Shravan Kumar and the Curse on Dasharatha

The death of King Dasharatha, broken-hearted at the exile of Rama, did not come by chance. It was the ripening of a curse he had earned long before, in his youth, through a single arrow loosed in the dark. The story of Shravan Kumar is at once the most famous tale of a devoted son and the hidden cause of the Ramayana’s first great sorrow.

The most devoted of sons

Shravan Kumar was the only child of an aged, blind couple who lived as forest ascetics. His love for his parents was complete. When they longed in their old age to visit the holy places they could no longer walk to, Shravan seated them in two baskets slung from a pole across his shoulders, a kanwar, and carried them on his back on a long pilgrimage across the land, serving their every need along the way.

The fatal arrow

One night the travellers halted near a forest, and Shravan went down to a river to fetch water for his thirsty parents. In that same forest the young prince Dasharatha was hunting. He had mastered shabdabhedi, the rare art of shooting by sound alone at a target he could not see. Hearing the gurgle of the pitcher filling in the dark, he took it for an elephant drinking at the water and let fly an arrow. The shaft struck not an animal but Shravan Kumar.

A dying wish

Dasharatha ran toward the cry and found, to his horror, a dying youth. With his last breath Shravan did not curse the prince; he thought only of his parents, waiting thirsty and blind, and begged Dasharatha to carry the water to them and to tell them what had happened. Then he died.

The curse of a grieving father

Dasharatha took the water to the old couple. When they understood that the one who approached was not their son, and heard how he had died, their grief was beyond bearing. The blind father pronounced a curse upon Dasharatha: that he too would one day die in the agony of separation from his own son, just as they were now dying for theirs. Then the two of them gave up their lives in sorrow, and Dasharatha carried the weight of those words in silence for the rest of his life.

The curse fulfilled

Years later, when Queen Kaikeyi’s demand sent Rama into the forest for fourteen years, Dasharatha could not endure the parting. He wasted away in grief, calling his son’s name, and died with Rama far from Ayodhya. Only then was the old sage’s curse fulfilled, and Dasharatha himself, on his deathbed, remembered the arrow he had loosed in the dark so many years before.

The meaning of the story

The tale carries two lessons the Ramayana never lets go. The first is the ideal of matru-pitru bhakti, devotion to one’s parents, of which Shravan Kumar remains the eternal model in Indian culture. The second is the unbreakable law of karma: that no deed, however long past or however unintended, is ever truly forgotten, and that even a righteous king must one day meet the fruit of his own actions.