A few days ago, the trailer of Ramayana was released. Like millions of others, I watched it with fascination. Magnificent visuals, familiar characters, and a story that has shaped the moral imagination of this land for centuries. Yet, what caught my attention was something else. Ravana was portrayed by Yash, one of Karnataka’s most celebrated actors, a man who has carried Kannada cinema onto a national and now global stage. Watching him command the screen as the demon king, I found myself thinking less about the special effects and more about a question that has followed me for years, one I do not raise as a historian, because I am not one, but as someone who has travelled this country enough to notice things that do not sit easily together.
In India, there is a pattern I have watched repeat itself across regions and centuries. A mighty personality, a king who conquers, a reformer who challenges an old order, a ruler remembered for his justice or his cruelty, eventually stops being remembered as a man at all. Over generations, he becomes something closer to god, folded into the language of incarnation, until asking whether he was once simply a powerful human being starts to sound almost disrespectful. I have wondered, more than once, whether Lord Ram belongs to this pattern. I do not ask this to diminish him. I ask it because I want to understand him. Was he a king whose reign was so significant, whose sense of duty so total, that the memory of him slowly rose beyond the reach of ordinary history and into the register of the divine?
If you allow yourself to read the epic that way, even briefly, other parts of the story begin to look different too. Rama, after a dispute within his own household, leaves his kingdom and travels south, into unfamiliar territory. There he encounters a people the text calls Rakshasas, described in many retellings as dark skinned, as meat eating, as fundamentally other. I have found myself asking, quietly, whether these Rakshasas were not demons in any literal sense at all, but a description, filtered through many centuries of retelling, of the Dravidian peoples native to the southern part of this subcontinent. And Ravana himself is not drawn, even in the original text, as a simple villain. He is described as deeply learned, a Brahmin by birth, a scholar of the Vedas, a ruler whose kingdom by several accounts was prosperous and orderly. Some regional and folk traditions, particularly across the south, have long portrayed him with genuine sympathy, even reverence.
That reverence is not just a matter of old folk memory either. It is still practiced today, in temples that stand as living evidence of it. Close to my home in Kerala, there is a place called Ravaneshwaram, in Kanhangad, in the north of the state, where a temple stands that is believed to have been established by Ravana himself. Local legend holds that he stopped there on his way back to Lanka, installed a Shiva Linga, and spent time in deep penance. There is even a cave nearby where he is believed to have meditated, and a pond he is said to have bathed in daily. This is not an isolated curiosity either. Ravana is worshipped in a temple in Kakinada, Andhra Pradesh, the only place in that state where he receives such reverence. In Vidisha, Madhya Pradesh, there is an entire village called Ravangram built around his memory, tied to the belief that his wife Mandodari came from that region. In Mandsaur and in Mandore near Jodhpur, he is remembered as a son in law rather than a demon, since both places claim ties to Mandodari’s family, and in Kanpur, thousands gather every Dussehra at the Dashanan temple to honour him even as effigies of him burn elsewhere in the same country on the same night. A man remembered by most of India as pure evil is, in these places, remembered as a scholar, a devotee of Shiva, and a king worth invoking rather than burning.
Read a certain way, the epic starts to resemble something other than a story of good defeating evil. It starts to resemble the story of a northern power moving into southern land already governed by a sophisticated, settled civilisation, and a victory that later generations were taught to understand only as the triumph of dharma over darkness.
I want to be honest about where this idea comes from, because it did not begin with me. This reading has a real history in Indian political thought, most visibly in the Dravidian movement of the twentieth century, where thinkers like Periyar E. V. Ramasamy argued openly that Ravana was a wronged southern king and that the Ramayana, as popularly told, was a story written by the victors. That argument shaped decades of politics in Tamil Nadu and continues to surface, in one form or another, whenever the north south question resurfaces in this country.
And that question does resurface, often in small, ordinary moments rather than grand political ones. Travelling across India, speaking with people from different regions, I have often felt as though I were moving between two countries that happen to share a passport. The food is different, the languages are unrelated to one another in ways that Hindi and Bengali, say, are not, the rhythms of daily life feel differently paced, and yes, even something as simple as the average complexion of the people around me shifts as I move from north to south. None of this is imagined. It is felt, repeatedly, by anyone who travels this country with open eyes. Whether that felt difference has anything to do with an ancient migration of Sanskrit speaking peoples into a subcontinent already inhabited by others is a much harder question, and one that historians, linguists, and geneticists continue to argue about without full agreement even today. The idea of a full scale Aryan invasion, in the dramatic sense the term once suggested, has been substantially revised by scholars in recent decades toward a slower, more layered picture of migration and mixing rather than conquest. I raise this not to settle the question, because I cannot, but to be honest that it remains genuinely unsettled, and that for the vast majority of Indians, north and south alike, Rama is not primarily a historical puzzle at all. He is a living figure of devotion, and Diwali itself, the festival timed deliberately to this film’s release, exists because of what his return home has meant to people for a very long time.
I do not write any of this to unsettle anyone’s faith, and I suspect it will unsettle some regardless, which is a risk I accept in asking the question honestly rather than not asking it at all. What I find genuinely moving is that a film built with such scale and reverence, casting a son of Karnataka as the story’s most towering antagonist, has landed at exactly the moment when this old, unresolved argument about who this land’s true heroes and villains were is quietly alive again, in comment sections and family dinner conversations and, now, in a trailer millions of people have already watched more than once. Yash plays Ravana with a magnetism that, by every account so far, threatens to outshine the hero of the story itself. Perhaps that is simply excellent casting. Perhaps it is also, without either the actor or the makers quite intending it, the story finding its way back to an audience that has never fully stopped asking whether the man in the golden crown was really the villain, or simply the king who lost.
I do not have an answer to give you at the end of this, and I am not sure one exists that would satisfy everyone who has ever asked the question. What I have is what I started with. A trailer, a familiar story told at extraordinary scale, and a country that is still, after all these centuries, trying to decide what to make of the distance between its north and its south, and between the histories each side of that distance chooses to remember.
Brilliant sir
Much appreciated, Prasanna Ji!