Can there be Rama without Ravana? The men who vandalised the Ravana idol at Bisrakh, UP, believed to be the birthplace of the Rakshasa king, may think there ought to. But the truth is Ravana complements Rama. With his tamasik and/or rajasik features, Ravana stands in contrast to Rama, the epitome of satvik virtues, and completes the personality of the avatara purusha. The blockbuster, after all, needs a villain as well. But beyond the universe of the populist narrations of the Rama story, there exists a Ravana, a complex personality who defies the stereotype of the demon. There is enough evidence in the Ramayana tradition, which is a collection of the numerous Ramayanas and its performative universe spread across folk and classical forms, music, dance, painting and sculpture, and, perhaps now, cinema as well, that recognise Ravana as a rounded personality, worthy of respect and recognition as a complex figure. In fact, every Ramakatha is also a Ravanakatha and there are as many Ravanas as Ramayanas, each one telling a different story, offering a unique perspective. Of course, popular culture has over time reduced the complex renderings of the Ramayana to turn Rama and Ravana into tropes, one the blemishless god and the other a representative of all things evil. This stereotype has also fed into a political narrative built around Rama as the ideal king and Ravana as his demonic other. Not surprisingly, Ravana has been reinvented as a pole of resistance to the ethics represented by adherents of Rama Rajya, when it comes to represent a state that scrupulously enforces caste hierarchy. Any show of respect or recognition of Ravana’s personality, which in itself is a recognition of the complex power play and statecraft in the Rama story, is seen as a challenge to a singular reading of the epic. In the transition of Rama from a god-like figure to a god, Ravana was turned in to a caricature of the demon king. Such reductionist rendering of Ravana does not do justice to the epic imagination. The earliest “revisionist” reading of the Rama story, perhaps, were the Jain Ramayanas like Vimalasuri’s Paumacariya. In his celebrated essay, Three Hundred Ramayanas, AK Ramanujan says “the Jaina texts express the feeling that the Hindus, especially the Brahmans, have maligned Ravana, made him into a villain”. Ramanujan calls these pratipuranas (counter-puranas). In Paumacariya, Ravana is a noble, learned Jaina, who has earned all his magical powers and weapons through austerities and is a devotee of Jaina masters. Ramanujan adds that “this Ravana is a tragic figure; we are moved to admiration and pity for Ravana when the Jains tell the story”. Many other retellings of the Rama story also takes liberties with the story line of Valmiki’s Ramayana. In one version, Sita is Ravana’s daughter and the abduction story becomes that of a father taking away his daughter. In modern times, this story, likened to a story wherein Vedavathi, a woman assaulted by the rakshasa king, curses him that his daughter will be the cause of his death, has been reworked into a popular poem (Ravanaputri) by Malayalam poet-lyricist Vayalar Rama Varma. As Rama began to be projected as the idea king of the ideal republic, those in disagreement with the idea would have explored the character of Ravana for a counter-politics. From folk narratives that extol Ravana’s greatness to the writings of a modern political ideologue like Periyar EV Ramasami on Ramayana are evidence of this search for a counter-politics in the asura king. Periyar, the ideologue of the Dravidian movement, reads the Ramayana as a tale of the subjugation of the Dravidians by Aryans. His Ravana is a great scholar, a just and brave ruler of character, protector of his followers and so on. In his polemical reading of Ramayana, Ravana comes across as representative of a superior political vision. Periyar’s take on on why Ravana disliked the devas and the sages, for instance, is that they would sacrifice animals during yagnas. Ravana abducted Sita because Rama had insulted his sister and disfigured her. The motive for abduction was not lust but revenge. Rama, however, orders the whole of Lanka to be burnt and its inhabitants murdered, a far greater crime than any that Ravana had done. To Periyar, celebration of Ramayana is akin to insulting the self-respect of Tamils. This polemical interpretation suited Periyar’s argument for a Dravidian political imaginary that refused to accept the “Aryan” inheritance which included Brahmanism and the Sanskrit language. In many of these retellings, Ravana is a more exuberant personality, to borrow a category socialist thinker Ram Manohar Lohia uses to describe India's “three great dreams of perfection”. Lohia considers Rama the perfection of the limited personality — someone who stays within the circles of rules. Krishna, to Lohia, is the second of the “great dream of perfection”. Krishna symbolises the exuberant personality, who recognises rules and constitution only as long as it wishes to do so and violates them the moment that their administration begins to prove irksome. There is an element of this “exuberant personality” in Ravana. From his genealogy, one may deduce that he is a self-made person, almost a subaltern hero, who fights all odds to come into his own as a ruler. He is a scholar, a musician, a Shiva devotee, who refuses to submit to the rules and hierarchies imposed by the society. It is, perhaps, this rebellious streak that has attracted non-conformists, especially artists, to him. This Ravana is a complex political figure, a counterpoise to Rama, who is a prisoner of his destiny, the raja dharma of his time. His celebration can yield a critique of Rama's political vision, especially its Hindutva version. That should be a disturbing thought for those who seek to a build a muscular political narrative around Raja Ram.
