Mārīca

In the story

Mārīca is Tāṭakā's son, and Rāma's first serious opponent. In the Bāla Kāṇḍa he and Subāhu attack Viśvāmitra's sacrifice; Rāma kills Subāhu and, choosing not to kill Mārīca, hurls him a hundred leagues out to sea with a weapon that does not draw blood. The experience changes him. He withdraws to the forest as an ascetic and, by his own account, sees Rāma everywhere thereafter — in trees, in the dark, in his sleep.

When Rāvaṇa comes to him with the plan for the golden deer, Mārīca gives the epic's most lucid warning. He tells Rāvaṇa what Rāma is, what happened to him personally, and what happened to Khara's fourteen thousand; he tells him that Sītā is not worth the destruction of Laṅkā; and he says, in the line the tradition remembers, that wherever Rāma is, there death is. Rāvaṇa answers that he did not come for advice and that Mārīca will die by his hand if he refuses.

Mārīca chooses to be killed by Rāma instead, on the ground that death from that quarter is at least death from a great enemy. He takes the form of a deer of gold studded with jewels, draws Sītā's eye, leads Rāma far into the forest, and as he dies cries out in Rāma's exact voice — hā Sītā, hā Lakṣmaṇa — the sound that empties the hermitage.

What he is for

Mārīca is the poem's demonstration that everyone concerned could see what was coming. He is not deceived, not loyal, and not willing; he acts under a direct threat, having stated the case against the action in full. That the plan works anyway, and that he is the instrument of it, is the epic's bleakest piece of construction.

He is also a rare figure in Indian literature: an enemy converted by defeat into a genuine ascetic, whose reformation is real and who is dragged out of it and killed for someone else's appetite.

The warning

Mārīca's speech to Rāvaṇa is the longest and clearest piece of counsel in the epic, and it is delivered by a rākṣasa to a rākṣasa. He describes his own encounter with Rāma as a boy — the weapon that threw him a hundred leagues into the sea without drawing blood — and says he has seen Rāma in trees and in the dark ever since. He recites what happened at Janasthāna. He tells Rāvaṇa that Sītā is not worth Laṅkā.

And he ends with the line the tradition remembers: wherever Rāma is, there death is. Rāvaṇa's answer is that he did not come for advice.

Death by choice

Mārīca's decision is the epic's bleakest calculation. He is told he will die by Rāvaṇa's hand if he refuses, and he reasons that death from Rāma is at least death from a great enemy, and that he will take that. Then he goes and does it perfectly.

The golden deer is the most skilful piece of work in the poem — the shape, the movement, the tantalizing approach and retreat that draws Rāma miles from the hut, and finally the dying cry in Rāma's own voice that empties it. It is done by someone who wanted no part of it and had told everyone so.