Chapter 23 — Shurpanakha

Panchavati had acquired the shape of a home: the leaf dwelling, the river path, Jatayu's watch above the trees. Into that ordered life came Shurpanakha. She was a rakshasi, a powerful nonhuman being able to change form, and sister to Ravana, Kumbhakarna, and Vibhishana. Khara and Dushana, who held the rakshasa country nearby, were her cousins. She had no history in the forest beyond those names. She was not a beautiful stranger come out of the trees: her appearance was altered and frightening, and she stood in it and looked at Rama, and desire seized her.

She asked who he was and why he had entered a forest ruled by rakshasas with a wife and weapons. Rama told her plainly: he was Dasharatha's eldest son; Sita was his wife; Lakshmana was his younger brother; they lived there to fulfill a parental command. Then he asked her name.

“I am Shurpanakha,” she said. “I go where I will. Ravana is my brother.” She named the others and proposed that Rama take her as his wife. Sita, she said, did not suit him. Shurpanakha could travel the whole forest with him.

Rama's first answer was a deflection. He said he was already married and pointed her toward Lakshmana, presenting his brother as unattached. Lakshmana sent her back with another deflection, saying that he was dependent upon Rama and that she should choose the elder. The exchange is uneasy from the start: it plays with Shurpanakha's desire, but it does not stay a game.

She turned on Sita. Calling her unworthy, Shurpanakha rushed forward to kill her and remove the woman she imagined as her rival. Rama stopped her and told Lakshmana that cruel people were not to be handled with such teasing when Sita's life was at risk. Lakshmana drew his sword and cut off Shurpanakha's nose and ears.

She fled bleeding into the forest and fell before Khara at Janasthana, the nearby rakshasa stronghold. Her report joined injury, rage, and accusation. Khara demanded the names of the men who had done this, boasting that no being short of the great gods could affront him. He sent fourteen armed rakshasas with her.

At the leaf house, Rama told Lakshmana to stay close to Sita while he met the attackers. He warned them to turn back. They answered with threats and charged. Rama cut their weapons from the air and struck each one down. Shurpanakha, who had expected a rescue, returned alone to Khara.

This time Khara called Dushana, his commander, and assembled the larger force at Janasthana. Among its principal champions was Trishiras—“Three-Headed”—a formidable rakshasa warrior who fought beside Khara and Dushana. The force had long terrorized the hermitages of Dandaka: this was the danger for which the ascetics had shown Rama their dead and asked him to act.

The army did not march unseen. The forest resisted it with signs the soldiers understood as ill: beasts and birds cried out, the ground seemed to shudder beneath the chariots, and weapons slipped or trembled in their bearers' hands. Khara's left arm throbbed and his voice caught; his chariot horses stumbled, and the standard shook. The men around him saw each sign and spoke of turning back. Khara answered with contempt. He laughed at fear, ordered the chariots forward, and treated every warning as something to be overrun by force.

Rama saw the advancing host and sent Lakshmana with Sita into a sheltered mountain hollow. “Guard her,” he told his brother, and Lakshmana did. Rama then stood before the force alone, bow raised. The rakshasas came with chariots, standards, spears, swords, and arrows; their volleys darkened the space around him. Rama answered arrow for arrow. The string of his bow sounded through the trees as he broke weapons in flight, cut down horses and charioteers, and held the line before they could reach the refuge where Sita waited.

Dushana drove forward as the battle's commander, scattering arrows at Rama and urging the survivors to surround him. Rama's shafts tore through his defense; Dushana fell, and the force recoiled. Trishiras came next, fighting with three heads lifted above his armor, his weapons arriving from several directions until Rama broke his defense and killed him. The survivors drew back toward Khara. Khara entered the field in his chariot, and the two exchanged volleys until the chariot, bow, and companions around him were destroyed. Even on foot, armed with a heavy club, Khara pressed forward. Rama met him with the weapon he had received from Agastya and struck him down.

Only then did the forest grow quiet. The ascetics were released from the immediate force that had hunted them, interrupted sacrifices, and made their hermitages unsafe. But the victory was not an ending. Shurpanakha survived, and the destruction of Janasthana was already moving toward the brother whose power reached far beyond this stretch of Dandaka.