Ravana

This series has already told the story of Jaya and Vijaya, the two gatekeepers of Vaikuntha cursed by the four Kumaras and given the choice of seven devout lifetimes or three lifetimes of open war against Vishnu himself — a choice they made once, as Hiranyaksha and Hiranyakashipu, in the opening chronicle of this collection. Ravana and his brother Kumbhakarna are, by the same tradition, that pair's second incarnation. It's worth carrying that thread forward here rather than treating Ravana as an unrelated new figure: everything that follows is, in one reading, the same soul choosing confrontation with the same god a second time, in a far more elaborate and much longer life than the first.

Ravana's father, the sage Vishrava, was himself the son of Pulastya, one of the mind-born sons of Brahma — which makes Ravana, on his father's side, a Brahmin by lineage, not a demon by birth in any simple sense. Vishrava's first wife, Ilavida, bore him a son named Kubera, who grew into the god of wealth and was granted the city of Lanka to rule. Vishrava's second wife, the Rakshasa princess Kaikasi, bore Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Vibhishana, and a daughter, Shurpanakha — and by every account that survives of Ravana's childhood, Kaikasi raised her sons keenly aware that their elder half-brother already held the golden city that should, by some reasonable accounting, have been shared among all of Vishrava's children rather than settled on the son of the first, favored wife.

It was Kaikasi, more than any external ambition, who is said to have pushed her sons toward greatness specifically measured against Kubera — urging Ravana in particular to make himself powerful enough that no one, including his own father's house, could treat him as the lesser son again.

Ravana's austerities are among the most extreme in this entire series: a penance sustained across ten thousand years, during which he is said to have severed one of his own ten heads and offered it into the sacrificial fire every thousand years, ready to offer the last when Brahma finally appeared and restored all ten, granting the boon Ravana had spent a hundred centuries earning. What Ravana asked for was invulnerability against gods, gandharvas, yakshas, and other Rakshasas — every category of supernatural opponent he considered worth fearing. He did not ask for protection against men or animals, judging them too insignificant a threat to bother naming.

What the war narrative rarely has room for is that Ravana was, by his own account and by wide devotional tradition, a genuine and passionate devotee of Shiva — not a convenient piety, but the source of some of the most enduring devotional poetry in the entire tradition. In one well-known episode, Ravana attempted to lift Mount Kailash itself to carry it, and Shiva's abode with it, back to Lanka, only to have Shiva press the mountain down with a single toe, trapping Ravana's hand beneath it in agony. Rather than curse his way free, Ravana composed the Shiva Tandava Stotram on the spot — using, in some tellings, the sinews of his own arm as veena strings — a hymn of such devotional power that Shiva, moved, released him and blessed him instead.

Ravana's wife Mandodari, daughter of the architect-Asura Mayasura, is one of the more consistently underused figures in popular retellings of this story, despite being portrayed throughout the Ramayana as wise, righteous, and clear-sighted about exactly what her husband's abduction of Sita would cost him. She counseled him repeatedly to return Sita and make peace before Rama's forces ever reached Lanka's shores, warning him that his own scholarship and devotion made his current course beneath him. Ravana did not heed her, any more than he heeded Vibhishana — but her presence in the tradition matters, because it establishes clearly that Ravana's downfall was never a matter of no one warning him. Between his wife and his own brother, he had exactly the counsel Mahabali's household, by contrast, actually listened to.

Vibhishana, the youngest of Kaikasi's sons and by far the gentlest, urged his brother toward restraint from the beginning and ultimately defected to Rama's camp when Ravana refused to release Sita, a defection that tradition treats not as betrayal but as righteousness choosing itself over blood loyalty. Kumbhakarna's position was more tragic still: he is recorded as agreeing with Vibhishana's assessment entirely, telling Ravana plainly that he had acted wrongly — and then fighting and dying for him anyway, bound by fraternal duty even against his own judgment. Of the three brothers, only Ravana never wavered, which says less about conviction than about a lifetime spent needing to be the one who could never be told he was wrong.

Sita's abduction, the alliance with Sugriva and the Vanara army, the building of the bridge to Lanka, and the war that followed are the most extensively told sequence of events in this entire body of literature, and this chronicle will not attempt to re-narrate what the Ramayana itself, and this site's companion coverage, already tell in full. What belongs here is only the shape of the ending: Ravana, ten-headed and immensely learned, cut down at last by Rama — a man, exactly the category of opponent his own boon had never thought worth naming.

What almost never makes it into shorter retellings is the scene that follows Ravana's death. Rama, before Ravana's funeral rites, sends Lakshmana to Ravana's deathbed — not to gloat, but to receive instruction. Ravana, dying, was recognized even by the man who killed him as one of the great scholars of statecraft, astrology, and the Vedas of his age, author of what tradition remembers as the Ravana Samhita. Lakshmana, at first reluctant to kneel before a defeated enemy, is told by Rama that a king seeking wisdom should approach even his enemy with respect if the enemy is wise — and Ravana, in his final moments, obliges, offering counsel on kingship, patience, and the wisdom of not delaying what must be done, wisdom his own life had spectacularly failed to follow.