Nila

Within the Ramayana tradition and related retellings, Nila is described as a son of Agni, the Vedic god of fire, giving him a semi‑divine genealogy. Accounts of his extraordinary ability to make stones float while helping construct the Rama Setu vary across texts: the Valmiki Ramayana credits Nala alone as builder, while the Ramacharitamanasa and other traditions credit both Nala and Nila; variant etiologies explain the floating‑stone power either as Varuna's assurance that both brothers could make stones float (sometimes with a proviso) or as a sage's decree enacted after Nala and Nila threw sacred images into water as children. These variants are presented across Ramayana recensions rather than as a single unified mechanism.

Sources identify Nila as a vanara — a simian/monkeylike warrior people — and describe him performing distinctive martial actions rather than providing extended physiognomic detail. Narrative episodes attest that he hurls great rocks and boulders in battle, once seizes the chariot wheel of the rakshasa Nikumbha and kills him with it, mounts enemy chariots (including an episode of jumping onto Ravana's chariot), and at times is depicted engaging in direct assaults on rakshasas alongside other vanara leaders such as Hanuman and Angada.

Nila is portrayed as a foremost vanara in effulgence, reputation, and prowess and functions as commander‑in‑chief of Sugriva's vanara army. He is credited with significant battlefield feats: killing rakshasas including Nikumbha (killed by a chariot wheel hurled by Nila), Mahodara (killed by a rock), Prahasta (struck down after withstanding arrows), and Pramathi in some sources; he fights on the front lines in the Yuddha Kanda and is at times described as directly assaulting Ravana's chariot. In bridge traditions he (sometimes together with his brother Nala) is said to possess the ability to make stones float and so contribute to the construction of Rama Setu; textual traditions differ on whether this power is Nala's alone or shared, and on whether it is explained by a sage's decree or by Varuna's assurance with conditions. Later Jain retellings record Nila as taking diksha and attaining moksha at Mangi‑Tungi, showing his adaptation into different religious frameworks.