The Giant is Roused

Rāvaṇa had a brother greater in size and strength than any being in Lankā, a giant among the demons, and his name was Kumbhakarṇa, and he lay sleeping, for a strange fate governed his life, and the rousing of him is one of the most vivid and, in its way, most poignant episodes of the war.

Kumbhakarṇa was a giant of colossal size and matching strength, a demon so mighty that he might have conquered the worlds himself; but he lay under a curious doom, the fruit of an old boon gone awry. In seeking a great boon in his youth, his tongue or his fate had twisted the asking, so that instead of the eternal power he sought he was granted eternal sleep, or a sleep so long and so deep that he woke only for a single day out of many months, gorged himself, and slept again.

And so this mightiest of the demons passed his life in a monstrous slumber, waking rarely, a terrible weapon held in reserve, to be roused only in the direst need.

And the need was direst now, for Rāvaṇa himself had been defeated and spared, his sorceries undone, his own might overthrown; and so the order was given to wake Kumbhakarṇa, and the waking of him is rendered by the tellers with a kind of grim comedy, for it was no easy thing to rouse a giant from so deep a sleep.

They came in their multitudes to wake him, and they used every means: they shouted in his ears with the noise of thousands; they beat drums and blew conches; they heaped mountains of food before him, for the smell of food might stir him; they had elephants trample upon his body; they struck him and pricked him and roared at him; and for a long while the giant slept on, insensible to all of it, the mountains of food and the trampling elephants and the shouting hosts unable to pierce his enormous slumber.

At last, by the sheer accumulated force of all these means together, the giant stirred, and woke, and rose, and the waking of that colossus was like the rousing of a mountain, terrible to behold.

And Kumbhakarṇa, roused, first fed, for his hunger after his long sleep was as colossal as himself, and he consumed the mountains of food and drink prepared for him; and then, his hunger satisfied, he was brought before Rāvaṇa to be told why he had been waked and what was required of him.

And here the episode turns from grim comedy to something deeper and more poignant, for Kumbhakarṇa, though a demon and a giant and a terror, was not a fool, and when he heard the cause of the war, he spoke to his brother with a bluntness and a wisdom that the flatterers of the court had never dared. You have done wrong, brother, Kumbhakarṇa told Rāvaṇa plainly.

You have stolen another man’s wife, a woman of virtue, and brought this war upon us for the sake of your lust, and you were warned, and you would not hear, and now the doom the wise foretold is upon us. This war is the fruit of your folly and your crime, and it was a crime, and I will not pretend otherwise. You have acted wrongly, and wickedly, and against all dharma, and you have brought this ruin upon yourself and upon us all.

He reproached his brother to his face, naming the wrong, refusing to flatter, speaking the truth that Rāvaṇa had refused to hear from all the wise counsellors of his court, the plain hard truth that the whole catastrophe was Rāvaṇa’s own crime come home.

And then, having spoken the truth, Kumbhakarṇa did a thing that is the poignant heart of his story: having condemned the wrong, he went out to fight and die for it anyway, out of loyalty to his brother. For I am your brother, he said, and though you have done wrong, and though this war is unjust and lost, yet I am bound to you by blood and by loyalty, and I will not desert you in your hour of ruin. You have doomed us, but I will not abandon you to face the doom alone.

I will go out and fight, and I will die, for I know that this war is lost and that Rāma cannot be defeated; but I will die at my brother’s side, in my brother’s cause, however wrong that cause may be, because loyalty binds me and I will not break it even to save my life. And so Kumbhakarṇa, having named the war a crime and a folly and a certain defeat, took up his weapons and went out to fight in it, knowingly, to a death he foresaw, for the sake of a brother he could not approve and would not abandon.

Let us weigh the tragedy of Kumbhakarṇa, for the tellers draw him with real sympathy, and his case raises a hard question that the story means us to feel. Here is a being who saw the truth clearly, who named the wrong plainly, who knew the war was unjust and lost, and who went out to fight and die in it anyway, out of loyalty to his brother. Was he right?

