चतुर्दशराक्षसवधः

Then the dreadful Śūrpaṇakhā came to Rāghava's hermitage and pointed out to the rākṣasas the two brothers and Sītā with them. They saw the mighty Rāma seated in the leaf hut with Sītā, attended by Lakṣmaṇa. The poet's order of seeing is subtle: first the rākṣasas see, and then the glorious Rāghava sees Śūrpaṇakhā and the rākṣasas who had come with her, so that gaze meets gaze. Rāma said to his radiant brother Lakṣmaṇa: ‘Stay close by Sītā for a while, Saumitri. I will kill these creatures who have followed her trail here.’ These words reveal Rāma's nature: his first thought was Sītā's safety, and only then the fight; and he was confident that he alone was enough to deal with fourteen rākṣasas. Hearing the words of Rāma, who knew himself, Lakṣmaṇa said ‘So be it,’ honouring Rāghava's word and accepting the order without dispute or delay. Then righteous Rāghava strung his great gold-adorned bow and spoke to the rākṣasas; he strung it before he spoke, so that he spoke already prepared, as a hero should. Here the fearful clamour of the previous sarga subsides at once: fourteen rākṣasas like Death have come, yet Rāma merely gives an order to his brother and strings his bow, with no agitation and no alarm.

Rāma's speech is laid out in four verses — who they were, a question, his reason, and an offer. First he introduced himself: ‘We are the sons of Daśaratha, the brothers Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, and we have entered the trackless Daṇḍaka forest with Sītā. We live here in the Daṇḍaka forest on fruit and roots, self-controlled, ascetics and celibates. Why do you seek to harm us?’ With this he first establishes what is just: to harm blameless ascetics is wrong. Then he gave the reason for his coming: ‘At the bidding of the sages I have come here bow in hand to kill you in a great battle, you evil creatures who persecute them.’ Rāma does not rest on a personal quarrel but on the sages' charge; his purpose is the protection of dharma, not revenge. Finally he gave them a choice: ‘If you are content to fight, stand your ground here and do not turn back; but if you care for your lives, night-rangers, go away.’ To give even an enemy the chance to withdraw is the mark of a noble man; with it the poet establishes Rāma's devotion to righteous war, and shows that the rākṣasas' destruction would be of their own choosing.

Hearing his words, the fourteen rākṣasas grew furious. The poet calls them slayers of brāhmaṇas with pikes in hand, naming their wickedness and their weapons together. Again he sets the two sides against each other: they were bloodshot-eyed, dreadful and harsh, while Rāma's eyes were red by nature, his speech was sweet, and his valour had been proved; both had red eyes, but theirs from anger and his by nature. Exultant, they said: ‘Man, you have roused the anger of our master, the great Khara; struck down by us in battle, you will lose your life this very moment. What strength has one man like you to stand before so many of us at the head of the battle, let alone to fight us? Beaten by the bludgeons, pikes and spears hurled by our arms, you will give up your life, your valour and the bow clenched in your hand.’ So saying, the fourteen rākṣasas rushed straight at Rāma in fury, weapons and swords raised. Their pride was an echo of Khara's; their only argument was numbers, which would prove useless against Rāma alone. Their question, ‘What strength has one man like you?’, is answered by the next five verses — the poet refutes it with action. And their words about his giving up his bow are ironic, for that very bow would be their death.

They hurled their pikes at the invincible Rāghava, but Kākutstha cut down all fourteen of them with just as many gold-adorned arrows. The matching numbers are part of the poem's beauty — fourteen pikes, fourteen arrows, not one more or less. Then the mighty hero, in the height of anger, took up fourteen iron shafts whetted on stone and bright as the sun; grasping and drawing his bow, he aimed at the rākṣasas and loosed his arrows as Indra of the hundred sacrifices looses his thunderbolts — an image of Rāma's divine strength. Piercing the rākṣasas' chests with their speed, the arrows came out bathed in blood and fell to the ground like snakes gliding out of an anthill; the image is vivid, the bloody arrows emerging from their breasts like serpents leaving their mound. Their hearts shattered by those shafts, the rākṣasas fell to the ground like trees cut at the root, drenched in blood, mangled and lifeless. The two images are set in sequence, the first showing motion and the second stillness, so that the passage from life to death is painted as a picture. The whole battle is over in five verses, which shows how effortlessly Rāma fought. Khara's boasts in the previous sarga ran to six verses; here the slaughter takes only five — words at length, deeds in brief, a contrast the poet intended.

Seeing them all fallen on the ground, the rākṣasī, faint with rage, went back to Khara and in her distress fell down before him once more. The poet notes that her blood was now somewhat dried — the blood from her ears and nose had begun to dry, a subtle mark of passing time — and compares her to a creeper oozing sap, a fine image, for she looked like a wounded vine whose sap is no ornament but the sign of a wound. Stricken with grief in her brother's presence, she let out a great wail and wept aloud, her face gone pale. She had fallen before him once already, at the end of sarga 18; her falling again is itself a sign of her helplessness. Having seen the rākṣasas struck down in battle, Khara's sister had run back once more, and she told him the whole story of how every one of them had been killed. With a long closing verse the sarga ends on a solemn note. This is Rāma's first clash with Khara's rākṣasas, and the battle with the fourteen is like a foretelling of the slaughter of the fourteen thousand to come, and the story moves on to the next outcome of Khara's anger.