Skip to main content

Ravana



Fiction

Anand Shankar was trolled mercilessly in social media when he posted his story ‘Ravana’ in his blog.  He was a little known blogger and hence the tremendous attention that his present story drew came as a rude shock as well as pleasant surprise at once.

His story ended with Sita longing to return to Lanka because Rama suspected her chastity.  No, she didn’t return.  In fact, she didn’t even want to return.  A painful conflict arose in her consciousness.  This man, Rama, the Maryada Purushottam, the hero of a whole country, god incarnate, this man faltered when some silly gossip monger raised a question about my chastity, Sita reflects at the end of Anand’s tale.  Ravana emerges as a far better hero in her consciousness.  Ravana who stood before her in Ashok Vatika with love and admiration in his eyes.  And reverence that did not at all match his royal narcissism.  When he knew that his love for her could never surpass her love for Rama, he surrendered himself in devotion to Rama and begged to be killed by none other than his rival.  Ravana sacrificed himself for me while my husband is seeking to sacrifice me for his honour, Sita sat pondering at the end of Anand Shankar’s story.

Trolls marched in hoards accusing Anand Shankar of blasphemy, irreligion, demon worship, secessionism, anti-nationalism, and all sorts of things.  The euphoria over the attention his blog received soon gave way to jitteriness.  Anand wondered what his crime really was.  He contemplated for days and days.

Ravana’s ten heads appeared to him with various colours and expressions.  Anand saw his own blasphemy, irreligion, and other evils on those faces.  But very often he saw his trolls, the numerous nationalist organisations and their fanatic supporters, on Ravana’s faces.  Anand was confused.  Who is the real Ravana? 

Sita will be sacrificed again and again until the real Ravana is discovered, Anand Shankar began his next blog post.




Comments

  1. Why do people react so mercilessly to imagination while they have nothing to do when 'seasoned' rapists go scotfree on grounds of minority.
    There have been many books which found mythology in different light Like Anand Neelakantan's books which were bestsellers. Then why this pseudo tears now? Is there more to it than we see on the periphery

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm afraid there is more, Rakhi. There's a whole gang of paid trolls who work for a particular political party whose goal is to eliminate those who question the party's goals and objectives.

      Delete
    2. Horrible. Can't explain this in better words

      Delete
  2. Different viewpoints have become very difficult in the present times. Sad...

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Sad indeed. This zeal for suppressing dissent and diversity is taking the nation back by centuries.

      Delete
  3. Thanks for sharing this. I was expecting a link to Anand's said post. As these days I'm writing on slut-shaming, I see Sita's case as a victim of slut-shaming who committed suicide later.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Didn't you see the first line: 'fiction'? 😑 Well, the reality is even more sinister.

      Delete
  4. Hmm...a case study of Ravana, Sita and Shankara...oh I am heavily influenced by Dan Brown to see this initials everywhere nowadays.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Even before Brown, a Malayalam novelist M T Vasudevan Nair rewrote the Mahabharata from the perspective of Bheema. It's good to see the other side too 😑

      Delete
  5. Exactly. I have always felt M.T wrote the first mythological fiction in India. Anyways, waiting to see Randamoozham on screen

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Capital Punishment is not Revenge

Govindachamy when Kerala High Court confirmed his death sentence The Bible suggests that it is better for one man to die if that death helps others to live better [ John 11: 50 ]. Forgive me for applying that to a criminal today, though Jesus made that statement in a benign theological context. A notorious and hardcore criminal has escaped prison in Kerala. Fourteen years ago he assaulted a young girl who was travelling all alone in a late evening train, going back home from her workplace. The girl jumped out of the running train to save herself from this beast. But he jumped after her and raped her. The postmortem report suggested that he raped her twice, the second being when she had already fallen unconscious. And then he killed her hitting her head with a stone. Do you think that creature is human? I wrote about this back then: A Drop of Tear For You, Soumya . The people of Kerala demanded capital punishment for this creature, the brute called Govindachamy. He is inhu...

Gods, Guns and Missionaries

Book Review Title: Gods, Guns and Missionaries: The Making of the Modern Hindu Identity Author: Manu S Pillai Publisher: Penguin Random House India, 2024 Pages: 564 (about half of which consists of Notes) There never was any monolithic religion called Hinduism. Different parts of India practised Hinduism in its own ways, with its own gods and rituals and festivals. Some of these were even mutually opposed. For example, Vamana who is a revered incarnation of Vishnu in North India becomes a villain in Kerala’s Onam legends. What has become of this protean religion of infinite variety and diversity today in the hands of its ‘missionary’ political leaders? Manu S Pillai’s book ends with V D Savarkar’s contributions to the religion with a subtle hint that it is his legacy that is driving the present version of the religion in the name of Hindutva. The last lines of the book, leaving aside the Epilogue titled ‘What is Hinduism?’, are telltale. “Life did not give Savarkar all he...