The Wedding of Ravana: How the King of Lanka Married Mandodari, and Why Two Indian Towns Still Call Him Son-in-Law

Every autumn, at Dussehra, India builds him out of bamboo and paper, fills him with fireworks, and burns him in front of a crowd.¹ It is one of the great public rituals of the country, and it leaves no room for the other Ravana: the scholar of the Vedas, the devotee of Shiva,¹ the king of a golden city, and, in the Uttara Kanda, the last book of Valmiki's Ramayana and the one almost nobody reads, the groom. Ravana had a wedding. Valmiki describes it. It was small, it was in a forest, it was arranged by a worried father in a single conversation, it came with a dowry that would one day nearly kill Lakshmana, and it set off, within the same sarga, two more royal marriages and the birth of the most dangerous warrior in the epic.

The Ravana wedding is also, oddly, one of the most alive in India. In Jodhpur a community of Brahmins say their ancestors came with his baraat and never went home, and they mourn him on Dussehra while the rest of the city cheers².³ In Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh a 35-foot statue of him stands because the town believes it was Mandodari's home, which makes him the local damaad.⁴ In a village in Vidisha he is invited, symbolically, to every wedding before any other guest.⁵ The man India burns is also the man two towns married their daughter to.

This is the story of that wedding, told from the text first and the towns second, with the detail that the effigy leaves out. Its companion is the Journal's account of the other great wedding in the same epic, 7 Unknown Facts About the Ram Sita Wedding; read together, they are a study in how one poet described two very different grooms.

Quick answer: Ravana's wedding is told in sarga 12 of the Uttara Kanda, the last book of Valmiki's Ramayana. Hunting in a forest after his coronation, Ravana meets the asura architect Maya walking with his daughter Mandodari, child of Maya and the apsara Hema. Maya, anxious to find his daughter a husband, asks who Ravana is, learns that he is the son of a brahmarshi of Pulastya's line, and offers Mandodari to him. Ravana kindles a fire there and then and takes her hand. With her, Maya gives him an unfailing spear (shakti) won by austerity, which Ravana later hurls at Lakshmana. Returning to Lanka, Ravana marries Kumbhakarna to Vajrajvala, granddaughter of Virochana, and Vibhishana to Sarama, daughter of the gandharva king Shailusha; Mandodari then bears Meghanada, who becomes Indrajit. Local tradition places the wedding at Mandore near Jodhpur, and Mandore and Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh both claim Mandodari as their daughter; there, and among Jodhpur's Dave Godha Shrimali Brahmins, Ravana is honoured as a son-in-law or an ancestor, and mourned on Dussehra.

In this article

1. A king's first duty: his sister's wedding
2. A father in the forest
3. The question Maya asked
4. The ceremony: a fire kindled in the forest
5. The dowry: a spear
6. Three brides for Lanka
7. The child who cried like thunder
8. Who was the bride: Mandodari's many origins
9. Where it happened, according to India
10. Ravana's wedding and Rama's, side by side

1. A king's first duty: his sister's wedding

The sarga does not open with Ravana's wedding. It opens with his sister's. Freshly anointed king of Lanka, with his brothers beside him, the first thing Valmiki has Ravana do is arrange a marriage for Shurpanakha, giving her to the danava Vidyujjihva (Uttara Kanda 12.1 and 12.2).⁶ It is a small detail with a long shadow. Shurpanakha's husband will later die at Ravana's own hand in a battle, and her widowhood is part of what sends her roaming the forests of the south, where she meets Rama and Lakshmana at Panchavati and the war begins.⁷ But in this chapter it is simply what a new king does: before he thinks of a wife for himself, he settles his sister. Any Indian eldest son will recognise the order of operations.

Verse numbers here follow the 29-verse Sanskrit text of the sarga on sanskritdocuments.org (the Tokunaga and Smith digital edition); other editions may differ by a verse or two. Scholars regard the Uttara Kanda as a later addition,⁸ but it travels under Valmiki's name, and so does this piece.

