The exile is the great pivot of the Ramayana, the moment when private virtue collides with private grief and neither yields. Dasharatha, feeling the weight of age, resolved to consecrate Rama as yuvaraja, heir-apparent. The city of Ayodhya gave itself over to joy.

Into that joy crept a single voice. Manthara, the hunchbacked servant of Queen Kaikeyi, poured suspicion into her mistress's ear: Rama's elevation would mean the eclipse of Kaikeyi's own son, Bharata, and her own descent into a rival's shadow. Kaikeyi, who until that hour had loved Rama as dearly as Kausalya did, was poisoned by the thought.

She remembered then a debt the king had long owed her. In an old war Kaikeyi had saved Dasharatha's life upon the battlefield, and he had granted her two boons, as yet unclaimed. Now she claimed them: that Bharata be crowned in Rama's place, and that Rama be banished to the Dandaka forest for fourteen years.

Here the epic stages one of its deepest meditations on dharma. Dasharatha is destroyed. He pleads, he faints, he begs Kaikeyi to relent; but a king who breaks his given word unmakes the very order he exists to uphold. Satya — truth, the keeping of one's word — is the axle on which his world turns, and to save his son he would have to shatter it. He cannot. He can only collapse in grief, and not long after, with Rama gone, his broken heart will give out entirely, lamenting a curse he had earned in his youth.

Rama's response is the moral centre of the tale. He receives the sentence without a flicker of resentment, neither toward his father nor toward Kaikeyi. To honour his father's word is his honour. He puts off his princely robes and dons the bark garments of an ascetic.

What he could not foresee was that he would not go alone. Sita refused to be left behind, declaring in some of the epic's most quoted lines that a wife's place is at her husband's side, in palace or in wilderness alike. Lakshmana, unable to bear separation from his brother, took up his bow to follow. The three walked out of the unconquerable city into the trackless forest — and behind them Ayodhya wept as though for a death.