The council hall of Lanka, and Akampana is standing in it, one of the few who got out of Janasthana alive. Sarga 31 of the Aranya Kanda gives Ravana his own first words in the poem, and they are a question. Akampana has just said that a young son of Dasharatha killed Khara, and Dushana with him. “Ravana listened, and the sound that came out of him was the hiss of a king cobra.” “Tell me, Akampana. Did this Rama come to Janasthana with Indra behind him, and all the other gods?” The answer is that no god came, that one man did it on foot, and that there is only one means of bringing about his death: “Bereft of Sita, Rama will not go on living, whatever else happens.” Ravana sits and ponders it for a while. “Tomorrow morning I will go, alone but for my charioteer, and I will bring Sita, the princess of Videha, joyfully to this great city.” He flies as far as the hermitage of Maricha, who tells him to leave the sleeping lion alone, and he turns the chariot around and goes home. That is Ravana’s first scene: a question, a decision, and one retreat.
The poem tells his birth much later, in sarga 9 of the Uttara Kanda, in the mouth of the sage Agastya. Sumali’s daughter Kaikasi goes at her father’s bidding to the sage Vishrava, at the inauspicious hour when he is pouring the daily offering into his three fires, and the sage tells her what she will bear: “Lady of shapely limbs, you will bring forth rakshasas given to cruel deeds.” The child comes “with ten heads and huge teeth, dark as a heap of antimony, with coppery lips, twenty arms, vast mouths, and hair like fire.” “The rain-god poured down blood.” His father names him for his ten necks, Dashagriva. One day Kubera flies past in the Pushpaka to visit their father, and the mother takes her son aside: “Son, look at your brother Vaishravana, how full of splendor he is. And look at yourself, so poor a thing, though you are his equal in brotherhood.” Out of that envy comes the austerity at Gokarna: ten thousand years without food, and at the end of each thousand one of his heads into the fire. He has his hand on the tenth when Brahma appears. “I choose immortality.” “There can be no absolute immortality for you.” So he asks for the second thing, “immunity from death at the hands of suparnas, the great eagles, and of nagas, yakshas, daityas, danavas, rakshasas, and gods,” and adds the sentence that drives the whole poem: “Human beings and the rest of them I count as so much straw.” Kubera gives up Lanka at their father’s word, Dashagriva is crowned, and in a forest the danava Maya puts his daughter’s hand in his: her name is Mandodari.
The One Who Set the World Crying
In sarga 16, with Kubera beaten and the Pushpaka taken, the chariot stops dead over a mountain and will not move. Nandi, Shiva‘s attendant, tells him to turn back, because Shankara is at play on that hill. “Who is this Shankara?” He looks at Nandi’s monkey face and “laughed out loud, a laugh that boomed like a cloud heavy with water,” and the curse comes: because he mocked that face, “monkeys will be born for the destruction of your race.” “I could kill you even now; but you will not be killed by me, because you are already killed by what you have done.” He thrusts his arms under the mountain to tear it up; Mahadeva presses it down with his great toe, the arms are crushed beneath it, and for a thousand years he sings Shiva’s praises in the hymns of the Sama Veda. Shiva frees him and names him: “you will go by the name of Ravana,” he says, “because you set the world crying.” Ravana asks Shiva for what he asked Brahma, and leaves out what he left out: “I do not reckon human beings at all, lord; to me they are very insignificant.” In sarga 17 a girl in black antelope skin in a Himalayan forest, Vedavati, tells him that Narayana is her husband and no one else. “And who is this Vishnu you speak of?” He takes her by the hair. She walks into fire with a promise, “I will be born again for your destruction,” and Agastya tells Rama how she came up out of the earth under Janaka‘s plow, “and because she came out of a furrow, human beings call her Sita.” In sarga 19 Anaranya, king of Ayodhya, struck down from his chariot, tells him, “Fate has destroyed me, and you are only the instrument in Death’s hand,” and curses him: “In this same noble line of the Ikshvakus a son of Dasharatha will be born, and his name will be Rama. He will take your life.” In sarga 26, after a night on Kailasa when he forces Rambha with the argument that “Apsaras have no husband, and the gods are bound to no single wife,” Nalakubara lays the curse that if he ever forces an unwilling woman again, “in that very moment his head will split into seven pieces,” and “from that day he gave up every inclination to force himself on a woman who did not want him.”