2. A father in the forest

Then Ravana goes hunting, and in the forest he comes upon a strange pair: an asura of enormous dignity walking with a young woman (12.3 to 12.5). Ravana asks who he is, alone with a girl in a forest without men. The asura is Maya, son of Diti, the architect of the gods' enemies, the builder of Tripura's three cities and of the Pandavas' hall of illusions.⁹ And Maya, instead of answering briefly, tells Ravana his life.

He had been given, by the gods themselves, an apsara named Hema as his wife, in a match he compares to Indra's with Paulomi (12.6). For five hundred years he was devoted to her. Then she went away on the gods' business, for fourteen years (12.7). For her sake he had built, by his magic, a city all of gold, set with diamond and lapis (12.8). Without her, he says, he found no pleasure in it, so he left the city with their daughter and came into the forest (12.9). And then Maya says the thing that makes this passage, the better part of two thousand years later,⁸ feel like a conversation at a wedding sangeet. To be the father of a daughter, he tells Ravana, is a sorrow for any man who cares for his good name, because a daughter always keeps two families in doubt, her father's and the one she will join; and he has come out looking for a husband for her (12.10 and 12.11). He mentions his two sons, Mayavi and Dundubhi, almost as an afterthought (12.12). The daughter is the point.

The young woman is Mandodari. She does not speak in the sarga. Her father speaks for her, as fathers in Valmiki do, and what he says is not about her beauty, which the sarga never mentions, but about his own fear for her future. It is the most human moment in the chapter, and it belongs to the father of the bride.

3. The question Maya asked

Before he offers anything, Maya asks Ravana who he is (12.13). Not what he rules, not what he owns. Whose son.

Ravana answers, humbly, that he is the son of Paulastya, of Pulastya's house, and that his name is Dashagriva (12.14). His father is the sage Vishrava, Pulastya's son, and Pulastya is one of the mind-born sons of Brahma.¹ At that, Valmiki says, Maya is delighted, because he knows Ravana now for the son of a brahmarshi, a sage of the highest order, and he resolves there and then to give him his daughter (12.15). Three verses later the poet adds, with a small shiver, that Maya gave her knowing the grandfather's line but nothing of the ascetic's curse (12.18). The rakshasa king's mother, Kaikesi, was the daughter of the rakshasa king Sumali;¹ his father was a Brahmin seer. It is the father's line that Maya hears, and it is the father's line that decides him.

This is an early form of the question every Indian family still asks before a match, and it is worth noticing what it is not. Maya does not ask about Lanka, or about Ravana's boons, or his ten heads. He asks, in effect, about gotra and kula, lineage and house, and kula is Valmiki's own word (12.18). The answer satisfies him because it places Ravana inside the Vedic order rather than outside it. Modern families ask the same question with a horoscope and a quiet phone call to a cousin in the other city; Shaadiwaale's Kundli Matching is the modern version of Maya's question in the forest.

4. The ceremony: a fire kindled in the forest

Maya, laughing, offers Mandodari as a wife (12.16). Ravana says, very well. And then, in a single verse, the wedding happens: Ravana kindles a fire there in the forest, prajvalya tatra chaivagnim, and takes her hand, the panigrahana, for which Valmiki's word is panisangraha (12.17). That is the whole ceremony. No baraat, no palace, no priests of Lanka, no music, no feast that the poet troubles to describe. A father, a groom, a bride who does not speak, and a fire.

It would be easy to read this as a slight, a villain's wedding done cheaply. It is the opposite. The father gives the bride and the groom takes her hand before a fire, which makes this something other than a gandharva match, the marriage by consent alone, with no rite, witness or family, that the Smritis count among their eight forms and that some old authorities doubted would last because it did not involve Agni.¹⁰ Ravana, the son of a brahmarshi, marries with Agni as witness. Valmiki is careful here in a way that modern retellings are not. The Ramayana's great antagonist is married correctly, with the same two acts, the fire and the taking of the hand, that are at the heart of Rama's wedding in Mithila.¹¹ The poet gives the two grooms the same ritual and lets the difference lie elsewhere.

