Ráma’s horse sacrifice and the recitation of the Ramayana joins a royal rite to an act of poetic transmission: while Ráma prepares to sacrifice the votive horse, he hears Kuśa and Lava sing the epic Válmíki has taught them. The scene moves the poem from the sage’s instruction to a king’s hall, where its young performers become the means by which the ruler encounters the story. The narrative places the sacrifice’s beginning in spring, but leaves the episode focused not on the rite’s completion, but on the song and the audience it gathers.

Preparation in the Hermitage

The performance begins with teaching. Kuśa and Lava, dressed in the garments of hermits, come to greet their master and embrace his feet. Válmíki regards the twins as especially well suited to the task: they are skilled in sacred learning, and he teaches them the Ramayana, described as a heroic song rich in divine lore. Their training makes the recitation more than a spontaneous display. The twins have received the poem from its author and are prepared to carry it beyond the hermitage.

Válmíki directs them to recite in the quiet places where sages gather and where good people resort. He kisses their heads as they bow before him. The gesture places affectionate recognition beside formal instruction: the poet entrusts his work to pupils who honor him as their master, while the song is meant for listeners beyond their immediate circle. Its circulation begins with disciplined learning, but is not confined to a private or scholarly audience.

The Song’s Form and Emotional Range

The poem’s performance is presented through sound as well as subject. Its seven musical notes and triple measure are carefully fashioned, with melody, tone, and time contributing to its effect. The twins are praised for the sweetness and strength of their voices, and for the skill with which they blend tone and accent. Recitation and song meet in the episode: the Ramayana is a composed verbal work, but it reaches its listeners through trained voices and musical arrangement.

Its emotional reach is similarly broad. The song moves through contrasting states, including rejection of what is false and base, anger, mirth, terror, tenderness, surprise, and contentment. That range helps explain why the listeners find it both joyful to hear and sweet to recite and sing. The recitation is not described as a bare report of deeds; its measured form and changing emotional colors shape how those deeds are received. Elsewhere, the work describes verse as measured language made with even lines and feet, rhythm, time, and tone, a formal emphasis that complements the twins’ musical performance.

The Royal Hearing

The twins’ song passes from the hermitage into the public world of kings. They sing in a royal hall, where their performance is praised. Ráma happens to hear the poem while the votive horse is to be sacrificed. He sends suitable messengers to bring the pair before him, turning an accidental hearing into a formal audience. The ritual setting supplies the occasion, but the action shifts toward listening: the king summons performers whose song has already attracted acclaim.

When the twins arrive, Ráma addresses his brother Lakshmaṇ and the others, inviting them to attend to the remarkable strain. His response makes the court a second audience within the scene. The brothers sing with sweet, strong voices, carrying the poem’s full tide through deftly blended tone and accent. The episode thus enlarges the song’s reach in stages: Válmíki teaches it, the twins perform it before listeners in a royal hall, and Ráma gathers his household to hear it. The account establishes the encounter and the attention it receives; it does not, in these passages, describe the sacrifice’s completion or what Ráma says after listening.

Recitation and Public Memory

The episode gives the Ramayana a place inside its own narrative as a work that can be learned, performed, and heard. Válmíki’s authority as teacher is carried forward by Kuśa and Lava, whose voices bring the poem to the ruler whose story it tells. The movement from the hermitage to the hall changes the scale of the audience without changing the song’s identity: trained recitation remains the link between composition and public hearing.

The accompanying account also describes a distinct public afterlife for the epic in the Bharat-Miláp, the annual dramatic meeting of Ráma and Bharata that closes a representation of Ráma’s victory and return. It reports that the open-air Rám-Lalá lasts fifteen successive days, with one day’s break, and that in Benares three performances take place at nearly the same time: one near the Maharajah of Benares’s palace at Ramnaggur, another near the Missionary settlement at Sigra and elsewhere in the city, and a third near the College at Chowká Ghát, organized by leading residents. The account describes the brothers’ meeting as a crowded civic spectacle, with processions of elephants, richly adorned riders, flowers falling on the advancing car, music, and spectators filling streets, squares, balconies, and rooftops. This later reenactment is not the horse-sacrifice scene itself; it shows how the epic’s recitation and performance could extend beyond the court into shared public memory.