Sundara Kāṇḍa

What happens

Reminded of his own strength, Hanumān grows to an immense size on Mount Mahendra and throws himself off it across the hundred yojanas of open sea. He meets three encounters in the air, and the poem makes them a test of judgement rather than of force: a submerged mountain rises to offer him rest, which he touches in courtesy and passes; a serpent-mother demands to eat him as her right, which he satisfies by entering her mouth and leaving it before she can close it; and a shadow-seizing demoness who drags him down by his reflection, whom he kills.

He waits for nightfall and enters Laṅkā shrunk to the size of a cat, striking down the city's guardian goddess at the gate. The book then takes its time over a sleeping city of astonishing wealth — terraces, lamps, music, sleeping women, Rāvaṇa's own bedchamber and his queen Mandodarī, whom Hanumān takes for Sītā for a moment out of sheer hope. He searches and does not find, and comes close to despair, and reasons his way out of it: despair is the one thing that guarantees failure, and failure has no acceptable outcome for anyone.

At last he comes to the aśoka grove and sees, under a tree, a thin woman in a single soiled garment sitting on bare ground with rākṣasī guards around her. He hides in the branches. Rāvaṇa comes and threatens her with a two-month deadline; she answers him without hesitation, keeping a blade of grass between them, and tells him what will happen to him. When he has gone the guards abuse her, and she considers hanging herself with her own hair. One of them, Trijaṭā, stops them by reporting a dream in which Rāvaṇa fell.

Hanumān, alone with her at last, drops Rāma's signet ring where she can see it and begins to recite Rāma's story from the branches — the only way to identify himself to a woman who has just been deceived by a shape-shifter. She is slow to believe him and he does not hurry her. She gives him her hair-jewel and a token that only her husband could know, a private incident with a crow at Citrakūṭa, and refuses to be carried out on his back: she will not be taken from Rāvaṇa by stealth, because it is Rāma's business to win her, and because she will not willingly touch another man.

Hanumān then destroys the grove deliberately in order to be caught, kills the guards and the princes sent against him, and allows Indrajit's weapon to bind him. Brought before Rāvaṇa, he speaks as an envoy — states whose messenger he is, delivers the terms, and advises Rāvaṇa to give her back. Rāvaṇa orders him killed; Vibhīṣaṇa objects that an envoy may not be killed and that a king who kills one disgraces himself; and the compromise is to set his tail alight and parade him. Hanumān slips his bonds and carries the burning tail across the roofs, and Laṅkā burns. He recrosses the sea, and the book ends with the words the tradition loves best: I have seen her.

Why it stands alone

The Sundara Kāṇḍa is the only book of the epic regularly recited whole and by itself, in households and temples, often over a set number of days and often as a remedy for difficulty or fear. The reason usually given is that it is the one book in which nothing goes wrong: an impossible task is set, attempted and completed, by a servant, on behalf of an absent lord, with intelligence and without a single moral compromise. Hanumān never has to be argued with, never forgets an oath, and never does anything the poem has to excuse.

Its name has never been satisfactorily explained. The Beautiful Book — but of whom or of what the beauty is asserted, the tradition does not agree: Hanumān himself, who is called sundara in some readings; the city; Sītā; or the book's own poetry, which is denser and more lyrical than anything around it.