Ravana's final battle and death

Rávaṇ’s final battle and death are the decisive turn in the war at Lanká: after the fighting has carried on without pause, Ráma kills the giant king with a mighty arrow, and Rávaṇ falls on the field. The poem makes the ending a convergence of relentless combat and divine intervention, shifting the scene from the noise and ruin of battle to the death of its central antagonist.

The Approach to the Field

The final encounter follows a renewed advance by Rávaṇ. The lamentations of the women mourning the slain reach the king, but he goes out to fight; the narrative presents his onward movement as driven by Death itself. His approach is announced not by a speech but by the thunder of his chariot, which the Vánars hear across the battlefield and meet with fierce excitement. The sound carries the conflict toward its climactic confrontation before the combatants meet face to face.

The field is already marked by the cost of the war. In the canto introducing Rávaṇ’s appearance there, the plain is strewn with wounded and dead bodies. Against this landscape of accumulated losses, Ráma and Rávaṇ meet, and the fighting intensifies. Rávaṇ’s assault is powerful enough to overwhelm Lakshmaṇ with a dense shower of darts; the duel is therefore not a simple or effortless triumph, but the most severe contest of the battle.

Mátali’s Counsel and the Fatal Arrow

After the day-and-night conflict has continued without respite, Mátali urges Ráma to end the struggle with the dart kindled by the Almighty Sire. Ráma follows his counsel, laying the weapon upon his bowstring. Its immense weight is associated with Meru and Mandar, the great mountains that supplied it; the arrow is more than another missile in the exchange, but the means by which the seemingly unending duel can reach its conclusion. Ráma turns its point toward Rávaṇ and releases it. The dart pierces the giant king’s chest and cleaves his heart, and Rávaṇ falls dead upon the plain, his end likened to that of Vritra struck down by the Thunderer.

Scale and the Shape of the Ending

The weapon’s scale gives the ending a distinctive compression: its weight reaches toward the cosmic proportions of Mount Meru and Mount Mandara, yet its force is concentrated in one bodily wound. That movement from mountain-sized magnitude to the pierced chest makes the battle’s resolution legible at once as a superhuman feat and as Rávaṇ’s physical death. The plain that had held the war’s accumulated casualties becomes the place where its central opposition is finally settled.

The End of the Contest

The prolonged exchange makes the decisive act a change in means as well as force: Ráma does not prevail by simply extending the same combat, but takes Mátali’s counsel and uses the specially kindled dart. The passage thus turns endurance into a threshold. Once the struggle has continued through night and day without pause, the divine weapon brings the conflict to its final, bodily consequence: Rávaṇ’s death.