दूषणवधः राक्षससहस्राणां च संहारः

At the end of the previous sarga the surviving rākṣasas could not even move towards Rāma. Now Dūṣaṇa, seeing his army being cut down, responded: the mighty-armed commander sent five thousand rākṣasas of fearful speed, hard to withstand, who never turned back in battle. The epithet matters — he picked men who would never show their backs, since the ordinary troops had already broken. They poured down on Rāma from every side pikes, halberds and swords, showers of stones and trees, and an unbroken rain of arrows; their weapons were no longer arrows alone but rocks and trees, a sign of their demonic strength. That great, deadly rain of trees and rocks the righteous Rāghava met with his keen arrows. The poet calls him righteous at this very point, because even in the midst of slaughter he remained so, fighting to protect the sages. Having taken that rain like a bull standing with closed eyes, he paused a moment, then summoned up a supreme anger to destroy all the rākṣasas. The image of the bull is apt: a bull stands still with its eyes shut while the cloud rains on it, and afterwards charges with force. So Rāma's response was calm: first he endured the storm, then he gathered his anger, then he struck — a threefold movement that reveals his steadiness. Possessed by wrath and blazing as if with fire, he then covered the whole army, Dūṣaṇa with it, with arrows on every side.

Then Dūṣaṇa, the commander, the tormentor of foes, grew angry and held Rāghava off with arrows like thunderbolts; his name itself means one who torments his enemies. But Rāma in great fury cut through his great bow with a razor-headed shaft, killed his four horses with four arrows, took off his charioteer's head with a crescent-headed shaft, and pierced the rākṣasa in the chest with three more. So in a moment he was left bowless, chariotless, without horses and without a driver, every part of a chariot-fighter's strength destroyed at once. Then he seized a mace like a mountain peak, a hair-raising thing, bound with plates of gold, able to crush even the army of the gods, studded with sharp iron spikes, smeared with the fat of enemies, its touch like thunder and lightning, able to break open the gates of enemy cities. The poet describes the weapon at such length for a reason: the more terrible the weapon, the more complete its failure. Grasping that mace, huge as a great serpent, the cruel night-ranger Dūṣaṇa fell upon Rāma. As he came on, Rāghava cut off both his arms, ornaments and all, with two arrows. The great mace slipped from him and fell on the battlefield before the handless warrior like Indra's banner brought down — as Indra's banner is lowered at the end of the great festival, so the emblem of the rākṣasa's pride fell before him. And Dūṣaṇa himself fell to the ground with his severed hands, like a proud great elephant fallen with its tusks broken off; the word ‘proud’ touches on pathos, for a tuskless elephant is powerless, and so is a hero without arms. Dūṣaṇa's death is told more fully than anything else in the sarga, because he was the chief warrior after Khara: first his chariot is destroyed, then his last weapon described, and at last his arms cut off, so that all the fear built up by the description of the mace is dispelled in a single verse.

Seeing Dūṣaṇa slain and fallen on the ground, all beings honoured Kākutstha, crying, ‘Well done! Well done!’ Their praise proclaims the righteousness of Rāma's deed; placed in the middle of the sarga, it carries the moral verdict on the whole battle. At that very moment three leaders of the army, enraged and already caught in the noose of death, rushed at Rāma together: Mahākapāla, Sthūlākṣa and the mighty Pramāthī. Mahākapāla raised a huge pike, Sthūlākṣa took up a halberd, and Pramāthī an axe. Seeing them coming, Rāghava received them with keen, sharp-pointed arrows as a householder receives guests who have arrived — an irony typical of Vālmīki: each was welcomed with what he himself brought. The delight of Raghu's line cut off Mahākapāla's head, crushed Pramāthī with a countless flood of arrows, and filled Sthūlākṣa's great eyes with his shafts, so that he fell slain like a great branching tree. Each death matches the warrior's name: Mahākapāla, ‘Great Skull’, lost his head; Pramāthī, ‘the Crusher’, was crushed; Sthūlākṣa, ‘Big-Eye’, had his big eyes filled with arrows — a play on names that makes the story memorable. Saying they were caught in the noose of death tells the reader the outcome the moment they appear. Then, in his anger, Rāma in a single moment killed Dūṣaṇa's five thousand followers with five thousand arrows and sent them to the house of Yama. The death of the five thousand takes a single verse, since they have no individual identity, while the three named warriors are described at length; the imbalance is deliberate.

Hearing that Dūṣaṇa and his followers had been slain, Khara angrily commanded his mighty generals: ‘Dūṣaṇa has been killed in battle with his retinue. Go with a great army and fight this wretched man Rāma; kill him with weapons of every kind, all you rākṣasas!’ Khara's word for Rāma is contemptuous, yet it is by this despised man that his whole army is being wiped out — that is the irony. His command has three parts: the news of Dūṣaṇa's death, the urging of his army, and contempt for Rāma; and that contempt is the root flaw of his character, for even as he watches his army dwindle he will not admit the strength of his opponent. Having said this, Khara himself rushed in fury at Rāma, and with him twelve commanders of great valour — Śyenagāmī, Pṛthugrīva, Yajñaśatru, Vihaṃgama, Durjaya, Karavīrākṣa, Paruṣa, Kālakārmuka, Hemamālī, Mahāmālī, Sarpāsya and Rudhirāśana — charged Rāma with their troops, loosing their finest arrows. These twelve were named earlier, in sarga 23, when Khara's army set out; here they are sent into battle. The list fixes the size of the army in the listener's mind, and each name hints at its bearer's nature — one swift as a hawk, one a drinker of blood, one snake-faced. And since they came with their troops, it was not twelve men but twelve separate companies that charged.

Then the radiant Rāma struck down what remained of that army with arrows like fire, adorned with gold and diamond. Those gold-nocked shafts, like fires wreathed in smoke, struck down the rākṣasas as thunderbolts strike great trees. Rāma killed a hundred rākṣasas with a hundred barbed arrows and a thousand with a thousand, at the head of the battle — one arrow for one rākṣasa, no more and no less, so unfailing was his aim. Their armour and ornaments shattered and their bows cut and broken, the night-rangers fell to the earth smeared with blood. With them lying there, hair loosened and drenched in blood, the whole earth was spread over like a great sacrificial altar strewn with kuśa grass. That image is especially memorable: Khara's army had come to destroy the sages' sacrifices, and now it lay like the altar itself; so the poet shows the fruit of their deeds in a symbol. In that instant the terrible forest, with its slain rākṣasas and its mire of flesh and blood, looked like hell itself. Fourteen thousand rākṣasas of dreadful deeds were killed by Rāma alone — a man, and on foot. That line is the essence of the whole episode: one, a man, on foot, three words that recall the disparity again, against fourteen thousand in chariots, on elephants and on horseback; yet victory went to the side of dharma. Of that entire army only Khara the great chariot-fighter and the rākṣasa Triśiras were left — and before them stood Rāma, the destroyer of foes. All the rest, rākṣasas of great valour, terrible and hard to withstand, had been slain at the head of the battle by Lakṣmaṇa's elder brother. Then, seeing that fearsome host slain in the great battle by the mightier Rāma, Khara came at him in his great chariot, like Indra with his thunderbolt raised. So the last part of the sarga does three things — it destroys the rest of the army, gives the count, and announces the single combat to come — and with its long closing verse the pace slows and deepens, as one act of a drama ends and another begins.