For a family reading this today, the scene is a corrective. A wedding does not need a city. At its core the rite is a fire, the clasped hand and the steps; the Hindu Marriage Act itself says that where the ceremonies include the saptapadi, the seven steps taken together before the sacred fire, the marriage becomes complete and binding when the seventh step is taken.¹² Everything else, the week of functions, the stage, the horse, is what a family adds because it can. Ravana, who could have added anything, added nothing, and the marriage held for the rest of his life. The Story of Weddings follows the fire, the hand and the seven steps from the Rigveda to that Act, and the pandits on Shaadiwaale will tell you the same thing if you ask them what a ceremony actually requires.

5. The dowry: a spear

Maya's gift to his new son-in-law is the strangest dowry in the epic. Along with his daughter, Valmiki says, Maya gave Ravana a shakti, a spear, unfailing and supremely wondrous, won through supreme austerity (12.19). And the poet, who knows how his story ends, adds a line looking forward: this is the spear with which Lakshmana would be struck. In the Yuddha Kanda, Ravana hurls the spear that Maya made at Lakshmana, it pierces his chest and he falls,¹³ and only Hanuman's flight to the mountain of healing herbs, from which, unable to tell one herb from another, he brings back the whole peak, revives him.¹⁴ The dowry given at a forest wedding is the thing that nearly ends the war in Lanka's favour.

A later telling adds a darker gift. In the Devi Bhagavata Purana, as Vettam Mani's Puranic Encyclopaedia summarises it, Maya warns Ravana that Mandodari's horoscope shows her first-born will destroy his clan, and that the child should be killed. Ravana will not do it, and has the baby buried in a casket in Janaka's city instead, where she is later found. The child is Sita.¹⁵ The warning, like the spear, comes true.

Two things about this are worth carrying out of the text. The first is that in Valmiki the gift flows from the bride's father to the groom, and it is given freely, by a father who has chosen the match and is pleased with it; nobody in the sarga asks for anything. That is a long way from the dowry demand, which Indian law has prohibited since the Dowry Prohibition Act of 1961.¹⁶ The second is that Valmiki's dowry has consequences. What a family gives at a wedding, the poet seems to say, does not stay at the wedding. The Journal's companion piece on the Ram Sita wedding notes that Dasharatha gave four lakh cows to the Brahmins of Mithila, in the bride's own city;¹⁷ here the gift goes the other way, and it is a weapon. The Shagun Registry exists so that what is given is at least something the couple wanted.

6. Three brides for Lanka

Ravana returns to Lanka with his bride, and the sarga, which has so far been a forest idyll, becomes a wedding season (12.20 to 12.24). Kumbhakarna is married to Vajrajvala, a granddaughter of the great asura king Virochana through his daughter, which makes her kin to Bali, Virochana's son, the king whom Vishnu as Vamana sent to the underworld;¹⁸ it is a match between Lanka and the oldest asura royalty. Vibhishana, the brother who will one day cross to Rama's side, is married to Sarama, daughter of the gandharva king Shailusha.

Valmiki pauses on Sarama's name. She was born on the shore of Lake Manasa, and as the lake swelled in the rains, her mother, in her love for the child, cried out saro ma vardhata, "lake, do not rise," and the child was called Sarama (12.23 and 12.24). It is the sort of etymological aside the poet loves, and it tells us that Vibhishana's wife came from a gandharva court on the shore of the lake that Indian tradition says Brahma made from his mind, beside Mount Kailash,¹⁹ about as far from Lanka as the epic's geography allows. Sarama will matter: in the Yuddha Kanda, when Ravana shows Sita an illusory head of Rama, it is she who comforts Sita and tells her the head is only magic²⁰.²¹

Three brothers, three brides, three different worlds: an asura architect's daughter, an asura king's granddaughter, a gandharva king's daughter. Rama and his three brothers married four women of one family in Mithila and interlocked two dynasties. Ravana and his two brothers married into three separate powers and spread Lanka's alliances across the map. The poet does not say which strategy is wiser. The reader knows how both turned out.

