What is Tapovan?

It was the rishi Agastya who sent them here. Ram had asked him for a place with trees and plenty of water where the three of them could live in peace, and Agastya thought for a moment and said: go to Panchavati. There is fruit there, and roots, and deer, and it is close to the Godavari. Sita will be happy there. He told them the way — past a wood of madhuka trees, then a grove of figs, then over a ridge of hills — and Ram walked round him, touched his feet, and the two brothers picked up their bows and set off with Sita between them.

When they got there Ram looked about and chose the place himself. A flat piece of ground with trees all round it, and the river close by, wide and slow, with lotuses on the water and deer coming down to drink. He took Lakshman’s hand and said, build it here. And Lakshman, who had just told him that if Ram lived a hundred years he would still be his servant, built the hut with his own hands. Walls of mud on a frame of long bamboos, a roof of shami branches and reeds and leaves, the floor beaten level. When it was done he went down to the Godavari, bathed, came back with lotuses and fruit, did the small rites you do for a new house, and only then brought Ram to see it.

Ram looked at it and held his brother to his chest. I am pleased with you, he said. As long as you are alive, with all this care in you, our father is not dead.

And then, for a long time, nothing much happened. The rains came and went, the river rose and fell, and the three of them lived by it. Rishis from the forest came to the hut, sat, ate, talked, and went back. Jatayu lived nearby. Ram read the old texts in the mornings. Sita sat at the door.

One of those mornings went like this. It was winter. The three of them walked down to the river before sunrise, Ram in front, Lakshman behind him carrying the water pot, Sita with them. There was frost on the ground and mist lying over the fields, so thick you could hear the cranes but not see them, and the river was so cold that the elephants pulled their trunks back out of it. Lakshman talked as they walked, the way you do when you are cold. He talked about the season, and then about Bharat — their brother, back in Ayodhya, who had refused the throne and was living like an exile inside the city for Ram’s sake, and who at this very hour was probably walking down to the Sarayu to bathe in water as cold as this. How does he stand it, Lakshman said, brought up soft the way he was. And then he said something hard about Kaikeyi, Bharat’s mother, and Ram stopped him. Do not speak against her, he said. Talk about Bharat. And he said that thinking about Bharat was the one thing that made him want to give up the forest and go home. Then they bathed in the Godavari, offered water to the gods and to their ancestors, prayed to the rising sun, and walked back up to the hut.

It was one of those mornings. They had bathed, come back, said the morning prayers, and Ram had sat down inside the hut to recite. And a woman came walking out of the trees.

She was Shurpanakha, Ravan’s sister, and she roamed this forest the way she roamed everywhere. She saw Ram before he saw her. She looked at him — the long arms, the big eyes, the matted hair piled on his head, and the way he carried himself, even in bark cloth, like the king’s son he was — and she wanted him, then and there.

She came up and asked him what he was doing here. Dressed like a sadhu, with his hair matted, but carrying a bow and arrows, and with a wife beside him, in a forest that belonged to rakshasas. What had brought him?

Ram told her the truth, all of it. My father was King Dasharath. I am his eldest son, Ram. This is my younger brother Lakshman, and this is my wife Sita, the daughter of the king of Videha. I am living in the forest because my father wished it. Now tell me who you are — by the look of you, you are a rakshasi.

I am Shurpanakha, she said. I can take any shape I like. I wander this forest and everything in it is afraid of me. My brothers are Ravan, whom you must have heard of, and Kumbhakarna who is always asleep, and Vibhishan who is not like the rest of us, and Khara and Dushan who are great fighters. And I am stronger than all of them. I saw you and I want you for my husband. What is this Sita to you? Look at her, thin and plain. I will eat her right here in front of you, and your brother with her, and then you and I will go wherever we please, over the hills and through the whole Dandaka forest.

Ram smiled.

He answered her the way you answer someone you are not taking seriously. I already have a wife, he said, and a woman like you deserves a husband all to herself. But look at my brother here. He is young, he is handsome, and he has no wife with him in this forest. Go to him.

Everyone who knows this story knows Lakshman had a wife — Urmila, who was back in Ayodhya. Ram knew it too. He was teasing.

So she went to Lakshman, and Lakshman played along. What would a woman like you do with a servant like me, he said. I do whatever my brother tells me. Go back to him. He will happily leave that ugly, bad-tempered wife of his for you.

She did not hear the joke in it. What she heard was that the wife was the problem. She turned, and she went for Sita, who was sitting at the door of the hut, the way a falling star goes for the ground.

