Into Lanka

Hanuman entered Lanka by night, shrunk to the size of a cat, and the Ramayana slows down to let him — and the reader — see the city. It is described as overwhelming: gold and gemmed, terraced up its mountain, walled and gated and patrolled, a civilization at the height of its splendour. The epic is deliberate about this. It will not let Ravana’s Lanka be a squalid lair. It is magnificent, ordered, prosperous — and that magnificence is the poem’s most unsettling claim, that great evil in its world is not ugly or chaotic but cultured, beautiful, and working extremely well.

At the gate he was challenged by Lanka herself — the city’s guardian spirit in a body — and the encounter is a small omen the epic plants on purpose. He struck her, lightly, and she fell, and remembered an old prophecy: that when a monkey overcame her, the end of Lanka had begun. The Ramayana files this the way it files all its causes, quietly, to collect later: the city’s own guardian knows, the night Hanuman enters, that the city is already lost. He went in past her, through the sleeping splendour, searching.

The search is the chapter’s substance and the epic makes it long and intimate, because it is doing something morally careful. Hanuman moved through Ravana’s palaces, through the inner chambers, through the women’s quarters where the rakshasa king’s wives and consorts slept — and the poem pauses, in Hanuman’s own mind, on a scruple: that to look on these sleeping women in their privacy, even to find Sita, troubled him; that he searched because the duty required it and reminded himself that the looking was for a pure purpose and left no stain on a mind that intended none. The Ramayana gives its strongest figure this delicacy on purpose. Hanuman’s greatness in the Sundara Kanda is never only the leap; it is that immense power moves through the world with this much care, this much restraint, even unseen, even when no one would know.

He searched the whole city and did not find her, and the epic brings him, exactly as it brought the southern host on the shore, to the edge of despair — the city combed, the night burning down, the mission seemingly failed, the thought forming that without her there was no point returning, that the whole leap and the whole war and the whole hope ended here in not finding. The Sundara Kanda places its darkest moment in its hero’s mind deliberately: Hanuman’s faith, not his strength, is what is tested, and the poem lets it nearly break so that the recovery means something.

What turned him was reasoning, not luck — the mark of the figure the epic has drawn from the start. He thought it through: he had searched the places of pleasure and power and not found her; a captive who refused her captor, who grieved, would not be kept among splendour but apart, under guard, where her refusal could be worn down — somewhere green and isolated and sad. There was such a place he had not yet looked: a grove of ashoka trees, walled, set apart, within the palace grounds. He went there, and the chapter ends with him climbing into the leaves above it, looking down — and the next chapter is what he sees: one woman, on the bare ground, surrounded, refusing, exactly as his reasoning had foretold.