Ramayana · Chapter 30 · Part 2 of 2 · Ravana’s conquests and the childhood of Hanuman

About 120 minutes · in 4 sittings

Anaranya’s Curse: The Ikshvaku Line Speaks Its Seed

Marutta’s sacrifice lay behind him, and the taste of that easy victory had only sharpened Ravana’s hunger. Ravana, Dashanana, the ten-faced king of the rakshasas, turned the Pushpaka toward the capitals of men. He went from throne to throne, and to kings whose power the world compared with Indra and Varuna he put the same demand each time, in the same flat words: “Give me battle, or declare that you are defeated. That is my ultimatum. No one who chooses a third course escapes.”

The kings took counsel among themselves. They were brave men, and clever, and strong, and their resolve in matters of dharma was firm; and precisely because they were clever they understood the nature of what stood at their gates. Ravana’s strength came from a boon, and they knew what a boon means in a fight. So Dushyanta bowed his head, and Suratha, and Gadhi, and Gaya, and King Pururava; every one of them, Agastya told Rama, spoke the words “We are defeated.” Then Ravana came in due course to Ayodhya, the city that Anaranya guarded as Indra guards Amaravati, and went up to its king, a tiger among men whose strength the world set beside Indra’s own, and said to him, “Give me battle, or say ‘I stand defeated.’ That is my command.”

Anaranya heard that command from the sinful-minded rakshasa, and rage took him. “King of the rakshasas,” he said, “I grant you a duel, two warriors face to face. Wait a little and make yourself ready, and be quick about it. I am making ready too.” He was already prepared. Word of the rakshasa’s coming had reached him before the rakshasa did, and he had gathered a great army against the day: ten thousand elephants, a hundred thousand horses, and chariots and foot soldiers beyond easy counting, who now poured out through the gates and covered the ground before Ayodhya. The battle that followed was savage. The army of Ayodhya struck against Ravana’s host, and it fought long, and it fought with the highest valor a king could ask of it, and it was consumed anyway, the way oblations are consumed when they are poured into the sacrificial fire. It came up against the blazing Ravana and it went the way of moths that fly into a flame.

Anaranya watched his huge army vanish as a hundred rivers in full flood vanish when they reach the sea. Rage nearly took his senses. He twanged his bow, which was like the bow of Indra, and drove straight at Ravana himself, and Ravana’s ministers, Maricha and Shuka and Sarana and Prahasta, felt the weight of that charge and fled from him like deer. Then Anaranya, the pride of the Ikshvaku line, put eight hundred arrows into the ten heads of the rakshasa king. They did no more harm than a cloudburst does to the top of a hill. Ravana, in his fury, struck the king on the head with the flat of his hand, and Anaranya fell from his chariot to the ground, dazed and shaking, like a sal tree that lightning has struck in the forest.

Ravana laughed down at the ruler of Ikshvaku’s house. “What have you gained by facing me today? There is no one in the three worlds who can give me battle. You were too deep in your pleasures, I suppose, to have heard of my strength.” The king’s life was already leaving him, and he answered from the ground. “What can I do now? Death cannot be turned aside. Understand me, rakshasa, you who are so fond of praising yourself: you have not defeated me. Fate has destroyed me, and you are only the instrument in Death’s hand. And what could I have done differently, at this hour when my life is running out? I did not shrink from the fight. Thank the gods for that: I am killed fighting.”

“You have insulted the house of Ikshvaku,” Anaranya said, “and so I will curse you. If I have ever given a gift, if I have ever poured an oblation into the sacred fire, if I have practiced austerity as it should be practiced and guarded my people as they should be guarded, then let these words of mine come true. In this same line of the high-souled Ikshvakus a son of Dasharatha will be born, and his name will be Rama. He will take your life.” As the curse left him the kettledrums of the gods rolled across the sky like thunder and flowers came down in heaps from heaven. King Anaranya rose to the world of the gods, and the rakshasa went on his way.

A key to reading this (name): Anaranya is a king of the Ikshvaku line and a direct ancestor of Rama, so the curse he speaks here is spoken from inside Rama’s own family, generations before Rama is born. It is the seed of the Uttarakanda: the first time, in this long account of Ravana’s rise, that his death is named, and named at the hands of a man. Valmiki returns to that point again and again, because the boon Ravana won from Brahma listed every kind of being he could not be killed by and left men off the list.

The gist: After Marutta, Ravana ranged the earth putting his ultimatum to its kings, and the wise ones yielded. Anaranya of Ayodhya fought, lost his whole army, and fell from his chariot under Ravana’s hand; dying, he denied that Ravana had beaten him, laid the blame on fate, and cursed him with the birth of Dasharatha’s son Rama, who would take his life.

Narada’s Warning and the March Toward Yama

Ravana had been making a misery of the world of mortals for some time when, one day, high among the clouds, his aerial chariot came upon Narada. The seer who wanders freely between the worlds of gods and men was riding a cloud, and his light was beyond any measuring. Ravana greeted him, asked after his welfare, and wanted to know what had brought him down toward the earth. Narada answered the rakshasa king where he sat in the Pushpaka. “Son of Vishrava, my friend, you come of a noble house. Wait a moment. I am pleased with your exploits. Vishnu satisfied me by cutting down the daityas in battle, and you have satisfied me in the same way by overthrowing the gandharvas and the nagas.”

“But there is something I would say to you, child, if you are willing to hear it, and it is worth hearing. Listen closely. Why are you destroying this world of mortals, you whom even the gods cannot kill? This world is destroyed already; it lies in the grip of death. Men cannot be killed by gods, or by danavas and daityas, and so they are beneath the notice of yakshas and gandharvas and rakshasas, and far beneath yours. Who would go to the trouble of killing people who do not know their own good, who are hemmed in on every side by calamity, who are subject to old age and a hundred diseases? What wise man would sow slaughter through a world that is already so full of grief? Look at it. Here men are dancing to music, drunk with delight; there men are weeping, the tears running down their faces. They are so tangled in their love for mother and father and son, so lost in their plans for wife and kin, so fallen from virtue, that they cannot see the suffering coming for them. They are preyed on by hunger and thirst and age. Fate has already doomed them. What will you gain by harassing a world that delusion has undone? You have conquered it already, friend. There is no doubt of that.”

“Every one of these beings must go in the end to the house of Yama. So, scion of Pulastya, conqueror of enemy cities, subdue Yama. Conquer him, and everything is conquered; there is no doubt of that either.” The lord of Lanka laughed out loud. He bowed to Narada, who blazed before him like a fire, and answered. “Great seer, you who love the company of the gods and the gandharvas and love to watch a fight, I am ready. I was on my way to Rasatala, the underworld, to conquer it. After that I mean to conquer the three worlds, bring the nagas and the gods under my yoke, and churn the ocean for its nectar.”

“Then why,” Narada asked, “are you traveling by this other road? This road is very hard going, tamer of enemies, and it leads to the city of Yama.” Ravana laughed again, a laugh like the rumbling of a cloud in autumn. “Consider it done,” he said, and went on. “I have resolved to make short work of the son of the sun, and so I go south, where Yama lives. I have sworn in my anger, thirsting for a fight, that I will conquer all four guardians of the world. I am on my way now to the city of the king of the dead, and I will put an end to the one who puts an end to every living thing.” He bowed to the sage, and he and his ministers turned the Pushpaka into the southern quarter.

Narada stayed where he was for a while, sunk in thought, shining like a fire that gives off no smoke. How, he wondered, will Ravana conquer Time? Time is the power before which the whole of the three worlds, everything that moves and everything that stands still, and Indra with them, must yield when their allotted life is spent; that is dharma, and Time carries it out. That exalted one is like a second fire. He knows the gifts and the deeds of every creature; it is through his energy that all beings have their consciousness and their motion; the three worlds shrink from him in fear. He sustains the universe and hands out the fruit of every good and evil act, and the three worlds already lie under his rule. How will Ravana walk up to such a being of his own accord and lay hands on him? And if he does subdue Yama, what order will he set up in place of the old one? Curiosity had him now. He decided to go himself to the house of Yama and watch the two of them, Yama and the rakshasa, meet.

A key to reading this (concept): Narada is far more than a carrier of news in this scene. He steers events: it is his goading that turns Ravana from Rasatala toward the south and the city of the dead, and the question he leaves hanging as he watches the Pushpaka go is the question the next two cantos answer. Can any creature conquer Time itself? Every canto that follows turns on it.

The gist: Meeting Ravana among the clouds, Narada told him that the world of mortals was already in Death’s grip and beneath his trouble, and that the only conquest left worth making was Yama himself. Ravana laughed, swore to subdue all four guardians of the world, and turned south toward the city of the dead; Narada, wondering how anyone could conquer Time, went ahead to watch.

The Vision of Hell in Yama’s Realm and the Destruction of Yama’s Host

Narada moved fast. He wanted to be there before it happened, so that he could tell the story as it unfolded. In Yama’s house he found the god at his work, with the fire that witnesses everything set before him, giving to each living being its due according to what it had done. Yama saw the great sage, offered him the water of welcome as the rules of hospitality require, saw him comfortably seated, and asked after him. “Divine seer, whom gods and gandharvas attend, I trust all is well with you. I trust dharma is not failing anywhere. What brings you here?” “Listen,” Narada said, “and I will tell you why I have come. Then take whatever measures you must. King of the fathers, a night-ranger named Dashagriva is on his way here at this moment, meaning to subdue you by force of arms, hard as you are to overcome. That is why I have come in such haste. I wonder what is going to happen now to you, whose weapon is the rod of punishment.”

Even as he spoke they saw it, far off: the rakshasa’s aerial chariot coming on, bright as the sun at its rising. The Pushpaka’s radiance drove the darkness out of that whole region as it approached, and the mighty Ravana arrived. He looked about him. On every side living beings were reaping what they had sown, good and bad. He saw Yama’s soldiers and Yama’s attendants, and he saw the embodied souls whom Yama’s violent, hideous servants were beating and tormenting, and heard them bellow and shriek.

Along the way Ravana saw them in their hundreds of thousands. Some were being eaten alive by worms and by savage dogs, and the words they cried out were painful to hear and frightening to understand. Some were being driven again and again across the Vaitarani, the river whose current is blood. Some walked on burning sand and could not stop. Some, the unrighteous, were being cut to pieces in a forest whose leaves were as sharp as swords. Some were pushed under streams of brackish water and made to tread on razor blades. Some, mad with hunger and thirst, begged for a drink. Some were no better than corpses, wasted, wretched, and pale, their hair in disorder, their bodies caked with dirt and mud, helpless, running this way and that. And he saw the others too. In the finest of mansions people were taking their ease among singers and musicians, enjoying the fruit of their own good deeds. Those who had given cows were drinking milk; those who had given food were eating; those who had given houses lived in houses; and the pious sat decked in gold and gems and pearls, shining with their own light in the company of young women.

Then, by main force, Ravana set free everyone who was being tortured there for his sins. The souls Dashagriva released knew, for a little while, a happiness they had never expected and never thought of. The guardians of the dead saw what he was doing and came at the rakshasa king in a fury. A great clamor went up from every side as Yama’s soldiers, brave men all, came running to put the disorder down. They fell on the Pushpaka in their hundreds and thousands with spears, iron bars, pikes, pestles, javelins, and iron clubs, and like black bees they broke apart its seats and its pavilions, its daises and its gates. And still, battered as it was, the aerial chariot that had been the seat of gods held together, because Brahma’s power was in it and it could not be destroyed. Yama’s army was enormous and past counting; its vanguard alone ran to hundreds and thousands of heroes. Ravana’s ministers, every one of them a great warrior, and Ravana himself fought back with whatever their strength could lift, trees and boulders and the roofs of houses.

Ravana’s ministers, every limb of them smeared with blood, cut by every kind of weapon, kept up a hard fight. Yama’s ministers and Ravana’s struck each other savagely, and then Yama’s soldiers left the ministers alone and turned on Ravana himself with a rain of arrows. Torn by their blows, bleeding from every part of him, the rakshasa king stood in the Pushpaka like an ashoka tree in full red flower. He drew on his knowledge of divine missiles and hurled down on Yama’s troops where they stood on the ground pikes, clubs, spears, javelins, iron clubs, arrows, pestles, rocks, and whole trees; and the soldiers of Yama broke every one of those weapons apart, turned back the missile itself, and in their hundreds of thousands came at that single warrior. They ringed him as clouds ring a hill and pressed in on him with slings and darts to choke the breath out of him. His armor was cut from him. Bathed in his own blood, Ravana climbed down from the Pushpaka and stood on the ground in his rage. In a short while he had his senses back. He took up his bow and arrows, and his spirit rose in him, and he stood on that field enraged like Death itself. Then he fitted to his bow the missile that Shiva presides over, shouted “Wait, wait!” at the host in front of him, drew the string back to his ear, and let it go in fury, as Shankara once let it go at the three cities of the asuras. Ringed with smoke and flame, the arrow ran across the field the way a summer wildfire runs through a wood, and it burned bushes and trees and every carnivorous creature that followed in its wake. Yama’s troops, caught in its blaze, went down on the battlefield like the banners of Indra when they are lowered. Then the terrible rakshasa and his ministers raised a roar that seemed to shake the earth.

A key to reading this (place): The Vaitarani is the river of Yama’s realm, and its current is blood; the sword-leaf forest is the grove whose every leaf cuts like a blade. Valmiki puts the two of them, and the burning sand and the razors, into a single sweep of Ravana’s eye, and in the same sweep he puts the mansions where the givers of cows drink milk. Yama’s house holds the reward and the punishment together, and nothing decides which a soul receives except its own deeds.

The gist: In Yama’s realm Ravana saw the torments of the sinners and the ease of the meritorious side by side, and by force set every tormented soul free. Yama’s guardians of the dead fell on him in their hundreds of thousands, wrecked the Pushpaka’s pavilions, stripped him of his armor, and drove him to the ground; recovering, he loosed the missile of Shiva and burned Yama’s army where it stood.

The Duel of Yama and Ravana: Brahma Stays the Rod of Time

The roar reached Yama where he sat, and he read it correctly: the enemy had the upper hand, and his army was gone. His eyes went red. “Bring my chariot,” he told his charioteer, and the words came fast. The charioteer brought the great celestial chariot and stood before him, and the god whose energy has no limit climbed in. In front of him took her place Death herself, lance and mallet in her hands, the power by which these three worlds, which rise and fall in an endless succession, are brought to their end. At his side stood the Kaladanda, the rod of universal destruction, the weapon that belongs to Yama alone, in a body of its own and blazing like a fire; and about him on every side hung the nooses of Death, without a rent or a gap in them, and a mallet, also in bodily form, whose touch was the touch of fire.

