The Ramayana · 473 of 493

Yuddha Kānda (The War Book): Canto 110 — Rávan’s Death

Then Mátali to Ráma cried: “Let other arms the day decide. Why wilt thou strive with useless toil And see his might thy efforts foil? Launch at the foe thy dart whose fire Was kindled by the Almighty Sire.” He ceased: and Raghu’s son obeyed: Upon his string the hero laid An arrow, like a snake that hissed. Whose fiery flight had never missed: The arrow Saint Agastya gave And blessed the chieftain’s life to save That dart the Eternal Father made The Monarch of the Gods to aid; By Brahmá’s self on him bestowed When forth to fight Lord Indra rode. ’Twas feathered with the rushing wind; The glowing sun and fire combined To the keen point their splendour lent; The shaft, ethereal element, By Meru’s hill and Mandar, pride Of mountains, had its weight supplied. He laid it on the twisted cord, He turned the point at Lanká’s lord, And swift the limb-dividing dart Pierced the huge chest and cleft the heart, And dead he fell upon the plain Like Vritra by the Thunderer slain. The Rákahas host when Rávaṇ fell Sent forth a wild terrific yell, Then turned and fled, all hope resigned, Through Lanká’s gates, nor looked behind. His voice each joyous Vánar raised, And Ráma, conquering Ráma, praised. Soft from celestial minstrels came The sound of music and acclaim. Soft, fresh, and cool, a rising breeze Brought odours from the heavenly trees, And ravishing the sight and smell A wondrous rain of blossoms fell: And voices breathed round Raghu’s son: “Champion of Gods, well done, well done.”

Context

The final duel uses the Brahmā weapon, the dart Agastya gave to Rāma. Vālmīki names its parts in the manner of a Vedic ritual implement: wind for the shaft, sun and fire for the point, Meru and Mandara for the weight. The cataloguing matters. In the Mahābhārata the same weapon class is treated as the equivalent of nuclear arms in the Indic imagination, capable of destroying the world if misused. Whether one reads the device as poetic flourish, as memory of some archaic weapons technology, as nuclear premonition (a reading J. Robert Oppenheimer himself touched on in the Gītā quotation at Trinity), or as pure mythic figure, Vālmīki's verse is doing the work of placing the moment of the killing inside a cosmic register. The earth does not just lose Rāvaṇa. Something at the level of the elements is being adjusted.On Brahmā-weapon class as Indic cosmic-weapon imagination: Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (2009), ch. on warfare and metaphor; on Oppenheimer's Gītā quotation at Trinity, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin, American Prometheus (2005).

Insight

Rāvaṇa falls. The Rākṣasa host wails, the Vānars cheer, and the air fills with the rain of celestial flowers that the gods drop on the field when the wrong has been righted. But the line that follows, in the next canto in Vibhīṣaṇa's mouth, will be more important than the cheer: hatred dies when the foe lies in dust, the conflict is over, peace bonds us now. Vālmīki's ethic of war does not end with the killing. It requires the next sentence, the one that gives the dead enemy his funeral rites. Compare the Iliad's twenty-fourth book, where Priam comes to Achilles for Hector's body and Achilles, who has been animal with rage for the whole poem, becomes human again to give it back. Both epics know that the war is not finished until the burial.Iliad book 24 (Priam, Achilles, and the ransom of Hector); on the Vālmīki ethic of post-battle reconciliation, Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman, Princeton vol. 6 intro (2009).