Indrajit's victory over Rama and Lakshmana

Indrajit’s victory over Rama and Lakshmana is a sudden reversal in the battle for Lanka: after his father withdraws in anguish, Indrajit takes the field and brings the two princes down beneath a barrage of arrows. The episode makes his success concrete through its sequence of preparation, attack, collapse, and report. Its decisive weapon is a dart bestowed by Brahma, and its closing movement carries the apparent defeat back into Ravana’s hall.

Causes and preparation

The episode begins in the aftermath of Ravana’s distress. Torn by pain, the king withdraws from the hall; Indrajit answers his father’s despair with words of reassurance. The exchange gives the sortie a personal as well as military setting: the prince moves from consoling his father to acting against the force that has brought him to grief. The poem does not detail a wider plan in this passage, but the order of events makes the transition plain—anguish in the hall is followed by Indrajit’s departure for battle.

With his Rákshasa train close behind, Indrajit passes through Lanka’s gate and reaches the plain. He leaps down and tells a band of giants to remain beside the chariot. The detail marks a deliberate change from travel to combat: the chariot is left attended while Indrajit proceeds with the rites required before the attack. Preparation is not treated as incidental. Before striking the enemy, he performs the prescribed rites, making the battle’s violence follow a ritual act.

The assault and the princes’ fall

While the sacrificial flame still glows, Indrajit is brought the dart bestowed through Brahma’s grace, together with the weapons he knows how to wield. The passage singles out the dart amid his arms, giving the attack a particular divine sanction without reducing it to that weapon alone. His followers then raise their maces and charge; rocks, trees, and arrows fly as the battle grows more terrible. The scene presents a widening assault, in which the fighters’ missiles and the princes’ resistance are overwhelmed by mounting force.

Indrajit shoots arrows in a rain-like stream. The shafts form nets from which the sons of Raghu struggle in vain to escape, and Rama is shown oppressed by their assault. The image of the net matters to the episode’s reversal: the princes are not simply exchanging blows with an opponent, but are caught within an attack that prevents their strength from changing the outcome. Indrajit’s arrows arrive bright and swift, and the account emphasizes that they cannot be avoided. His victory is thus expressed as the loss of the princes’ ability to act effectively, not merely as a claim of superiority.

The attack finally overwhelms both brothers. Struck down by the shafts and their power, Rama and Lakshmana reel and fall. For the watching Rákshasas, their bodies appear to confirm a decisive triumph. The victory is real in the immediate field: Indrajit has brought the princes down and has altered the battle’s balance. Yet the account’s attention to their fall does not itself establish that they are dead; it records the visible outcome of this assault and the report made from it.

Report and narrative consequence

After the fall, Indrajit’s followers shout and gaze upon the bodies. Indrajit then speeds back to Lanka, where he is to relate the princes’ fate in Ravana’s hall. This return completes the movement begun by the king’s grief: the attacker who left to answer his father’s anguish comes back with news of the apparent fall of Ravana’s opponents. The battlefield result is converted into a report at the center of Lanka’s rule, giving the victory both a military and a courtly consequence.

The episode closes at the moment of apparent defeat rather than narrating its reversal. The next canto is titled “The Medicinal Herbs,” so the sequence turns from the princes’ collapse toward a new phase concerned with their condition. That placement limits what this victory can mean: it is a severe and consequential setback, but not the war’s final outcome. Dramatically, the fall provides the hinge. Indrajit has achieved the immediate result his attack sought, and the narrative leaves the opposing side’s recovery to what follows.