The three worlds saw Time himself roused to anger, the terror of everything that lives, and the three worlds shook; the gods in heaven trembled. The charioteer whipped up the bright horses, and the chariot went down toward the place where the rakshasa king stood with a noise that was terrible to hear. Those horses were the equal of Indra’s and as quick as thought, and in an instant they had Yama on the field where the fight was already raging. Ravana’s ministers took one look at that chariot, and at the hideous figure of Death riding in it, and ran. Their strength was not enough for this; fear emptied their minds; crying that they could not fight here, they scattered in every direction. Ravana looked at the same chariot, the chariot that was frightening the whole world, and did not stir. Fear never entered him.

Yama closed with him in a rage, hurling javelins and iron clubs, and pierced him in his vital parts. Ravana kept his composure and answered with a hail of arrows on Yama’s chariot, the way a cloud pours down rain. Then the great javelins began to land on his chest in their hundreds, and the pain of them racked him so that for a while he could not lift his hand to strike back. For seven nights without a pause the fight went on, Yama pressing him with every kind of weapon, until the rakshasa was senseless and past wanting to fight. And still the duel resumed, tumultuous, two warriors each set on victory and neither willing to give a step of ground. The gods came down to that field to watch, with the gandharvas and the siddhas and the greatest of the seers, and Prajapati, the creator, at their head; and as Ravana and Yama contended, it seemed to those who watched that the dissolution of the world was near. Ravana bent his bow, which shone like Indra’s thunderbolt, and filled the whole of the air with arrows. He struck Death with four of them and the charioteer with seven, and then, swiftly, he put a hundred thousand arrows into Yama’s vital parts.

Fire came out of Yama’s mouth. It came with his breath, crowned with flame and trailing smoke, the fire of his anger made visible, and the gods and the danavas watching from the sky saw the marvel of it. Death and Time, the two who stood beside him, saw it too, and their own rage rose into a kind of eagerness for the fight. Death spoke to him. “Leave me alone on this field, Vaivasvata, until I have made short work of this sinful rakshasa. He does not survive today if he closes with me. That is the law of things. Hiranyakashipu and Namuchi and Shambara; Nisandi and Dhumaketu; Bali the son of Virochana; the giant Shambhu and the great king Vritra and Bana; royal sages who knew the scriptures, gandharvas and mighty nagas, seers, serpents, giants, yakshas, whole hosts of celestial nymphs; even this earth, with its ocean and its mountains and rivers and trees, at the end of the cycle of the ages: I have brought every one of them to an end. Those and countless other warriors whom no one could approach were destroyed the moment I looked at them. What is one night-ranger beside them? Leave me alone, you who know what is right, until I have finished him. Nothing I look upon survives, however mighty it is. That is no power of mine. That is simply the law of things.”

“Stand aside,” Yama told him. “I will kill this one myself.” His eyes red with rage, he lifted in his hand the rod of punishment that never fails, with the nooses of destruction hung about its four sides and the mallet standing beside it in its bodily shape, brilliant as fire and the thunderbolt, the weapon that draws the life out of a living being by its mere sight, let alone by its touch or its blow. Touched by that mighty god, the great weapon shone inside a ring of flame as though it meant to consume the rakshasa where he stood. Every rakshasa on that field fled at the sight of it. The gods, who had come to watch, saw Yama raise the rod and were shaken.

As Yama drew back his arm to strike, Brahma himself, grandfather of the whole creation, appeared before him and spoke. “Son of the sun, your prowess has no limit, and this night-ranger is not to be killed by you with this rod. I gave him a boon. That pledge must not be made void. If anyone, god or man, proves me a liar, the whole of the three worlds stands accused of lying with me, and of that there is no doubt. This terrible weapon, the terror of the three worlds, if you loose it in anger, will destroy every created being, with no regard for who is dear to you and who is hated. I made this rod myself, long ago, and I made it unfailing against every being and I made it to carry death. So it must not come down on Ravana’s head, gentle one; if it falls, no one lives even a little while after. And consider: whether the ten-headed one dies under it or fails to die, in either case my boon is proved false. Turn the rod aside from the lord of Lanka, and make my word true today, if you hold the worlds dear.”

Yama, whose mind was fixed on dharma, answered him. “The rod is turned aside. You are our master. And if this one stands protected by your boon and I cannot kill him, what is there for me to accomplish by staying on this field? I withdraw from the rakshasa’s sight.” He vanished where he stood, chariot and horses and all. Ravana, who had conquered Yama, proclaimed his own name aloud, climbed back into the Pushpaka, and rose out of the kingdom of the dead. Yama himself and the great sage Narada went up joyfully to heaven with the gods, Brahma at their head.

A sub-tale: Ravana does not conquer Yama in this canto; the boon does. Yama has him senseless inside seven nights, and the rod is in the air when Brahma intervenes, and the god who lowers it is protecting the creator’s word, with Ravana’s courage playing no part in the decision. Valmiki lets the reader see this without saying it: each of Ravana’s victories in these cantos happens inside the shadow of a boon or an order from above, and the shadow is where his strength lives.

The gist: Yama drove onto the field with Death beside him and the Rod of Time at his hand, and after seven nights of fighting he had Ravana senseless. When he raised the rod to end it, Brahma appeared and stopped him: whether the rakshasa died under the rod or survived it, the boon would be proved false. Yama lowered the rod and vanished, and Ravana, who had never landed a decisive blow, claimed the victory and flew on.

Friendship with the Nivatakavachas in the Netherworld and Victory over Varuna’s Sons

With Yama behind him, the rakshasa who loved a fight and loved to talk about it afterward looked around at his companions. They stared back at a king bathed from head to foot in blood and broken by blows, and their amazement was plain. Then the ministers, Maricha foremost among them, congratulated him on his victory; he reassured them in turn, and they all climbed back into the Pushpaka. His next road led down. To reach Rasatala, the last region but one of the worlds beneath the earth, he entered the ocean itself, the treasury of the waters, where giants live and the naga hosts with their human faces and serpent tails, all of it under Varuna’s guard. He went first to Bhogavati, the naga city that Vasuki rules, and brought the nagas under his sway, and from there, in high spirits, he went on to Manimayi, the city that is built of gems.

In that city lived a race of daityas called the Nivatakavachas, who held boons of their own from Brahma. Ravana went up to them and challenged them to battle. They were sons of Diti, every one of them a fighter, armed with every kind of weapon and ferocious in a fight, and a challenge like that was a gift from heaven to them; they took it up with joy. Rakshasa and danava went at each other with pikes and tridents and thunderbolt-weapons, with sharp-edged spears and swords and battle-axes, and they kept at it. More than a year went by. Neither side won and neither side lost. Then Brahma, the imperishable one, the refuge of the three worlds, came down in haste in his finest aerial chariot, stopped the Nivatakavachas in the middle of their war, and told them plainly what the case was. “Gods and demons together cannot get the better of this Ravana in a fight, and the danavas and the gods together cannot wipe you out. So it pleases me that you and this rakshasa should be friends. Friends hold every blessing in common; there is no doubt about that.”

So Ravana made an alliance with the Nivatakavachas then and there, with the sacred fire as witness, and was well pleased with it. They honored him as the rules of hospitality require, and he stayed with them a year, enjoying every pleasure his own city could have given him. He also watched them closely, and by watching he learned a hundred arts of illusion. Then he went ranging through Rasatala in search of the city of Varuna. He came instead to Ashmanagara, the city of stone, where the Kalakeyas lived, a people proud of their strength, and he made short work of them. Among them was his own brother-in-law, the husband of his sister Shurpanakha, a mighty daitya named Vidyujjihva who had a tongue that could lick a rakshasa to death and came at Ravana on the field to use it. Ravana cut him to pieces with his sword. When the Kalakeyas were beaten he went on killing, and inside an hour four hundred daityas were dead.

Then he saw the divine dwelling of Varuna, white as a cloud, shining like Mount Kailasa. And stationed before it he saw the cow Surabhi, the milk pouring from her udder, the mother of the foremost of bulls, the one that Shiva rides; from the flow of her milk is formed the ocean called Kshiroda, the ocean of milk, and from that ocean rose the moon of the cool rays, who ushers in the night; on her depend the greatest of the seers, who live on the froth of that milk, and from her come the nectar that feeds the immortals and the svadha that feeds the fathers. Ravana walked clockwise around that wonderful cow, whom people on the mortal earth call by the name Surabhi, and then went straight into the formidable domain of Varuna, where troops of every kind kept guard.

He came to the excellent dwelling of the god of the waters, ringed by hundreds of waterfalls, shining like a cloud in autumn and always a delight to look at. He struck down the generals of Varuna’s army on the field, took their blows in return, and then called to the soldiers who were left: “Tell your ruler at once: Ravana has come looking for a fight and stands at your door. Give him battle, or say with joined palms that you are defeated; then there is nothing to fear.” While he was still speaking, out came the sons and grandsons of the high-souled Varuna in a rage, and with them his two generals, Gau and Pushkara. They had harnessed chariots that could go wherever the driver wished and that shone like the rising sun, and they came onto the field in those chariots with their troops around them, men of every virtue. The battle that followed between the sons of Varuna and the clever Ravana made the hair stand on end. In an instant Dashagriva’s ministers, whose valor was beyond the ordinary, wiped out the whole of Varuna’s army. The sons of Varuna, buried under a rain of arrows, saw their army gone and drew back; and then they saw Ravana seated up in the Pushpaka while they stood on the ground, and they rose swiftly into the sky in their fast chariots to meet him on equal terms. The battle went on in the air, fierce and tumultuous, like the old war of the gods and the danavas.

With their burning arrows they forced Ravana to turn his face away from the fight, and they raised shout after shout of joy. Mahodara saw his king overpowered, and anger took him; he put the fear of death out of his mind and looked around him for someone to fight. The horses of Varuna that drew those chariots could go at their masters’ will and were as fleet as the wind, and Mahodara’s mace brought them to the ground. He killed the soldiers of Varuna’s sons and their horses with them, saw the sons stripped of their chariots, and raised a great roar, as the chariots fell to earth with their horses and their expert drivers. The sons of Varuna, the heroes that they were, stood firm in the empty air by their own divine power and felt no distress. They strung their bows, pierced Mahodara, and closed around Ravana in a ring, and in their fury they lashed him with arrows hard as adamant, as clouds lash a hill. Ravana answered like the swollen fire of the world’s dissolution, pouring a dreadful rain of shafts onto their vital parts, and from his chariot he hurled down pestles of every kind, lances by the hundred, sharp-edged spears and javelins, and the great shataghnis, boulders studded with iron spikes and four palm-lengths long. The foot soldiers of Varuna, pierced through and through, still came on, and that same hail of weapons brought them to a standstill, like elephants sixty years old that have walked into a bog. Ravana saw the sons of Varuna suffering and confused, and he thundered with delight like a great cloud, and with one weapon after another in his hands he struck at them, as a storm cloud beats down trees. They all fell to the ground, and their own men carried them quickly from the field to their homes.

“Now let Varuna be told that I am here,” Ravana said. It was Varuna’s minister Prahasa who answered him. “The great king Varuna, the ruler of the waters, whom you are challenging, has gone to Brahma’s world to listen to the music of the gandharvas. With the king away, hero, what will you gain by wearing yourself out for nothing? His brave sons, who were here, are already defeated by you.” The rakshasa king heard him out, proclaimed his own name aloud, and took his leave of Varuna’s realm shouting for joy. He returned by the road he had come, rose up into the sky, and set his course for Lanka.

A key to reading this (name): Surabhi, as Valmiki describes her, is the cow whose milk becomes the ocean of milk, out of which the moon was born and from which the seers draw their food, the gods their nectar, and the fathers their svadha; she is also the mother of the great bull that Shiva rides. Placing her at the door of Varuna’s house, and having Ravana walk around her before he fights, the poem lets the whole chain of nourishment, from cow to ocean to moon, pass before the reader’s eye in a single sentence. Vidyujjihva, the daitya whom Ravana cuts down among the Kalakeyas, is the husband of Shurpanakha, and that killing, done in the heat of the fight, is the grief the next canto opens on.

The gist: Ravana went down through the ocean into Rasatala, subdued the nagas of Bhogavati, and fought the Nivatakavachas for more than a year to no result, until Brahma made the two sides friends over the sacred fire. After a year among them, and a hundred illusions learned by watching, he destroyed the Kalakeyas, cut down his own brother-in-law Vidyujjihva among them, killed four hundred daityas within the hour, beat the sons of Varuna in an aerial battle, and, finding Varuna himself away in Brahma’s world, turned home to Lanka.

The Curse of the Abducted Women and the Consoling of Shurpanakha

Ravana went home rejoicing, and on the way that perverse soul carried off the unmarried daughters of kings and of seers, of gods and of danavas. Wherever he saw a girl or a woman who was beautiful, he killed her kinsmen and shut her up in his chariot. So into the Pushpaka went the daughters of nagas and of rakshasas, of asuras and of men, of yakshas and of danavas, and they wept there together, and their tears, which sprang from the fire of their grief and were born of their fear, fell like sparks.

Those tears filled the aerial chariot the way streams fill the ocean from every side, and none of the girls who shed them had ever done anything to deserve them. Naga maidens and gandharva maidens, the daughters of great seers, daitya and danava girls, wailed together in their hundreds. They were beautiful. Their hair was long and their limbs were graceful beyond the ordinary, their faces shone like the full moon, their waists gleamed like altars of diamond, their hips were made to capture the mind; they had the brilliance of refined gold and looked like women of heaven, and every one of them was crazed with grief and fear. The Pushpaka, lit on every side by their sighs, looked like a sacrificial pit with the fire laid in it. Fallen into Ravana’s power, their faces and their eyes dull with sorrow, they were does in the grip of a lion. One of them was thinking, “Will he eat me?” Another, sick with dread, was thinking, “Will he kill me?” They remembered their mothers and fathers, their husbands and their brothers, and they lamented all at once. “How will my son manage without me? How will my mother and my brother go on, drowning in grief? What will I do without my husband? Death, I ask this favor of you: carry me away, since misery is my lot. What wrong did I do in some earlier life, in some other body, that all of us have sunk like this into grief? We can see no end to it now.”

