Lakshmana Ji

Lakshmana is Rama's younger half-brother and his most devoted companion, the model in the Ramayana of selfless service (seva) and loyalty. Tradition holds him to be an incarnation of Shesha, the cosmic serpent on whom Vishnu reclines, so that where Rama is Vishnu, Lakshmana is the one who serves and shelters him.

Saumitra, "son of Sumitra," names him by his mother. Lakshman is the common vernacular form. Grouped with his brothers he is one of the four sons of Dasharatha, but he is remembered above all by the single quality the tradition attaches to him: unwavering devotion to Rama.

He is almost never shown alone. In the standard "Rama Darbar" grouping he stands at Rama's left with his bow, a younger, fairer figure mirroring his elder brother, Sita to Rama's right and Hanuman at their feet. The bow marks him as a warrior; his placement, always beside and a step behind Rama, marks him as the servant-brother rather than a deity worshipped in his own right.

When Rama is exiled for fourteen years, Lakshmana leaves his own home and comfort to follow him into the forest, choosing service over ease. A much-loved tradition holds that he stayed awake the entire fourteen years to guard Rama and Sita; the goddess of sleep, Nidra, granted this only because his wife Urmila agreed to sleep in his place for all fourteen years (the "Urmila Nidra"). The "Lakshman Rekha," the protective line he is said to have drawn around Sita before leaving to search for Rama, has entered everyday Indian speech as a metaphor for a boundary one must not cross, though this episode is more prominent in later and regional retellings than in the earliest Valmiki text. In the war at Lanka he is gravely wounded and saved only by the Sanjeevani herb Hanuman carries from the mountains.

Son of King Dasharatha of Ayodhya and Queen Sumitra, and twin of Shatrughna; half-brother to Rama and Bharata. His wife is Urmila, Sita's younger sister and a daughter of King Janaka of Mithila. His life is defined less by his own household than by his lifelong service to Rama and Sita.

He is venerated as the ideal of devotion and service, the younger one who subordinates his whole life to a higher love and duty. He is rarely the sole focus of a temple; his worship is almost always alongside Rama and Sita. A well-known temple associated with him stands at Lakshman Jhula in Rishikesh, where tradition holds he meditated and crossed the Ganga.

Urmila's fourteen-year sacrifice, largely passed over in the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana, is developed and celebrated in later and regional retellings, and has become a subject in its own right in modern literature that asks why the epic's women's sacrifices go unsung. As with the wider Ramayana, the weight given to Lakshmana's episodes shifts between Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, the Tamil Kamba Ramayana, and other tellings.