The Battle of Lanka is the campaign between Ráma’s allies and Rávaṇ’s forces, fought over Sítá’s captivity and ending in the canto named for Rávaṇ’s death. The account presents the conflict as both a contest of arms and a test of command: spies gather information, leaders marshal immense forces, and successive assaults wear down the defenders before the final encounter. Its scale is epic, but its movement is marked by specific reversals, from the Vánars’ flight before Kumbhakarṇa to their repeated charges against the giants.

Causes and stakes

The war’s immediate political stake is Sítá. The account’s commentary says Rávaṇ repeats his refusal to surrender her, insisting that neither the Gods, Gandharvas, nor fiends combined can compel him. The refusal makes the conflict more than a contest for territory: it blocks the remedy sought by Ráma’s side and leaves force as the means by which the captivity can be ended. Rávaṇ’s confidence in his protection against supernatural enemies also sharpens the irony of a war in which his human opponent presses the attack.

The battle narrative places the opposing armies within a wider political and divine order. Its commentary describes the Lokapálas as guardians of the directions, listing Indra, Agni, Yáma, Súrya, Varuṇa, Váyu, Kuvera, and Soma. The gods and their spheres supply a cosmic frame for the earthly conflict, while the campaign’s outcome turns on the actions of its commanders and combatants. The account does not reduce the war to a single duel: it unfolds through musters, sorties, routs, and successive encounters.

Intelligence and the scale of the armies

Information is one of the campaign’s instruments. The narrative describes secret spies as reporting what people were doing or were likely to do. Later, Rávaṇ orders Shardula to identify the Vánar chieftains seen in Ráma’s army; the commentary notes that Shuka and Sáraṇ had already named them. The repeated reports show that the opposing leaders are trying to turn observation into usable knowledge, even as the same information is revisited in the poem.

The musters are rendered on extravagant scales. A commentator gives the numbers for Rávaṇ’s present army as 150 million chariots, 300 million elephants, and 1.2 billion horses and asses, with foot soldiers unnumbered. Elsewhere, a note calls a set of figures comparatively moderate: 10,000 elephants, 10,000 chariots, 20,000 horses, and 10 million giants. These distinct enumerations convey the poem’s shifting measures of military magnitude rather than a single stable census. Against such vastness, the battle’s attention to named commanders and individual combats gives the immense host a succession of visible actions.

Assaults, reversals, and combat

The war advances through repeated sorties. One canto heading identifies Dhúmráksha’s assault, whose approach is heard by Rávaṇ amid the thunder of drums and conches. Elsewhere, the Vánars charge to drive back the giants as their cries and roars echo across earth and sky. The clash is not narrated as a smooth advance: the defenders and attackers meet in surges, and the account repeatedly returns to the physical fact of a crowded battlefield.

Kumbhakarṇa’s emergence brings a sharp reversal. The commentary reports ominous signs accompanying his sortie and describes the Vánars’ terror and flight at the canto’s close, briefly repeated at the opening of the next. The episode gives the giant’s appearance a force that changes the immediate balance of the scene: the army that had charged now retreats. The recurrent flight and renewed engagement make the battle’s progress uneven rather than inevitable.

Single combats provide another measure of the campaign. The translator notes that several were omitted because their details varied little and each ended in victory for a Vánar or an ally. This editorial observation identifies a repeated pattern in the poem’s larger war narrative: individual contests accumulate as evidence of the attackers’ persistence, even when the form of each duel is familiar. The commentary also identifies Devántak, Narántak, Atikáya, and Triśirás as sons of Rávaṇ, connecting the named combatants to the ruling household and giving the battlefield’s roster a dynastic dimension.

The final confrontation and the poem’s treatment

The account emphasizes duration as well as spectacle: the conflict continues through the hours of night and day without pause. At the approach of the final encounter, the canto heading announces Rávaṇ’s death. Mátali then calls on Ráma to let other arms decide the day, directing attention to the weapons that will determine the outcome. The excerpted scene thus places a decision about arms at the threshold of the battle’s decisive conclusion, without treating the final turn as merely another anonymous clash.

The printed account also makes its shaping of the battle visible. Its notes acknowledge omitted single combats and warn that the canto concerning Kumbhakarṇa contains repetition; they report that verses in the long canto describing the fighting are regarded by many as interpolated. The commentary further records differences between the version followed and the Bengal recension, including a different account of Vibhishaṇ’s departure from Rávaṇ and appeal to Ráma. These remarks distinguish the battle’s narrated action from the editorial and textual choices through which it reaches the reader. The result is a war portrayed as immense and recurrent, but also as a layered poem whose omissions, repetitions, and variant traditions affect how its course is presented.