Ráma’s intervention in the second duel between Báli and Sugríva converts a renewed contest into a decisive, lethal reversal. A flowering creeper supplies the crucial mark by which Ráma can identify Sugríva; once he sees his ally weakening, he draws his bow and shoots Báli through the chest. The sequence turns on recognition, watching, and timing: Ráma waits until the danger to Sugríva becomes unmistakable, then changes the course of the fight with a single arrow.

A badge for the second encounter

The need for a visible distinction shapes the event before the combat begins. In the first duel, Ráma had failed to distinguish the two brothers and withheld his arrow. For the renewed encounter, he tells Sugríva to bind a badge around himself, so that Ráma will know which fighter to watch. The instruction makes identification an explicit condition of intervention: Ráma cannot safely act on allegiance alone when the brothers are locked together in battle.

The badge is not a crafted emblem but a flower plucked from a creeper growing on the mountain slope. Lakshmaṇ gathers the bloom and ties it around Sugríva. This small, practical gesture answers the problem left by the first fight. The flower gives Ráma a visible point of recognition before the fighters meet again, turning the mountain’s vegetation into a means of distinguishing friend from foe. The scene’s preparation therefore belongs to its action, not merely to its setting: without a mark, Ráma risks repeating his earlier failure to intervene.

The duel and Ráma’s decision

When the brothers meet again, the narration presents them as closely matched in their clash, like thunderclouds meeting amid battle cries and threats. Ráma watches Sugríva rather than acting at once. He sees his ally begin to lose strength and notices Sugríva’s searching glance, cast toward every quarter. The detail makes Sugríva’s distress visible and gives Ráma a clear moment to respond; the second encounter does not simply repeat the first, because the badge has made recognition possible and the balance of the fight now calls for intervention.

The poem marks Ráma’s decision through a sequence of increasingly direct actions. He cannot endure the sight of his friend’s defeat; he fixes his attention on his arrow, burns to kill the victorious opponent, and lays the shaft on the bow. The passage moves from watching to resolve and from resolve to physical action. Ráma’s concern for Sugríva is thus not left as a general allegiance: it takes the form of a deliberate choice to enter a fight in which Sugríva is being overcome.

The arrow and the reversal

The arrow springs from the bowstring with the force of a serpent’s fang. The narration compares its flight to red lightning and stresses that it reaches its aim. These images compress the interval between Ráma’s decision and its consequence: the shaft is released, crosses the space between archer and combat, and strikes Báli in the breast. The arrow quivers there as Báli reels and falls. The exchange of force is immediate and irreversible; a duel that had been turning against Sugríva is ended by Ráma’s shot.

The blow also completes the scene’s pattern of recognition. The flower badge was introduced to prevent uncertainty about which brother was fighting; Ráma then watches Sugríva’s weakening, selects his moment, and directs his arrow at the opposing champion. The consequence is not an abstract victory but Báli’s mortal fall, anticipated by the warning that he will lie stricken and gasp as he dies. The narrative therefore links preparation, perception, and consequence in a tightly ordered chain: the mark enables recognition, recognition enables intervention, and intervention ends the duel.

Narrative significance

The second fight reverses the failure of the first. Previously, Ráma could not act because he could not tell the brothers apart; now the flower makes that distinction visible, and he shoots when Sugríva’s defeat appears imminent. The change is practical, but it also gives the scene its dramatic structure. The reader is made to wait with Ráma through the combat, watching for the moment when the danger to Sugríva and the identity of the fighters are both clear enough for decisive action.

The episode’s emotional movement follows the same narrowing sequence. The clash begins as a contest between the brothers; attention shifts to Sugríva’s failing strength, then to Ráma’s refusal to accept his friend’s defeat, and finally to the arrow in flight. The imagery intensifies at the instant of the shot, from battle cries to lightning-like speed and the fatal wound. Ráma’s intervention is consequently both an act of aid and the decisive mechanism of Báli’s death. The scene closes not with a prolonged exchange but with the wounded warrior reeling and falling, leaving the consequences of that act to the events that follow.