Digital Object Identifier
The Kishkindha Kanda contains one of the Valmiki Ramayana’s most anxiously commented-upon scenes: Rama kills Vali from concealment, and Vali, mortally wounded, formally accuses him before dying. That question of justification has been argued for centuries. This paper asks a different one—how different traditions handle the accusation, how long they allow it to slow the narrative, and at what moral threshold each decides it can be set aside. Reading across seven retellings—Valmiki’s Kishkindha Kanda, the NCERT Bal Ramkatha, Raghaveshananda’s devotional text, Amar Chitra Katha, Pattanaik’s The Book of Ram, Sagar’s television Ramayan, and Neelakantan’s Vanara—as well as digital spaces where sympathy for Vali circulates without institutional mediation, the paper traces how each tradition develops its own formal method for setting the accusation aside. Drawing on Jameson’s concept of the political unconscious and Ramanujan’s comparative framework, the paper proposes that the length of time each text keeps the accusation active is not merely a formal variable: it is a measure of the institution’s capacity to absorb an ethically unresolved episode.
Ms Saishilpa Janamanchi, Prof. Y. L. Srinivas. “The Wounded King’s Accusation: Narrative Management of Ethical Instability in the Vali Episode across Ramayana Traditions.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 3, June 2026, pp. 528-547. DOI, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n3.32.
Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · Crossref DOI ·
the-criterion.com