7. The child who cried like thunder

The sarga ends with a birth. Mandodari bears Ravana a son, and his first cry is so loud, like a thundercloud, that all of Lanka is stunned by it; his father names him Meghanada, "cloud-roar," for the sound (12.26 to 12.28). He grows up in the inner apartments of Ravana's palace, guarded by its women, Valmiki says, like a fire hidden in wood (12.29). The world will know him as Indrajit, the conqueror of Indra, the name the sarga itself gives him (12.26): the warrior who twice brings down both Rama and Lakshmana in battle, and who dies only after Lakshmana, with Vibhishana's warning to guide him, breaks up his sacrifice.²²

Folk tradition has added an astrological legend that every Indian who has ever been handed a kundli will enjoy. Ravana, an expert astrologer by reputation and, tradition says, the author of the Ravana Samhita, a book of Hindu astrology,¹ is said to have ordered the planets into their proper places at the moment of his son's birth so that the boy would be immortal; Saturn moved, and in one telling Ravana struck it with his mace and broke one of its legs.²³ In another, Shani simply disobeyed and settled in the twelfth house of the boy's chart, and that is why Meghanada died at Lakshmana's hands.²² The story is not in Valmiki, and it is told in more than one version, but it is the Indian wedding's favourite joke about horoscopes: even Ravana could not get a perfect one.

8. Who was the bride: Mandodari's many origins

Valmiki gives Mandodari a simple pedigree, the daughter of Maya and Hema, and almost no voice at her own wedding. Later India gave her a string of other origins, and most of them involve a frog.¹⁵

In the Telugu Uttara Ramayana, she begins as Madhura, an apsara who makes love with Shiva on Kailash while Parvati is away, and whom Parvati curses to live twelve years as a frog in a well; when she calls out from the well, Maya and Hema adopt her and name her Mandodari. In the Ranganatha Ramayana, also Telugu, Parvati makes a doll that Shiva brings to life as a maiden, later turns her into a frog, and the frog becomes a girl again and is given to Maya. The Kuchipudi dance tradition has Ravana ask Shiva for Parvati herself, and Parvati make a look-alike from a frog and hand her over instead. The Odia Dharma Purana and the Mahari temple-dance tradition tell of a frog who leaps into poisoned milk to save sages and comes back as the girl who becomes Lanka's queen. Only the Kuchipudi story explains her name from the frog; the Odia one names her after the two sages she saved, Mandar and Udar, and the Sanskrit name itself means, plainly, "soft-bellied".¹⁵ It says something that so many traditions wanted Ravana's wife to have begun as something small, blameless and easy to overlook.

Other Ramayanas go further. The Jain versions, the Vasudevahindi and Gunabhadra's Uttara Purana, make Sita the daughter of Ravana and Mandodari, abandoned at birth after a prophecy that she would destroy her father and his house, and found and adopted by Janaka¹⁵:²⁴ in that telling Rama's wedding and Ravana's are the same family's story. The Adbhuta Ramayana has Mandodari, drinking a pot of sages' blood to end her life, conceive Sita instead. The Thai Ramakien and the Malay Seri Rama rework her again. And the mainstream Hindu tradition places her among the Panchakanya, the five maidens whose names, remembered every morning, are said to destroy the greatest sins: Ahalya, Draupadi, Sita, Tara, Mandodari¹⁵.²⁵ It is an extraordinary company for a rakshasa's wife, and it is the tradition's verdict on her: that she married a villain, counselled him again and again to give Sita back, and was not herself to blame for any of it.

What happened to her after the war is the tradition's last argument about her. Many later Ramayanas have Rama advise Vibhishana to marry his brother's widow, and scholars have read the match as statesmanship, as a matrilineal custom by which the new king married the reigning queen, or as the alternative to a widow taking her own life.¹⁵ Valmiki, characteristically, leaves it alone.

9. Where it happened, according to India

Valmiki sets the wedding in an unnamed forest. India has named it.