“Shame on this human world. There is no viler world than this, where our poor helpless husbands were destroyed by this mighty Ravana as the stars are put out by the sun when it rises. Ah, the rakshasa is strong beyond measure, and he delights in devising ways to kill. He holds to his evil ways and feels no disgust at himself; the prowess of a mind like his is exactly what one would expect of it. But laying his hands on other men’s wives is beneath even him. And because this wretch among rakshasas takes his pleasure in the wives of others, there is no doubt of it: a woman will be the death of him. The sighs of a woman will bring it.” When those virtuous, high-born women had spoken that curse, the kettledrums sounded in the sky and flowers fell to the earth. Cursed by chaste wives devoted to their husbands, Ravana seemed to lose his luster, like a man whose vigor has been drained out of him, and a kind of desolation settled on him. He heard their lament, and, hailed on every side by the night-rangers, he went in deep into the city of Lanka.

He had hardly arrived when his sister came to him: a fearsome rakshasi who could take whatever shape she chose, and who now came running and threw herself on the ground before him. Ravana lifted her, tried every way he knew to comfort her, and asked, “Blessed one, what is it you have to say to me so urgently?” Her eyes were red and streaming. “You have made me a widow, king, by your own strength and your own hand. The other day you destroyed fourteen thousand of the daityas called Kalakeyas in battle, by your valor; and among them, dear brother, you killed my husband, who was mightier than all of them and dearer to me than my life. My own brother, who dealt with me as an enemy would. I am destroyed, king, by my own kinsman.”

“I will wear the title of widow that you have given me. But tell me: I am your younger sister, which makes me a daughter to you, and my husband was your son-in-law. Did he not deserve to be spared by you, even in a battle? Instead he was killed in an encounter with you yourself, and you feel no remorse for it.” Ravana let her weep and reproach him, and then he set himself to soothe her. “Enough of weeping, child. You have nothing to fear from anyone. I will make it up to you with gifts, with every courtesy, with every favor in my power. I was drunk with the fight and out of my mind with wanting to win; I was pouring arrows into the enemy and I could not tell my own people from theirs. Fighting as fiercely as I was, I did not recognize my own son-in-law. That is how your husband came to die by my hand, sister. Now I will do whatever good can be done for you at this hour.”

“Go and live under the protection of your cousin Khara, whom I have given a kingdom. He is strong beyond the ordinary, and he will have the power to send out fourteen thousand rakshasas at his will and to keep them fed. Khara is the son of your mother’s own sister; he is fit for this, and he will always do your bidding. Let that hero go at once to guard the Dandaka forest closely. Dushana, who is mighty beyond the ordinary, will command his forces. Living there, Khara will always do as you say, and he will rule over rakshasas who take whatever shape they choose.” Then Ravana ordered fourteen thousand of his bravest rakshasas to form Khara’s army. Ringed by those grim-faced fighters, Khara, who had nothing to fear from any direction, went in haste to the Dandaka forest and set up an unchallenged rule there. And Shurpanakha went to live in the same forest.

A key to reading this (concept): The curse of the abducted women, that Ravana will die through a woman, is the poem’s second prophecy of his end, laid beside Anaranya’s; the one names the man, the other names the cause, and together they describe the abduction of Sita and everything that follows from it. In the same canto Khara and Dushana are posted to the Dandaka forest with fourteen thousand rakshasas, and Shurpanakha goes to live among them: the whole cast of the Aranyakanda is put in place here, years before Rama walks into that forest. These tales of the Uttarakanda are the roots of the story the reader already knows.

The gist: Flying home, Ravana abducted the daughters of every race, and the chaste women in the Pushpaka cursed him to die through a woman. In Lanka his sister Shurpanakha confronted him with her widowhood, since it was his own sword that had killed her husband Vidyujjihva; he pleaded the confusion of battle, gave her the cousin Khara as protector, and sent Khara and Dushana to the Dandaka forest with fourteen thousand rakshasas, where Shurpanakha went to live too.

Meghanada’s Attainment, Vibhishana’s Warning, and the Pact with Madhu

With Khara given his army and his sister comforted, Ravana felt his mind ease, and he was glad. He went with his followers into Nikumbhila, the finest of the groves of Lanka, and deep inside it he came upon something he had not expected: a sacrificial hall, set close with hundreds of sacrificial posts, with an altar of good omen in the midst of it, and the whole place seeming to give off flame, so bright was it with the splendor of the rite. And there was his son. Meghanada stood in a black deerskin with the tuft of the initiate on his crown, a water pot and a staff in his hands, and there was something in his look that inspired fear. Ravana went to him and took him in his arms. “Child, what is it you are doing here? Tell me the truth.”

Meghanada was under a vow of silence, and if he broke it the sacrifice failed; so it was the one conducting the rite who answered, Ushana, the preceptor of the daityas and the danavas, the foremost of the twice-born and a great ascetic. “I will tell you everything, Your Majesty. Your son has performed seven great sacrifices, each of them rich in every detail the rules require. Six are complete: the Agnishtoma, the Ashvamedha, the Bahusuvarnaka, the Rajasuya, the Gomedha, and the sacrifice that propitiates Vishnu. And when the seventh began, the sacrifice to Maheshvara, which mortals find almost impossible to carry through, your son received boons from Shiva himself, in person, on this very ground. He was given a heavenly chariot that will last and that courses through the air at its master’s will; and he was given an art of illusion called Tamasi, by which darkness can be brought down on an enemy’s ranks, and when it is used in a fight neither gods nor demons can trace the movements of the one who uses it. With these he has won a pair of quivers whose arrows never run out, a bow that is very hard to withstand, and a powerful missile that can wipe out an enemy host. Now that he has all of this, Ravana, your son is standing here at the close of his rite longing to see you, and so am I.”

Ravana heard the list and did not like all of it. “This was badly done,” he said. “My enemies, Indra and the rest of them, have been fed with these offerings.” Then he let it go. “Well, what is done is done, and it was well done; there is no doubt about that. Come, my good child. Let us go home.” He left the grove with his son and with Vibhishana, and it was then that the women were brought down from the Pushpaka, the women he had taken on his way home, their throats choked with tears, women marked with every auspicious sign and jewels among the ladies of the gods and the danavas and the rakshasas. Vibhishana, whose mind was set on dharma, saw what his brother intended for them and spoke. “You do exactly as you please, and you know what you are doing: these practices of yours wrong living beings, and they eat away your fame and your fortune and stain the family. You have overpowered these women’s kinsmen and carried the women off. And meanwhile, king, someone has passed over you and done the same to us. Madhu has carried off our cousin Kumbhinasi.”

“I know nothing of this,” Ravana said. “Who is this Madhu you are talking about?” Vibhishana’s anger rose at the question, and he answered his eldest brother. “Listen. Here is the fruit of your sinful deed, and it has come as the abduction of your own cousin. There is an aged and wise night-ranger named Malyavan, the eldest brother of Sumali, our mother’s father, and so the eldest uncle of our mother Kaikasi, a man we owe respect. He had a daughter, and that daughter had a daughter named Kumbhinasi. Her mother is Anala, our mother’s own younger sister, which makes Kumbhinasi, by every rule of dharma, a sister to all of us brothers. While your son was busy at his sacrifice, Your Majesty, and I lay under the water at my austerities, and Kumbhakarna was sleeping, the rakshasa Madhu, who is strong beyond the ordinary, killed our ministers, honored rakshasas every one, and carried her off. She was under guard in your own inner apartments, and he overpowered the guard and took her. We heard of it, and we swallowed the insult and did not kill him, because a maiden must one day be given by her brothers to a husband. Understand this: it is the fruit of your own sins and your own perverse mind, and it has ripened in this very life.”

Ravana heard his brother out, and his eyes went red with anger; his own viciousness had come back on him, and he churned like an ocean whose waters have been set boiling. “Harness my chariot at once,” he said. “Let the heroes make ready. Let my brother Kumbhakarna and every leading night-ranger climb into his vehicle armed with everything he has. Today I kill Madhu in battle, this Madhu who is not afraid even of Ravana, and then, with my friends about me, I go on to the world of the gods to give them a fight.” Four thousand akshauhinis of picked rakshasas set out in haste, every man of them thirsting for combat and armed to the teeth. Indrajit marched at the head of the army with his own troops around him; Ravana rode in the center; Kumbhakarna brought up the rear. Vibhishana stayed behind in Lanka, keeping to his dharma. The rest, the fortunate ones, rode for the city of Madhu on donkeys and camels, on excited horses, on dolphins and enormous serpents, and left no room in the sky; and daityas by the hundred, the old enemies of the gods, saw Ravana on the march and fell in behind him.

They reached the city of Madhu and went in, and Ravana found his sister there, and no Madhu. Kumbhinasi was frightened. She joined her palms in submission, fell at the feet of the rakshasa king, and touched them with her head. “You have nothing to fear,” Ravana said, and lifted her up. “What shall I do for you?” “If you are pleased with me, mighty king, do not kill my husband here today. Nothing in this world is as dreadful to a woman of good family as the death of her husband; of all the things that are feared, widowhood is the greatest misfortune. Be true to your word, ruler of rulers. Have regard for me, who am begging you. You gave me an assurance just now of your own accord, in these words: ‘You have nothing to fear.’”

Ravana was pleased with her. “Then tell me at once where your husband is. I am going on to the world of the gods to conquer it, and I will take him with me; there is no doubt of that. For your sake, out of compassion and goodwill toward you, I give up the destruction of Madhu.” Kumbhinasi, reassured and very nearly beside herself with joy, went and woke the night-ranger, who was fast asleep. “My brother is here, the mighty Ravana, the ten-headed one. He means to conquer the world of the gods, and he is asking for your help. Go out with your kinsmen and help him. You should do your very best for a man who feels affection for you and loves you as a son-in-law.” “So be it,” said Madhu. He went out to the foremost of the rakshasas, approached him with all propriety, and paid him the respects the code prescribes. Ravana accepted the hospitality of Madhu’s house, stayed the one night, and made ready to leave for the world of the gods. He came to Mount Kailasa, where his brother Kubera, the son of Vishrava, has his home, and there, as mighty as Indra himself, he made his army’s camp.

A sub-tale: Everything Meghanada carries into the wars of the Yuddhakanda he wins here, at Nikumbhila: the chariot that goes at his will, the Tamasi art that makes him untraceable in battle, the quivers that never empty. With those he will capture Indra four cantos from now and earn the name Indrajit, and the boon of conditional immunity that Brahma will give him for Indra’s release is the one whose condition Lakshmana turns against him. Nikumbhila itself is the grove where, in the Yuddhakanda, Lakshmana interrupts his last rite and kills him.

The gist: In the grove of Nikumbhila Ravana found his son at the close of seven sacrifices, with Shiva’s own gifts in hand: a chariot that goes at will, the Tamasi illusion, and inexhaustible weapons. Vibhishana rebuked him for the women in the Pushpaka and told him that Madhu had carried off their cousin Kumbhinasi, the granddaughter of Malyavan; Ravana marched on Madhu’s city with four thousand akshauhinis, spared Madhu at Kumbhinasi’s plea, made him an ally, and camped on Kailasa.

The Violation of Rambha and Nalakubara’s Deadly Curse

The sun went down, and Ravana chose to camp on Kailasa for the night with his army. The moon rose, clear of clouds, and its splendor matched the splendor of the mountain it rose over; and the great host, with all its weapons, slept. Ravana did not. He sat on the summit and looked out at the beauty of the mountain, which the moon and the trees threw into relief. Its forest hollows were bright with groves of karnikara, with kadamba and bakula, with lotus ponds fed by the Mandakini and starred with open flowers; there were champaka and ashoka and punnaga and mandara, mango and patala and lodhra, priyangu and arjuna and ketaka, tagara, coconut, priyala, jackfruit. Kinnaras, sweet-throated and in love, sang together with feeling, and the melodies made the mind’s delight grow. Vidyadharas, drunk, the corners of their eyes red with wine, sported and made merry with their wives. From Kubera’s mansion came the singing of troupes of apsaras, like the ringing of bells. The trees, shaken by the wind, rained down flowers and made the whole mountain fragrant with the scent of every blossom of spring, and a breeze blew softly, heavy with pollen and honey, and stirred Ravana’s desire.

The music, the weight of blossom on every branch, the coolness of the wind, the charm of the hill, the rising of the moon: with night just beginning, Ravana, whose power was so great, fell into the power of desire. He sighed, and sighed again, and gazed at the moon. It was then that Rambha appeared, the foremost of all the apsaras. She was decked in the jewels of heaven; her face was like the full moon; her limbs were smeared with ethereal sandal paste and her hair was dressed with the mandara flowers that grow only in heaven. She had just set out for a festival of the gods and was adorned for it, with wet ornaments of flowers from all six seasons of the year, her eyes stealing the soul, a girdle across her full hips that she carried like a love-gift, and in her splendor and her elegance and her fame she shone like a second Shri, the goddess of fortune. Her eyebrows were two bows, her thighs were shaped like an elephant’s trunk, her hands were soft as new leaves, and she wore a blue garment the color of a rain cloud; and Ravana saw her passing through the middle of his sleeping army. He sprang to his feet, took her by the hand as she went blushing on her way, and, with the darts of love already in him, spoke to her smiling. “Where are you going, lady of the lovely limbs? Whose wish are you on your way to fulfill? Whose is the hour of good fortune coming now, who is about to enjoy you? Who will be sated today with the nectar of your lips, fragrant with lotus and lily? Whose chest will these breasts of yours, full and close-set and like two golden pitchers, bless with their touch, timid one? Who will lie tonight on these broad hips, a disc of gold girdled in gold, heaven itself made flesh? What male is greater than I am today, Indra, Vishnu, or the Ashvins? It is wrong of you, timid one, to pass me by.”

