Entering the forest of Dandhaka the exiles encountered a huge, terrible and misshapen monster, besmeared with fat and covered with blood, who was roaring horribly with his widely distended mouth, while with his single spear he held transfixed before him quite a menagerie of lions, tigers, leopards and other wild animals. This awful being rushed towards the trio, and, quick as thought, snatched up the gentle Vaidehi in his arms, bellowing out “I am a Rakshasa, Viradha by name. This forest is my fortress. Accoutred in arms I range (here), feeding on the flesh of ascetics. This transcendantly beauteous one shall be my wife. And in battle I shall drink your blood, wretches that ye are.” At this juncture, Rama, as on some other trying occasions, gave way to unseasonable lamentations and tears; but Lakshmana, always practical, bravely recalled him to the necessity of immediate action. The Rakshasa, having ascertained who his opponents were, vauntingly assured them that, having gratified Brahma by his asceticism, he had obtained this boon from him, that no one in the world could slay him with weapons; and he mockingly advised the princes to renounce Sita and go their way. But Rama’s wrath was now kindled, and he began a vigorous attack upon the monster, piercing him with many arrows. A short, though fierce, combat ensued, the result being that the Rakshasa seized and carried off both Rama and Lakshmana on his ample shoulders. His victory now seemed complete, and Sita,—who had apparently been dropped during the combat,—dreading to be left alone in the terrible wilderness, piteously implored the monster (whom she insinuatingly addressed as the “best of Rakshasas”) to take her and to release the noble princes. The sound of her dear voice acted like a charm upon the brothers, and, with a vigorous and simultaneous effort, they broke both the monster’s arms at once, and then attacked him with their fists. They brought him to the ground exhausted, and Rama, planting his foot upon the throat of his prostrate foe, directed Lakshmana to dig a deep pit for his reception, and when it was ready, they flung him into it. The dying monster, thus overcome, though not with weapons, explained that he had been imprisoned in that dreadful form of his by the curse of a famous ascetic, and was destined to be freed from it only by the hand of Rama. With this explanation the spirit of the departed Viradha passed into the celestial regions.
Rama, with his wife and brother, now sought the hermitage of the sage Sarabhanga, and on approaching it, a strange, unexpected and imposing sight presented itself to Rama’s view:—Indra, attended by his court, in conversation with the forest sage! The god of heaven, in clean apparel and adorned with celestial jewels, was seated in a wondrous car drawn by green horses up in the sky. Over him was expanded a spotless umbrella, and two lovely damsels waved gold-handled chowrees above his head. About him were bands of resplendent celestials hymning his praises.
At Rama’s approach the god withdrew and the sage advised the prince to seek the guidance of another ascetic named Sutikshna, adding, “This is thy course, thou best of men. Do thou now, my child, for a space look at me while I leave off my limbs, even as a serpent renounces its slough.” Then kindling a sacrificial fire, and making oblations to it with the appropriate mantras, Sarabhanga entered the flames himself. The fire consumed his old decrepit body, and he was gradually transformed, in the midst of the flames, into a splendid youth of dazzling brightness, and, mounting upwards, ascended to the heaven of Brahma. After Sarabhanga had left the earth in this striking manner, bands of ascetics waited on Rama, reminded him of his duty as a king, and solicited his protection against the Rakshasas. As Rama and his companions wandered on through the forests another wonder soon engaged their attention. Sweet music reached them from beneath the waters of a charming lake covered with lotuses, and on inquiring about the strange phenomenon, a hermit told them that a great ascetic had formed that lake. By his fierce austerities, extending over ten thousand years, he had acquired such a store of merit that the gods, with Agni at their head, began to fear that he desired a position of equality with themselves. To lure him away from such ideas they sent him five lovely Apsaras to try the power of their charms upon him. Sage though he was, he succumbed to their allurements, and now, weaned from his old ambitions, he passed his time in youth and happiness—the reward of his austerities and yoga practices—in the company of the seductive sirens whose sweet voices, blending with the tinklings of their instruments, came softly to the ears of the wandering princes.
