The Many Faces of Ravana

A major point of difference among Ramayanas is the intensity of focus on a major character. Valmiki focuses on Rama and his history in his opening sections; Vimalasuri's Jaina Ramayana and the Thai epic focus not on Rama but on the genealogy and adventures of Ravana. In the latter [Jaina texts], Ravana is a noble hero fated by his karma to fall for Sita and bring death upon himself, while he is in other texts an overweening demon. I shall attempt to explore these three characterisations of Ravana in a three-part series. 

Ramakien

Ravana, or Totsakan as he is known in the Ramakien, is the Ramayana's main antagonist, who is depicted as immoral, amorous, and selfish on the surface. However, if you dig a little deeper, you'll see some interesting changes in how Ravana is portrayed in various retellings.

Tosakanth / Thotsakan is the embodiment of the demon gatekeeper Nontuk, a ten-faced, twenty-armed demon king of Longka. He has a lot of power, but he uses it to destroy everyone who offends him. He serves as a foil to Phra Ram's life. In Thailand, he is the personification of all evil. The more sympathetic features of his character, which are evident throughout the tale, are repressed in popular culture's black-and-white portrait. The Rama narrative has had an impact on Thai folklore, as seen by various proverbial idioms that may be traced back to the Rama myth. Thosakan (Dasakantha, or Ravana) is a term used to describe someone who lacks good manners. Parents and educators used to present youngsters the characters from the mythology as role models or as a warning. As a result, Rama's stories play an important role in the education and character development of young Thais.

The Ramakirti, on the other hand, admires Ravana's cleverness and learning; his kidnapping of Sita is considered as a loving gesture and is seen sympathetically. Ravana's sacrifice of family, country, and life itself for the sake of a woman moves the Thais. His final words ("The world should be shown that it is better to die than to live with a shattered heart!") became the subject of a renowned nineteenth-century love poem, an inscription of a Wat of Bangkok. The Thai characters, unlike Valmiki's, are an imperfect, human blend of good and evil. One is saddened by Ravana's demise here. It is not a time for unambiguous joy, as it is in Valmiki.

Ravana boastfully shouts to his charioteer in the 104th chapter of Valmiki's Yuddha Kanda that he does not turn back from combat without murdering his opponents.

Totsakan is shown in the Ramakien as reassuring his family about his impending death before the final battle with Ram. He appears to have accepted his defeat as inevitable as he says the words “Tomorrow I shall be killed” and “I must go to my death.”

In the Valmiki Ramayana, Ravana's unrestrained avarice is contrasted with his weakness in the Ramakien. Thosakan is portrayed as a layered character with both human strengths and flaws. He is portrayed to be a magnificent character, known for his strength and cleverness, and his abduction of Nang Sida is motivated by the lofty motive of love, for which he is willing to die. This gives his portrayal more depth, distinguishing it not only from his portrayal in the Valmiki Ramayana, but also from the caricature-like evilness of Ravana that has saturated popular Indian consciousness. His demise is unavoidable, evoking sadness and sympathy. To the Thai audience, Totsakan is not merely the evil villain, rather, a more complex and fallible character with a tragic ending.

To understand why such a difference in characterisations exist, we must trace the journey of the epict to Thailand. Some accounts suggest that the epic was not directly transmitted from India but through the Khmer kingdom in Angkor, Cambodia, during the Ayutthaya period when there was a cultural exchange between Thailand and Cambodia. This indirect route of transmission could explain the difference in the characterisations between the Indian and Thai versions.

Alternatively, as the Ramakien was originally written by King Rama I as a dance-drama, it had little religious connotations unlike Valmiki’s Ramayana. The nature of a dance-drama allows for flexibility in representation of characters so that they are more dramatically appealing to the audience. Sita being Totsakan’s abandoned daughter also serves this very purpose by creating dramatic irony where the audience knows about his tragic fate even before the battle truly begins.

Also, being a Buddhist society, the representation of Hindu gods in the epic had no religious significance to the Thai people. Hence, unlike Valmiki’s Ramayana, the need to venerate Rama as an incarnation of Vishnu and equally demonise Ravana to match him, did not exist. As a result, Totsakan becomes more than just a mere tool to validate the divinity of the Hindu gods.