One Man, and One Blade of Grass
In Aranya Kanda 32 Shurpanakha walks into the full court with her face cut, and Ravana’s first question is the same one again: “Who is this Rama?” The portrait she draws for him has Sita in it, and in sarga 35 he goes to Maricha a second time. “I am in distress, and for a man in distress you are the supreme refuge.” “Fourteen thousand rakshasas of terrific energy were cut down by one human being, on foot, alone, with arrows of fire.” The plan is a golden deer, the two brothers drawn off, and Sita carried away “the way Rahu takes away the splendor of the moon.” “It took only the sound of Rama’s name in Ravana’s mouth” for Maricha’s own mouth to go dry. In sargas 46 to 49 the mendicant at the hermitage door gives his name: “I am Ravana, the celebrated ruler of the hordes of rakshasas, Sita, and the whole world, gods and demons and human beings alike, has been struck with terror by me.” Sita calls him a jackal who covets a lioness, and he counts out his strength for her: “Indra and the other gods take one look at my face when I am angry and run.” “The mortal Rama is not equal to one of my fingers on a field of battle.” Then the disguise goes, and he stands there “in a colossal form with ten heads and twenty arms.” “With his left hand he seized the lotus-eyed Sita by the hair. With his right hand he seized her by the thighs.” In the chariot over the forest she tells him that “time plays its part in the ripening of an act, as it does in the ripening of grain.”
In Sundara Kanda 10 Hanuman sees him for the first time, asleep after the night’s drinking, and reads his history off his two outflung arms, “marked with the scars of Airavata’s tusks, of Indra’s thunderbolt, and of Vishnu’s discus.” In sargas 20 to 22 he comes into the ashoka grove with a hundred thousand rakshasas at his call and chooses to beg. “To approach another man’s wife, or to take her by force, is the very way of ogres,” he tells her. “And yet, Maithili, until you desire me, I will not touch you.” Sita lays a single blade of grass on the ground between them and answers that. “It is the love that has risen in me for you that holds back my anger,” he says, and then names the term: two months, and after that “my cooks will hack you into pieces for my morning meal.” In sargas 48 to 53 a bound monkey is brought before him, and an old debt surfaces in his mind: “Could this be Nandi himself, who cursed me on Kailasa when I mocked him?” The envoy tells him that “Rama is no god, no yaksha, no demon; he is a man,” and that he should “throw off this noose of death that you have hung about your own neck in Sita’s form.” Ravana orders him killed, “There is no sin in killing the wicked,” and Vibhishana saves the envoy’s life.
The Ledger in His Own Hand
In Yuddha Kanda 6 to 16, in a city with scorch marks on it, he calls his council and tells it, “I am no longer my own master; I have become the slave of desire.” “We have no fear of men, yet let us consider.” Mahaparshva advises him to take Sita by force, and Ravana answers with the thing he has told no one: “Mahaparshva, hear a secret of mine.” After the nymph Punjikasthala, Brahma told him that if he ever forced a woman again, “your head will split into a hundred pieces,” and “for fear of that curse I do not force the princess of Videha onto my fair bed.” Every soft word under the ashoka trees had a curse behind it. Vibhishana asks “who has tied to your neck this great serpent that is Sita” and tells him to give her back, and the answer is a speech on kinsmen that ends, “a curse on you, stain of our line!” The brother rises into the air with his mace and leaves him with a sentence: “At the end of their time, men whose life has run its course do not take the good counsel of their friends.” His grandfather Malyavan counsels peace, and Ravana tells him the truest thing he says all day: “I would sooner break in two than bend before anyone. That is the flaw I was born with, and nature is hard to overcome.” In sarga 59 he rides out himself for the first time and comes back beaten, and in sarga 60 the poem has him open “the ledger of his own choices” and read it aloud. He had never asked for safety from mortals; “Mortals had seemed beneath the asking.” “I conclude that this Rama, the son of Dasharatha, is the very mortal Anaranya spoke of.” Vedavati, Nandi, Rambha, Uma: he names them one by one. “Everything they foretold has come to me. What those with prophetic sight say is never untrue.” And then: “Knowing this, you must strive to conquer the enemy.” Kumbhakarna, woken from Brahma’s sleep, tells him to his face that “the fruit of a sinful deed has come to you quickly, the deed being the theft of Sita,” and his brother answers, “The wise do not grieve over what is gone. What is gone is gone.”
