The slaying of Ravana is the decisive turn in the battle for Lanka: the crossing of Nala’s bridge brings Rama’s forces to the golden city, Rama strikes Ravana down, and Vibhishana succeeds to the defeated king’s domain. The account gives the victory a double consequence. It restores Sita from captivity, while replacing Ravana’s rule with that of his brother, whom Rama has made an ally.

Causes and Approach

The episode belongs to a sequence of crossing, alliance, and attack. Nala throws a bridge across the narrow sea from shore to shore, creating the passage by which Rama’s side reaches Lanka. The bridge is presented as the necessary threshold between the separated shores and the confrontation at the city; the crossing itself is a major action, not merely a change of setting.

Before the killing, Rama makes a treaty with Vibhishana. The sung account places this agreement beside the plan to destroy Ravana, linking the military objective to a political realignment within Lanka’s royal family. Vibhishana is not simply named after the victory: his agreement precedes it, and the ending of the battle will give him a new role in the defeated kingdom. The compact thus anticipates the transfer of rule that follows Ravana’s death.

The Battle and Its Turning Point

The narrative compresses the fighting into a sequence of losses and a final decisive blow. Kumbhakarna and Meghanada fight and die; then Ravana himself is slain. Their deaths mark the destruction of the principal resistance described in this account, but the focus falls most sharply on the king’s fall. The phrase that Rama’s hand smites Ravana down makes the outcome direct and conclusive: the conflict reaches its turning point through the defeat of the ruler at its center.

The change is stark. Before the blow, Ravana holds Lanka and Sita remains a captive; after it, the king is dead, Sita is brought back, and the rule of his domain is assigned to another. The brief narration does not detail the tactics or duration of the combat. Instead, its ordered succession—bridge, treaty, deaths in battle, Ravana’s slaying—makes the outcome legible through the consequences attached to each step.

Rescue and Transfer of Rule

Ravana’s death is followed by the return of captive Sita. Her restoration gives the victory its personal consequence: the military crossing and the destruction of the enemy’s power culminate in the recovery of the person whose captivity has made the conflict urgent. The account places this return alongside the political settlement, joining the end of the battle to the repair of what Ravana’s rule had ruptured.

Vibhishana is left to reign over his brother’s wide domain. This succession is more than a final note of triumph. The ally established by treaty becomes the new ruler, so the victory alters the government of Lanka as well as its immediate military fortunes. The narrative moves from an alliance made before the attack to a kingship secured after it, giving the event a clear political aftermath rather than ending at the moment of Ravana’s death.

The Event in the Sung Narrative

The battle is recounted as part of a larger sung account of Rama’s life, which presents his princely birth, kindness, heroic worth, patience, gentleness, and truth alongside the story of his deeds. Within that larger portrait, the slaying of Ravana completes an arc from heroic character to decisive action: the same figure praised for constancy and care is also the agent who ends the king’s rule and brings Sita back.

The broader description of the song emphasizes its musical construction and its range of feeling, including tenderness, surprise, contentment, anger, mirth, and terror. The battle therefore belongs to a narrative capable of holding violence and restoration together. Its ending does not leave the listener only with Ravana’s death: it turns from the fallen king to Sita’s return and Vibhishana’s accession. That movement from conflict to recovery and succession gives the episode its defining shape.