Measuring An Ocean With A Fox’s Tail: How Vairamuthu Shrinks Kamban’s Ramayana

To stand before Srimad Ramayana is to stand before the Himalayan range that pierces the clouds of history. It is not a mere literary epic but a vast, sprawling meta-literature of meaning, a Dharmic and spiritual ecosystem that has shaped the consciousness of the larger Indian land mass for millennia.

Its peaks are moments of divine clarity and heroic sacrifice. Its valleys are shadowed with profound ethical dilemmas, the dharma-sankatas, that have challenged and nourished generations of scholars, saints, and common folk.

Within this majestic topography, the Vali Vadham is one of its most formidable, complex, and awe-inspiring peaks, a place where the very nature of righteousness is tested in the unfolding of divine action.

Into this landscape of epic grandeur steps the lyrics-seller Vairamuthu, not with the humility of a pilgrim or the meticulous tools of a scholar, but with a pocket-sized legal statute from a colonial-era penal code.

His assertion, that the poet Kamban "saved" Rama by portraying him as mentally unsound and thus providing an alibi under IPC Section 84, is not merely a flawed interpretation. It is an act of breathtaking intellectual miniaturisation.

It is an attempt to explain a supernova with a flickering candle which had extinguished itself long ago. To place Vairamuthu's paltry reading beside the splendour of the Ramayana tradition is to witness a comical, almost pathetic, spectacle.

Now let us get into the facts.

Did Kamban make Sri Rama's supposedly disturbed state of mind an excuse? Did Kamban ethically improvise upon Valmiki himself?

Valmiki, the adikavi, presents a raw, troubling, and deeply human dilemma. His Rama, a king bound by conflicting duties, offers a legalistic defence that is intellectually formidable yet morally paradoxical. He punishes Vali for the human sin of incest while simultaneously killing him like an animal, to whom human laws of combat do not apply.

Valmiki leaves this knot for the reader to untangle, forcing a confrontation with the messy, contradictory nature of dharma in a fallen world. This is not a flaw in the narrative. It is its very strength, a testament to its psychological realism and moral honesty.

Centuries later, the emperor of Tamil poets Kamban approaches this same ethical mountain not to level it, but to build a magnificent temple of Bhakti upon its summit. Living in an age saturated with the devotional fervour of the Bhakti movement, to Kamban his Rama was unequivocally God. A simple legal defence would no longer suffice.

And so, he performed an act of sublime transcreation. He did not offer a cheap psychological excuse for his hero. He provided a profound Dharmic and Darshanic revelation.

Kamban’s solution was not to diminish Rama but to elevate the entire context of his actions. The killing of Vali is reframed as the Lord’s sacred duty to a surrendered devotee (saranagathi). The method of the attack is not a cowardly hunt but a divine strategy to ensure justice is meted out before a self-serving, last-minute surrender could prevent it.

Most crucially, Vali’s death is not a tragic end but a glorious beginning, a moment of liberation (moksha) where the devotee, in his final moments, is granted a beatific vision of the Supreme Being.

Kamban takes the ethical problem and resolves it by transcending it, transforming a trial of human law into a drama of divine grace. This is the splendour of the tradition, its capacity to evolve, to deepen, and to find ever more profound layers of meaning within its foundational stories.

Against this colossal intellectual and spiritual edifice, Vairamuthu places his little legal brick. The only thing humanly impossible here is the way Vairamuthu takes a gloriously profound literary situation and makes it utterly ridiculous.

It takes the Avatar of Kamban, the divine incarnate grappling with the paradoxes of the human manifestation, and reduces him to a common defendant pleading temporary insanity. It strips the episode of all its Dharmic-Darshanic weight.

Gone is Valmiki’s complex debate on the duties of a king. Gone is Kamban’s sublime vision of grace and liberation. All that remains is a pathetic, pseudo-modern stupidity as if Kamban prefigured Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code to rescue Rama. Such was the greatness of Kamban and his Tamil.

The Anachronistic Absurdity of a Legal Defence

Section 84 of the Indian Penal Code, derived from the 19th-century M'Naghten Rule, provides a defence for a person who, at the time of committing an act, "by reason of unsoundness of mind, is incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to law".

To suggest that Kamban was pre-emptively employing this legal concept that would not exist for another 700 years is historically illiterate. But the error runs deeper than mere anachronism.

The insanity defence, as codified in IPC Section 84, is not a catch-all for emotional distress. It requires a specific and high threshold of cognitive impairment: the person, "by reason of unsoundness of mind," must be "incapable of knowing the nature of the act, or that he is doing what is either wrong or contrary to law".

Indian jurisprudence makes a sharp distinction between "medical insanity" (a diagnosis) and "legal insanity" (a cognitive failure so complete that it negates criminal intent).

