Ravana’s capital of Lanka is more than a remote stronghold: its changing ownership makes the city a record of older divine conflicts and a prize around which the epic’s political history turns. Set on Mount Trikūṭa beside the Southern Ocean, it is associated first with the Rākṣasas, then with Kuvera, and later with Ravana. Its story reaches beyond the island itself, joining divine warfare and rival dynasties to the later conflict over Sita.

Setting and Competing Origins

Agastya’s account places the city on Mount Trikūṭa, on the shore of the Southern Ocean. It gives more than one explanation of how Lanka came to be there. In one version, Viśvakarmá built it for the Rākṣasas; they abandoned it through fear of Vishnu, leaving the city unoccupied when Kuvera sought a home. In another, Viśvakarmá built the city on Mount Trikūṭa at Indra’s command and gave it to three Rākṣasa brothers. Rather than presenting a single, seamless foundation story, the account layers different histories of construction, occupation, and abandonment around the same place.

The city’s location matters to that history. Its mountain site and position beside the Southern Ocean make it a remote but consequential seat of power: it can shelter rulers removed from the ordinary political world, yet its ownership remains bound to conflicts reaching heaven and the underworld. The account treats Lanka as both a specific city and the recurring center of competing claims.

Kuvera and the Rākṣasa Return

After gaining a boon from Brahma, Kuvera becomes a guardian of the world and the god of riches. When he asks his father Viśravas where he should dwell, Viśravas recommends the unoccupied city. Kuvera takes possession, establishing a period in which Lanka belongs to a ruler associated with wealth and divine authority rather than the Rākṣasas for whom it had first been built.

The displaced Rākṣasa family remains connected to the city’s fortunes. Sumali lives with his family in Patala while Kuvera resides in Lanka. Seeing Kuvera travel to visit Viśravas, Sumali considers how his own family might recover its position and urges his daughter Kaikasi to seek Viśravas as a husband. She becomes the mother of Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Shurpanakha, and Vibhishana. This family history links Lanka’s earlier Rākṣasa ownership to the generation that will make it the center of the epic’s principal conflict.

A Base for Power and Conquest

The city’s earlier Rākṣasa rulers also establish a pattern of power followed by challenge. According to Agastya’s account, three brothers receive long life and invincibility from Brahma after practicing austerities. From their city on Mount Trikūṭa, they oppress the gods and the Rishis. The gods appeal for help; Vishnu defeats the Rākṣasa kings, kills Máli, and drives the survivors back to Lanka. The city thus becomes not only a possession but a refuge after defeat, a place where a defeated power can persist.

Ravana’s own campaigns extend the city’s reach into a wider map of rival kingdoms and supernatural realms. He is defeated and captured by Karttavirya Arjuna near the Narmada River, but Pulastya intercedes and secures his release. Ravana later makes an alliance with Bali, king of the Vánars, and ventures into the realm of the dead and Patala. There he defeats Yama and subdues Bhogavati, ruled by Vasuki, before departing in triumph. The account also places his return to Lanka after other expeditions, including one in which Indrajit captures Indra. These episodes make the capital the home base of a ruler whose ambitions repeatedly carry him far beyond it.

The City in Rama’s Story

In the later events recounted after Rama has returned to Ayodhya, the city is the place where Ravana holds Sita captive. Its political history therefore becomes immediate and personal: the stronghold associated with successive Rākṣasa rulers is also the destination of Rama’s campaign to recover his wife. The account’s movement from Lanka’s ancient foundation to its role in Sita’s captivity ties the epic’s cosmological past to its central human crisis.

After the conflict, the account notes that Pushpaka, the flying chariot, is returned to its original owner, Kuvera. This detail recalls the earlier history in which Kuvera occupied Lanka and possessed the vehicle before Ravana’s rise. The return of the chariot does not erase the city’s intervening history; it closes a smaller arc of possession that began with Kuvera’s residence there.

Historical Interpretation

A later editorial note quotes Signor Gorresio’s preface, which identifies Lanka with Ceylon and interprets the epic’s war as preserving a historical conflict between Aryan groups and a southern population. The note reports this as Gorresio’s historical theory, not as a settled fact established by the narrative. His account argues that epic tradition transformed its opponents into monstrous beings while retaining, in his view, traces of a human society and its distinct practices.

This historicizing interpretation belongs to the book’s commentary and should be distinguished from Agastya’s mythic genealogy of the city. Read together, the narrative and the editorial speculation show how Lanka can function on two levels: as a legendary stronghold whose changing rulers connect divine and human conflicts, and as a place later readers have tried to map onto real geography and history.