Long before Lanka became infamous as the site of Sita’s captivity, it was a different brother’s inheritance entirely. Kubera, god of wealth and the son of the sage Vishrava through his first wife, had been granted the magnificent golden city of Lanka by his father, along with the Pushpaka Vimana – the same flying chariot that would, generations later, carry Ravana and his captive back from the war’s aftermath in an entirely different context.
A half-brother born of envy
Vishrava later remarried the rakshasi princess Kaikesi, and their children – Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Surpanakha, and Vibhishana – grew up watching their half-brother Kubera enjoy a splendid, established kingdom while they had comparatively little. Kaikesi, according to several tellings, actively encouraged Ravana to seek power and status to match or exceed Kubera’s, framing his own more modest circumstances as an injustice worth correcting through ambition.
Penance as a path to power
Ravana responded the way he consistently would throughout his life when he wanted something beyond his current reach: with extreme, prolonged penance aimed at Brahma, eventually earning boons of near-invincibility against gods and demons alike, along with immense strength for himself, Kumbhakarna, and eventually blessings for Vibhishana as well, granted for his contrastingly devoted and humble conduct during the same penance.
Armed with this new power, Ravana turned to Lanka directly. Rather than negotiate or wait for any claim through inheritance, he confronted Kubera and, through threat and force enabled by his boons, drove his half-brother out of the city entirely, seizing Lanka along with the Pushpaka Vimana as his own.
Kubera’s response
Kubera, unwilling to fight a war he likely could not win against his boon-strengthened brother, withdrew rather than resist by force, relocating to Alaka on Mount Kailash, where he continued to serve as guardian of wealth and treasure under a different jurisdiction, notably maintaining a far more measured, warning relationship with Ravana afterward – at points sending messengers urging him toward restraint, including, in some versions, cautioning him specifically against the abduction of Sita before it happened.
A pattern set before Sita ever entered the story
The seizure of Lanka establishes, well before the main events of the epic, exactly what kind of figure Ravana already was: someone willing to use immense earned power not for protection or justice but simply to take what a sibling possessed and he wanted, evicting family without particular remorse once he had the strength to do so. His later abduction of Sita, then, was not really a departure from character. It was the same pattern – desire, power, and seizure without regard for whose life it disrupted – applied one more time, against an opponent who this time would not simply withdraw the way Kubera had.