Righteous Killing or Ethical
Dystopia? Re-examining Rama's Killing of Vali
D. Vaidehi¹*, Dr. Teena Tiwari² and
Dr. Shruti Agrawal³
ABSTRACT
is the murder of Vali in the Kishkindha Kanda of
the Ramayana. The act is traditionally justified as an act of
kshastradharma, the duty of the warrior-king to maintain cosmic and
social order, but it also poses the very uncomfortable questions of
procedural justice, moral transparency and the sovereign
prerogative. The episode is questioned in the paper based on an
interdisciplinary approach to it using dharma theory, political
theology, just war theory, and the idea of ethical dystopia as it is
developed in Western philosophical and literary literature. The
paper presents an argument based on close textual analysis of the
Kishkindha Kanda and interaction with peer-reviewed scholarship on
Valmiki Ramayana, kingship theory, and comparative ethics to argue
that the killing of Vali by Rama is paradoxical: both restorative
logic of dharmic kingship and disorienting moral disorder that is
the hallmark of ethical dystopia. The paper also argues that this
ambiguity cannot be deemed an accidental flaw of the moral vision of
the epic but rather an invitation to ethical considerations that the
author has placed within the structure of the narrative itself. The
comparative study of the episode with Aristotelian virtue ethics,
Kantian deontology, Manusmriti jurisprudence, and Mahabharata ethics
indicates that the episode is incompatible with any particular
ethical theory and requires a pluralistic and historically-specific
approach to moral decision-making in the classical literature of
Indic tradition.
Keywords: Valmiki Ramayana, dharma, kshatra dharma, kingship,
ethical dystopia, Kishkindha Kanda, just war theory, Vali, Sugrīva,
political theology.