Mandore, Rajasthan. Nine kilometres north of Jodhpur, the old capital of Marwar is believed to be Mandodari's native place, and local belief says it is named after her.²⁶ Tradition points to a site at Mandore as the place where Ravana married her: Rajasthan Patrika calls it Ravan ki Chavri and reports that it is in the care of the tourism department, while noting that historians do not accept the claim as proven²⁷.²⁸ The Maudgil Brahmins of Mandore regard him as their son-in-law and do not burn his effigy.⁵ In Jodhpur itself, the Shrimali Brahmins of the Dave Godha gotra go further. Their priest, Kamlesh Dave, told ETV Bharat that his ancestors came in Ravana's wedding procession and settled here;² the clan told the Press Trust of India in 2018 that Ravana married Mandodari, daughter of the king of Mandawar, as Mandore was then known, that some of his relatives stayed behind after the wedding, and that the clan descends from Ravana himself.³ Until 2007 the families performed Ravana's last rites in their homes after the effigies had burned. Then they built him a temple, its idol ready by 2008,³ in the grounds of the Amarnath Mahadev temple on Kila Road.²⁷ On the tenth day of Shraddha Paksha they perform tarpan and pind daan there for Ravana, his father Vishrava and his grandfather Pulastya.⁵ On Dussehra evening, Ajay Dave told PTI, "we wait till the effigies of Ravana are completely burnt," and then the family bathes, dresses in fresh clothes and gathers at the temple to pray.³ His father Kamlesh's verdict on the ancestor, as PTI reported it: "a great scholar, who had unmatched knowledge of the Vedas, Puranas and Upanishads," and "barring the abduction of Sita, one cannot find any blot on his character." The baraat, in other words, never entirely left.

Mandsaur, Madhya Pradesh. Over the border in Madhya Pradesh, Mandsaur makes the same claim to Mandodari, and draws the same conclusion: if she was the town's daughter, Ravana is the town's damaad. A statue of him, 35 feet tall by Madhya Pradesh Tourism's count, stands in the Khanpur area of the town; women cover their heads when they pass it or pray before it, as a bride does before her in-laws, and on Dussehra, instead of burning him, households switch off their lights for a few minutes.⁴ The Namdeo Vaishnav Samaj in particular counts him as its son-in-law, the Free Press Journal reports.²⁹ Two towns, in two states, each certain it gave Lanka its queen, and each treating the groom with the exact mixture of respect and proprietorship that Indian in-laws reserve for a son-in-law.

Ravangram, Madhya Pradesh. In Vidisha district a village keeps a ten-foot reclining statue it calls Ravana Baba,⁵ and before any wedding in the village, the first invitation card goes to his temple.²⁹ The villain of the national epic is the senior guest at every local shaadi.

Bisrakh, Uttar Pradesh, claims his birth and honours his memory with yajnas and prayers at Navratri; Kanpur's Dashanan temple opens its doors only on Dussehra; Kakinada has a temple at a site he is said to have chosen; Kolar and Mandya in Karnataka remember him with a Lankeshwar Mahotsav; the Gond community of Paraswadi in Maharashtra calls itself Ravanvanshi.⁵ None of these is about the wedding. But together they explain why the wedding matters: in a large part of India, Ravana is not a monster but a relative, and relatives, whatever they did, get a seat.

For a family that would like its own wedding in a Rajasthani fort, start with Shaadiwaale's palaces and forts, in Jaipur and Udaipur among other places; the Dave Godha families would say the habit of marrying in Rajasthan is older than anyone thinks.

10. Ravana's wedding and Rama's, side by side

Valmiki wrote both weddings, the second in the Bala Kanda¹⁷,¹¹ and both first sons: Rama's twins, Lava and Kusha, are born years later at the poet's own hermitage.³⁰ Set them next to each other and the poet's design shows.

The same poet, the same rite, the same fire. One wedding has a city, a go-between, a public condition and two royal courts for witnesses, and Janakpur still keeps it every year as a seven-day festival³¹;²⁴ the other has a worried father and a forest. The difference, Valmiki seems to say, is not in how a man marries. It is in what he does afterwards.

What the villain's wedding teaches

It is tempting to end a piece like this with a moral about Ravana, and Valmiki, who was a better writer than that, declined to. So here is what the wedding itself teaches, which is more useful.

The father of the bride is anxious, and the anxiety is as old as the ceremony. Maya's speech in the forest is the better part of two thousand years old and could be delivered at any engagement this winter. The lineage question comes before the offer. The rite is small: fire and hand; everything else is choice. The gift in the sarga is a pleased father's, freely given, and what is given at a wedding travels with the couple for the rest of their lives, so give carefully. Marrying three siblings into three different houses in one season is a strategy, and the Indian habit of doing exactly that is older than the Indian habit of criticising it. And the baraat, if it is welcomed well enough, may never go home.

