Rakshasas and Ravana

The earliest Indian texts already know the rakshas. In the Rigveda they are harmful, shadowy beings that attack the sacrifice and harm people, and the hymns call on Agni, the fire god, as rakshohan, “slayer of rakshasas”, to burn them away. Whole hymns are devoted to this protective task. The rakshasas of these early texts have no names or kingdoms; they are part of a world crowded with forces that threaten the order maintained by ritual.

In the great epics, the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, rakshasas became fully drawn characters with families, cities and histories. They are described as night-wanderers, shape-shifters and eaters of human flesh, haunting forests and cremation grounds. They are also, often, children of sages, learned in the Vedas and capable of extraordinary austerity. This double nature, terrifying and yet human in its passions, made them some of the most memorable figures of Indian literature.

The rakshasas’ chief power is the ability to take any form. In the Ramayana Ravana appears to Sita as a wandering ascetic, his uncle Maricha becomes a golden deer, and in many tellings Ravana’s sister Shurpanakha first approaches Rama in the form of a beautiful woman. Rakshasas are strongest at night and gather around fire rituals to defile them, which is why the sage Vishvamitra asks King Dasharatha to send the young princes Rama and Lakshmana to guard his rites. Their first battle is against the rakshasi Tataka.

Rakshasa power usually comes from austerity. By years of penance Ravana won from the god Brahma the boon that no god, demon or other heavenly being could kill him. In his pride he did not think to name humans or animals, and so Vishnu was born as the human prince Rama, aided by an army of monkeys and bears. The pattern of a great boon with a fatal gap recurs throughout Hindu myth and shows that, in this view of the world, power gained through discipline must still answer to cosmic order.

Not every rakshasa is a villain. Ravana’s youngest brother Vibhishana urges him to return Sita, is rejected and joins Rama, who makes him king of Lanka. Kumbhakarna, who sleeps for months at a time, knows Ravana is wrong but fights for him out of loyalty. In the Mahabharata, the rakshasi Hidimbi marries the hero Bhima, and their son Ghatotkacha dies fighting bravely for the Pandavas.

Rakshasas also have a place in Hindu law and cosmology. Classical law books list eight forms of marriage, and the one by capture, the rakshasa form, is named after them. Puranic genealogies trace them, like gods and other beings, to the sage Pulastya or to the creator’s first children, so they belong to the ordered family of creation rather than standing outside it. Lesser beings of the night, such as pishachas and bhutas, are often grouped with them in folk belief, and village tales across India tell of rakshasas guarding forests, kidnapping travellers or being outwitted by clever heroes. In this wider lore they are dangerous but not invincible, and courage, wit and devotion usually win the day.

Ravana is the greatest of the rakshasas. Valmiki’s Ramayana describes him as the son of the sage Vishrava, half-brother of Kubera, lord of wealth, and ruler of the golden city of Lanka. His ten heads and twenty arms signal immense strength, and he is a master of the Vedas and a devotee of Shiva. During Rama’s fourteen years of exile, Ravana abducts Rama’s wife Sita and carries her to Lanka. Hanuman finds her there and sets the city ablaze, and Rama, Lakshmana and their allies cross to the island on a bridge built by the monkeys and kill Ravana in battle.

Other traditions told the story differently. In Vimalasuri’s Paumacariya and later Jain Ramayanas, the rakshasas are a human dynasty of vidyadharas, people with magical powers, not demons, and Ravana is a noble but flawed king. Rama, who ends his life as a Jain monk and attains liberation, does not kill him; Lakshmana does, and is reborn in hell for the violence. Some Jain accounts add that Ravana himself will become a great teacher in a future age. The Mahayana Lankavatara Sutra begins with Ravana inviting the Buddha to Lanka and listening to his teaching. In East Asian Buddhism, rakshasas, called rasetsu in Japanese, appear both as fearsome beings and, in the Lotus Sutra, as ten rakshasi women who vow to protect those who keep the sutra.

Later Hindu poets also deepened the portrait. Kamban’s twelfth-century Tamil Ramayana gives Ravana a tragic dignity, and in 1861 the Bengali poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt made Ravana’s son Meghnad, also called Indrajit, the hero of his epic. As A. K. Ramanujan argued in a famous essay, there is no single Ramayana but a vast family of tellings, and each has its own Ravana.

The story of Rama and Ravana is retold every year in the Ramlila performances of northern India, recognised by UNESCO as intangible cultural heritage, and in dance-dramas across Southeast Asia, where Ravana is known as Tosakanth in Thailand and Krong Reap in Cambodia. At Dussehra huge effigies of Ravana, Kumbhakarna and Meghnad are filled with fireworks and burned, celebrating the triumph of good over evil. Ramanand Sagar’s television Ramayan of 1987–1988 drew one of the largest audiences in Indian television history.

Other communities honour Ravana. Some temples in India revere him as a scholar and devotee of Shiva, a few places claim him as a local son or son-in-law, and in Sri Lanka some people today celebrate him as an ancient king of the island. Modern writers have continued the debate over who Ravana was. Novels and plays in many Indian languages retell the Ramayana from the side of Lanka, giving voice to Ravana, his wife Mandodari or his sister Shurpanakha, and asking what the war looked like to the defeated. Rakshasas also live on in folklore, comic books and fantasy fiction. Across these many images runs the epic’s own insight: that the rakshasa, however frightening, is a mirror for human pride, desire and loyalty.