Khara and His Army Liquidated

Shūrpaṇakhā did not flee all the way to Lankā at first. She went to nearer kin, to her brothers Khara and Dūshaṇa, demon chieftains who held the forest country of the Daṇḍaka with a great host of rākshasas at their command, ruling that wild region in their brother Rāvaṇa’s name. To them she came, bleeding and shrieking, disfigured and mad with humiliation and rage, and she flung herself before them and demanded vengeance.

She told them what had happened, but she told it as fury tells things, twisted and inflamed, to kindle their anger to match her own. She spoke of the insult, the mockery, the mutilation. She may have said little of her own lust and her own attack on Sītā that had provoked the blade; the injured seldom dwell on their own share in their injuries.

She made it a matter of demon honour, of the family’s pride, of a rākshasī sister humiliated and disfigured by two human wanderers in the forest, and she demanded that her brothers avenge her, that they destroy these insolent humans and bring her the blood she thirsted for.

And Khara’s fury rose to meet hers. That his sister should be so treated, that two mere men should dare to disfigure a princess of the demon race in Khara’s own domain, was an insult he would answer in blood. He did not go himself at first; he sent a party of his warriors, fourteen of them, fierce rākshasas, to kill the humans and avenge his sister. And Rāma met them, and destroyed them, all fourteen, swiftly and utterly, so that not one returned.

And Shūrpaṇakhā, seeing even these champions fall, raged the more, and taunted her brother, and demanded that he take the field himself with his whole host.

So Khara mustered his army, and it was a mighty one: fourteen thousand rākshasas, a vast host of demon warriors, the whole strength of the Daṇḍaka’s dark power, and he led them out himself, with Dūshaṇa and his other captains, to fall upon Panchavaṭī and wipe out the two brothers and take their vengeance. Fourteen thousand demons marched against one man, for it would come to that, one man against fourteen thousand, and the story means us to feel the enormity of the odds.

For Rāma, seeing the vast host approaching, did a thing that shows both his prudence and his confidence. He would not risk Sītā in a battle of such scale, and he would keep Lakshmaṇa to guard her, and he would meet the demon army himself, alone. He sent Sītā, with Lakshmaṇa to protect her, into a hidden cave, safe away from the battle, and then he took his stand alone upon the field, one man, to face the fourteen thousand.

Let us hold that image, for it is one of the great images of the epic: Rāma standing alone, bow in hand, facing an entire army of demons pouring toward him across the forest, calm, unhurried, a single figure against a host, and utterly unafraid.

There is something almost beyond the human in it, and the story means there to be, for this is one of the moments when Rāma’s divinity shows through the human surface, when the man we have followed through grief and exile is revealed as something more, as a power against which even fourteen thousand demons are as nothing.

And the battle, when it came, was a thing of terrible splendour. The demon host fell upon him, and Rāma met them with his divine weapons, the astras he had received from Vishvāmitra long ago, and he loosed them into the oncoming army, and the arrows flew so fast and so many that the sky was darkened with them, and the demons fell in their hundreds and their thousands.

They came at him from every side, with every weapon and every dark art, and he stood and turned them all, an unbroken storm of arrows pouring from his single bow, and wherever the arrows fell the demons died. The forest was filled with the roar of it, the war-cries and the death-screams and the crash of the great trees as they fell, and through it all the single calm figure at the centre, loosing shaft after shaft, unhurried, unwearied, unstoppable.

Khara and Dūshaṇa hurled their whole strength against him, their champions, their sorceries, their vast numbers, and it availed them nothing. One by one the demon captains fell. Dūshaṇa fell.

The great host was scythed down like standing grain, fourteen thousand demons destroyed by one man in a single battle, until at last only Khara himself remained, and Khara too came against Rāma in his fury and his despair, and Khara too fell, and the whole army of the Daṇḍaka, the dark power that had terrorized the sages and heaped up their bones, lay dead upon the forest floor, destroyed utterly by the single bow of the exiled prince.

It was a staggering feat, and the story frames it as such, but we should not miss the deeper thing it accomplishes, which is not merely a display of power but the fulfillment of a vow. Remember what Rāma had sworn, at the mound of bones, to the terrified sages: that he would rid the forest of its demons, that he would protect the holy from the darkness that hunted them. Here, in the destruction of Khara’s host, that vow was made good on a massive scale.

The whole demon power of the Daṇḍaka, the very force that had made the forest a place of terror for the sages, was broken in a single day, and the hermits who had lived so long in dread could breathe at last, their tormentors destroyed, their protector’s promise kept.

The slaughter of the fourteen thousand was terrible, but it was the terror of a healing, the same hard arithmetic that had governed the killing of Tāṭakā long ago: that the protector must sometimes deal death on a great scale so that the innocent may live, and that the destruction of a great evil, however bloody, is finally a mercy to all it would have consumed.

And yet, and yet, we must hear beneath the triumph the note of dread that the story is sounding, for this victory, glorious as it is, is also the striking of the second stone in the avalanche. Shūrpaṇakhā’s injury was the first; the destruction of Khara’s army is the second; and each blow, struck in justice, draws the exiles deeper into the war they did not seek. For Shūrpaṇakhā, seeing even Khara and his fourteen thousand annihilated, seeing the whole nearer power of her family destroyed, did not give up her vengeance.

She fled now, at last, to the farthest and greatest of her kin, across the sea to Lankā itself, to lay her injury and her fury before the one being in all the world mighty enough to answer it: her brother Rāvaṇa, the ten-headed lord of all the demons, the terror of the three worlds. And what she would say to him, and how she would turn his mind toward Sītā, would set in motion the last and greatest movement of the tragedy, the abduction that would loose the war that would end the age.

Rāma had won his battle and kept his vow and cleared the forest of its terror. But in doing so he had drawn upon himself and upon Sītā the deadly attention of a power against which even his single overwhelming bow would need the help of armies, and the wilderness peace was gone forever, and the road now ran straight toward the abyss.