Sita, who had confidently followed her husband, like his very shadow, through all these adventurous years in the forest, seems at length to have been somewhat shaken by the very risky encounter with Viradha, of which she had been an unwilling and terrified eye-witness, in which her own person had been the object of contention, and which had threatened, at one critical moment, to end very tragically for her and her loved ones. Under the influence of these recent and impressive experiences, Sita ventured, in her gentle, womanly way, to suggest to her husband the advisability of avoiding all semblance of hostility towards the Rakshasas. There were, she timidly assured her husband, three sins to which desire gave rise: untruthfulness, the coveting of other men’s wives, and the wish to indulge in unnecessary hostilities. Of untruthfulness, and of allowing his thoughts to stray towards other women, Sita unhesitatingly exonerated her lord; but she artfully insinuated that, in his dealings with the Rakshasas, he was giving way to the sin of provoking hostilities without adequate cause, and she advised his laying aside his arms during his wanderings in the forest; since the mere carrying of bows and arrows was enough to kindle the wish to use them. To give point to this contention, Vaidehi related how, in the olden time, there lived in the woods a truthful ascetic whose incessant austerities Indra desired, for some reason or other, to frustrate. For the attainment of his end the king of heaven visited the hermit in the guise of a warrior, and left his sword with him as a trust. Scrupulously regardful of his obligation to his visitor, the ascetic carried the sword with him wherever duty or necessity directed his footsteps, till constant association with the weapon began to engender fierce sentiments, leading eventually to the spiritual downfall of the poor ascetic, whose ultimate portion was hell. Rama received Sita’s advice in the loving spirit in which it was offered, and thanking her for it, explained that it was his duty to protect the saints from the oppression of the evil Rakshasas, and that Kshatriyas carried bows in order that the word “distressed” might not be known on this earth.
Several years of exile slipped away, not unpleasantly, in the shady forests through which the royal brothers roamed from hermitage to hermitage, always accompanied by the lovely and faithful Sita, whose part throughout is one of affectionate, unfaltering and unselfish devotion to her husband. On the banks of the Godavari, Lakshmana, who has to do all the hard work for the party, built them a spacious hut of clay, leaves and bamboos, propped with pillars and furnished with a fine level floor, and there they lived happily near the rushing river. At length the brothers got involved in a contest with a brood of giants who roved about the woods of Dandhaka, delighting, as usual, in the flesh of hermits and the interruption of sacred rites. This time it was a woman who was at the bottom of their troubles. Surpanakha, an ugly giantess and sister of Ravana, charmed with the beauty and grace of Rama, came to him, and, madly in love, offered to be his wife. But Rama in flattering terms put her off, saying he was already married. In sport, apparently, he bid her try her luck with Lakshmana. She took his advice, but Lakshmana does not seem to have been tempted by the offer, and, while artfully addressing her as “supremely charming and superbly beautiful lady,” advised her to become the younger wife of Rama, to whom he referred her again. Enraged by this double rejection, the giantess attempted to kill Sita, as the hated obstacle to the fulfilment of her desires. The brothers, of course, interposed, and Lakshmana, always impetuous, punished the monster by cutting off her nose. Surpanakha fled away to her brother Khara, and roused the giant Rakshasas to avenge her wounds. These terrible giants possessed the power of changing their forms at will; but their numbers and their prowess were alike of little avail against the valour and skill of Rama, who, alone and unaided,—for he sent Lakshmana away with Sita into an inaccessible cave,—destroyed fourteen thousand of them in a single day. The combat, which was witnessed by the gods and Gandharvas, Siddhas and Charanas, is described at great length, and the narrative is copiously interspersed with the boastful speeches of the rival chiefs. In the bewildering conflict of that day his fourteen thousand assailants poured upon Rama showers of arrows, rocks, and trees. Coming to close quarters they attacked him vigorously with clubs, darts, and nooses. Although hard pressed and sorely wounded, the hero maintained the conflict with undaunted courage, sending such thousands of wonderful arrows from his bow that the sun was darkened and the missiles of his enemies warded off by them. Finally Rama succeeded in laying dead upon that awful field of carnage nearly the entire number of his fierce assailants. Khara, the leader of the opposing host, a worthy adversary and possessed of wondrous weapons, still lived. Enraged at, but undaunted by, the wholesale destruction of his followers, Khara boldly continued the fight. In his war-chariot, bright as the sun, he seemed to be the Destroyer himself, as he fiercely assailed the victorious Rama. With one arrow he severed the hero’s bow in his hand; with seven other shafts like thunder-bolts he severed his armour joints, so that the glittering mail fell from his body. He next wounded the prince with a thousand darts. Not yet overcome, however, Rama strung another bow, the mighty bow of Vishnu, and discharging shafts with golden feathers, brought Khara’s standard to the ground. Transported with wrath at this ill-omened event, Khara poured five arrows into Rama’s bosom. The prince responded with six terrible bolts, some of them crescent-headed. One struck the chief in the head, two of the others entered his arms, and the remaining three his chest. Following these up with thirteen of the same kind, Rama destroyed his enemy’s chariot, killed his horses, decapitated his charioteer, and shattered his bow in his grasp. Khara jumped to the ground armed with a mace, ready to renew the conflict. At this juncture Rama paused a moment to read the Rakshasa a homily on his evil doings; the latter replied with fierce boasts, and hurled his mace at Rama, who cut it into two fragments with his arrows as it sped through the air. Khara now uprooted a lofty tree and hurled it at his foe; but, as before, Rama cut it into pieces with his arrow ere it reached him, and with a shaft resembling fire put a period to the life of the gallant Rakshasa. At this conclusion of the conflict the celestials sounded their kettle-drums, and showered down flowers upon the victorious son of Dasahratha. Thus perished the Rakshasa army and its mighty leader:
“But of the host of giants one,
Akampan, from the field had run,
And sped to Lanka to relate
In Ravana’s ear the demon’s fate.”