There is something noble in his loyalty, in his refusal to abandon his brother in the hour of ruin, in his willingness to die at his brother’s side; and yet the cause was unjust, and Kumbhakarṇa knew it, and his loyalty led him to spend his life and his enormous strength in the service of a wrong he had himself condemned.

His story is the tragic counterpart to Vibhīshaṇa’s: for both brothers saw the same truth, that Rāvaṇa was wrong and the war lost; but Vibhīshaṇa followed the truth and left, choosing dharma over blood, while Kumbhakarṇa followed his loyalty and stayed, choosing blood over dharma, and died for it.

The story sets the two choices side by side and does not entirely resolve which was right, for there is a real good in each, in Vibhīshaṇa’s fidelity to dharma and in Kumbhakarṇa’s fidelity to his brother; but it lets us feel the tragedy of Kumbhakarṇa, the good giant who spent his greatness in a bad cause out of a loyalty that was itself a kind of virtue, and who died knowing his cause was wrong and dying for it all the same.

And die he did, but not before a terrible slaughter, for Kumbhakarṇa in battle was a horror beyond anything the vānaras had faced, a colossus who waded through the army devouring vānaras by the handful, crushing them underfoot, scattering whole hosts, an engine of destruction so vast and so mighty that it seemed nothing could stand against him.

He raged through the battle, and the vānaras fell before him in multitudes, and even the greatest of the leaders could not stop him, and for a while it seemed that this last terrible weapon of Rāvaṇa’s might turn the tide of the whole war by sheer devouring strength. The giant was a catastrophe loosed upon the field, and the slaughter he worked was immense, and the host reeled before him.

But even Kumbhakarṇa, mightiest of the demons, could not stand against Rāma, and it was Rāma who met him at last, and Rāma who brought him down.

The two of them clashed, the colossus and the champion of dharma, and Rāma, with his divine weapons, withstood the giant’s terrible assault and struck back, and at last, with the mightiest of his shafts, Rāma cut the giant down, felling the colossus, ending the rampage, sending Kumbhakarṇa crashing to the earth in death, the last and greatest of Rāvaṇa’s champions before Indrajit fallen, the terrible weapon spent, the giant who had condemned the war and died in it laid low at last by the champion of the cause he had known was just.

And Rāvaṇa, hearing that even Kumbhakarṇa was slain, that even his giant brother had fallen to Rāma, was plunged into a grief and a dread deeper than any yet, for the doom was closing upon him now, champion after champion falling, and the end drawing near.

Is this Nārāyaṇa Himself?

The fall of Kumbhakarṇa broke something in Lankā, and the war entered its last and most desperate phase, and this chapter belongs to the slow dawning, among the demons themselves, of a terrible suspicion about the true nature of the enemy they fought.

Rāvaṇa’s grief for his giant brother was immense, and it was followed swiftly by more grief, for the champions of Lankā now fell one after another before the assault of Rāma’s host. The secondary commanders, the lesser sons and kinsmen of Rāvaṇa, the captains and the heroes of the demon race, came out in their turn and fought and fell.

Among them were sons of Rāvaṇa himself, princes of Lankā, who came against the vānara leaders and against Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, and were slain; and with each fall, the strength of Lankā was further diminished, and the grief and the dread in the city deepened, and the sense grew that the doom was closing in, champion after champion going out to fight and not returning, the great house of the demons being emptied of its warriors one by one.

The tellers pass over the details of these many combats, for they are many, and the pattern of them is one: the demon champion comes out in his might, fights terribly, and falls at last before the superior power of Rāma’s cause. What the tellers dwell on instead is the change that these deaths worked in the minds of the demons, the slow, cold, dawning realization of what they were truly facing, and it is this realization that gives the chapter its name and its meaning.

For the demons had gone into the war believing they fought a man, a mere human prince, however gifted, at the head of an army of beasts. That was how Rāvaṇa had spoken of Rāma; that was how the boasters of the council had dismissed him; that was the contempt with which Lankā had first regarded the enemy.