In sarga 92 the news of Indrajit’s death comes in. “Alas, my child, leader of the rakshasa army.” “Without Indrajit, and only Indrajit, the whole earth with its forests looks desolate to me.” The grief turns to rage and the rage to a decision: “I am going to finish Sita, the princess of Videha, who is so devoted to Rama, that vile kshatriya.” He runs toward the grove with a drawn sword, and one minister, Suparshva, stops him with a question, “How can you think the killing of a woman fit for you,” and he turns back. In the chariot duel of sargas 102 to 108, “Rama fought certain he would win, and Ravana fought certain he would die.” Rama cuts off a head and another springs up in its place, a hundred times, through days and nights, until Matali reminds him: “The hour of his doom that the gods foretold has come today.” Agastya’s arrow drives through Ravana’s heart and into the earth, and he falls from the chariot “the way Vritra fell when the thunderbolt struck him.” Vibhishana weeps over him, “The very fate I foretold has fallen on you,” and Rama tells him, “Ravana did not die for any want of fire. He fell in battle for the good of the world.” Mandodari falls across the body and says that no man did this: “Surely this was Lord Vishnu, who took a human form for the good of the worlds,” and also, “Again and again I told you not to make war on Rama.” Vibhishana refuses the rites to “an enemy wearing a brother’s face,” and then comes Rama’s sentence: “Though he made men weep, he possessed great strength and stature.” “Enmity ends with death. Our purpose is achieved. Let his obsequies be performed now. He is as much mine as he is yours.” His three sacred fires are carried out of Lanka in copper vessels, and the rakshasas lift the bier and walk south.
His Path
Three Stops, Three Questions
Three places where Ravana asks for something, hides something, or reads his own ledger. Pause at each one.
- What the boon left out. In the ancient history of Ravana’s line, read Uttara Kanda 10, where he asks for safety from every order of being from the gods down to the serpents and sets human beings aside as straw. Ask: what was he afraid of that day, and what was he not?
- A curse that looked like courtship. In the surrender of Vibhishana, stop at Yuddha Kanda 13, where he tells Mahaparshva the curse of Brahma, and then reread “until you desire me, I will not touch you” in the ashoka grove. Ask: how much of that sentence was restraint, and how much was fear?
- “He is as much mine as he is yours.” In the slaying of Ravana, read Yuddha Kanda 109 and 111, where Vibhishana refuses the rites and Rama calls the dead man a hero. Ask: under what name does the poem record his death, the fruit of a curse, a warrior’s end, or Vishnu’s hand?
At the end, return to the first scene, where a king is asking whether that man came with the gods behind him. Does the question look like arrogance now, or like a search for the one name he left off the list when he asked for his boon?
Entering Lanka, and the Sight of the City · A king asleep in the Lanka night, and on his arms the old scars of Airavata, the thunderbolt, and the discus.
Kumbhakarna · A brother woken to tell the truth first and fight second, and a king who says the wise do not grieve over what is gone.
The Death of Indrajit, and Ravana Takes the Field · Three worlds gone desolate at a son’s death, a drawn sword, and one minister who stops it.
The Man Who Read His Own Ledger
Read whole, Valmiki’s Ravana is a man bound by his own boon. Before Brahma he named every order of being he feared and set human beings aside as straw; before Shiva he repeated the list and left out the same name. Then the poem reads back to him, one voice at a time, the names he did not count: monkeys in Nandi’s mouth, a son of Dasharatha in Anaranya’s, and a woman who will come up out of a furrow in Vedavati’s. The hardest thing in his story is that in sarga 60 of the Yuddha Kanda he reads that list himself, curse by curse, and goes out to fight anyway, because bending is the flaw he was born with. His one restraint, the hand he never laid on Sita, comes out of his own mouth as the fear of a curse. And still the poem sets two voices over his body: Vibhishana’s, which calls him an enemy wearing a brother’s face, and Rama’s, which calls him a hero and claims his funeral as its own. Mandodari adds a third, that no man killed him and Vishnu did, and Rama burns him all the same as a kshatriya is burned. The one who would not count human beings is killed by one, and it is that man who calls him great.
Edition and source passage
Main edition: Gita Press Valmiki Ramayana, Sanskrit with Hindi translation, all seven kandas; quoted speech follows the English chapters of the Valmiki Ramayana in this library, which rest on the Gita Press English text.
Passage for this reading: Aranyakanda 31 to 49; Sundarakanda 10, 20 to 22, and 48 to 53; Yuddhakanda 6 to 16, 35 to 36, 59 to 63, 92, and 102 to 111; Uttarakanda 9 to 12, 16 to 19, and 26
What this edition covers: A character portrait drawn from the Valmiki Ramayana from the Aranya Kanda to the Uttara Kanda, with three marked reading questions.
Limits and differences: The curse that his head would split if he forced a woman is told twice in the poem and differently: in Uttara Kanda 26 it is Nalakubara’s, for Rambha, and the head splits in seven; in Yuddha Kanda 13 Ravana himself tells it as Brahma’s, for Punjikasthala, and the head splits in a hundred. Each is kept in its own scene. The Ravana of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas belongs to another telling and is named only; nothing from it is blended in.
Compare the sources: Gita Press edition (the kandas and sargas listed above); Sanskrit and independent English translation (Uttarakanda 10).