Krita Yuga

Krita Yuga is the first age in the four-part cycle of world history described in the book’s explanatory notes, and its defining character is perfection: it is the Golden Age, associated with truth and the divine. The age also gives the epic a deep mythic past. Events placed in it explain the origins of powers, conflicts, and identities that shape stories set in later times, especially the transition from Krita Yuga to Treta Yuga.

Place in the Four-Age Cycle

An explanatory note describes the four yugas as a cosmological rather than strictly chronological system. It calls Krita Yuga the age of truth and the perfect age, and also names it Deva-yuga, the age of the gods. Treta is characterized by the three sacred fires, both domestic and sacrificial; Dvapara is the age of doubt; and Kali is the age of evil. The sequence therefore marks not simply the passage of time but a decline from an ideal condition toward a morally troubled present.

Another note identifies Krita Yuga as the first of the four ages and gives Satya as an alternative name. The poem’s references to the age as golden reinforce the same conception. These descriptions belong to the book’s mythological and editorial framing; they establish the period’s traditional character without offering a calendar date or a measurable duration.

A Mythic Past Within the Epic

Krita Yuga appears as a setting for events that precede the principal action. In one account, the age is newly begun when little hills and mountains are described as flying wherever they pleased. The image places extraordinary natural powers within a remote, primordial world, before the more settled geography of the heroes’ travels. Its brief appearance makes the age a marker of origins: the present landscape has a history in which mountains themselves could move.

The account of the Rákṣasas’ ancestry likewise reaches into an ancient past. After Ráma has returned to Ayodhyā and taken the throne, the assembled sages greet him, and Agastya answers his questions by recounting the histories of former enemies. In the account summarized by the book’s note, Pulastya is an austere sage of Krita Yuga; his son Viśravas continues that ascetic lineage and becomes the father of Kubera. Kubera performs austerities for thousands of years, receives authority as a guardian of the world and god of riches, and takes possession of Lanka on his father’s advice. This succession of sages, austerities, divine favor, and kingdoms gives the epic’s conflicts a history older than Ráma’s own generation.

Agastya’s answer also complicates Ráma’s understanding of the Rákṣasas. Ráma had understood them as descendants of Pulastya, but learns that their origins include another line of ancestry. The explanation proceeds from the creation of beings to the early Rákṣasa kings and the later history of Lanka. The passage thus uses a question about an enemy people to open out into cosmogony and dynastic history, with the remote past supplying context for the political world of the main story.

From Vedavatí to Sítá

The most consequential link between Krita Yuga and the later epic is the story of Vedavatí. The account places her encounter with Rávaṇ in the age of Krita. She is described as the daughter of the sage Kuśadhwaja, raised in devotion to Vishṇu and undertaking austerities because her father wished Vishṇu to become her husband. Rávaṇ approaches her in the forest and urges her to become his bride, but she refuses him and maintains her devotion to Vishṇu.

After Rávaṇ insults her, Vedavatí declares that she will be reborn for his destruction and enters the fire. Agastya identifies her later birth as Sítá, daughter of Janaka and wife of Ráma, in Treta Yuga. The account therefore makes the passage between the two ages a hinge in a personal and cosmic history: the woman whose resolve begins in Krita Yuga returns in a later age, and her connection to Rávaṇ is presented as a cause of his eventual downfall. The note also reports the commentator’s interpretation that Sítá is Lakshmi and that she is the principal cause of Rávaṇ’s death, while Ráma carries out the act of destroying him.

Divine History and Later Ages

A separate explanatory account of Vishṇu’s forms places the first four listed incarnations in the first age, identified there as Satyayug, and places the Vamana incarnation in Treta Yuga. It describes the Matsya form as saving the pious king Satyavrata and the seven sages and their wives from a deluge; in the Kúrma form Vishṇu supports Mount Mandara while gods and demons churn the ocean for amrita and other sacred things. The Varáha and Narasinha forms, in turn, defeat demons who threaten the earth. These summaries extend the idea of Krita Yuga beyond a label for ancient events: it is a period in which the cosmic order is repeatedly preserved through divine intervention.

The account’s transition to Vamana in Treta Yuga offers a clear contrast between the first age and what follows. In that episode Vishṇu appears as a dwarf before Bali, asks for land measurable in three steps, and then expands to encompass the world; Bali retains Patala after losing heaven and earth. The age sequence organizes these narratives into a broad sacred history, while the Vedavatí-Sítá story connects that history directly to the epic’s central conflict. Krita Yuga is therefore both an ideal beginning and an active reservoir of causes: its old events continue to determine identities, inheritances, and consequences in later time.