“Rest a while on this beautiful rock, lady of the shapely hips. The lord of the three worlds is no one but me. Ravana, master and sustainer of the lords of the three worlds, begs you with joined palms, humbly. Accept me.” Rambha was shaking. She joined her own palms. “Be gracious to me. You should not speak to me like this. You are my elder. In the eyes of dharma I am your daughter-in-law; I tell you the truth. It is you who should protect me, if anyone else ever offered me violence.” She stood with her face lowered and her eyes on her feet, and the hair rose on her skin at the mere sight of him. “You can be my daughter-in-law,” Ravana said, “only if you are my son’s wife.” “And so I am,” Rambha said. “By law I am the wife of your son, bull among rakshasas. He is the son of your brother Kubera, dearer to Kubera than his own life, and the three worlds know him as Nalakubara. By birth he is a Brahmin, by his valor a Kshatriya; in anger he is fire and in patience he is the earth herself. I have promised to meet that son of a guardian of the world tonight. Every ornament on me was put on for him alone. As his heart is set on me and on no one else, so mine is set on him alone. He is waiting for me now, eagerly; on the strength of that truth, king, tamer of enemies, let me go. You must not stand in the way of his purpose. Let me go. Walk in the path of the virtuous. You deserve honor from me; I deserve protection from you.”

Ravana answered her in the tone of a humble man, and what he said was this. “Your plea, ‘I am your daughter-in-law,’ holds good for women who have a single husband. Apsaras have no husband, and the gods are bound to no single wife. That is the eternal law of the world of the gods.” He laid her on the rock, and the rakshasa, who lived for the gratifying of his lust, forced himself on her. In his embrace her ornaments of flowers fell away, and she was troubled in her mind like a river that a lordly elephant has waded into for its sport; and then he let her go. With the ends of her hair loose and tossed about, her hands shaking like new leaves, she was a flowering creeper that the wind had shaken. She went to Nalakubara with joined palms and fell at his feet, trembling with fear, sick with shame.

Nalakubara, who was great of soul, saw the state she was in and asked, “Blessed one, what is this? Why have you fallen at my feet?” Trembling, breathing hard, her palms still joined, she told him exactly what had happened. “Ravana, the ten-headed one, has arrived here, my lord, on his way to heaven, and he has spent the night here with his army. As I was coming to you, tamer of enemies, he saw me. He seized me and asked me whose I was, and I told him the whole truth. But his mind was drowned in the delusion of lust and he would not hear me. I pleaded with him, adorable one, I said to him, ‘I am your daughter-in-law,’ and he disregarded all of it and violated me by force. Forgive this fault of mine, my lord, you whose vows are so admirable. A woman’s strength and a man’s are nowhere near equal. I beg you to forgive this offense.”

Nalakubara heard her, and the son of Kubera was filled with rage. He went into a trance, so the story is told, to see the truth of the outrage for himself, and in a short while he knew what Ravana had done. His eyes burned copper-red. He took water into his left hand, sprinkled each of his senses with it as the rite requires, and laid on Ravana, the ruler of the rakshasas, a terrible curse. “Because he has violated you by force, blessed lady, against your will, he will never again be able to go near any young woman for sexual union if she is unwilling. If he ever, in the grip of desire, violates a woman who does not want him, in that very moment his head will split into seven pieces.” The curse was spoken, and it was like a fire that has been lit. The kettledrums of the gods sounded; flowers fell in heaps from the sky; every god, with Brahma at their head, rejoiced. The seers and the fathers, who understood what this meant for the fate of the world and for the death of the rakshasa, felt a joy beyond anything they had known. Ravana heard of the curse, and it made his hair stand on end, and from that day he gave up every inclination to force himself on a woman who did not want him. And the chaste women he had carried off, wives devoted to their husbands, heard the curse of Nalakubara, and it gladdened their hearts.

A key to reading this (concept): Nalakubara’s curse is the quiet guardian of the whole Ramayana. Because of it, Ravana cannot lay a hand on Sita in the ashoka grove against her will; he can only threaten, and set a term, and wait. Valmiki tells the story of a crime, in full, and the consequence of the crime is the reason Sita’s purity stays untouched through every month of her captivity.

The gist: On Kailasa, in the moonlight, Ravana caught the apsara Rambha on her way to his own nephew Nalakubara, her betrothed, brushed aside her plea that she was his daughter-in-law, and raped her. Nalakubara, learning the truth in a trance, cursed him: force himself on an unwilling woman again, and his head would split into seven pieces. The gods rejoiced, Ravana gave up that particular violence for good, and the women in his chariot took heart.

The Invasion of Indra’s Realm and the Death of Sumali

Ravana went on past Kailasa with the full might of his army and his vehicles, and the ten-headed king in his extraordinary energy came at last to the realm of Indra. The noise of the rakshasa army advancing from every side rolled through the world of the gods like the roar of the sea when it was churned. Indra, at word of Ravana’s coming, was shaken from his throne, and he spoke at once to the gods assembled around him, the twelve sons of Aditi and the eight Vasus, the eleven Rudras and the Sadhyas and the forty-nine Maruts, the gods of the storm-wind: “Get ready to give battle to that evil-minded Ravana.” The gods, who were Indra’s equals in war and heroes beyond the ordinary, put on their armor, and the fever of battle took them. Indra himself was very afraid, and low in spirit, and he went to Vishnu. “How am I to deal with the rakshasa Ravana, Vishnu? He is at my door this moment, immensely strong, looking for a fight. He has grown mighty through the boons he was given and through nothing else, and the word Brahma spoke has to be carried out. So lend me your strength now, the way I leaned on your strength when I destroyed Namuchi and Vritra, Bali and Naraka and Shambara. There is no refuge in the three worlds, in all that moves and all that stands still, except you, ruler of those the gods adore, destroyer of Madhu. You are the eternal and glorious Narayana, the lotus springs from your navel; by you these worlds were set in their places, and I was set over the gods; by you the three worlds were brought into being, and into you they all enter at the end of the cycle of ages. So tell me yourself how victory can come to me, or whether you will take up your sword and your discus and make war on Ravana.”

Narayana answered him. “There is nothing for you to fear. Hear what I advise. That wicked soul cannot be conquered by gods and demons together, much less killed by anyone who meets him face to face; Brahma’s boon makes him that hard to overcome. And he and his son, drunk with power as they are, will do great deeds; I have seen it in the nature of things. As for what you say to me, ‘Fight’: I will not meet the rakshasa Ravana in combat now. Vishnu does not, as a rule, come back from a fight without killing his enemy, and against a Ravana protected by a boon a victory is hard to come by today. But I declare this solemnly, in your presence, Indra of the hundred sacrifices: when the time comes, I myself will be the cause of that rakshasa’s death. I will know when his hour has arrived, and I will kill Ravana myself, and those who march ahead of him with him, and give the gods their joy. That is the truth, and now you have it. Put fear out of your mind, husband of Shachi, and fight beside the gods.”

So the Rudras came out of the city of the gods in their armor to meet the rakshasas, and with them the sons of Aditi and the Vasus, the storm-gods and the two Ashvins, the twin physicians of heaven, and they came out fast. It was the last hour of the night. From every side came the tumult of the rakshasa army, an army whose whole way of making war was superior to the gods’. The rakshasas woke, saw one another, and advanced in high spirits with their faces set toward the field and nothing else. The gods saw that enormous host, which seemed to have no end, drawn up at the head of the battle, and confusion ran through their ranks. Then the fight began between the gods on the one side and the danavas and rakshasas on the other, in a roar of voices and a flourish of every kind of weapon.

Into it came Ravana’s ministers, the famous ones, brave rakshasas of grim aspect: Maricha and Prahasta, Mahaparshva and Mahodara, Akampana and Nikumbha, Shuka and Sarana, Samhrada and Dhumaketu, Mahadamshtra, Ghatodara, Jambumali, Mahahrada, and the rakshasa Virupaksha; Suptaghna and Yajnakopa, Durmukha, Dushana, Khara, Trishira, Karaviraksha, and the rakshasa Suryashatru; Mahakaya and Atikaya, Devantaka and Narantaka. Ringed by all these warriors, whose valor was out of the common, Sumali, Ravana’s maternal grandfather, came onto the field. In his fury he scattered the hosts of heaven with his sharp weapons as a tempest scatters the clouds, and the army of the gods, Agastya said, hit hard by the night-rangers, fled in every direction like deer with a lion after them.

Then a hero came to the front of the battle: the eighth of the Vasus, whom the world knows as Savitra. He was ringed by exultant troops, he carried every kind of weapon, and he struck terror into the enemy ranks as he came. Two of the sons of Aditi, Tvashta and Pushan, valiant and afraid of nothing, entered the fight beside him with their armies at the same moment. The fight went on between the rakshasas, who never retreated, and the gods, who envied them their glory. The rakshasas struck at the gods with dreadful weapons of every kind, in their hundreds of thousands, and the gods with their spotless weapons sent rakshasas of great might and prowess to the house of Death. Sumali, in his rage, armed with everything a warrior can carry, drove at the army of the gods and wrecked it as a hurricane wrecks the clouds. Under his rain of arrows and pikes and spears, not one of the gods could keep his place beside another.

As the gods were being driven before Sumali, Savitra, the eighth Vasu, stood firm. With his own troops around him, that god of extraordinary energy checked, by his valor, the night-ranger who was pressing the attack, and between the two of them, Sumali and the Vasu, neither of whom had ever turned his back on a fight, a great battle began that made the hair stand on end. Sumali’s chariot was drawn by serpents; the Vasu’s heavy arrows overturned it in an instant. He destroyed the chariot where it lay, bristling with a hundred arrows, and then he took up a mace to finish the rakshasa. Its head blazed like the rod of Death, and Savitra gripped it and brought it down on Sumali’s head. It came down on him like a meteor, with a flash like the great thunderbolt Indra hurls crashing onto a mountain, and it burned him to ash. When it was done, of the killed rakshasa there was nothing to be seen on the field: no bones, no head, no flesh. The rakshasas saw him fall, and all of them together broke and fled in every direction, calling to one another as they ran; driven by the Vasu, they could not hold their ground.

A key to reading this (name): The roll-call of Ravana’s ministers in this canto is the cast of the Yuddhakanda in miniature: Maricha, Prahasta, Khara, Dushana, Trishira, Devantaka, Narantaka, Atikaya, and the rest are the captains whom Rama and his monkeys will meet one by one before Lanka, and the poem introduces them here, in their first war. Sumali, Ravana’s maternal grandfather, holds no boon of his own, and Savitra’s mace shows what a god can do to a rakshasa without one: burn him to nothing in a single blow.

The gist: Ravana marched on Indra’s realm; Indra, frightened, begged Vishnu for help, and Vishnu declined to fight that day and vowed instead to be the cause of Ravana’s death when the time came. Ravana’s ministers broke the army of heaven, but the eighth Vasu, Savitra, held the line and burned Ravana’s grandfather Sumali to ash with his mace, and the rakshasa army fled.

The Duel of Meghanada and Jayanta; the Battle of Indra and Ravana

Meghanada saw his great-grandfather burned to ash by the Vasu and the rakshasa army running from the gods, and rage took hold of him. He rallied every rakshasa he could reach, turned them around, and planted himself on the field. His chariot shone like fire and went wherever he willed it, and in it that great chariot-warrior went at the army of the gods the way a blazing fire goes at a forest. He carried every kind of weapon on his body, and at the mere sight of him entering the field the gods scattered in all directions; no one could stand in front of him then, so hungry was he for the fight. Indra shouted at the terrified gods. “Do not be afraid, and do not run. Come back to the field. Here is my own son going out to meet him, and my son has never been beaten.” And Jayanta, Indra’s famous son, the child of Shachi, came onto the field in a chariot of marvelous workmanship.

The gods closed around the son of Shachi and went at the son of Ravana together, striking hard, and the fight that followed was evenly matched, the gods against the rakshasas and Indra’s son against Ravana’s. Meghanada put his gold-adorned arrows into Gomukha, the son of Indra’s charioteer Matali, who was driving Jayanta’s chariot; Jayanta wounded Meghanada’s charioteer in return, and Meghanada, enraged, wounded Jayanta from every side. Anger had him now, his eyes were wide, and he buried Indra’s son under showers of arrows. He loosed thousands of sharp-edged weapons on the celestial troops; he hurled shataghnis and pestles and spears, clubs and swords and battle-axes, and whole crags of the mountains. And while he was destroying the enemy battalions his art of illusion went to work, and darkness fell on every side, and the worlds and everyone living in them were terrified.

The army of the gods, torn by his arrows, rallied around the son of Shachi and knew every kind of distress. In that darkness no one could tell one fighter from another, rakshasa or god; everything was thrown into confusion, everyone ran this way and that, and the gods, blinded, struck at gods, and the rakshasas struck at rakshasas, while others simply fled. It was then that a powerful daitya lord named Puloma appeared on the field. He was the father of Shachi, and so Jayanta’s own grandfather on his mother’s side, and he took hold of his daughter’s son, carried him off the field, and dived with him into the sea, where he lived. When the gods understood that Jayanta had vanished, their hearts failed them; stricken, they all took to their heels. Ravana’s son, with his forces around him, drove at them in his fury with a great shout.

Indra saw his son gone and his army in flight, and said to his charioteer Matali, “Bring my chariot up.” Matali brought it, the celestial chariot, huge, fully armed, terrible to look at, and very fast, and it stood at Indra’s hand. Above it and ahead of it huge clouds, split by lightning and driven by the wind, thundered as they went. As the lord of the gods set out, the gandharvas played on every kind of instrument together and the apsaras danced. He rode out with the eleven Rudras around him, the eight Vasus, the twelve sons of Aditi, the hosts of the storm-gods armed with everything they had, and the two Ashvins. And as he went a piercing wind got up, the sun lost its brightness, and great meteors fell.

Ravana, for his part, climbed into his heavenly chariot, the one Vishvakarma the artisan of the gods had built for him, hung about with enormous serpents so that the hair rose to look at it; the wind of their breathing made the chariot seem to burn on the field. With daityas and night-rangers around it, that divine chariot came forward and stood in front of Indra. Ravana held his son back and took his own stand in the battle, and Meghanada withdrew from the fight and sat quietly in his chariot. Then the battle of the gods and the rakshasas began all over again, with weapons raining down as clouds rain. Kumbhakarna was in it, carrying an armful of weapons and not knowing, in that darkness, whom he was fighting: he struck the gods with whatever came to hand, with his teeth and his feet, his arms and his hands, with javelins and iron clubs and mallets. He came to close quarters with the fierce Rudras and fought them hard, and they wounded him so thoroughly that no unbroken skin was left on him; covered with arrows and dripping with blood, he shone like a storm cloud, lightning and thunder and rain all together. Then the gods with all their weapons, and the storm-gods beside them, drove the whole rakshasa army from the field. Some were killed; some, cut down, rolled on the ground; some stayed stuck to their mounts. Night-rangers lay motionless with their arms clamped around their chariots and elephants, their donkeys and camels, their serpents and horses, their dolphins and boars and the strange goblin-headed beasts they rode; others came back to their senses only to be torn apart by the gods. The slaughter of the rakshasas who lay dead across the face of the earth was a thing to marvel at. At the head of the battle ran a river whose water was blood, thick with crows and vultures, with weapons floating in it like alligators. And Ravana saw that his whole army had been destroyed by the gods, and his anger rose, and he dived straight into that swollen sea of a celestial army and drove for Indra himself, killing gods as he went. Indra stood and drew his great bow, and the twang of it was thunder that rang through the ten directions; he bent it and sent down onto Ravana’s heads arrows that rivaled fire and the sun for brightness, and Ravana, the mighty-armed, covered Indra in turn with showers of arrows from his own bow. The two of them fought so hard, and the arrows fell so thick on every side, that in a moment everything was wrapped in darkness and nothing could be seen at all.

