Dashmukh

Asura : Tale of the Vanquished

The story of Ravan and His people

Written by Anand Neelakantan and published by Leadstart. The author is a former engineer in a PSU and has come up with this novel after lot of deliberation in which he narrates the story of Ravan from his own perspective. All the other versions are either of Ram or Hanuman and no one has tried to understand Ravan and his side of story. As it is said that the history is written by the victors and so none will take up his side.

In the introduction, the author writes that Ravan is portrayed as 10 faced traditional income, ism places, importance on the control of emotions and projects the intellect alone as the being supreme. 

His guru Mahabali advises Ravan to shun, the nine emotions of anger, pride, jealousy, happiness, sadness, fear, selfishness, passion, and ambition. Intellect alone is to be revered. But Ravan argues and states that all these 10 emotions make him a complete man without any pretence of holiness and he cannot shun other 9 for sake of being superior to his people. 

The book is divided into 65 small chapters in which the protagonist is Ravan himself and in some chapters the narrator is Ravan's slave Bhadra. The book starts with the last day of the battle where Ravan lies almost dead in the battlefield and revisits his life from the day he remembered as a kid. Ravan‘s mother belonged to a prominent Asura tribe Hethis and his father was a Brahmin for the fact of which he used to despise brahmins as he was not supportive to the family which was left to fend for itself. Interestingly, Kuber was his step brother. 

After Ravan's initial education, Mahabali asked few vows and lessons to be followed by Ravan. Mahabali states, "Anger is the lowest emotion. It clouds intellect, and can make you do foolish things. You become blind to reason and react only with your body, without thinking. This leads to failure in every sphere. Uproot this evil from your system." 

The next base emotion is pride. Arrogance stems from pride and kills clear thinking and vision. Pride makes you underestimate your force and overestimate yourself. Then he speaks about jealousy. Jealousy is a vile emotion, and mastering it is one of the most challenging task human being has. 

Speaking of Fear, he says it is not an emotion, it is a disease. Nothing has killed more men in war than fear.

Mahabali tried to teach and reason with Ravan and requested him to leave all the ambition and focus on his duty. However Ravan countered all his lessons with his reasoning and moved away to conquer the world. A civilisation draws its pride from the cities it has built, the books it has produced, the artist and artisans it has bred, the temple that has built and so on. A conqueror's first duty is to make the mightiest blow  possible on these edifices of civilised existence.

The book traverses through the entire story of Ravan from his childhood to the occupation of territories in India through his conquest from central to north and subsequently abduction of Sita and resultant war with Ram and Lakshman. The book gives anecdotes related to birth of Sita, Bali - the king of Kishkindha, of Hanuman  burning Lanka in search of Sita, attack of Varuna. Another feature is Bhadra, who was slave to Ravan. His is an interesting character who survives to tell the story after Ravan has died and to avenge his death Badra comes to Ayodhya. The novel is very lucid, in continuum and being the first book of the author there is a freshness. It would be good if people who are aware of the story of Ram-Ravan as they will be able to connect better. Even after so many years spending reading Ramayanic literature, I found few facts for the first time. If you are interested in history, mythology, dharmic reading, please go ahead and read.