The Villain of the Ramayana Was Also a Scholar, a Musician, and a King

Every autumn, across the plains of northern India, giant effigies of a ten-headed man rise in fields and fairgrounds. They are packed with firecrackers. At dusk on Dussehra, a flaming arrow is loosed, the figure catches, and the crowd cheers as it burns down to ash. The message is old and plain. Good has beaten evil. The demon is gone for another year.

The demon is Ravana, king of Lanka, the great antagonist of the Ramayana. The burning is faithful to the epic, which ends with his death at the hands of Rama.

Yet the same epic that condemns Ravana spends a surprising amount of effort telling you how remarkable he was. Set the fireworks aside and read the text, and a fuller figure appears: a scholar of the Vedas, a devotee of Shiva, a gifted musician, and one of the mightiest kings in the whole story.

A rakshasa, but a brahmin’s son

Start with what he is. Ravana is a rakshasa, one of the shape-shifting beings usually translated as “demons,” though the word covers a wide range of powerful and often monstrous figures in Hindu myth.

His ancestry is not simple, though. In the Ramayana he is the son of Vishrava, a revered brahmin sage, and Kaikasi, a rakshasa princess. (Names and spellings drift between versions of the epic, so you will also see the mother called Nikasa.) Through his father he is the grandson of Pulastya, one of the mind-born sons of the creator Brahma. Ravana carries brahmin blood and demon blood at once, and the pull between the two runs through everything he does.

He is best known for his heads. Tradition gives him ten, which earns him a shelf of names: Dashanana and Dashamukha, “ten-faced,” and Dashagriva, “ten-necked.” Whether the heads are meant literally, or as a sign that he had mastered the four Vedas and the six shastras, is a question the tradition has debated for centuries.

How he got the throne, and the name

Ravana did not inherit Lanka. He took it. The golden island had been ruled by Kubera, the god of wealth, who happened to be Ravana’s own half-brother, another son of the sage Vishrava. Ravana forced him out and seized the kingdom, and Kubera fled north.

Even the name “Ravana” comes from a moment of raw force. In a famous episode he tries to lift Mount Kailash, the mountain home of Shiva. Shiva simply presses down with a toe, and the peak pins Ravana’s twenty arms beneath it. Trapped, the demon king lets out a roar so terrible it shakes the worlds. From that cry, rava, Shiva gives him the name Ravana, “the one who roars.”

That story is usually told to show his arrogance. Notice what he does next.

The prisoner who sang

Crushed under the mountain and in pain, Ravana does not curse Shiva. He praises him.

Tradition holds that he composed, on the spot, a hymn of great beauty, the Shiva Tandava Stotra, a rush of Sanskrit that describes the god’s cosmic dance. Pleased, Shiva releases him and grants him gifts, including a sword and, in some tellings, a sacred linga to worship. The hymn is still sung in temples and homes today, attributed across the tradition to the demon king himself.

Ravana’s devotion to Shiva is no footnote in the epic. It is central to who he is. He is a Shaiva, a worshipper of Shiva, of fierce intensity. Some traditions say his penances were so severe that he offered his own heads on the fire one by one, and that the boons which made him nearly impossible to kill were won this way.

A villain who is also one of the great devotees in the story is a strange thing. The Ramayana does not look away from it.

Master of the arts

Then there is the learning. In the epic Ravana is no brute. He is educated to the highest degree his world can offer, well versed in the four Vedas and the six shastras, the bodies of sacred and technical knowledge a brahmin was expected to command.

Later tradition adds more. He is remembered as a scholar of astrology, credited with a text called the Ravana Samhita, and with a knowledge of Ayurveda, the classical Indian system of medicine. Whether he actually wrote such works cannot be established, and these attributions sit outside the core epic. What they show is that the tradition wanted its great antagonist to be brilliant rather than stupid.

He was also, by reputation, a formidable musician. He is said to have played the veena, and a bowed folk instrument still heard in Rajasthan, the ravanahatha, carries his name and, by legend, his invention. The image the tradition keeps returning to is of Ravana beneath Mount Kailash, making music to please Shiva, using his own body for the instrument when he had nothing else to hand.

Seen that way, the ten heads start to look less like a monster’s deformity and more like a symbol of a mind that could hold everything at once.

A great king who threw it away

For all the darkness fixed to his name, the Ravana of the epic is a great king. Lanka under his rule is described as a city of gold, rich and well ordered, its ruler feared across the three worlds. He had subdued gods and kings, and his penances had earned him boons that made him all but impossible to destroy.

That is what turns his fall into a tragedy rather than a simple defeat. In the epic his boons shield him from gods, demons, and spirits, but in his pride he never troubled to ask for protection from mere human beings, whom he thought beneath him. So the god Vishnu takes birth as the man Rama, and the one gap in Ravana’s arrogance becomes the door his death walks through.

None of it excuses the crime at the center of the story. Ravana abducts Sita, the wife of Rama, and carries her to Lanka in a flying chariot. He holds her in a grove of ashoka trees and presses her to marry him. She refuses him completely, without wavering, for the whole length of her captivity. That abduction is the wrong that drives the entire second half of the Ramayana, and it is the wrong that ends him.

His own younger brother Vibhishana pleads with him to return Sita and avoid the war. Ravana will not hear it. When Rama’s army crosses the sea to Lanka and the final battle comes, none of the boons and none of the learning are enough. Rama’s arrow strikes him in the chest, and the ten-headed king falls.

The lesson the epic draws is not that Ravana was secretly good. It is that a being of vast gifts can still be ruined by a single choice. That is a harder thing to hold than a cartoon villain.

The places that do not burn him

Which brings us back to the effigies, and to a fact that surprises many people who grew up watching them burn. Not everyone in India treats Ravana as a figure to be destroyed.

In a handful of towns he is honored instead. In Bisrakh, a village near Greater Noida in Uttar Pradesh, local tradition holds that Ravana was born there, and residents speak of him as a learned ancestor rather than a villain. The temple there does not celebrate on Dussehra. Some years the day is closer to mourning.

In Mandsaur, in Madhya Pradesh, the reasoning is different and rather touching. The town is believed to be the birthplace of Mandodari, Ravana’s queen, which makes Ravana, by the logic of Indian kinship, the local son-in-law. A tall ten-headed statue stands in his honor, and by custom married women veil their faces before it, the same respect they would show a father-in-law. He is remembered there for his learning and his devotion to Shiva. Nearby, in the Vidisha region, another Ravana is visited by families before weddings.

These are minority traditions, and none of them denies the epic. Mostly they hold two ideas at once: that Ravana did a terrible thing, and that he was also a brahmin, a scholar, and a supreme devotee of Shiva who is owed some measure of respect for those things.

Why the fuller picture matters

It would be easy to turn all of this into a cheap reversal, the idea that the villain was the hero all along. That would be false to the text, and unfair to the millions for whom the burning of Ravana is a meaningful act of faith.

The truer reading is quieter. The Ramayana gave its antagonist real greatness on purpose. A hero who defeats a stupid, flat monster has done nothing much. A hero who defeats a ten-headed king of deep learning, real devotion, and enormous power, and who is pulled into that war by the king’s one unforgivable act, stands inside a story worth telling for more than two thousand years.

Ravana burns every autumn because of what he did. He is remembered, and in a few places honored, because of everything else he was. Both truths sit in the epic. It always meant for you to carry them together.