A sub-tale: This is the first time the poem shows Meghanada’s art of darkness in action, the Tamasi illusion he won from Shiva at Nikumbhila: in the Yuddhakanda he will use the same power to fight Rama and Lakshmana unseen and to bind them in serpent-arrows. Jayanta’s rescue is worth noticing too. In the confusion of the darkness the one who reaches him is his mother’s father, the daitya Puloma, and a grandfather who happens to be a daitya carries a son of Indra to safety in the sea; on the gods’ side as much as on the rakshasas’, it is kin who save.

The gist: Meghanada rallied the rakshasas and, with the Tamasi illusion, brought darkness down on the army of heaven; Jayanta, Indra’s son, fought him to a standstill until his grandfather Puloma carried him into the sea. Indra himself came out in his chariot, Ravana in his serpent-hung chariot met him, Kumbhakarna battled the Rudras blind, and the rakshasa army was slaughtered; Ravana charged Indra through the wreck of it, and the fight of the two kings filled the field with darkness.

Meghanada’s Capture of Indra and the Triumphant Return to Lanka

In that darkness gods and rakshasas, drunk on their own strength, went on fighting and killing one another. Of the enormous rakshasa army the gods left barely a tenth standing on the field; the rest they sent to the house of Death. It was a battle fought without sight, and none of the gods or rakshasas in it could recognize the one he was fighting. Only three on that whole field stayed clear in their minds: Indra, Ravana, and Meghanada, whose strength was beyond the ordinary. Ravana saw his whole army destroyed in an instant. A violent anger took him, and he roared, and in his fury he spoke to his charioteer, who still stood in the chariot. “Take me through the enemy ranks to the place where the far end of them is. Today, by feats of my own arm, I will send every one of these gods to the house of Death under a thick rain of weapons of every kind. I will kill Indra and Kubera, Varuna and Yama; I will destroy them all in no time, and then I will live in heaven myself. Do not lose heart, whatever happens. Drive, and do not waste time; I say it to you again today: take me to the far end of their army. Where we stand now is a corner of the Nandana grove, Indra’s pleasure garden. Take me today to the place where the mountain of sunrise stands.” The army of heaven stretched from the one to the other.

The charioteer heard him and drove the horses, which were as swift as thought, straight through the enemy ranks. Indra, in his own chariot on the field, understood what Ravana was resolved on, and he spoke to the gods around him. “Gods, hear me. What pleases me best at this moment is that the ten-headed one be taken alive. In that chariot of his, which has the speed of the wind, this mighty rakshasa is going to plunge through our army like the sea driving in on the day of the full moon. He cannot be killed today; Brahma’s boon has made him utterly fearless. So we will capture him. Be ready for that on the field. I rule the three worlds now only because Vishnu took the demon Bali captive; the capture of this sinful rakshasa would please me in just the same way.” Then Indra left Ravana to the others, went elsewhere on the field, and fought there, and the rakshasas learned to fear him.

Ravana, who never turned his back on a field, drove into the army of the gods from the north; Indra, the god of the hundred sacrifices, drove into the rakshasa army from the south. Ravana cut a hundred yojanas deep and covered the whole celestial army with a rain of arrows. Then Indra, seeing his own army so destroyed and no more shaken by it than before, closed around Ravana and forced him to turn back. The danavas and the rakshasas saw Ravana overcome by Indra and a cry went up among them: “Ah, we are all undone!” It was Meghanada who answered that cry. Beside himself with anger, he took his seat in his chariot and drove deep into the fierce army of the gods, and as he went he took cover under the great power of illusion that Shiva had given him long before. In his fury he scattered the army of the gods to every side.

He left all the other gods alone and went for Indra himself, and Indra, for all his extraordinary energy, could not see the enemy’s son. Meghanada’s armor fell from him on that field, and the gods, heroes beyond the ordinary, struck him again and again, and he felt no fear at all. He hit Matali as he came on with the best of his arrows, and then he covered the mighty Indra with a shower of them. Indra left his chariot, dismissed his charioteer, mounted the elephant Airavata, and went looking for Ravana’s son. Invisible, moving through the air, wielding the power of illusion that was his, Meghanada confounded Indra with that power and shot him full of arrows; and the moment he knew that Indra was worn out, he bound him by illusion and carried him off to the flank of the rakshasa army. The gods watched the mighty Indra borne away by force from the great battle and wondered aloud what was going to happen now. “Meghanada, the conqueror of Indra,” they said, “is an adept in illusion, and he has won this battle, and now he has carried Indra off by his tricks, Indra who himself knows how to dispel illusion, and he cannot be seen anywhere.”

Meanwhile the hosts of heaven, in their anger, forced Ravana to turn his face from the field and covered him with a rain of arrows. He came up against the twelve sons of Aditi and the eight Vasus, and, hard pressed on every side, he could not fight them. His son saw him weary and shattered by their blows and spoke to him, unseen. “Come, father, let us withdraw. Let the fighting end. Understand that the victory is ours; be at ease and put anxiety away. That Indra, who until now was the master of the army of the gods and the lord of the three worlds, has been captured out of the very midst of his army, and the pride of the gods is broken with him. You have taken your enemy by your own strength; rule the three worlds as you please. What will you gain by exerting yourself further? Fighting now is fruitless.” The gods heard what Meghanada said, and they stopped fighting and went back to heaven without their king. Ravana listened to his son’s good counsel with respect, withdrew from the field, and answered him. “You are the one who carries my line forward, my powerful son. Today you have conquered the ruler of the gods, whose strength had no equal, and the other gods with him, and the exploits were worthy of your strength. Put Indra in your chariot, take him to the city of Lanka, and leave this place with your army around you. I will come joyfully at your heels with my ministers.” Ravana’s son reached his own house with his army and his vehicles and the ruler of the gods in his keeping, and there he dismissed the rakshasas who had fought the campaign.

A key to reading this (concept): By capturing Indra Meghanada earns, in the next canto, the name the whole poem knows him by: Indrajit, the conqueror of Indra. The irony of the canto is exact. Indra, who cannot kill Ravana because of the boon, resolves instead to take him alive, and it is Indra who ends the day bound, taken alive by an enemy he never once managed to see. Pride and trickery turn back on the one who thought to use them.

The gist: Ravana cut a hundred yojanas through the army of heaven before Indra, who had resolved to take him alive since the boon made him unkillable, forced him back. Then Meghanada, invisible in Shiva’s illusion, wore Indra down, bound him, and carried him off; the gods went home without their king, and Ravana, praising his son as the one who carries the line forward, had Indra taken to Lanka.

Brahma’s Boon to Indrajit and the Release of Indra: The Episode of Ahalya

When Indra had been conquered by the son of Ravana, the gods put Brahma, the lord of created beings, at their head and went to Lanka. Ravana sat surrounded by his sons and his brothers, and Brahma, staying up in the air, spoke to him in a conciliating voice. “Dear Ravana, I am pleased with the way your son bore himself in the battle. The greatness of his prowess is a wonder. He is your equal, or he is better than you. By your own energy the three worlds are conquered now and your vow is fulfilled, and I am pleased with you as well as with him. This son of yours, Ravana, is mighty and strong beyond the ordinary, and from now on the world will know him by the name of Indrajit, the conqueror of Indra. This rakshasa, on whom you leaned to bring the gods under your yoke, will be powerful and very hard to overcome. So let the mighty Indra, the tamer of Paka, be set free. And what should the gods pay you for his release?”

Indrajit, the victor of the battle and a warrior of extraordinary energy, answered for himself. “If he is to be set free, lord, I ask you for immortality.” “There is no immunity from death for any living being on earth,” Brahma told him, “for a bird or a four-footed beast or any other creature, however mighty it is.” Meghanada heard the grandfather of the creation say it, and made a second choice. “Then let me tell you the alternative I will accept in exchange for the release of Indra, the god of the hundred sacrifices. Whenever I wish to fight, seeking the utter defeat of my enemies, and have first propitiated the sacred fire with oblations, chanting the mantras as I pour them, let a great chariot harnessed with horses rise out of that fire in front of me, and let me be safe from death for as long as I am seated in it. That is the boon I ask. And if I ever go into a battle before the muttering of the prayers and the pouring of the oblations into the fire is complete, then let my death come, then and only then. Every other being, lord, seeks immortality through austerity. I am asking for mine through prowess.” “So be it,” Brahma said. Indra was set at liberty by Indrajit, and the gods went home to heaven.

But Indra was a wretched figure now, Agastya told Rama. His divine luster had gone out of him, his mind was plunged in thought, and he sat lost in contemplation. Brahma saw the state he was in and said to him, “Indra, why did you commit that terrible sin, all those ages ago? When I made the creatures, ruler of the gods, I made them in my wisdom all alike: the same complexion, the same voice, the same form in every way. There was no difference in their appearance or in their distinguishing marks. So I fixed my mind on how I might introduce difference among them, and to make a distinction I created a woman. Whatever was most striking in every limb of the created beings I reproduced in her. With those features and those excellences I made the woman Ahalya. In her name, ‘hala’ stands for ugliness, and ‘halya’ for the reproach that follows from it; she was called Ahalya because there was nothing in her to reproach, and it was I who proclaimed that name.”

“When she was made, jewel among the gods, one question haunted me: whose partner should she be? And you, Indra, breaker of citadels, had already decided in your own mind that, in view of the superiority of your position, she must be yours. Instead I placed her as a sacred trust in the keeping of the high-souled sage Gautama, for many years, and in due time he gave her back to me. I had tested the extraordinary self-mastery of that sage by then, and I knew his austerities had reached their goal, and so I gave her to him to be his wife. The great sage lived happily with her. And the gods, when she was given to Gautama, were sick with disappointment. That was when you went to his hermitage, angry at what had been done, your mind given over to lust, and there you saw that woman, bright as a tongue of flame, and, mad with desire and with anger, you violated her. And the great seer saw you, in his own hermitage.”

“He cursed you, that sage of supreme power, in his anger, and this is what he said, and this is why your fortune turned: ‘Since you have violated my wife without a fear in the world, chief of the Vasus, you, Indra, will fall into the hands of your enemy in war. And the way of life you have introduced here will spread among human beings as well; there is no doubt of that. Of any man who commits such a sin, only one half of the sin will fall to him; the other half will fall to you. Nor will your throne be secure. Whoever comes to be the ruler of the gods will not endure in that place. This is my curse.’ That is what he said to you then. Then he turned on his own wife, that sage of hard austerities, and rebuked her without mercy. ‘Shameless woman, live unseen in the precincts of my hermitage. Since you proved inconstant, for all your beauty and your youth, you will no longer be the one beautiful woman in the world. All created beings will share your beauty from now on, since it was your singular beauty that put this perversity into Indra’s mind.’ And from that day the creation has been, for the most part, beautiful.”

“Ahalya tried to appease the great seer. ‘I was violated in my ignorance by a god who came in your own likeness, and never by my own free will. Brahmin-seer, be gracious to me.’ Gautama answered her: ‘Among the descendants of Ikshvaku a great chariot-warrior will be born, mighty-armed, of extraordinary energy, whom the world will know as Rama; he will go to the forest for the sake of a Brahmin, the sage Vishvamitra, and he will be Vishnu himself in human form. When you see him, blessed one, you will be purified, for he alone can wipe away the deed you have done. Offer him hospitality, and then come back to me. Only then, fair-skinned one, will you live with me again.’ With that the Brahmin-seer went back into his hermitage, and that wife of a master of the Vedas took up an austerity harsher than any.”

“All of this followed from that sage’s curse. Remember, mighty-armed one, the wrong you did. It was through that curse, and through nothing else, that you fell into your enemy’s hands. So collect yourself now, without delay, and perform with full attention the sacrifice that propitiates Vishnu. Purified by it, you will go up to heaven from the sacrificial ground itself. And your son was not destroyed in the great battle, ruler of the gods. His grandfather Puloma carried him off and is keeping him close, in the ocean.” Indra heard this. He performed the Vaishnava sacrifice, went up to heaven again, and ruled the gods as he had before.

“That, Rama, was the might of Indrajit, and now I have told it,” Agastya said. “And so Ravana came into the world, with his son, a thorn in the side of every creature, and conquered the ruler of the gods himself in battle. He conquered Indra; what wonder is it that other beings fell to him?” Rama and Lakshmana, and the monkeys and the rakshasas gathered around them, cried out together, “Wonderful!” Vibhishana, who sat beside Rama, said, “Today I am reminded of that marvel of the old days. I saw it with my own eyes.” And Rama said to Agastya, “It is all quite true. I heard it before this, from Vibhishana.”

A key to reading this (concept): Two threads are woven together in this canto, and both run forward to the end of the war. The first is Indrajit’s boon, with its condition: a chariot out of the fire, safety only while he sits in it, and certain death if he ever fights before the rite is complete. That condition is the exact opening Lakshmana uses at Nikumbhila in the Yuddhakanda. The second is the story of Ahalya, which seems to arrive from nowhere and turns out to be the karmic root of Indra’s capture: Gautama’s curse, spoken ages before, is why the king of the gods ends this battle in a rakshasa’s chains. It is Valmiki’s own telling of Ahalya, and it differs in its details from the version Vishvamitra gives in the Balakanda.

The gist: Brahma named Meghanada Indrajit and, in exchange for Indra’s release, gave him the conditional immortality he asked for: a chariot out of the sacrificial fire, safety while he sat in it, death if he ever fought before the rite was done. Then he explained to the humbled Indra why he had fallen: the making of Ahalya, her marriage to Gautama, Indra’s violation of her, and Gautama’s curse; a Vaishnava sacrifice purified Indra and sent him back to heaven, with the news that his son Jayanta was safe with Puloma in the sea.