Valmiki Ramayana

We've seen how much of the story's morphology makes it easy and necessary to place Ravana in a long series of demonic villains (Hiranyakasipu and the rest), and how, as a result, he frequently appears to embody the power of cosmic evil manifest. However, this transcendence is not consistent, and what Ravana represents appears to be far deeper and more intricate than any such cosmic rank would allow.

"like Milton's Satan, Ravana has to be endowed with substantial 'merit,' since great evil presupposes the perversion of great virtues”.  according to Pollock. This is undoubtedly true to some extent, but it also has a corollary: in order to be a fit opponent for a great avatara of Vishnu,

Ravana must be built in the image of the gods' formidable asura foes. To save the worlds from some petty ogre chieftain of the forest, the supreme lord of the universe does not need to take on human form; and so Ravana, virtually alone among the rakshasas of Indian myth, is allowed to rise to a level of power and grandeur sufficient to warrant the intervention of a full-fledged avatara.

In retrospect, a close study of the Yuddhakanda text reveals a Ravana who, while undoubtedly one of world literature's great villains, is far from the one-dimensional bogeyman depicted in later and more popular versions of the epic saga. Megalomania, vanity, and power abound in his towering stature. He is further vitiated only by his insane and self-destructive desire for the one thing in the universe he cannot have, coming as close to a traditional tragic hero as any figure in the epic.

Though Totsakan's cruelty and avarice make his death appear justifiable, the inevitability of his demise, as well as the way he goes into it blindly and voluntarily, elicits catharsis and sympathy for his character.

Rāvaṇa, the epic's grand antagonist, is a more interesting and complex figure than the crass, cruel, and lecherous monster of innumerable later writings, performative media, and popular imagination, at least in Vlmki's interpretation. Despite his overbearing passion and hubris, as well as the damage he has wreaked in the three realms, he is depicted in the earlier chapters as a glorious potentate, an obsessed lover, a husband grieved by his many wives, and a person who, in the end, realises the foolishness of his last transgression.

Jaina Ramayana

Vimalasuri's Jaina Ramayana, known as Paumacariya (Prakrit for the Sanskrit Padmacarita), examines the Valmiki and corrects its mistakes and Hindu excesses. This is a pratipurana, or anti- or counter-purana, like other Jains puranas. Prati, which means "anti- '' or "counter-," is a popular Jaina prefix.

The Jains' Vimalasuri begins the narrative with Ravana's ancestry and glory, rather than Rama's. Ravana is one of the Jaina tradition's sixty-three commanders, or salakapurusas. He is noble, scholarly, and a disciple of Jaina gurus, earning all of his magical talents and weaponry through austerities (tapas). To appease one of the gurus, he swears that he will not touch any woman who is unwilling. He laid siege to an impregnable fort in one notable occasion. The queen of that realm falls in love with him and sends him her messenger; he breaches the fort and defeats the king using her knowledge of the fort. He restores the kingdom to the king and advises the queen as soon as he conquers it to return to her husband. Later, when he hears from soothsayers that he would meet his end through a woman named Sita, he is shaken to his core. It is the same Ravana who falls in love with Sita's beauty, abducts her, seeks in vain to earn her graces, sees himself fall, and dies on the battlefield. In these stories, he is a wonderful man who is undone by a passion that he has pledged to resist but can't. Sita is his daughter, according to another Jaina Ramayana storey, but he is unaware of it: this Oedipal predicament stacks the odds against him even further.

In truth, this Ravana is a tragic figure in our modern eyes; we are moved to adoration and empathy for Ravana when the Jainas tell the story. They even justify Ravana's identity as the Ten-Headed Demon. His mother was given a necklace with nine stones when he was born, which she wore around his neck. She named him Dasamukha, or the Ten-faced One, because she saw his face reflected in them nine times.

Ravana is a Pluto-like abduction into the dark region in the south (the south being the abode of death); Kamba's Ramayana is a rereading of Valmiki's Ramayana, which is a discourse of the dominant Aryan culture. In a later version of Asura, Neelakantan appears to caricature Ravana, the Dravidian work's hero, and the attempt appears to delegitimize Kamaba's claim to Ravana's greatness.

Through the exploration of the character of Ravana in different versions of the epic we can recognise the crucial role religious attitudes and beliefs play in shaping the characterisations within Indian epics. In conclusion, the versions that were most popular and accepted in India tend to Ravana as cardboard characters whereas the other retellings try to justify and bring forth the actions and struggles of different characters according to the society and values they were developed in.