Ram caught hold of her. And the smile was gone. This is what comes of joking with cruel creatures, he said to Lakshman. Never play with them. Look, Sita is in danger. Cut her.

Lakshman drew his sword and cut off her nose and her ears.

She screamed and ran. She went howling through the forest with her arms up and the blood pouring down her, and she did not stop until she reached her brother Khara at Janasthan, the part of the Dandaka forest that the rakshasas ruled, and fell on the ground in front of him and showed him her face.

Khara looked at his sister on the ground and asked who had dared to do it. Who puts his foot on a sleeping snake, he said. Whoever it was has put the noose round his own neck today. Tell me. She told him about two young men in bark cloth, princes by the look of them, and a beautiful woman between them, and said it was because of the woman that she had been treated like this. I want to drink their blood, she said.

Khara called fourteen of his rakshasas and sent them. She went with them to show the way, and stood there pointing out the hut, and Ram and Sita and Lakshman inside it. Ram told Lakshman to stay with Sita and went out alone, and she watched all fourteen die. She ran back to Khara a second time and fell down a second time, and this time he lost his patience — did I not give you my best fighters, why are you rolling on the ground crying — and she wiped her eyes and turned on him. She said his fourteen were lying dead. She said if he was any kind of hero he would go himself. She said he was a hero only in his own head, and that if he did not kill Ram today she would kill herself in front of him.

So Khara went himself, with Dushan and Trishiras and fourteen thousand behind them. Ram saw the signs of it before he heard the drums — the wrong colour in the sky, the birds gone quiet, his own bow moving in his hand — and he sent Lakshman off with Sita to a cave in the hills, somewhere hidden by trees and hard to get at, and told him not to argue. Then he put on his armour and stood alone in front of the hut, and the gods came out to watch. When it was over there was no one left of the fourteen thousand. Khara went down last, with an arrow that Agastya had once been given by Indra, and the rishis of the forest came out and thanked Ram, and Lakshman brought Sita out of the cave and she held him.

Then Shurpanakha went to Lanka. She walked into Ravan’s court and stood in front of her brother with her face the way it was, and told him he was a fool, sitting there enjoying himself while all this had happened to his people. He asked her who Ram was, and what he was like, and who had done this to her. And she did tell him about Ram, and about Lakshman who had cut her. But mostly she told him about the woman. A woman with skin like gold, she said, with a face like the full moon, so beautiful that there was no one like her among the gods or anywhere on earth. A woman like that was wasted on a man in bark cloth. It was for you I went there, she told him. It was trying to bring her to you that I lost my nose.

Ravan listened. Then he sent his ministers out of the room and sat by himself, thinking about what to do.

What he did is told on Sita Gufa. The golden deer, the empty hut, Jatayu — all of it comes after this.

The Ramayana puts the hut at Panchavati. Nashik puts it there too, and then carries the story a little way down the river. This is what Nashik tells.

Ram did not stay in one spot through those years. He stayed here at Tapovan as well, in the forest where the rishis did their penance, and Lakshman went out into these trees for the fruit they lived on. And it was here, not up at the hut, that Shurpanakha met Lakshman’s sword. The spot where she stood is marked, down at the river, and pilgrims are taken to it. That is where the city got its name, people say. नासिका nasika is the nose.

Tapovan is a little downstream of Panchavati, at the place where the Kapila comes in and joins the Godavari. A सङ्गम sangam is the meeting of two rivers, and this one is counted among the bathing places along the river. The tirthas on the Godavari has all of them.

Compared with the bathing steps in the town it is quiet. The river is wide here and the trees come down close to it. Pilgrims are shown the marked spot by the river where Shurpanakha’s nose was cut. Next to it is the temple everyone calls the all-religion temple, built to honour every faith at once — its message is that people are human beings before they are Hindus or Muslims or Sikhs or Christians or Parsis — and in its Ram Darbar the scenes of the exile are shown, the years by this river and what came at the end of them. Close by are two small temples, one to Ram’s parnakuti and one to Lakshman. A पर्णकुटी parnakuti is a hut of leaves, the kind Lakshman built.

The other thing to know about Tapovan is what happens to it at the Kumbh. When the Simhastha comes, most of the sadhus who arrive at Nashik make their camp here, in the forest — the Vaishnav akhadas, who bathe at Ramkund. The Shaiva and Udasin akhadas, and the naga sadhus among them, camp at Trimbakeshwar instead, and Sadhugram has both camps in full.

Upstream, in the town, Panchavati has the hut and Sita Gufa has the cave. The Ramayana connection walks the whole story from Agastya’s advice to the morning the hut was found empty.