Inviting Battle

His errand of finding was done, but Hanumān did not leave at once. He was, beneath his gentleness and his wisdom, a warrior, and a bold one, and he saw an opportunity that his bold heart could not let pass. He had found Sītā; he had comforted her; he had her token; he could have leapt back across the ocean that very hour with his news.

But he reasoned that there was more he could usefully do before he left, and the reasoning was sound: he could test the strength of Lankā, could provoke the demons into revealing their forces, could gauge the enemy Rāma’s army would have to face, and, not least, could strike a blow that would announce to Rāvaṇa, in a way that could not be ignored, that his golden city was no longer the untouchable fortress he imagined it to be.

So Hanumān, the gentle messenger, became Hanumān the destroyer, and he began by wrecking the very grove in which he stood. The Ashokavana was Rāvaṇa’s pleasure-garden, a place he cherished, and Hanumān, grown great again, tore through it, uprooting its trees, smashing its pavilions, ruining its beauty, laying waste the demon king’s beloved garden in a storm of destruction, sparing only the one tree beneath which Sītā sat, and the ground immediately around her, so that she should not be harmed or frightened by the havoc.

He made of the lovely grove a wreckage, deliberately, as a challenge, as a declaration, as a way of forcing the demons to come out and fight and so reveal themselves.

And come out they did. The demon guards, seeing their king’s garden being torn apart by a single monstrous vānara, raised the alarm, and the warriors of Lankā came pouring out to deal with the intruder, and Hanumān met them, and destroyed them. Wave after wave of demon warriors came against him, and he broke them, fighting with the uprooted trees and the pillars of the ruined pavilions and his own colossal strength, slaying the guards, scattering the soldiers, showing the whole city the terrible power of a single servant of Rāma.

The alarm mounted, and greater warriors were sent against him, and still Hanumān prevailed, and at last the demons brought word to Rāvaṇa himself that a mighty vānara had entered the city, found the captive, wrecked the royal garden, and was slaughtering the warriors sent against him. And Rāvaṇa, enraged and alarmed, sent out his own champions, his greatest fighters, and among them, at last, his own son.

For the fighting drew in Aksha, or Akshakumāra, one of Rāvaṇa’s sons, a prince of the demons, a warrior of great prowess, and he came against Hanumān with the full force of his royal strength, and the combat between them was fierce and worthy, for Aksha was no common soldier but a mighty demon prince. But Hanumān was more than a match for him. They fought, and Hanumān, for all the young demon’s valour, overpowered him and slew him, killing Rāvaṇa’s own son before the eyes of the horrified city.

The killing of Aksha was a grave blow and a grave provocation, and the story means us to feel its weight, for now Hanumān had not merely wrecked a garden and slain some guards; he had killed a prince, a son of Rāvaṇa himself, and the war that was coming had drawn its first royal blood, and drawn it in the very heart of Lankā, by a single intruder.

It was a demonstration of power that shook the whole city: that one servant of Rāma, sent merely to find the captive, could enter the impregnable fortress, wreck the royal garden, slaughter the warriors, and slay a prince of the blood, and still stand unconquered in the midst of the enemy’s capital. If a single messenger could do this, the demons must have begun to wonder, with a cold dread, what the master of such a servant, and the army of such servants, would do when they came.

Let us mark what Hanumān was doing here, for it was deliberate and it was strategic, and it shows a side of him beyond the gentle devotee. He was, in effect, delivering a message written in destruction: a message to Rāvaṇa and to all Lankā that their city was not safe, that their power was not invincible, that the force which had produced this single overwhelming warrior was coming, and that the golden fortress they had thought impregnable had been entered and wrecked and bloodied by one being alone.

It was psychological warfare of the boldest kind, meant to sow dread in the enemy, to shake their confidence, to make them fear what was coming; and it was reconnaissance, too, for by provoking the demons into battle Hanumān learned their strength, tested their warriors, gauged the forces Rāma’s army would face.

The wrecking of the grove and the slaying of Aksha were not mere destruction; they were a message and an assessment both, the work of a warrior who was also a strategist, using his own single overwhelming power to prepare the ground for the war to come.

But Hanumān had provoked the whole strength of Lankā now, and the demons, having lost a prince, would send against him a warrior greater than any yet, the mightiest of all Rāvaṇa’s sons, the one champion whose power might match even the son of the wind. For Rāvaṇa, hearing that Aksha was slain and the city in uproar, turned at last to his greatest son, the terror of the gods, the wielder of the most fearsome weapons in all the demon armoury, and sent him out to take or kill the intruder.

And against this one, Hanumān would face a truly formidable foe, and would meet, at last, a weapon he chose not to resist.