Hanumān Bound

They brought Hanumān bound into the great assembly-hall of Rāvaṇa, and it was a place designed to overawe, and the tellers describe its terrible splendour, for Rāvaṇa’s court was among the wonders of the three worlds.

It blazed with gold and gems; its pillars rose vast and gleaming; its hall was thronged with the lords and warriors of the demon race, mighty and terrible in their arrayed power; and upon a throne that dwarfed all others sat Rāvaṇa himself, the ten-headed king, in the full majesty of his conquered worlds, magnificent and dreadful, the very image of sovereign power.

It was a court meant to make any captive tremble, any petitioner shrink, any enemy despair; and into it Hanumān was led, bound with ropes, a single vānara amid all that arrayed demon might.

And Hanumān did not tremble.

This is the thing the chapter turns upon: that Hanumān, bound and alone in the heart of the enemy’s power, surrounded by the whole arrayed might of the demon race, standing before the conqueror of gods, was not overawed in the least, but stood there in his spirit entirely free, unbowed, unafraid, and looked upon Rāvaṇa and all his splendour with a calm and even a contempt that the demon king’s whole terrible majesty could not touch.

His body was bound; his spirit was wholly free; and the freedom of his spirit in that place of overawing power is a kind of victory in itself, the victory of one who cannot be frightened by any display of might because his allegiance and his courage rest on something the enemy cannot reach.

Rāvaṇa demanded to know who he was and why he had come and dared to wreck the garden and slay the prince, and Hanumān answered, and his answer was bold beyond anything the court had ever heard addressed to their dread king. He declared himself the messenger of Rāma, and he delivered, there in the enemy’s own hall, before the whole assembled might of Lankā, a fierce and fearless warning and a demand.

I am the servant and envoy of Rāma, he told Rāvaṇa, prince of Ayodhyā, whose wife you have stolen by cowardly deceit, and I have come to find her, and I have found her, and I have seen what you have done, and I have come also to give you this warning, which you would be wise to heed. Return Sītā to Rāma. Return her now, with honour and with apology, and beg his forgiveness, and you may yet save yourself and your city and your race from the destruction you have called down. For Rāma is coming.

He will cross your ocean; he will break your walls; he will destroy your armies and your champions and your sons; and he will kill you, Rāvaṇa, with all your ten heads, and lay your golden city in ash, unless you undo now, while there is still time, the crime you have committed. You have not captured a prize; you have embraced your doom.

I have shown you today, in the wrecking of your garden and the slaying of your son and the breaking of your warriors, what a single servant of Rāma can do; imagine, then, what Rāma himself will do, and his whole army, when they come. Return Sītā, and live; keep her, and die, you and all your kind. That is the message I bring, and I have delivered it, and you would be a fool not to heed it.

It was an astonishing speech to be made by a bound captive to the conqueror of the gods in the midst of his own court, and it enraged Rāvaṇa past bearing, for no one addressed the lord of Lankā so, and to be so defied, so warned, so threatened, by a bound vānara in his own hall, was an insult his pride could not endure. In his fury he ordered Hanumān put to death on the spot, commanded that the insolent envoy be executed at once for his effrontery.

But here another voice was raised, and it was the voice of one of the few righteous souls in that court, and his intervention matters, for it introduces a figure who will become important. Rāvaṇa had a brother, Vibhīshaṇa, and Vibhīshaṇa, alone among the great ones of Lankā, was a soul inclined to righteousness, one who had always counselled his brother toward justice and away from the crime of Sītā’s abduction, one whose heart was set on dharma even amid the demon race.

And Vibhīshaṇa now intervened to stop the execution, not out of love for Hanumān but out of respect for law and custom, for there was an ancient principle, honoured even among the demons, that an envoy, a messenger, was inviolable, that whatever his message and however offensive, a messenger must not be killed, for to kill the bearer of a message was a violation of the law of nations and a shameful act unworthy of a king. Do not kill him, brother, Vibhīshaṇa urged.

He is an envoy, a messenger, and it is against all law and all custom to slay a messenger, however bold his words. Punish him if you must, but do not stain your honour and violate the sacred law by putting an envoy to death. It is beneath you and it is forbidden.

And Rāvaṇa, though enraged, heard his righteous brother, and could not simply ignore so fundamental a law, and so he relented from the execution, but he would not let the insolent envoy go unpunished, and he devised instead a punishment that was meant to humiliate, and that would prove, by the story’s grim irony, to be the instrument of Lankā’s burning.

He would not kill the messenger; but a vānara, he knew, prized its tail, and so he ordered that Hanumān’s tail be wrapped in oil-soaked rags and set alight, and that the vānara be paraded so through the streets of the city with his tail burning, a humiliation, a mockery, a punishment meant to shame the bold envoy and send him home disgraced with his tail afire.

So the order was given, and the demons seized Hanumān to carry it out, wrapping his tail in cloth and oil to make of it a torch; and in that vengeful and mocking punishment, Rāvaṇa, without knowing it, was placing in Hanumān’s own possession the fire that would consume his golden city.