Profound grief and anguish, emotions that Kamban’s Rama certainly feels when presented as a human manifestation, do not qualify. A person acting out of sorrow understands the nature of killing.

To apply this standard to Kamban's Rama is to enter the realm of the absurd. Far from being a man incapable of understanding his actions, Kamban's Rama is deliberate, strategic, and articulate. He forges an alliance, devises a plan to distinguish Sugriva from Vali in the second duel, and after the act, engages in a profound Dharmic dialogue with his victim.

He does not claim ignorance; he asserts a higher justification. But then Vairamuthu is not a domain expert with respect to criminal insanity, at least in the legal sense. So he can be excused for his ignorance.

Now let us look into the literary dimension, which Vairamuthu should have known better.

It is crucial to remember that the verse in question is not an excuse offered by the poet, but a taunt hurled by the arrow-struck Vali.

It is the opening salvo in a nineteen-verse indictment delivered by a dying king, steeped in the shock and fury of betrayal.

The spirit of the verse is pure accusation. This act is unworthy of Sri Rama.

Sri Rama’s response, delivered over ten verses, is not that of a man whose mind has faltered, but of a sovereign dispenser of justice.

He lays out his case with cold, legal precision. The primary charge is Vali's adharmic deed, his lustful appropriation of Sugriva's wife, a sin that demanded the ultimate penalty.

Rama then delivers his profound Avataric mission statement.

The argument is not over. Vali, his initial fury giving way to debate, counters in four verses that the moral codes of humans do not apply to him, a Vanara.

Rama refutes this immediately in a powerful eight-verse rebuttal. He establishes that Dharma is not a matter of species but of consciousness. He points out that Vali, as the son of a Deva and one who has performed penances to Siva, knows Dharma intimately. Lowliness, Rama argues, comes not from one's birth but from one's failure to adhere to Dharma.

He then elevates his argument with unimpeachable examples of non-human beings who attained the highest liberation, citing the salvation of the elephant Gajendra and the noble sacrifice of the eagle Jatayu, whom Rama poignantly refers to as his own "great-father".

At this point, the moral and legal case is closed. Vali is convinced of the reason for his death. Yet one final, burning question remains. Why from a hiding place, like a cruel hunter?

According to divine law, one who has surrendered cannot be punished for past crimes. The implication is that such a situation would have actually pushed Vali into Karmic chains again.

With this final piece of the divine puzzle in place, Vali is at peace. He understands and feels the Divine Love. His accusations cease, and in the following nine verses, he worships Rama as the God of Gods.

These verses are not the words of a defeated monarch, but a sublime hymn of Bhakti, one of the finest literary expressions of Bhakti, as an abiding guide in the evolution of the soul and its final liberation.

In this final, enlightened state, Vali recognises that his death is not a punishment delivered by a human king, but an act of supreme grace from God himself. It is a divine intervention designed to release him from the karmic consequences of his actions and grant him moksha, liberation from the painful cycle of birth and death.

His final words are not of accusation, but of adoration and ecstasy. He asks Rama for forgiveness, not for his earthly crimes, but for his initial ignorance and audacity in daring to question the ways of the Lord. His death becomes the ultimate boon from God, the greatest state Yogis strive for through ages and countless birth cycles to achieve. Kamban's Vali transforms into a Bhakta, and through the act of death with the name and form of Sri Rama on his lips and in his heart.

In Kamban's hands, the dialogue transcends mere moral reconciliation to become a profound cartography of the soul, charting its journey through its dark night of confusion into the dawn of glorious liberation. Vali’s initial, wounded fury first sharpens into logical argument, only to dissolve entirely as he is granted a beatific vision of Rama’s true, divine form. In that sublime moment, he understands that his death is not a punishment but an act of supreme grace, a divine intervention designed to sever the bonds of karma and grant him moksha, liberation from the cycle of rebirth.

Through this powerful sequence, Kamban masterfully condenses the entire spiritual sadhana of a devotee (Bhakta). He maps the path from initial naïve assumptions about the Divine in our own image, through the bitter anger that erupts when the actions of the Divine defy mortal expectations, to the final, humbling understanding of the limits of Jiva in the cosmic grandeur of the Divine and the ultimate liberation of the Atman.

But that profanity is the defining feature of Dravidianism.

Srimad Ramayana tradition has weathered countless interpretations over thousands of years. It is an ocean that has absorbed the streams of myriad cultures, philosophies, and critiques, its depths only growing richer. Vairamuthu’s comment is not a stream; it is an insignificant puddle of offensively smelling ugliness tossed into the surf. It makes a brief, shallow splash before sinking without a trace, while the great ocean of the epic rolls on, its grandeur and splendour utterly undisturbed and undiminished.

Himalayan peak Sagarmata, after all, takes no notice of the graffiti scrawled at its base.