Questions We Keep: “He Who Never Mastered Himself”

Why is Ravana revered in Southeast Asia?

The Knower

The Familiar Face of Adharma

Every autumn, across much of India, towering effigies of Ravana are set ablaze. The flames rise, the crowd cheers, and Rama’s victory is celebrated once again. It is a scene so familiar that it rarely invites another question. Ravana is the villain. The story appears settled.

…Until one begins to follow the Ramayana beyond India.

The epic travelled across kingdoms, crossed mountains and seas, entered new languages, new courts and new philosophical worlds. The central story remained recognisable, yet every civilization received it through its own concerns. The events did not change as much as the questions people asked of them.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the figure of Ravana.

Within much of the Indian imagination, particularly in devotional traditions, Ravana comes to embody the dangers of pride, desire and the abuse of power His learning is acknowledged, his devotion to Shiva remembered, but these qualities remain secondary to the moral clarity of the narrative.

Rama stands for dharma; Ravana stands against it. The lesson is unmistakable.

Yet this is not the only way the Ramayana has been remembered.

A Different Remembering

Across Southeast Asia, Ravana often retains a grandeur that surprises those accustomed to seeing him only as the defeated antagonist. In Thailand’s Ramakien, Cambodia’s Reamker, and the Ramayana traditions of Java and Bali, he appears not as a petty tyrant but as an accomplished king, a formidable warrior and a ruler of immense capability.

His destruction is never denied.
But neither is the greatness that preceded it.

Why preserve the greatness of the fallen?

It is tempting to conclude that these cultures admired Ravana as an ideal . I am not sure that is what they were doing. Perhaps they were asking a different question.

Not every civilization expects the same thing from its epics. Some preserve them primarily as moral instruction. Others also preserve them as reflections on kingship, power, human potential and the mysterious ways in which greatness decays. The story remains the same, but its centre of gravity shifts.

A king who defeats a weak and insignificant rival proves very little. A king who overcomes an adversary of immense intelligence, discipline and power demonstrates something altogether different. Preserving Ravana’s stature does not diminish Rama. It magnifies the achievement of overcoming him.

But I suspect there is another reason.

Ancient traditions often seemed less eager than we are to divide human beings into the categories of hero and villain. They were willing to recognise that extraordinary ability and profound moral failure could coexist in the same person.

Ravana did not cease to be a scholar because he desired what he shouldnot. His devotion to Shiva did not become an illusion. His political genius did not disappear. His knowledge surrendered to his ego, and his ego edited his limits.

His achievements did not erase his wrongdoing, but neither did his wrongdoing erase the reality of those achievements.

Perhaps this is precisely what some civilizations wished to preserve.
Not the innocence of Ravana, but the complexity of human beings.

For if greatness and failure can inhabit the same person, then the story ceases to be about identifying villains and begins to ask a far more unsettling question:

That question transforms the Ramayana from a tale of good defeating evil into an inquiry into

How can extraordinary greatness coexist with profound moral failure?

There is a well-known tradition that, after the battle, Rama asked Lakshmana to approach the dying Ravana and learn from him before he breathed his last. Whether one understands this as history, symbolism or a later tradition is almost beside the point. Its enduring appeal lies elsewhere. It suggests that defeat does not exhaust a person’s life. Even after Ravana’s moral collapse, there remained something worth learning from him.

Heroes, Expectations and Discernment

Every civilization must eventually decide what it expects from its heroes. Are they to be flawless examples to imitate, or are they human beings whose lives contain both brilliance and blindness?

The first invites devotion. The second demands discernment.

Perhaps this is why preserving a complete Ravana matters. If future generations remember only his brilliance, they inherit hero worship. If they remember only his downfall, they inherit caricature. Neither prepares them for life, where the people who influence us are seldom entirely one thing or the other.

Blind admiration is as dangerous as blind condemnation. One refuses to see the flaws; the other refuses to see the virtues. Both surrender the responsibility of judgment.

A mature civilization asks for something harder. It asks us to remain capable of admiration without becoming uncritical, and capable of criticism without becoming unjust.

This may be one of the quiet purposes of epic itself. It is not merely to tell us whom to praise and whom to blame. It is to educate our judgment. By preserving lives in their fullness rather than reducing them to symbols, a civilization trains its people to think beyond simple opposites. It teaches that wisdom lies not in abandoning moral judgment but in refining it.

Human character is rarely monochrome.
Greatness does not make a person infallible,
and failure does not necessarily erase everything that came before it.

That is a difficult lesson.

Perhaps that is why stories like the Ramayana continue to endure. They resist such simplification

The question, then, is not whether Ravana was a hero or a villain. The more revealing question is what a civilization hopes to teach by the way it remembers him.

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From the Akaayati Reflections Series
© Akaayati, 2026
These essays are original reflections on Indian epics and civilizational thought. Please share with attribution.