Lankā in Flames

The demons wrapped Hanumān’s tail in oil-soaked rags, and the tellers say that the more they wrapped, the more Hanumān let his tail grow, lengthening it by his own power so that they had to use more and more cloth and more and more oil, until an enormous length of his tail was bound in fuel; and then they set it alight, and led him, tail blazing, through the streets of Lankā to be paraded and mocked before the whole city.

But before the fire could touch him or pain him, a wonder preserved him, and it came through Sītā. For word of Hanumān’s capture and punishment had reached the Ashokavana, and Sītā, hearing that the faithful messenger who had brought her Rāma’s ring and her first hope was being led with his tail afire through the city, was stricken with grief and fear for him, and she prayed.

She prayed to Agni, the god of fire himself, with all the force of her fidelity and her virtue, that the fire should not burn Hanumān, that it should be cool to him, that the flames should spare the servant who had served her Lord so faithfully. And such was the power of Sītā’s virtue, of her unbroken chastity and devotion, that the fire-god heard her, and the fire on Hanumān’s tail, though it blazed and burned, gave him no pain and did him no harm; it was cool to him, harmless, for the prayer of so pure a soul had power even over fire.

Hanumān felt the flames and knew that they did not burn him, and understood that some grace protected him, and his heart was glad.

And then Hanumān turned the punishment against those who had inflicted it, and here the story reaches one of its most spectacular and satisfying moments. His tail was ablaze, but the fire could not hurt him; he was bound, but his bonds were only ordinary ropes that his strength could break at will; and he was in the midst of the golden city of his enemy, a city of gold and wood, dry and rich and ready to burn. Hanumān saw his opportunity, and he took it.

He broke his bonds, snapping the ropes as though they were threads, and he grew, swelling to a colossal size, and with his blazing tail he became a moving torch, a living instrument of fire loosed in the heart of a burnable city.

And he set Lankā ablaze. Leaping from rooftop to rooftop, from palace to palace, dragging his burning tail across the golden city, Hanumān set fire to Lankā, and the flames leapt up and spread and roared, catching the wooden mansions, the gilded pavilions, the great halls, the whole splendid fabric of the demon capital, until the golden city that Rāvaṇa had thought impregnable was a sea of flame, burning, collapsing, its splendour turned to roaring fire and rising smoke.

Hanumān raced across the burning city, spreading the conflagration, and Lankā, the golden fortress, the seat of the demon power, the city that had never feared any enemy, burned from end to end in a single night at the hands of a single servant of Rāma.

Let us understand the full meaning of this burning, for it is not mere destruction, and the tellers weight it with significance. It was, first, the fulfillment of prophecy, for Trijaṭā had dreamed of Lankā in flames, and here the dream came true, the golden city burning exactly as the omen had foretold, the first great sign of the doom that was coming upon Rāvaṇa and all his kind.

It was, second, the completion of Hanumān’s message written in destruction, for now Rāvaṇa and all Lankā had seen, beyond any possibility of doubt, what a single servant of Rāma could do: not merely wreck a garden or slay a prince, but burn their whole city to the ground. If one envoy could do this, what would the master and his army do? The burning was the ultimate demonstration, the final terrible warning, the proof written in fire across the whole city that Lankā’s doom was certain and coming.

And it was, third, a kind of justice, the beginning of the repayment of all the wrongs that Lankā had done, the first installment of the destruction that Rāvaṇa had called down upon himself by his crime, the golden city beginning to pay, in fire, for the queen it held captive in its garden.

There is a grim irony in it that the tellers savour, and that we should savour too: that Rāvaṇa himself set this fire loose. It was his own vengeful, mocking punishment, the burning of the envoy’s tail, that put the fire into Hanumān’s possession and gave him the means to burn the city. Had Rāvaṇa simply killed Hanumān, or imprisoned him, or sent him away, Lankā would not have burned that night.

But his pride demanded not merely to be rid of the insolent envoy but to humiliate him, to mock him, to send him home disgraced with his tail afire, and that vengeful excess, that need to humiliate rather than simply to punish, was exactly the thing that armed Hanumān with fire in the heart of the burnable city. Rāvaṇa’s own cruelty, his own vindictive pride, loosed the flames that consumed his capital.

It is the pattern of the whole story of Rāvaṇa: that his own ungoverned passions, his lust, his pride, his vindictive cruelty, are the true authors of his ruin, that he destroys himself by his own excesses, that every cruelty he commits comes home to him magnified. He set a tail afire to mock an envoy, and burned his own golden city to the ground.

Amid the burning, Hanumān felt a sudden stab of fear, for he remembered Sītā, and dreaded that the fire he had loosed might spread to the Ashokavana and harm her. But he was reassured, whether by report or by his own reasoning or by a sign, that Sītā was safe, that the grove where she sat was spared, that the fire which he had loosed and which Sītā’s own prayer had made harmless to him had not touched the captive queen.

And so, his work done, the city ablaze behind him, the warning delivered in fire, his errand complete beyond anything that had been asked of him, Hanumān quenched the fire of his tail in the sea, and prepared to make the great leap back across the ocean, to carry to Rāma the news that would end his grief and set the army in motion: that Sītā was found, that she lived and kept faith, that she waited, and that Lankā, for all its golden might, could be entered and wrecked and burned, and would fall.