What happens
The exiles move south through the hermitages of the Daṇḍaka forest, where sages ask Rāma's protection against the rākṣasas who harry their rites and eat the ascetics. He gives it, and the killing accumulates — the book is franker than the others about how much of it there is, opening with the death of the rākṣasa Virādha, who seizes Sītā and is buried alive in a pit.
Sītā, alone of the three, questions the arrangement. She puts to her husband, carefully and as a wife who says she is speaking out of affection rather than instruction, that a man who has laid down the life of a king for the life of the forest should perhaps not be carrying weapons at all, and that killing beings who have done him personally no harm is a fault that attaches to the archer. Rāma answers that he has given his word to protect those who asked, and that the word is worth more to him than his life or than her. The exchange is left standing, unresolved, a hundred pages before it becomes the plot.
They visit Śarabhaṅga, who has waited to see Rāma before entering his own fire; Sutīkṣṇa; and, after ten years the poem passes over almost without comment, Agastya, the sage who made the south habitable. Agastya gives Rāma the bow of Viṣṇu, an inexhaustible quiver and a sword, and directs him to settle at Pañcavaṭī on the Godāvarī. There Lakṣmaṇa builds a leaf hut and they live.
The rākṣasī Śūrpaṇakhā, Rāvaṇa's sister, sees Rāma and desires him. He refuses, tells her he is married, and mockingly sends her to Lakṣmaṇa; Lakṣmaṇa mocks her in turn and sends her back; and when, humiliated, she rushes at Sītā, Lakṣmaṇa cuts off her nose and ears. Her brothers Khara, Dūṣaṇa and Triśiras come out of Janasthāna with fourteen thousand rākṣasas and are destroyed by Rāma fighting alone, in the book's set-piece battle. She carries her mutilation to Laṅkā and works on Rāvaṇa — not with the insult to herself, which he might discount, but with a description of Sītā.
Rāvaṇa goes to Mārīca, who has already been thrown into the sea by Rāma once and wants nothing to do with him, and orders him against his own strong advice to take the shape of a golden deer. Sītā sees it and wants it, alive if possible; Rāma follows it and shoots it, and the dying creature calls out in Rāma's own voice for Lakṣmaṇa. Sītā, hearing it, tells Lakṣmaṇa to go, and when he refuses accuses him of wanting his brother dead in order to have her — words the poem lets her say and does not let her take back. He goes. Rāvaṇa comes to the empty hermitage in the guise of a mendicant, and when courtesy has got him near enough, takes her.
The old vulture Jaṭāyu, a friend of Daśaratha's, attacks him in the air, breaks his chariot and is cut down. Rāma finds him dying, hears his report, and burns his body with the honours due to a father. The book ends with the brothers going south in grief: they kill the deformed Kabandha, who directs them to Sugrīva, and are received by the ascetic Śabarī by Lake Pampā.
The turn
Everything before this book is a story about a family and a promise; everything after is a war. The Araṇya Kāṇḍa is where the poem changes register, and it does so through a sequence in which no one behaves impeccably. Rāma mocks a woman who has offered herself to him; Lakṣmaṇa mutilates her; Sītā covets an animal because it is beautiful and then accuses her protector of the worst thing she can think of. The abduction is not a bolt from a clear sky. It is the consequence of a chain of ordinary human failures, each of them small, and the poem arranges them so that the reader can see the chain.
The book is also where the epic's geography changes. North of the Vindhyas the world is cities, roads and kings; south of them it is forest, hermitage and rākṣasa, and the further the exiles go the less the categories of the court apply. That the alliance which wins the war is made with monkeys, and the throne of Laṅkā given to a rākṣasa, follows from this.
Further reading
- Goldman, Robert P. The Ramayana of Valmiki: An Epic of Ancient India. Princeton University Press, 1984
- Goldman, Sally J. Sutherland. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Sundarakanda. Princeton University Press, 1996
- Hart, George L. The Forest Book of the Ramayana of Kampan. University of California Press, 1988
- Pollock, Sheldon. The Ramayana of Valmiki: Aranyakanda. Princeton University Press, 1991
- Sattar, Arshia. Valmiki's Ramayana. Harper Collins, 1996
See also
- Rāmāyaṇa — The Rāmāyaṇa is the Sanskrit epic attributed to Vālmīki, in seven books, telling how Rāma of Ayodhyā is exiled for fourteen years, loses his wife Sītā to the rākṣasa king Rāvaṇa, and wins her back by war.
- The Daṇḍaka forest — The Daṇḍaka is the great forest south of the Vindhyas in the Rāmāyaṇa, where the exiles spent most of their fourteen years and where the rākṣasas ruled — the epic's frontier between the settled world and everything else.
- Pañcavaṭī — Pañcavaṭī is the place on the Godāvarī in the Rāmāyaṇa where the exiles built their hut on Agastya's advice, and from which Sītā was carried off.
- Śūrpaṇakhā — Śūrpaṇakhā is Rāvaṇa's sister in the Rāmāyaṇa, who desired Rāma in the forest, was mocked and then mutilated by Lakṣmaṇa, and turned her humiliation into the abduction of Sītā.
- Khara — Khara is the rākṣasa commander of Janasthāna in the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāvaṇa's kinsman, whose army of fourteen thousand was destroyed by Rāma fighting alone.
- Mārīca — Mārīca is the rākṣasa in the Rāmāyaṇa who took the form of the golden deer that drew Rāma away from the hermitage, having first told Rāvaṇa at length that the plan would destroy them both.
- The golden deer and the abduction — The golden deer is the disguise in the Rāmāyaṇa by which the rākṣasa Mārīca drew Rāma away from the hermitage at Pañcavaṭī so that Rāvaṇa could carry Sītā off.
- Rāvaṇa — Rāvaṇa is the ten-headed rākṣasa king of Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa, a brahmin's son, a scholar and an ascetic protected by a boon against every being except man, who carries off Sītā and is destroyed for it.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.