The Search for Arjuna at Mahishmati: Ravana’s Worship on the Narmada

Rama was full of wonder, and he had a question. He bowed his head to Agastya again and put it with all humility. “Revered sir, jewel among the twice-born: all that time that this cruel rakshasa ranged the earth, was there no manhood left in it? Was there no king anywhere, Kshatriya or otherwise, to give him a check, since Ravana met with no rebuff at all? Or was it that the rulers of the earth had no courage, or no proper weapons, so that so many of them fell to him?” The glorious Agastya heard the question and laughed, the way Brahma might laugh at a question from Shiva, and gave Rama his answer.

“In just that way, jewel among the rulers of the earth, Ravana ranged the world, harassing its kings. And then he came to the city of Mahishmati, which had the splendor of Amaravati and in which the god of fire was always present. A king named Arjuna ruled there, and by the grace of the fire he was the fire’s equal in radiance; in his house the sacred fire lived forever, enshrined in a pit lined with kusha grass. On the day that matters to this story, Arjuna, the mighty lord of the Haihayas, had just gone down to the Narmada to sport in the water with his women. Ravana arrived that very day, and the rakshasa king spoke to Arjuna’s ministers. ‘Where is King Arjuna? Tell me exactly, and tell me now. I, Ravana, have come to try my strength against Arjuna, the foremost of the kings of men. Let him be told beforehand that I am here.’ Those ministers were wise men, and they told the rakshasa king only that their king was away from the capital.”

“From the citizens Ravana learned that Arjuna had gone out of the city, and he turned away toward the Vindhya, a mountain that stands as high as the Himalaya. He saw it drive up into the clouds, as though it had burst out of the earth to scrape the sky; it had thousands of peaks, and its caves were the dens of lions; the cool water falling from its heights seemed to laugh aloud; gods and danavas and gandharvas sported on it with their women, and apsaras and kinnaras with theirs, so that the whole mountain had become a heaven; and with its rivers of clear water it stood rooted in the earth like the serpent Shesha with his thousand hoods and his thousand restless tongues. Ravana looked at it, rising and rising, riddled with caves, the Himalaya’s twin, and then he went on to the holy Narmada, the river that runs over a bed of rock toward the western sea.”

“Its pools were churned by buffalo and young deer, by lions and bears and lordly elephants driven down to it by the heat and their thirst; ruddy geese crowded it, and wild duck and swans and water-fowl, and cranes in their season, screaming. It wore its flowering trees like a crown; a pair of chakravaka birds were its breasts, its broad sandbanks its hips, the lines of swans its lovely girdle; its limbs were powdered with the pollen of flowers, its spotless robe was the foam, and the thrill of a dip in it was the thrill of its touch; its wide-open lotuses were its beautiful eyes. The Narmada, foremost of rivers, was like a beautiful and gracious woman, and Ravana got down quickly from the Pushpaka, went into the water, and then sat down with his ministers on its lovely bank, where sages come.”

“He praised the Narmada. ‘Here is the holy Ganga,’ he said, and the sight of the river gave him real delight. He spoke playfully to his ministers and to Shuka and Sarana. ‘Look at the sun. Its thousand rays have turned the world to gold, and standing at the zenith it ought to be burning; and it has gone as cool as the moon, simply from seeing me seated here. This breeze, cooled by the Narmada, fragrant, easing every weariness, blows softly because it is afraid of me. And the Narmada herself, first of rivers, carrying crocodiles and fish and birds on her waves, heightening my pleasure, stands here like a timid girl. All of you are pierced with the weapons of kings who thought themselves Indra’s equal on the field, and you are bathed in blood, as if you had been sprinkled all over with the sap of the red sandal tree.’”

“‘So go down into the Narmada, lovely and delightful as she is, the way the great rutting elephants who guard the quarters, Sarvabhauma and the rest, go down into the Ganga. Bathe in this great river and your sins will be washed off you. And I will offer flowers, slowly, to Shiva of the matted locks, here on this sandbank that shines like the autumn moon.’ At that command Prahasta and Shuka and Sarana, and Mahodara and Dhumraksha with them, went into the Narmada; and those elephants of Ravana’s ruffled the river as the great elephants of the quarters, Vamana and Anjana and Padma, ruffle the Ganga. When they came out they fetched flowers for Ravana’s worship of Shiva, and on the delightful sandbank of the Narmada, white as a cloud, the rakshasas raised a mountain of flowers inside the hour.”

“When the flowers were gathered, the rakshasa king went down into the river to bathe, as a huge elephant goes down into the Ganga. He bathed, murmured the Gayatri, the finest of all sacred texts, with every proper ceremony, and came up out of the Narmada’s waters; he took off his wet garments and was dressed in a white robe. Then he went forward with his palms joined to make his offering of flowers, and the rakshasas came after him like mountains given bodies, swaying to his gait. Wherever Ravana went, a golden emblem of Shiva was carried after him. He set that linga in the middle of an altar of sand and worshiped it with sandal pastes of every kind and with flowers whose fragrance never dies. And when he had worshiped the supreme Shiva, the highest of all, who wears the moonbeams on his head, who takes away the anguish of the good and gives boons, the night-ranger sang, and spread his arms wide, and danced in front of him for joy.”

A key to reading this (name): This Arjuna is Kartavirya Arjuna, the thousand-armed king of the Haihayas, whose capital is Mahishmati and whom the wider tradition remembers as the king Parashurama killed. The canto also shows, without a word of comment, a side of Ravana the reader has not seen: the same king who tormented the gods travels with a golden linga, bathes and recites the Gayatri before he touches it, and dances in front of Shiva with his arms flung wide. Valmiki lets that complexity stand.

The gist: Rama asked whether the earth had held no king able to check Ravana, and Agastya, smiling, began the story of Arjuna of Mahishmati. Arriving while the king was away sporting in the Narmada, Ravana was drawn by the beauty of the Vindhya and the river, bathed, recited the Gayatri, raised a mountain of flowers on the sandbank, and set himself to worshiping a golden Shiva-linga, singing and dancing before the god.

The Thousand-Armed Arjuna Takes Ravana Prisoner

“Not far from the sandbank where the dread rakshasa king was making his offering of flowers to Shiva, Arjuna, the powerful ruler of Mahishmati and the foremost of conquerors, was playing in the water of the Narmada with his women. He stood among them, and he looked at that moment like a bull elephant in the middle of a thousand cows. He wanted to know the utmost strength of his thousand arms, and to find it out he dammed the Narmada with them. Held back, the river rose, with its fish and crocodiles and alligators, with its flowers and the layers of kusha grass that sacrificers had spread on its banks, until it looked as it looks in the monsoon; and the clear water, checked by the arms of Kritavirya’s son, ran back fast upstream, and reached Ravana, and swept away every flower he had gathered for Shiva.”

“The rite was half done, and now it was undone. Ravana looked at the Narmada the way a man looks at a beloved wife who has turned against him. He studied the flood coming out of the west and gathering force as it drove eastward, like the tide coming into the sea, and he saw that the river herself was in her natural state, because the birds on her were not alarmed; she was a woman at peace. Without a word from his mouth, with one finger of his right hand, he directed Shuka and Sarana to find out the cause. The two brothers, heroes both, set off westward through the air. Half a yojana on they saw a man like a huge sal tree at play in the water with his women. His hair tossed loose in the current, the corners of his eyes were red with wine and his mind was muddled with it, and he was plainly a man who could crush an enemy: he was holding back the river with a thousand arms, as a mountain holds back the earth with a thousand spurs, and a thousand beautiful young women were around him, as a thousand cows in season are around a bull elephant.”

“Shuka and Sarana looked at that prodigious man and flew back to Ravana. ‘Ruler of the rakshasas, someone we do not know, a man like an enormous sal tree, has dammed the Narmada like a dike and is amusing his women with it. Held back by his thousand arms, the river keeps throwing back great volumes of water, like the tide of the sea.’ ‘So it is Arjuna,’ Ravana said, and went out to him, thirsting for the fight. As the rakshasa king set his face toward Arjuna, a wind rose and blew furiously, with a roar and a storm of dust, and the clouds gave one peal of thunder and let fall drops of blood. With Mahodara and Mahaparshva around him, and Dhumraksha, and Shuka and Sarana, the rakshasa king, who was as dark as antimony, came in a short while to the dreadful pool of the Narmada where Arjuna was, and saw the king surrounded by his women like an elephant among his cows.”

“Ravana’s eyes were red with anger and he was swollen with the arrogance of his own strength, and he spoke to Arjuna’s ministers in a deep voice. ‘Ministers, tell the king of the Haihayas, and be quick about it, that a warrior named Ravana has come here to fight him.’ Arjuna’s ministers sprang to their feet with weapons in their hands and answered him. ‘Well! You certainly know the right moment for a trial of strength, Ravana, since you feel like fighting a prince who is drunk and in the company of his women. A tiger picking a fight with a bull elephant in rut while the cows stand around him! Be patient today, ten-headed one. Spend the night here. If you are still keen on it, fight Arjuna tomorrow, dear friend. And if your thirst for battle is too urgent to wait, you will get your encounter with Arjuna only after you have gone through us.’ So Ravana’s ministers killed Arjuna’s ministers in the fight that followed, and, since they were hungry, they ate them.”

“An uproar rose on the bank of the Narmada between the followers of King Arjuna and the ministers of Ravana. Arjuna’s men came at the intruders, and at Ravana himself, from every side, with arrows and iron clubs, lances and tridents, weapons that tear the skin the way the thunderbolt does, and the rush of the Haihaya king’s warriors was as fierce as the roar of a sea full of crocodiles and fish and alligators. Prahasta, Shuka, and Sarana, in their fury, set about wiping out the army of Kritavirya’s son by main strength. Arjuna’s men, out of their minds with fear, ran to tell him what Ravana and his ministers were doing to them while he sported in the river. ‘You have nothing to fear,’ he told the women, and he came up out of the water of the Narmada like the elephant Anjana coming up out of the Ganga. His eyes were colored with anger, and he flared up like the terrible fire at the end of a cycle of ages. He seized a mace, that king who wore fine golden armlets, and drove the rakshasas before him as the sun drives the darkness; and lifting his huge mace, which his arms could whirl, and moving with the speed of Garuda, he rushed at them.”

“Prahasta stood in his path, pestle in hand, unshakable as the Vindhya, as the Vindhya once stood in the path of the sun itself. Puffed up with arrogance and hot with anger, he hurled his dreadful copper-bound pestle at Arjuna and roared like Death as it left his hand; at its tip there burned a fire the color of an ashoka flower, as though it meant to consume its target. Arjuna, unshaken, met the pestle as it came flying and stopped it with his mace. Then the lord of the Haihayas, still armed with the mace, whirled it with five hundred of his arms and rushed at Prahasta, and struck him with terrible force, and Prahasta, who had stood so straight, fell full length like a hill struck by the thunderbolt of Indra. Maricha, Shuka, and Sarana, with Mahodara and Dhumraksha, saw him fall and slipped away from the field.”

“With his ministers gone and Prahasta down, Ravana rushed at Arjuna himself, the foremost of kings, and a fierce fight began between the thousand-armed and the twenty-armed that made the hair stand on end. Each seized a mace. The rakshasa and the king came together like two churning seas, like two mountains whose roots have shifted, like two suns burning with the passion of war, two blazing fires, two elephants drunk on their own might, two bulls fighting for a cow in heat, two thundering clouds, two lions proud of their strength, like Rudra the destroyer and Time himself provoked to anger; and they struck each other with all their force. As the mountains withstood the terrible strokes of lightning at the beginning of the world, so the man and the rakshasa withstood the blows of each other’s maces. The clash of those maces rang through all the quarters the way thunder echoes. Arjuna’s mace, driven at the enemy’s breast, turned the whole sky golden as a flash of lightning does; and Ravana’s mace, driven again and again at Arjuna’s breast, shone like a meteor coming down on a great mountain. Neither Arjuna nor the ruler of the rakshasas grew tired. It was a match as even as the old fight between Bali and Indra. They struck at each other with everything they had, the foremost of men and the jewel of the rakshasas, the way two bulls fight with their horns and two elephants with their tusks.”

“Then Arjuna, in his rage, hurled his mace with all his strength at Ravana’s mighty chest. It struck full force, and Ravana’s chest was guarded by Brahma’s boon, and the mace fell to the ground broken in two, as if there had never been any strength in it. But the blow itself told. Ravana staggered back a bow’s length under it and sank down groaning, and Arjuna, seeing the ten-headed one dazed, sprang on him and caught him as Garuda catches a serpent. He took hold of him by force with his thousand arms, and that mighty king bound him as Narayana, in his descent as Vamana, bound Bali. While Ravana was being bound, the siddhas and the charanas and the gods, watching from the sky, covered the air above Arjuna’s head with flowers and cried, ‘Well done!’ Then the Haihaya king, holding Ravana as a tiger holds a deer or a lion holds an elephant, thundered like a cloud, again and again.”

“Prahasta came back to his senses and saw Ravana bound, and rage lifted him and threw him straight at Arjuna. The rush of the night-rangers behind him grew and grew, like the clouds that pile up over the sea at the end of summer. They came on shouting ‘Hurl the weapon! Hurl the weapon!’ and ‘Wait! Wait!’ and Prahasta rained pestles and darts across the field. Arjuna, the destroyer of his enemies, was not in the least confused. He caught those weapons of the gods’ enemies in the air before they reached him, and with those same weapons, the finest weapons, weapons that most hands could not even hold, he pierced the rakshasas and drove them off as the wind drives off clouds. Kritavirya’s son had frightened them thoroughly, and, holding Ravana, with his friends around him, he went into his city. The Brahmins and the citizens showered him with heaps of flowers and unbroken rice as he passed with Ravana in his grip, and Arjuna, who so resembled Indra, entered his famous city as the thousand-eyed Indra once entered his after capturing Bali.”

A sub-tale: Arjuna’s mace breaks in two on Ravana’s chest, because that chest is guarded by Brahma’s boon; and then Arjuna simply seizes him with his thousand arms and binds him as Bali was bound. The boon keeps Ravana alive, and it leaves him open to capture. This scene is the hinge of the whole Uttarakanda: no weapon can kill the rakshasa king, and a human king with enough arms can still carry him home in chains.

