Jatayu: The Old Vulture Who Fought Ravana Alone

The Friend at the Tree

On the road into the deep forest, past the hermitages, Rama, Sita and Lakshmana came upon a vulture the size of a small hill, and Rama, who had already met enough rakshasas wearing borrowed bodies, asked it bluntly who it was. The bird was not offended. He answered with a family history that began at the making of the world and came down through Aruna, the charioteer of the sun, to two brothers, Sampati and Jatayu, kings of the vultures. And then he said the sentence that settled everything: know me, child, as a friend of your father.

Dasharatha was dead by then, and Rama was in the forest because of the promises his father could not escape. A friend of Dasharatha, met among the trees, was not a small thing. Rama embraced the bird. And Jatayu made an old man's offer, the only one he had. When you and your brother are away, he said, I will stay near and keep watch over Sita. The forest is not empty.

So when the three of them built their house at Panchavati, on the bank of the Godavari, the vulture kept his word in the plainest way a creature can. He was simply there, day after day, in a tree within earshot.

The Chariot Going South

The day it mattered, everything had already gone wrong. A golden deer had drawn Rama off into the forest, a cry in Rama's voice had pulled Lakshmana after him, and a wandering monk at the door of the empty hut had shown his ten heads and taken Sita up into a chariot that ran on the air. She cried out to the trees as she went, to the river, to the deer at the water, to anything that could carry a word to Rama. And then she saw, on a branch, the old bird drowsing, and called his name.

Jatayu woke to the sight the whole story turns on: Ravana of Lanka in the sky, and in his grip the woman the bird had promised to watch.

He did the arithmetic out loud, and Valmiki lets us hear it. I am sixty thousand years old, he said to Ravana. I am tired, I am unarmed, and you are young, in armour, carrying a bow, riding a chariot. Even so. Set her down. He tried the law first, because he had been a king and knew it: Sita is the wife of another man, and a king who steals wives breaks the thing that makes him a king. He said, as one ruler to another, that Ravana was putting his whole city into a fire. Ravana's answer was arrows.

What the Old Bird Broke

Then the vulture folded his wings and fell on the chariot, and for a while the arithmetic was wrong. He was talons and a beak and sixty thousand years of anger, and he tore the jewelled bow out of Ravana's hands and broke it. Ravana strung another; Jatayu broke that too. He killed the mules with goblin faces that drew the chariot. He killed the charioteer. He smashed the flying chariot itself, and it went down out of the sky, and the king of Lanka stood on the earth of the forest holding Sita, on foot, like any thief.

An old bird had done that. And a younger Ravana on a lesser day might have lost everything there. But Ravana was not a cartoon of evil in a play. He was the king who had lifted Kailasa, and he set Sita down, took up his sword, and fought the vulture properly, and there could only be one end to it. He watched the pattern of the great wings until he had it, and then he cut them both off.

A vulture is his wings. Everything else is baggage the wings carry. Jatayu came down like a felled tree, and Sita ran to the broken bird and held him and wept over him as over her own kin, and Ravana pulled her away, and went up again by his own power, south. The forest was quiet. On the ground lay a dying creature and, scattered around him, the wreckage of the one fight anyone offered Ravana that day.

The Refusal

Here is the part that the tellers slow down for. Jatayu should have died then. The wound was the kind that kills, and he was old past any counting that means anything. He did not die. He held on, bleeding into the grass, through the rest of that day, because he was the only being on earth who knew which way Ravana had gone, and the knowledge was no use in a dead bird.

Rama and Lakshmana came following the trail of the fight and found first the broken bow, then the dead mules, then the ruined chariot, and then a mountain of grey feathers soaked in blood. Rama's first thought was the forest's usual truth: a rakshasa, in one more borrowed shape, and this one has eaten Sita. He drew his bow. And the mountain spoke, and said, child, put it down. This body you want to kill is already leaving.

Then, with what breath he had, he gave his testimony like a witness in a court. Ravana. Son of Vishravas, brother of Kubera. He took her south. And the old bird added one more thing, because he had lived sixty thousand years under the turning sky and knew its habits: the hour of the theft was the muhurta called Vinda, and wealth lost in that hour comes back to its owner. Ravana did not know what time it was, he said. You will find her.

Rama asked him more, where Ravana lived, what he was. The answers came slower and further apart, and somewhere between one question and the next the life went out of the bird, and his head went down. Rama put his arms around him and held him, saying his name, and got silence, and stood holding a dead vulture in an empty forest, having now lost, in the space of one day, his wife and his father's friend.

Rites for a Father

What Rama did next is the ending the whole story exists to reach, and Valmiki spends real time on it. Rama told Lakshmana to build a pyre, and said, of a bird: he gave up his life for me, and he is as worthy of my honour as Dasharatha was. They gathered the wood. Rama lit the fire himself and wept as it burned, the way a man weeps for his own dead. He hunted a great deer and laid out the flesh on the grass as the offering, because the rite asks for an offering and the forest is what he had. And he spoke over the fire the words a son speaks: go, by my leave, to the unsurpassed worlds, the worlds of those who keep the sacred fires, of those who fall in battle and do not turn, of those who give away land. Then the two brothers went down to the Godavari and poured the water for him, as sons pour it for a father.

A vulture, a carrion bird, the form every hand in that world waved away from the village, burned on a pyre lit by a prince of Ayodhya, with the water poured after. The tellers do not explain it, and there is no need. Jatayu had already been paid in the only coin he asked for, which was to finish his sentence.

The direction he bought did its work. Far to the south, months later, the searching monkeys would meet a wingless old vulture on a mountain by the sea, Sampati, the brother, whose own wings had burned long ago when he flew too near the sun shielding Jatayu beneath him. Sampati heard how his brother had died, and then he did the family's work one more time: he looked out over the water with a vulture's eyes and pointed the search at Lanka. The way to Sita was given twice, both times by the same house of birds, one brother dying and one brother grounded, neither of them able to fly a single yard of it.

Sources

• The Ramayana of Valmiki, Aranya Kanda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith, Sacred-Texts
• Valmiki Ramayana, Aranya Kanda, Wisdomlib
• Kamban, Ramavataram (Kamba Ramayanam), Aranya Kandam