—Griffith.
This fugitive made his way to the court of Ravana, the king of the giants, and related to him the sad fate of his followers. Close on the heels of Akampan came Surpanakha herself, with her cruelly mutilated face. Transported with rage at the destruction of his armies and at sight of the disfigured countenance of his sister, the terrible Rakshasa chief vowed vengeance on Rama and Lakshmana. But the necessity for great caution in dealing with such valorous foes was apparent, and Ravana did not seem over-anxious to leave his comfortable capital, Lanka, in order to seek out the formidable brothers in the woods of Dandhaka. But Surpanakha, scorned and mutilated, was thirsting for an early and bitter revenge. Reproaching her brother for his unkingly supineness, she artfully gave him a description of Sita’s beauty, far superior to that of any goddess, which served to kindle unlawful desires in his heart. She referred to Vaidehi’s golden complexion, her moon-like face, her lotus eyes, her slender waist, her taper fingers, her swelling bosom, her ample hips and lovely thighs, till the giant was only too willing to assent to her suggestion, that the most effectual and agreeable revenge he could take for the destruction of his hosts, and the cruel insults to his sister, would be to carry off the fair Sita, by stratagem, from the arms of her devoted husband, and thus add the lovely daughter of Janaka to the number, not very small, of the beauties who adorned his palace at Lanka. We shall presently see that the plot was ingeniously contrived and too successfully carried out.
How conveniently the race of Rakshasas could assume at will the forms in which they chose to appear, we know already. Taking advantage of this faculty of metamorphosis, a Rakshasa named Maricha, in obedience to Ravana’s orders, showed himself near Rama’s hermitage, in the shape of a wonderful golden deer, spotted with silver, having horns resembling jewels, a belly like a sapphire, and sides like madbuka flowers. The strange creature captivated the fancy of Sita, and she was so eager to possess it, alive or dead, that Rama was induced to go in pursuit of it. Suspecting mischief from this unusual appearance, Rama left his brother with Sita, commanding him on no account to quit her side until he returned from his pursuit of the jewelled deer. The chase led him to a considerable distance from the hermitage. Weary of his endeavours to secure the deer, Rama grew angry, and, with one of his flaming arrows, pierced it in the breast. It bounded off the ground to the height of a palm tree and, in the act of dying, began to cry, exactly in the voice of Rama, “Ah! Sita; Ah! Lakshmana.” The words reached the hermitage, as they were intended to do, and Sita, in an agony of terror, implored Lakshmana to go to the aid of his brother, who seemed to be in some dire trouble. Lakshmana, however, protested that it was all illusion, and refused to believe that Rama could be in any real danger; for, as he assured the trembling wife, “even the Almighty Himself with the celestials and the three worlds cannot defeat him” (Dutt, 609). But Vaidehi took another view of the matter, and turning sharply upon her brother-in-law accused him roundly of desiring the destruction of Rama in order that he might gratify an improper wish to possess her himself. This, indeed, she said, must have been the reason that brought him all the way from Ayodhya. What, if any, grounds the charming lady may have had for this accusation does not appear. They could have been known only to herself and to Lakshmana, who, with joined hands, humbly reproached her for her cruel words, and bending low before her went off, with a heavy heart, in search of his brother.
In a garment (probably a saree) of yellow silk, Sita sat alone at the door of her thatched cottage, weeping bitterly, when Ravana presented himself before her, in the guise of a pious medicant. Ravished by her beauty, this pious medicant began, without ceremony, to praise the various charms of Sita’s person with the most reprehensible license of detail. Nor did he stop there, but telling her that she had carried away his heart, as a stream carries away its banks, invited her to accompany him out of the gloomy forest, tenanted by Rakshasas and wild beasts, and quite unfit for the abode of a goddess like herself.