram’s wife. You are a king. A king does not take another man’s wife. Put her down. Then he said: I am old, and I will not win, but while I am alive you will not carry her past me. Stop and fight.

They fought in the air. Jatayu broke Ravan’s bow and killed his mules and brought his chariot down. Then Ravan drew his sword and cut off both his wings, and Jatayu fell, and Ravan picked Sita up again and flew south.

Ram met Lakshman on the path back and knew before a word was said. Why did you leave her, he said. Did the voice frighten you? Did she make you come? He was already saying that if Sita was dead he would die too. They walked faster. His left eye began to twitch. He stumbled.

The hut was empty. The mats and deerskins were lying about, the grass seats were trampled, and the trees, the deer, the birds, everything looked as if it was grieving. He ran round the clearing. He ran to the places she used to go. He asked the trees, one by one, by name — the bilva, the ashoka, the jambu, the tala — if they had seen her. He asked the deer and the elephants and the tiger. He thought he saw her yellow sari in the trees and ran to it and it was nothing. He searched the river and the hills and the streams until he could not stand.

Later, going through the forest, they found Jatayu, on the ground with his wings gone, still alive. He told Ram it was Ravan, and that he had gone south, and died. Ram said he grieved for the bird more than for Sita, because the bird had given up his life for him. He gathered wood and burned him the way you burn your own father, and then the two brothers went down to the Godavari and gave water for him, the way a son does. Then they went south.

This is what Nashik tells.

The forest Ram lived in was here. Janasthan, the name the story gives the rakshasas’ country, is one of the old names of the city, alongside Trikantak and the name it has now. Panchavati is the old part of Nashik, on the left bank of the Godavari, named for five banyan trees, and the hut is placed there. Close to it is the cave, Sita Gufa, where Ram used to hide Sita when he had to go out, and from where Ravan took her.

A little downstream is Tapovan, where Ram also stayed, living on the fruit Lakshman gathered from that forest, and where Shurpanakha met Lakshman’s sword. The city’s name comes from that morning, people say. नासिका nasika is the nose.

Ramkund is the pool on the left bank where Ram bathed. Along the same stretch of river is the Ramgaya tirtha, where Ram did the rites for his father, and the Dashashvamedh tirtha, where Sita’s father Janak made his sacrifices. Both are on the tirthas on the Godavari. North of the town is the hill called Ramshej, and the name says what Nashik tells of it — Ram’s bed, the place he slept.

The Kalaram temple has its own story of the ground it is built on, and its page tells it.

Nearly all of it is in Panchavati, and you can see it in the order the story happens. Start at the Kalaram temple, which is where people go first, and the five banyans near it. Sita Gufa is close by — a small cave you go down into, with Ram, Sita and Lakshman inside and a Shivling in a second, smaller cave, put there, Nashik says, because Sita would not eat until she had worshipped Shiva. Ramkund is down at the river. Then go downstream to Tapovan, quieter than the town, where the marked spot is and where the sadhus camp when the Kumbh comes.

Ramshej is outside the city to the north, a hill with a fort on it, and most pilgrims do not go.