What happens
The army marches to the shore. In Laṅkā, Rāvaṇa calls a council, and his youngest brother Vibhīṣaṇa says in open court what none of the ministers will: that the war is unjust, that Sītā should be returned, and that the omens are against them. He is repudiated and leaves, crossing the water with four companions to ask asylum. Rāma's counsellors are divided — Sugrīva says plainly that he is an enemy's brother and should be killed — and Hanumān speaks for acceptance. Rāma grants it on the principle that a suppliant who comes saying he is yours is not to be given up, even if he comes with a fault, and has Vibhīṣaṇa consecrated king of Laṅkā on the spot, before the city is taken.
Rāma lies three days on the shore addressing the ocean, which does not answer; he takes up a weapon to dry it, and the ocean appears and offers passage, proposing that Nala, a son of the divine architect, can build on it. The causeway is built in five days and the host crosses.
The fighting is told at length. Rāvaṇa's champions come out and fall in order — Dhūmrākṣa, Vajradaṃṣṭra, Akampana, and Prahasta last of the four great generals. Indrajit, Rāvaṇa's son, fights from the air and unseen: he binds Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa with serpent-weapons, from which Garuḍa releases them, and later strikes Lakṣmaṇa down with a javelin. Hanumān is sent to the northern mountain for four healing herbs, cannot identify them when he arrives, and carries the whole peak back — and it is Hanumān, not Rāvaṇa, who carries the fallen Lakṣmaṇa out of the field, a detail popular retellings often reverse. Kumbhakarṇa is woken from his enormous sleep by an army of noise-makers, tells his brother to his face that the war is unjust and that flattery has ruined him, goes out anyway because he will not desert his house, and is killed. Indrajit is at last killed by Lakṣmaṇa, caught at a ritual he had left half-finished.
Rāvaṇa comes out himself. The duel is long, and Indra sends his own chariot and his charioteer Mātali so that Rāma is not fighting a chariot-warrior from the ground. Rāma kills him with the weapon of Brahmā. Vibhīṣaṇa at first refuses to perform his brother's funeral rites and is told by Rāma that enmity ends at death; Mandodarī laments over the body; the rites are done.
Then the poem turns cold. Sītā is brought before the assembled army, bathed and adorned, and Rāma tells her in public that he fought to wipe out an insult to his house and not for her sake, that no man of his family could take back a woman who has lived in another man's dwelling, and that she may go where she likes — to Lakṣmaṇa, to Bharata, to Sugrīva, to Vibhīṣaṇa. She answers him with anger and dignity, asks Lakṣmaṇa to build a pyre, and walks into it. Agni gives her back untouched; the gods appear, and Brahmā tells Rāma who he is; and Rāma says he knew, and that the ordeal was for the world's satisfaction and not his own. Daśaratha appears and blesses them. The fourteen years end to the day; the Puṣpaka carries them north; Bharata, who had vowed to enter fire if the day passed, returns the sandals; and Rāma is consecrated in Ayodhyā.
Reading the war
The Yuddha Kāṇḍa is often described as a war of eighteen days on the model of the Mahābhārata, but the Rāmāyaṇa gives no such count and no day-by-day frame. What it gives is a sequence of engagements, each with its champion, its reversal and its aftermath; nights pass and the text says so, but the reader is never handed a calendar. Treating the book as a numbered war imports a structure from the other epic.
The book is also careful to give the enemy a case, and to put the best arguments against the war into rākṣasa mouths. Vibhīṣaṇa says it is unjust before it starts. Kumbhakarṇa says so on his way out to die in it. Mandodarī says so over her husband's body, and adds that he was destroyed not by Rāma but by his own inability to be told anything. Rāvaṇa is not destroyed because he is evil in the abstract; he is destroyed because he took another man's wife and would not give her back when three members of his own family told him to.
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 building of the bridge — The building of the causeway to Laṅkā in the Rāmāyaṇa follows Rāma's three-day appeal to the ocean and its refusal, and takes the vānara army five days under the engineer Nala.
- Vibhīṣaṇa — Vibhīṣaṇa is Rāvaṇa's youngest brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, who told him in open council to return Sītā, was repudiated for it, defected to Rāma, and was crowned king of Laṅkā before the war began.
- Kumbhakarṇa — Kumbhakarṇa is Rāvaṇa's giant brother in the Rāmāyaṇa, cursed to sleep for half the year, who woke to tell his brother the war was unjust and then went out and fought it for him.
- Indrajit — Indrajit is Rāvaṇa's eldest son in the Rāmāyaṇa, who defeated Indra and took his name from it, fought the war from the air and unseen, and was killed by Lakṣmaṇa at an unfinished sacrifice.
- 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.
- The agni-parīkṣā — The agni-parīkṣā is the passage in the Rāmāyaṇa in which Rāma, after winning the war, repudiates Sītā before the army — and she calls for a pyre herself and walks into it.
- The sañjīvanī and the mountain — The sañjīvanī episode in the Rāmāyaṇa is Hanumān's flight to a mountain in the north for four healing herbs, and his return with the entire peak when he cannot tell which plants they are.
This entry was last revised on 1 August 2026.