Ravana

Ravana was not born just any monster: he was born a Brahmin. He is the grandson of Pulastya, one of the mind-born sages of Brahma, son of the ascetic Vishrava and the rakshasi princess Kaikasi, and half-brother of Kubera, the god of wealth, whom he would in time drive out of Lanka to keep both the city and its flying chariot, the Pushpaka. His legend of power begins with an atrocious penance: for thousands of years he worshipped Brahma, and each millennium he cut off one of his ten heads and offered it to the fire. As he was about to sever the last one, Brahma appeared and granted him the boon of his choosing. Ravana asked to be invulnerable to gods, demons, celestial serpents and spirits, and left men and animals off the list out of sheer contempt: no creature so lowly could ever threaten him. His entire downfall fits inside that disdain. The ten restored heads remained his signature, and tradition read them in two ways: as mastery of the four Vedas and the six shastras, and as the ten faces of the ego a king never managed to cut off. For Ravana was, before he was a tyrant, a scholar: learned in the sacred science, a consummate player of the veena, an author to whom the Shaiva tradition attributes entire hymns.

With Brahma's boon in hand, Ravana took Lanka, the golden citadel raised on an island at the south of the world, and reigned over it with his court of rakshasas. At his side, the brothers the epic turned into archetypes: Kumbhakarna, the giant condemned to sleep six months at a stretch by a slip of the tongue when asking for his own boon; Vibhishana, the righteous one who would end up deserting him; and their sister Surpanakha, whose humiliation would ignite the war. His son Indrajit earned his name by defeating and binding Indra himself, king of the devas, and the rakshasa empire came to subdue the three worlds. But the scene that defines Ravana is not a conquest but a punishment: swollen with pride, he tried to tear Mount Kailash, Shiva's abode, up by the roots, and the god pinned him beneath the mountain by pressing down with a single toe. Trapped, Ravana did not beg: he sang. For years he composed and chanted the hymn tradition calls the Shiva Tandava Stotra, until Shiva, pleased, released him, gifted him the moon-blade Chandrahasa and gave him the name that follows him: Ravana, «he who makes the worlds roar». The episode portrays him whole: the boundless pride, the talent capable of moving a god, and the Shaiva devotion that not even his worst deeds erased.

The war began with a family affront. Surpanakha courted Rama and his brother Lakshmana in the forest; rejected, she attacked Sita, and Lakshmana mutilated her, cutting off her nose and ears. Ravana then devised a revenge in his own measure: he sent the rakshasa Maricha transformed into a golden deer to draw the princes away, and abducted Sita, carrying her through the air to Lanka. The vulture Jatayu died trying to bar his way. And here the poem keeps its most quoted nuance: Ravana did not force his captive. He installed her in the ashoka grove of his palace, circled her with promises and threats, and waited, for an old curse hung over him: for having raped the apsara Rambha, betrothed of Nalakubara, his heads would burst if he ever again took a woman by force. The rest is the war that fills half the Ramayana: Hanuman leaps the ocean and sets Lanka ablaze, the monkeys' bridge joins the continent to the island, Kumbhakarna wakes only to die, Indrajit falls, Vibhishana defects to Rama's side with the city's secrets, and Ravana dies by the arrow of Rama, a man, precisely the creature his boon had despised. Once he was defeated, Rama himself ordered royal funeral rites for him, with a sentence tradition still repeats: enmity ends with death.

Every autumn, across northern India, giant effigies of Ravana burn amid fireworks at the festival of Dussehra, which celebrates Rama's victory: he is the most-burned villain on the planet. And yet that is not his only memory. In Sri Lanka he is claimed as a wise native king, physician and astronomer, and the bowed instrument called the ravanahatha bears his name as its supposed inventor. Several Shaiva temples of southern India honour him as the devotee who could move Shiva with a hymn. The Jain tradition tells his story in the Paumachariya with a different moral ending: its Ravana is a pious king who never touches Sita and falls solely because he cannot renounce his pride. And Kamban's Tamil Ramayana, without absolving him, grants him a tragic grandeur that Valmiki's text reserves for the gods. None of these readings erases the others: the same character is the demon burning in the town squares and the scholar whose veena figures on his banner. That double memory, sustained for more than two thousand years, is what makes Ravana something more interesting than a villain: the reminder that even the enemy of the incarnate god was, in other mouths, a king worthy of mourning.