The gist: Kartavirya Arjuna, damming the Narmada with his thousand arms, sent the river back upstream and swept away Ravana’s offering; his ministers were slain and eaten, and he came out of the water in a fury, felled Prahasta with a mace lifted by five hundred arms, and fought Ravana mace to mace until his own weapon broke on the boon-guarded chest. Then he seized the ten-headed one bodily, bound him as Vamana bound Bali, and carried him into Mahishmati under a rain of flowers.

Pulastya Secures Ravana’s Release

“Word travels among the gods, and in heaven Pulastya heard them telling the story of Ravana’s capture, a capture that seemed as impossible as capturing the wind. He was a seer of the highest self-mastery, and even so, for love of his son’s son, pity moved him, and he came all the way down to see the ruler of Mahishmati. He took the road of the air, as fast as the wind, and reached Mahishmati with the swiftness of a thought, and went in among its happy and prosperous crowds as Brahma goes into Amaravati, the city of Indra, which Mahishmati so resembled. Arjuna’s ministers saw a sage coming down out of the sky on foot, like the sun, almost too bright to look at, and they reported his arrival to the king; and Arjuna, learning that this was Pulastya himself, put his joined palms above his head and went out to meet the ascetic.”

“His family priest walked ahead of him carrying the water of welcome and the madhuparka, the offering of honey and curds, as Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods, walks ahead of Indra. The sight of the seer coming toward him like the rising sun filled Arjuna with awe, and he saluted him as Indra salutes the supreme Brahman. He offered the madhuparka, and a cow, and water for the feet and the hands, and then the king of kings spoke to Pulastya in a voice thick with delight. ‘Today Mahishmati stands level with Amaravati, since today I see you, prince of the twice-born, whom it is so hard to see. Fortune is with me today, revered one. Today my vow is fulfilled and my birth is complete and my austerities have borne their fruit, because today I bow at your holy feet, feet the gods themselves bow to. This kingdom, these sons of mine, these wives, and I myself are at your service. What shall we do? Command us.’”

“Pulastya asked the king how it went with him: with his religious duties, his sacrificial fires, his sons. Then he said to Arjuna, the ruler of the Haihayas, ‘Your strength is beyond compare, ruler of men, you with the eyes like lotus petals and the face like the full moon; by that strength Ravana stands conquered. That grandson of mine, so hard to overcome, at the thought of whom the ocean and the wind themselves stood still and waited on him, you have made a captive on the field. You have swallowed my beloved child’s glory whole, and made your own name known everywhere. I am asking you now, child: set my Ravana free, at my intercession.’ Arjuna said nothing at all. He bowed his head to Pulastya’s command, and the king of kings, glad to do it, set the rakshasa king free.”

“He released the enemy of the gods without a single condition. He honored him with celestial ornaments and garlands and fine clothes, and made an alliance with him in the presence of the fire, an alliance by which neither would ever seek the other’s destruction; then he bowed to the son of Brahma and went into his palace. And Ravana, though Arjuna had released him without terms and treated him as a guest, though his own grandfather Pulastya had embraced him with love, stood there ashamed, because he had been utterly beaten. Pulastya, the mind-born son of Brahma, the foremost of ascetics, had secured his grandson’s freedom, and now he went back to Brahma’s world. So the powerful Ravana was defeated by Kritavirya’s son and then freed again at Pulastya’s pleading.” Agastya turned to Rama. “That, delight of the Raghus, is how it was. There are warriors mightier than the mighty, and anyone who wants his own good should never treat an enemy with contempt.” Then, with Arjuna’s alliance in hand, the rakshasa king went back to destroying the kings of men and ranged the whole earth again in his arrogance.

A key to reading this (name): Pulastya is Ravana’s grandfather: the mind-born son of Brahma whose own son Vishrava fathered Ravana on Kaikasi, as the first part of this chapter tells. That is why a sage of such self-mastery comes down from heaven for a captured rakshasa, and why Arjuna, who has just bound the terror of the three worlds, lets him go without a word. Agastya’s own moral for the canto, that there are warriors mightier than the mighty and that an enemy must never be scorned, is the center of gravity of the whole Uttarakanda.

The gist: Pulastya, hearing in heaven of his grandson’s capture, flew to Mahishmati, where Arjuna received him with honey and water and offered him the kingdom; at the sage’s word Arjuna set Ravana free without conditions, honored him, and swore friendship with him over the fire. Ravana, ashamed of his defeat, went back to ranging the earth in his pride, and Agastya drew the lesson: there are always warriors mightier than the mighty.

Ravana’s Humbling at the Hands of Vali, and Their Friendship

“Set free by Arjuna, with every cause for despondency lifted from him, the rakshasa king ranged the whole earth again. Whenever he heard of anyone, rakshasa or man, whose strength was said to be greater than his own, he went to that one in his arrogance and challenged him to a duel. And one day he came to the city of Kishkindha, where Vali ruled, and challenged Vali, who wore a necklace of gold, to single combat. It was Vali’s ministers who came out to the rakshasa king as he stood there hungry for a fight: Tara, and Sushena, the father of Vali’s queen, and Angada the crown prince, and Sugriva. ‘Ruler of the rakshasas,’ they said, ‘Vali, who might be a match for you, has gone out. What other monkey could stand in front of you? He has gone to say his twilight prayers on the shores of all four oceans, Ravana, and he will be back within the hour. Wait a little. Look at these heaps of bones, white as conch shells. They belonged to those who asked Vali for a fight and were crushed by the strength of the lord of the monkeys. Even if you have drunk the drink of immortality, rakshasa, your life will reach its end the moment you close with Vali.’”

“‘Look on this marvel of the world, son of Vishrava. Wait out this one hour, and your life will be hard to keep. Or, if you are in a hurry to breathe your last, go to the southern sea. You will find Vali there, like the god of fire come down to earth.’ Ravana, the terror of the worlds, scolded Tara roundly for that, climbed into the Pushpaka, and flew to the southern sea. There he saw Vali, who looked like a mountain of gold, his face bright as the newly risen sun, absorbed in his twilight prayers; and Ravana, black as collyrium, got down from the Pushpaka and crept toward him with soundless steps to take him.”

“As it happened, Vali saw him coming. He saw the evil intent on him too, and it worried him no more than a hare worries a lion or a serpent worries Garuda. He thought it over. ‘This Ravana, with his sinful mind, is coming to catch hold of me. The moment he is close enough I will clamp him under my arm and leave him dangling there, and go on to the three remaining oceans. People will see my enemy, the ten-headed Ravana, hanging from my armpit with his thighs and hands and clothes dangling, like a serpent in the claws of Garuda.’ Having settled it, Vali stood on like the king of mountains, silently repeating his Vedic mantras.”

“Each of them meant to lay hands on the other, the king of monkeys and the lord of rakshasas, and each was proud of his strength, and each set about it with great care. Vali judged from the sound of his footfalls that Ravana was ready to seize him, and, with his back still turned, he caught him as Garuda catches a serpent. He clamped the rakshasa king, who had come to capture him, under his arm, left him hanging there, and sprang up into the air. Ravana clawed and pinched at him with his nails, again and again, and Vali carried him off as the wind carries off a cloud. Ravana’s ministers came rushing after Vali with loud cries to get their king back, and as they pursued him through the middle of the sky Vali shone like the sun with a bank of clouds following it. Those jewels among the rakshasas could not get near him; the driving of his arms and thighs wore them out and they fell back. The greatest mountains moved out of Vali’s way as he flew; what wonder that a creature of flesh and blood who wanted to live should do the same? Vali, whose speed was beyond anything, paid his homage to the goddess of the twilight at the four seas, one after another, seas that flocks of the fastest birds could not have reached. Honored on his way by the creatures of the air, the foremost of the beings that fly, he came to the western sea with Ravana clamped tight under his arm. He plunged in, said his twilight prayers, murmured the sacred formula, and, with the ten-headed one still tucked in his armpit, moved on to the northern sea, carrying his enemy many thousands of yojanas at the speed of wind and thought. He said his prayers at the northern ocean and went on to the eastern, carrying Ravana, and said them there too; and then Vali, who was sprung from Indra himself, came back to the precincts of Kishkindha with Ravana held under his arm.”

“He had said his prayers at all four seas and he was tired now from carrying Ravana the whole way, and he came down in a park at the edge of Kishkindha. He let Ravana out from under his arm, laughed loudly, and went on laughing, and asked him, ‘Where did you come from?’ The rakshasa king’s eyes were rolling with weariness and astonishment, and he answered. ‘I am Ravana, the ruler of the rakshasas, king of monkeys, a match for Indra himself. I came here looking for a fight with you, and today you caught me. Astounding, your strength; marvelous, your valor; wonderful, the depth of you, that you could seize me and carry me around the four seas like an animal. What other hero could have carried me so far so fast without tiring, brave monkey? Such speed belongs to three created things alone, the mind, the wind, and Garuda, and now to you as well; there is no doubt of that, monkey. I have seen your strength, jewel among monkeys, and I want to enter with you, in the presence of fire, into a lasting and deeply loving friendship. Our wives and our sons, our cities and kingdoms, our luxuries, our clothes, and our food: all of it shall be held between the two of us in common, lord of monkeys.’”

“So they lit a fire, and the two warriors, the chief of the monkeys and the lord of the rakshasas, embraced and became brothers. Hand in hand they went into Kishkindha rejoicing, like two lions going into a cave in the rock. Ravana lived there for a month, as much at home as Sugriva. Then his ministers came for him, still bent on the destruction of the three worlds, and took him away. That is how it was in the old days, my lord: Ravana was overpowered by Vali and taken as a brother with fire as the witness. Vali’s strength was matchless; nothing surpassed it. And even he was consumed by you, Rama, as a moth is consumed by a flame.”

A key to reading this (concept): Agastya sets two facts side by side and lets Rama draw the line between them: Ravana was so strong that only Arjuna of the thousand arms and Vali could seize him, and Vali, who carried Ravana around the four oceans under one arm, fell to a single arrow of Rama’s. The comparison is a way of proclaiming Rama’s greatness without addressing him with a word of praise, and the story of Hanuman that follows raises it higher still.

The gist: Ravana came to Kishkindha to challenge Vali, was warned off by Vali’s ministers, and found him at his twilight prayers on the shore of the southern sea; Vali caught him without turning around, tucked him under his arm, and carried him to all four oceans before setting him down, laughing, in a park outside the city. Dazed, Ravana asked for friendship over the fire, became Vali’s brother, and stayed a month; and Agastya reminded Rama that this same Vali had died by one arrow of his.

Hanuman’s Boyhood: The Leap Toward the Sun and the Wrath of the Wind

Rama had one more question for the sage of the south, and he put it humbly, with his palms joined, and it was the question that mattered most to him. “The strength of Vali and Ravana was beyond compare, as you have told it. And yet, in my judgment, the strength of those two together was no match for Hanuman’s. Heroism, diligence, strength, steadiness, wisdom, prudence, prowess, and power: every one of them has made its home in Hanuman. When the monkey army lost heart at the mere sight of the sea, he was the one who put heart back into it, and then he leaped the sea himself, a hundred yojanas. He overpowered the rakshasi who guards the city of Lanka, stole into Ravana’s inner apartments, found Sita, spoke with her, and comforted her. The leaders of Ravana’s army, the sons of his ministers, his own servants, and his son Aksha: he struck all of them down there, alone. Then, when he had freed himself from his bonds and had his words with Ravana, he burned Lanka to ashes, as the fire of the world’s dissolution burns the earth.”

“Feats like the ones Hanuman did in the war were never done by Time, or by Indra, or by the god of fire, or by Kubera. By the strength of his arms alone I won Lanka and the victory, and got back Sita and Lakshmana and my kingdom and my friends and my kinsmen. If Hanuman, Sugriva’s friend, had not been with me, who could have brought me news of Janaka’s daughter? And here is what I do not understand. When the enmity broke out between Sugriva and Vali, why did Hanuman not burn Vali up, as fire burns a tree, to please Sugriva? I think Hanuman must not have known his own strength then, and so he simply watched Sugriva, who was dearer to him than his life, suffer every hardship of his exile. Tell me all of it, revered sir, in full and as it truly was, great sage whom the gods adore.”

Agastya heard that reasonable request, and he answered it with Hanuman himself sitting there. “What you say of Hanuman is true, jewel among the Raghus. No one is his equal in strength or in speed or in intelligence. But long ago some ascetics whose curses never fell idle laid a curse on him, tamer of enemies: that for all his might he would never be aware of the whole of his strength. What he did as a small child is past all telling, Rama, and it is the reason he grew up not knowing what he was. If you have a mind to hear it, scion of Raghu, listen with your mind fixed on it, and I will tell you.”

“There is a mountain called Sumeru, turned to gold by a boon of the sun-god, and Hanuman’s father Kesari rules there. Kesari’s beloved wife was known by the name of Anjana, and on her the wind-god begot a superb son. Anjana gave birth to Hanuman, whose color was the color of the awns of rice, and then, wanting the best of the forest’s fruit, that lovely woman went out to gather it. The baby, parted from his mother and gnawed by hunger, cried aloud in the reed thicket, as Kartikeya once cried in the thicket of reeds where he was born. And in that same moment he saw the sun rising, red as a heap of hibiscus flowers, and took it for a fruit, and wanted it, and sprang toward it. Face to the sun, the child, who looked like the rising sun made flesh, kept climbing the sky to catch the rising sun. Gods and danavas and yakshas watched Hanuman shooting upward in his child’s simplicity and were struck with wonder. ‘Neither the wind,’ they said, ‘nor Garuda, nor the mind itself moves as fast as this son of the wind is moving through the high sky. If his speed and his power are this as an infant, what will his speed be when he has the vigor of youth?’”

“The wind-god, cool to the touch as a mass of snow, went up after his son and guarded him against the scorching of the sun. Carried by his father’s might and by his own childish simplicity, the baby shot up through the heavens for many thousands of yojanas and came close to the sun. The sun saw that this was an innocent child, and the sun also knew that a great purpose, Rama’s purpose, waited to be accomplished through him, and so the sun did not burn him. Now, Rahu had chosen that same day to seize the sun. Rahu, the scourge of the sun and the moon, saw Hanuman on the sun’s chariot and slipped away from the place in fright. He went to Indra’s house with his brows knotted and spoke angrily to the king of the gods where he sat among his hosts. ‘You allotted me the moon and the sun to quiet my hunger, Indra, destroyer of Bala and Vritra. How is it that my share has been handed to someone else? Today, on the day of the new moon, I came to lay hold of the sun; and there was another Rahu at the sun before me, and he seized it in one grab.’”

