ABSTRACT
Candravati, admittedly a brahmani, but similarly disqualified by her gender, challenged the same system by emphasising the role of Sita and the sufferings of women in general. In the main Valmiki narrative as reconstructed in the Critical Edition, the story of the unnamed ascetic boy carelessly shot by Dasaratha is sketchy and not integrated into the main narrative but appears as a memory unexpectedly recovered by Dasaratha as he lies dying. There are reasons to suppose that this episode did not figure in the earliest form of the Sanskrit Ramayana, but in Taylor's narrative, the relative prominence of the two parts completely inverted, the equality emphasised by the separate titles. The casual reader is likely to be quite some way into it before realising that 'Servan' is in fact part of the Rama tale at all.
