The Ramayana opens not with a battle but with a longing. In the kingdom of Kosala stood Ayodhya, a city whose very name — a-yodhya, "not to be warred against" — promised order, prosperity, and peace. Its ruler, Dasharatha of the solar dynasty, the Ikshvaku line that traced its descent from the sun itself, was loved by his people and faithful in his duties. Yet for all his glory he remained childless, and a kingdom without an heir is a kingdom living on borrowed time.

On the counsel of his sages, Dasharatha undertook the great Ashvamedha horse sacrifice and, more particularly, the Putrakameshti, a rite performed expressly to obtain sons. As the offerings were made, a radiant being is said to have emerged from the sacrificial fire bearing a vessel of divine payasam, sweet milk-rice, to be shared among the king's three chief queens — Kausalya, Kaikeyi, and Sumitra.

In time four sons were born. Kausalya bore Rama; Kaikeyi bore Bharata; Sumitra bore the twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna. From the first, the brothers were bound in pairs of devotion — Lakshmana drawn to Rama, Shatrughna to Bharata — a friendship that would later be tested to its limit.

The tradition does not present Rama as merely a gifted prince. He is understood as an avatara, a descent of Vishnu into the world, taken on to relieve the earth of the burden of the demon-king Ravana, whose tyranny even the gods could not curb. Yet — and this is the genius of the epic — the divinity is largely hidden. Rama grows up living a fully human life: dutiful, modest, devoted to truth, the embodiment of dharma in a single graceful form. He is called maryada purushottama, the perfect man who never oversteps the bounds of right conduct.

Regional retellings shade this beginning differently. Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana keeps Rama's divinity restrained and human; Tulsidas, writing in Awadhi some two and a half millennia later, fills the same scenes with overflowing devotion, so that the infant Rama is openly adored as God made tender and small. Both, in their way, are telling us the same thing: that here, in a quiet palace beside the river Sarayu, the story of a perfect life has begun.