“Rahu’s grievance brought Indra up from his seat in alarm, his golden garland in his hand. He mounted Airavata, the king of elephants, who stands as tall as a peak of Kailasa, who has four tusks and was streaming with the juice of rut, richly decorated, laughing his elephant’s laugh in the ringing of a golden bell; and with Rahu going in front of him he rode to where the sun was, and Hanuman with it. Rahu left Indra behind and went ahead at speed, and Hanuman saw him coming on like a mountain peak in motion. He let the sun go, took Rahu for a fruit, and bounded up through the sky again to catch hold of the son of Simhika. Rahu saw the monkey leave the sun and come rushing at him, and Rahu, of whom only the head remains, huge as he is, turned his face the other way and fled. He looked to Indra as his protector, and in his terror he shrieked, over and over, ‘Indra! Indra!’ Indra knew the voice. ‘Do not be afraid,’ he called. ‘I will finish him now.’”

“Then Hanuman saw Airavata, and took the king of elephants for a fruit too, an enormous one, and the son of the wind rushed at him; and as he rushed at Airavata to seize him, for a moment his form became terrible and splendid, like the forms of Indra and the god of fire. Indra, the lord of Shachi, was not greatly provoked; even so, he struck the child rushing toward him with the thunderbolt from his hand. Struck by Indra’s thunderbolt, Hanuman fell onto a mountain, and as he fell his left jaw was broken. The wind-god saw his son lying there, senseless from the blow, and his anger against Indra rose, and the whole creation paid for it. The wind lives in every living body, and he withdrew his movement, which is breath, from all of them at once, took his infant son in his arms, and went into a cave. The bowels and the bladders of every creature stopped, and the pain of it was extreme; the wind held every living thing motionless, as Indra holds up the rains. Everywhere living beings choked under the wind’s anger, and their joints gave way, and they turned as stiff as wood. Without the study of the Vedas, without sacrifices, without rites, without the practice of dharma, the three worlds felt as though they had sunk into hell.”

“In their affliction all created beings, gandharvas, gods, demons, and men, hurried to Brahma, the lord of creation, for relief. The gods came with their bellies swollen like the bellies of men with dropsy, and they joined their palms and said, ‘Lord, our master, it was you who brought forth the four kinds of living beings, those born from the womb and those born from the egg, those born of sweat and those that sprout from the earth. It was you who gave us the wind to be the lord of our lives. Then why, best of the virtuous, has the one who governs our very breath shut us in today, the way a king shuts his women in the inner apartments, and made us suffer like this? The wind has struck us down and we have come to you for shelter. You who take away suffering, take away this suffering that comes from the stopping of the wind.’”

“Brahma, the lord of creatures and their protector, heard their petition. ‘This has happened for a reason,’ he said, ‘and you should hear it, created beings, because it is a just one. At Rahu’s appeal, Indra struck down the son of the wind today, and that is why the wind is angry. The wind has no body, and he moves through every body and keeps it alive. Without the wind a body is a block of wood. Air is life. Air is happiness. Air is the whole of this universe. Without air the world has no happiness in it, and just now the wind, which is the world’s very life, has abandoned the world. All of these beings stand unable to breathe, like blocks of wood, like walls. So we will go to the place where the wind is, the one who is causing us this pain, and we will not go to our ruin by failing to appease him.’ So Brahma, with the gods and the gandharvas, the serpents and the guhyakas and every created being, went to the place where the wind-god sat holding the son whom Indra had struck down. Four-faced Brahma looked at the son of the wind, radiant as the sun and the fire and gold, lying in his father’s lap, and Brahma, with the gods and the gandharvas around him, the seers and the yakshas and the rakshasas, took pity on the child.”

A key to reading this (name): “Hanu” is the jaw, and it is the left jaw broken by Indra’s thunderbolt that gives the child his name in the next canto. Valmiki takes two things about Rahu for granted: that nothing is left of him except his head, and that the sun and the moon are the food Indra allotted him. The story that explains both belongs to the Bhagavata, in its eighth Skandha: how Rahu slipped into the line of the gods as the nectar was being served, how the sun and the moon pointed him out, and how Vishnu’s discus took off his head after the nectar had already made it deathless, which is why he hunts those two lights across the sky.

The gist: At Rama’s asking, Agastya began the childhood of Hanuman: the infant, left hungry in a reed thicket on Sumeru, took the rising sun for a fruit and leaped for it, so fast that the gods marveled and the wind rose to shield him from the heat. Rahu, coming to eclipse the sun, fled from him; Hanuman chased Rahu and then Airavata as two more fruits, until Indra’s thunderbolt broke his jaw. The wind-god, in his grief, withdrew breath from every creature, and the choking gods carried their plea to Brahma, who led them to the cave where the wind sat with his son.

Hanuman Restored to Life, the Boons, and the Sages’ Curse

“The wind-god, tormented by the death of his son, saw the grandfather of the creation and stood up before him with the child in his arms. With his earrings swinging, in his diadem and his garland and his ornaments of gold, he presented himself three times in submission before the creator and fell at his feet. Brahma raised him up, and with his long, outstretched, ornamented hand he stroked the child. That was all it took. At the touch of the lotus-born one, given almost in play, Hanuman came back to life at once, like a crop that has been watered. The wind saw his son alive, and the wind, who is the vital breath of the whole creation, began once more to move inside every creature as he had before; and the beings who had been shut in by his anger were set free, and they were as glad as a lake full of lotuses when the cold winds have gone.”

“Then Brahma spoke to the gods, meaning to do the wind a kindness. He is the one who holds the three pairs of divine properties, glory and prowess, power and wealth, wisdom and dispassion; he appears in three forms and dwells in the three worlds and the gods all worship him. ‘Mighty Indra, and Agni, and Varuna, and Shiva the great lord, and Kubera, lord of wealth: you know everything already, and even so I will tell you what is for your good, so listen. Your purpose is going to be accomplished through this infant. Therefore, every one of you, grant him a boon, and let the wind be appeased.’ Indra of the thousand eyes, his face bright with pleasure, took off his own wreath of lotus flowers and hung it around Hanuman’s neck. ‘Since this infant’s jaw, his hanu, was broken by the thunderbolt from my hand, this tiger among monkeys will go by the name of Hanuman. And I give him this supreme and wonderful boon: from this day on he cannot be harmed by my thunderbolt.’”

“The glorious sun, who drives off the darkness, spoke next. ‘I give him a hundredth part of my own brilliance. And when the capacity to study the scriptures ripens in him, I will teach him the scriptures myself, and he will be a fine speaker; no one will be able to rival him in the knowledge of them.’ Varuna gave him the boon that his death would never come, not in millions of years, from Varuna’s noose or from water. Yama made him invulnerable to Yama’s rod and free of every ailment. Kubera, whose one eye is tawny, said, ‘I am well pleased, and I grant that this mace of mine shall never cause his death in any battle, and that in battle he shall never know weariness.’ Shankara, the giver of happiness, gave the highest boon of all: that the child would be safe from death at Shankara’s own hands and from every one of Shankara’s weapons. And Vishvakarma, the foremost of all builders, the wise one, looked at the infant who rivaled the rising sun and gave him this: that he would be invulnerable to every divine weapon Vishvakarma had ever forged, and to every one that existed in Vishvakarma’s mind, and that he would live long.”

“Brahma made his own augury over the infant: that he would be long-lived and great of soul, and that no rod of punishment belonging to Brahma and no curse spoken by a Brahmin would be able to kill him. Then, glad to see the child so enriched with the boons of the gods, the teacher of the worlds spoke to the wind. ‘This son of yours, Hanuman, will be a terror to his enemies and a giver of safety to his friends, and no one will ever conquer him. This jewel among monkeys will be able to change his form at will, and go wherever he pleases at whatever speed he chooses; nothing will impede his movements, and wherever he goes he will be glorious. And in the war he will do deeds that make the hair stand on end, deeds meant to uproot Ravana and dear to Rama.’ With that, all the gods with Brahma at their head took their leave of the wind and went back the way they had come. The wind carried his son home, told Anjana of the boons the gods had given him, and went on his way.”

“Enriched by the gods’ boons, Rama, and by the strength that flowed from them, Hanuman, brimming with the speed that was his by nature, was like the ocean. He overflowed with vigor, and, fearing nothing, he began to violate the sanctity of the great seers’ hermitages. He broke their sacrificial ladles and vessels; he interrupted the oblations as they were being poured into the fire; he tore into shreds the piles of bark-cloth that belonged to those perfectly tranquil ascetics. Hanuman, with his extraordinary strength, gave himself up to these pranks, and the seers, knowing that Brahma had made him immune to every curse a Brahmin could speak, bore with him on account of the boons. Kesari forbade him and the wind forbade him, and the son of Anjana went on crossing every bound of propriety. At last the great sages of the lines of Bhrigu and Angira, provoked, though in truth neither enraged nor deeply indignant, laid a curse on him, jewel among the Raghus. ‘By the spell of our curse, monkey, you will remain unaware for a long time of the power you rely on to harass us. You will know your own prowess only when someone reminds you of your glory.’ The curse of the great sages stripped him of the knowledge of his own energy and vigor, and from then on Hanuman moved through those same hermitages placidly.”

“In those days the father of Vali and Sugriva, Riksharaja, who was like the sun in splendor, was the king of all the monkeys. He ruled for a long time, and then Riksharaja, the sovereign of the monkeys, met the law that Time lays on everyone. When he was dead, his counselors, who knew their business, installed Vali in his father’s place and Sugriva in the place Vali had held as crown prince. From boyhood Vali and Sugriva had been brothers in the truest sense, and the bond between them, unwavering and unbroken, was like the bond between wind and fire. And Hanuman, because of that curse, did not know his own strength. So when the enmity rose between Vali and Sugriva, Rama, neither Sugriva, driven from place to place, nor this son of the wind was aware of the power that was in Hanuman. Stripped of that knowledge by the sages’ curse, the foremost of monkeys stood at Sugriva’s side through all that time, like a lion held back by an elephant, while Sugriva fought Vali.”

“Who in the world surpasses Hanuman in prowess, in energy, in the splendor of his name, in amiability and sweetness of temper, in knowing what is prudent and what is not, in depth, in cleverness, in manly vigor, in steadiness? He set his face toward the sun to learn grammar from him, and, wanting to put his questions to him, this chief of the monkeys, whose energy is beyond measure, traveled from the hill where the sun rises to the hill where it sets, his face toward the sun the whole way, until he had mastered the great work of grammar. He has mastered the great commentary on the sutras, with the sutras of grammar themselves, the vritti, the vartika, and the monographs on the subject; in the other branches of learning, and in prosody, there is no one like him. In every science and in the practice of austerity he rivals Brihaspati, the teacher of the gods. This Hanuman, versed in the nine systems of grammar, will prove a very Brahma by your grace. Who can stand face to face with him? He is like the ocean when it threatens to eat away the earth, like the fire when it goes out to consume the universe, like Death when the world is being destroyed.”

“And there are other great leaders of the monkeys like him: Sugriva, Mainda and Dvivida, Nila, Tara, Angada the son of Tara, Nala, and Rambha, and the gods made every one of them for your sake, Rama. Alongside those leaders of the monkeys there are the bears, Gaja, Gavaksha, Gavaya, Sudamshtra, Mainda, Prabha, Jyotirmukha, and Nala, and the gods made those too for your sake alone. Now everything you asked me has been told; the feats of Hanuman’s childhood have been told with the rest.” Rama and Lakshmana, and the monkeys and the rakshasas sitting with them, heard Agastya’s tale to its end in great wonder.

Then Agastya said to Rama, “You have heard all of it. We have seen you, Rama, and spoken with you, and now we go.” Rama heard the words of Agastya, whose radiance was formidable, and answered the great sage humbly, with his palms joined. “The gods are pleased with me today, and the eternal fathers, and the spirits of my own ancestors. As for us, the mere sight of you keeps us, and our kinsmen with us, content forever. But there is one thing I must bring before you. A longing has taken hold of me, and what I ask of you, you must do out of compassion for me. Now that I have come home from my exile in the forest and set the citizens and the people of the countryside to their proper duties, I mean to perform sacrifices, and I mean to perform them by the goodwill of saintly men like you. You who long to bless me, whose prowess is born of asceticism, must serve always as the superintending priests at my sacrifices. Leaning on you, who have shaken off every sin through your austerities, I will be blessed by my ancestors and be very happy. So when the sacrifice has begun, you must all come here together.” The sages of rigid vows, Agastya foremost among them, heard him and said, “So be it,” and began to take their leave, and they departed as they had come. Rama sat on in amazement, turning over in his mind that matter of the sacrifices. When the sun set he sent away the assembled kings and the monkeys, performed the twilight devotions with every proper ceremony, and, as night came on, the foremost of men went into his inner apartments.

A sub-tale: The seers’ curse on the child Hanuman, that he will forget his own strength until someone reminds him, is the mechanism of one of the poem’s great scenes: on the shore of the southern sea in the Kishkindhakanda, with the monkeys in despair, it is Jambavan who reminds Hanuman what he is, and only then does he leap. Notice too what the gods say over the infant. Brahma tells the wind that his son’s deeds in the war will uproot Ravana and please Rama, and the sun spares the child because Rama’s purpose waits to be accomplished through him: Rama’s story is written into Hanuman’s life before Hanuman can walk.

The gist: At Brahma’s touch Hanuman revived, and the gods, one by one, gave him his name and their boons: immunity to Indra’s thunderbolt, Varuna’s noose, Yama’s rod, Kubera’s mace, and Shiva’s weapons, a hundredth of the sun’s brilliance, and, from Brahma, a life beyond the reach of any Brahmin’s curse, with Rama’s work already named in it. For his pranks the seers cursed him to forget that strength until reminded. Agastya then took his leave, and Rama, before the sages went, bound them to attend the sacrifices he meant to perform.

Source: Srimad Valmiki Ramayana, Uttarakanda, Cantos 19 to 36. The Gita Press Hindi edition is the controlling witness. The Sanskrit e-text and an independent complete translation were used to verify names, sequence, and principal events. Where recensions differ, this retelling follows Gita Press.