D. Ravana and Shiva

Readers who know the Ramayana from elsewhere often arrive with a scene in mind that this book does not contain: Ravana pinned under Mount Kailasa for a thousand years, singing to Shiva until Shiva relents and rewards him. That scene is real, and it matters to a great many people. It is just not in the text this retelling follows. What is in that text is Chapter 58, and the difference between the two is worth setting out, because it is easy to get backwards.

What Chapter 58 is following

The critical account has more in it than is sometimes supposed. Ravana's chariot is stopped at the mountain. Nandi turns him back, Ravana mocks his face, and Nandi curses him: beings of that same form will one day arise for the destruction of his line. That curse is the textual root of the monkeys who eventually cross the sea.

Then Ravana does put his arms under the mountain and heave. Shiva does press it down with his toe, without rising, without a duel. Ravana's arms are caught, and the cry the pain tears out of him fills the three worlds. All of that is in the source, and all of it is in Chapter 58.

So is the name. The word ravita means made to cry out, and Shiva gives Ravana the name from that cry.

What later tradition adds

The enlarged version keeps the frame and changes what happens inside it. Ravana is held for a long time, in the best known form a thousand years. His pain turns into worship, and he sings. Shiva, moved by the devotion, releases him and grants him favor, in many tellings the sword Chandrahasa. The Shiva Tandava Stotra, a freestanding Sanskrit hymn, is traditionally said to be what he sang.

That is a different story from the one in Chapter 58, and the difference is not the mountain. It is what Shiva responds to. In the source Shiva is pleased by Ravana's strength and lets him go inside the same scene. In the devotional tradition Shiva is moved by his worship. One is a display of force that impresses a god. The other is the beginning of a lifetime of devotion.

Two cautions about the enlarged version, since they are easy to state too confidently. Its details are widely repeated but not easily traced to a named text and chapter, and the attribution of the Shiva Tandava Stotra to Ravana is traditional rather than demonstrated: no date, author, or manuscript history stands behind it. Attributing a hymn to a legendary figure is common in Sanskrit devotional literature, and it is not evidence of who wrote it.

Ravana as a devotee

Behind the enlarged Kailasa scene is a whole way of understanding Ravana that this book, following its source, does not take up: Ravana as one of Shiva's great devotees. Tamil Shaiva devotional literature associates him with music and with Shiva-worship, and one story has him cut off a head to build an instrument from it. A bowed folk instrument, the ravanahatha, carries his name and is played today by performer communities in Rajasthan.

There are also places where he is honored rather than burned. At Bisrakh in Uttar Pradesh, held locally to be his birthplace, Dussehra is marked with mourning instead of an effigy. A Dashanan temple in Kanpur, on the grounds of a Shiva temple, opens one day a year, on Dussehra, and people come to pray for wisdom, citing his learning. At Mandsaur in Madhya Pradesh, where his wife Mandodari is held to have come from, he is honored as a son-in-law of the town.

These are specific places with specific practices, not a region or a community. It would be wrong to enlarge them into a general claim.

What this section is not saying

It is not saying that the source is right and the devotional tradition is a later accretion to be corrected. The Shaiva framing, in which Ravana is a great devotee whose destruction is a tragedy, and the framing this book follows, in which he is the adversary of Vishnu made human, are both fully attested and neither cancels the other. They are answering different questions and they belong to different bodies of practice.

Nor is there an orthodox version. There are at least three distinct layers here: what the critical edition narrates, what the enlarged devotional telling narrates, and what people do at Dussehra in particular towns. Keeping them visibly separate is the only honest way to present any of them.