Shravan Kumar
Reading time aloud: about four minutes.
Most people know Rama was exiled for fourteen years. Far fewer know why it had to happen — and the answer is this story, from a generation earlier.
Shravan Kumar's parents were old and blind, and they wanted, before they died, to visit the holy places. They had no money and no way to travel.
So he made a pole with a basket at each end, put one parent in each basket, lifted it onto his shoulders and walked. Across the country, from shrine to shrine, for months. People came out of villages to watch him pass.
One evening, near the end of the journey, they camped by a river. His parents were thirsty. Shravan took a pot down to the water in the dark to fill it.
Upstream, King Dasharatha of Ayodhya was hunting. He was famous for a particular skill — he could shoot at a sound alone, without seeing his target.
He heard the gurgle of a pot filling at the water's edge, took it for an elephant drinking, and shot.
He heard a human cry, and ran, and found a boy in the shallows with an arrow in him.
Shravan, dying, was not angry. He asked one thing: take the water to my parents. They're waiting. They're blind. They don't know.
Dasharatha carried the pot to the camp. The old people heard footsteps and said, "Why so long, son?" — and then heard a stranger's breathing, and understood before he said a word.
They asked to be taken to the body. They held him. And the father — an old, blind, ruined man, sitting by a river — said to the king:
"You have taken my son from me, and I did not know it was coming. So you will die too, as I am dying, of grief for a son. You will not see it coming either."
Both parents died there that night.
And years later, when Dasharatha was old and had four sons and had at last been happy for a long time, he was made to send Rama away for fourteen years — and he died within days, of grief, calling his son's name.
The curse had waited its whole life.
Two things sit inside it. The obvious one is Shravan himself — he's held up across South Asia as the definition of a son's duty, and "be like Shravan Kumar" is still said in Desi houses. The harder one is Dasharatha: he did a terrible thing by accident, was forgiven by his victim, and was not forgiven by the world. The consequence came anyway, decades later, at the moment he had most to lose.
It's told as a self-contained folk tale far more often than as part of the Ramayana, and in many tellings the parents' curse is gentler — sorrow rather than sentence. Jain and Buddhist versions keep the pole and the baskets and drop the king entirely.
Last updated: 2026-08-11
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