For a family at the start of all this, Shaadiwaale's Kundli Matching is Maya's question, the pandits listed by city will kindle the fire, the Shagun Registry keeps the gifts from becoming spears, and the planning tools exist for the family marrying more than one child in a season. If the forest appeals, the lawns and farmhouses listing is the modern version. And if you have been to a wedding in Mandore where the groom's side was still there a week later, our team would like to hear about it.

Frequently asked questions

Who did Ravana marry?

Ravana married Mandodari, the daughter of the asura architect Maya and the apsara Hema. Valmiki's Ramayana tells the story in sarga 12 of the Uttara Kanda: Ravana met Maya and his daughter in a forest while hunting, Maya offered her after learning Ravana's lineage, and Ravana married her there, kindling a fire and taking her hand. Their son was Meghanada, later known as Indrajit.

Where did Ravana marry Mandodari?

Valmiki sets the wedding in an unnamed forest where Maya was walking with his daughter. Local tradition in Rajasthan places it at Mandore, nine kilometres north of Jodhpur, which is also believed to be Mandodari's native place, though historians do not accept the claim as proven; the Dave Godha Shrimali Brahmins of Jodhpur say their ancestors came with Ravana's wedding party and stayed. Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh makes a rival claim to be Mandodari's home.

What was Mandodari's dowry?

According to the Uttara Kanda, Maya gave Ravana an unfailing spear (shakti), won through austerity, along with his daughter. Ravana later hurled a spear made by Maya at Lakshmana in the war at Lanka, nearly killing him. In a later telling attributed to the Devi Bhagavata Purana, Maya also warns Ravana that Mandodari's first-born will destroy his clan; in that version the child is Sita.

Why is Ravana worshipped in Jodhpur and Mandsaur?

Because communities in both places regard him as a son-in-law, and some as an ancestor. Mandore near Jodhpur and Mandsaur each claim Mandodari as their daughter, so Ravana is the local damaad; Mandsaur does not burn him, and in Jodhpur the families who hold this belief mourn him on Dussehra. Jodhpur's Dave Godha Shrimali Brahmins set up a Ravana temple, its idol ready by 2008, and perform tarpan and pind daan for him, his father Vishrava and his grandfather Pulastya on the tenth day of Shraddha Paksha.

Who were Kumbhakarna's and Vibhishana's wives?

In the same sarga, Ravana married Kumbhakarna to Vajrajvala, granddaughter of the asura king Virochana, and Vibhishana to Sarama, daughter of the gandharva king Shailusha. Sarama was named for her mother's cry "saro ma vardhata" ("lake, do not rise") as Lake Manasa rose in the rains after her birth. During the war Sarama comforted the captive Sita and told her that the head of Rama Ravana had shown her was an illusion.

Why is Mandodari called a Panchakanya?

Mandodari is one of the five Panchakanya, with Ahalya, Draupadi, Sita and Tara, whose names are remembered in a daily prayer said to destroy the greatest sins. Tradition honours her as a virtuous queen who repeatedly counselled Ravana to return Sita and tried to dissuade him before the last battle, and who bore no blame for his conduct.

What is the frog story about Mandodari?

Several regional traditions, including the Telugu Uttara Ramayana and Ranganatha Ramayana, the Kuchipudi dance tradition and the Odia Dharma Purana, say Mandodari began as a frog, whether an apsara cursed by Parvati or a frog that saved sages from poisoned milk, and became a maiden; in the Telugu versions Maya and Hema adopt her. In the Kuchipudi version she is called Mandodari because she was made from a frog. None of this is in Valmiki.

Did Mandodari marry Vibhishana after Ravana died?

Many later Ramayanas say that Rama advised Vibhishana to marry Mandodari after Ravana's death, and scholars have read this as statesmanship, as a matrilineal custom by which the new king married the reigning queen, or as an alternative to a widow taking her own life. Valmiki's Ramayana does not describe such a marriage.