But as the war went on, as champion after champion fell, as the mightiest weapons and the deepest sorceries failed, as even Kumbhakarṇa the colossus was brought down, as Rāma withstood everything the demon race could hurl against him and could not be defeated by any means, a different understanding began to dawn, cold and terrible, among the wiser and the older of the demons: that this was no mere man they fought.

For consider what they had seen. A single servant of Rāma had burned their city. The serpent-darts of Indrajit, the deadliest sorcery, had been undone by a power from the sky. Rāvaṇa himself, the conqueror of the gods, had been defeated and spared. Kumbhakarṇa the giant had fallen. Weapon after weapon, champion after champion, sorcery after sorcery, had been spent against Rāma and had failed, and Rāma stood undefeated, undefeatable, withstanding all the massed might of the demon race as the shore withstands the sea.

And slowly, watching this, the demons began to whisper among themselves the suspicion that their pride had refused to entertain: that Rāma was more than a man; that no mere mortal could do what he was doing; that the being who withstood the whole power of Lankā and could not be overcome must be something greater, something divine; that they were fighting, perhaps, not a man at all, but a god in human form, the Supreme Lord himself, Nārāyaṇa, descended into the world for their destruction.

Is this Nārāyaṇa himself? The question spread through Lankā in fearful whispers, the dawning suspicion of the doomed that they had lifted their hands not against a man but against the Lord of all the worlds, that the enemy at their gates was the very power that upholds and destroys the universe, come in human shape to end their evil reign.

And with the suspicion came a dread deeper than any fear of mere defeat, for to be defeated by a man is one thing, but to have set oneself against God himself, to have stolen the wife of the Lord of the worlds and made war upon him, was a horror that turned the demons’ hearts to water, a recognition of a doom not merely military but cosmic, the doom of those who have blindly warred against the divine.

Let us mark the deep irony and the deep justice in this dawning recognition, for the tellers weight it heavily. Rāvaṇa had scorned to guard himself against men, in his pride, holding men too far beneath him to matter, asking protection against gods and demons but not against mere mortals; and it was precisely a man, or one in the form of a man, who was now destroying him, for the divine had chosen exactly the form that Rāvaṇa’s pride had left him vulnerable to.

The whole of the story’s theology is present in this irony: that the Supreme Lord, to destroy the demon who had made himself invulnerable to gods, took the one form the demon had despised and left himself open to, the human form, and came as a man, and by coming as a man slipped through the very gap that the demon’s pride had opened in his own defences. Rāvaṇa’s contempt for humanity was the chink in his armour, and the divine came precisely through that chink, in human shape, to accomplish the doom that the demon’s pride had made possible.

And now, too late, the demons began to see it, to understand that the man they had despised was the God they could not defeat, that their contempt for the human form had blinded them to the divine that wore it, and that they had warred, all unknowing, against the very Lord of the worlds.

This recognition, dawning among the demons even as they fought and fell, gives the last phase of the war its peculiar character, for it is a war fought now by the doomed against a foe they have begun to know is divine, a hopeless resistance continued out of pride and loyalty and desperation against an enemy recognized, too late, as God himself.

The demons who now came out to fight came out, many of them, knowing in their hearts that they could not win, that they fought the Supreme Lord, that their cause was doomed; and they came out anyway, out of loyalty to Rāvaṇa, out of the momentum of a war too far advanced to stop, out of the demon’s pride that would not surrender even to God; and they fell, one after another, into the doom they had begun to foresee.

And the recognition points forward, too, to the great confrontations still to come, to the death of Indrajit and the final duel with Rāvaṇa, in which the divine nature of Rāma, dawning now as a suspicion, would be made manifest in full, as the champion of dharma accomplished the doom for which he had descended into the world. The demons had begun to ask, Is this Nārāyaṇa himself?

and the answer, which the whole story has known from the beginning, was yes; and the last chapters of the war would be the working-out of that answer, the Supreme Lord in human form bringing to its appointed end the evil that he had come into the world to destroy.