Was Ravana from north India?

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That’s the… Okay, so was Ravana from North India? Okay, I was in South India, I was giving a class on Ramayana and after that one person came to me and says, I am from the RPC.
I said, what is RPC? This is Ravana Protection Committee. I said, what is that? In the Ramayana itself, Ravana died. How are you going to protect him? So he said that actually, what has happened is there have been a lot of vested interests who have tried to reinterpret the whole Ramayana in their own ways.
There is a Jain Ramayana. Now Jains are very nice people in many ways. In fact, culturally we are quite similar to them and no criticism on them.
But there is some person who wrote a Jain Ramayana, some Jain scholar. And what they have done is throughout the Ramayana, when Ram goes to the forest, he is meeting Jain sadhus. And at the end, when Sita enters into the earth, Ram becomes enlightened and becomes a Jain.
So what happened, these traditional epics, they have been reinterpreted by people according to their own vested agendas. So there had been some people who wanted to split India into, say, southern and northern people. So what has happened, they have tried to reconfigure the Ramayana as an attack by the North Indians and the South Indians.
So now what has happened is, they say that Ram was Aryan and Ravan was a Dravidian. So they tried to reconfigure it like that. Now actually speaking, first of all, we can look at it in two different ways.
One is, let’s look at it literally from the Ramayana’s perspective. Then we can look at it from a historical perspective. If you want to take it literally from the Ramayana’s perspective, Ravan was a Rakshasa.
And the Rakshasas are entirely different species. You know, to associate the Rakshasas with Dravidians is an insult to Dravidians. You know, it’s a big, big insult to associate the two together.
And it’s described that actually Lanka was the kingdom of Kuvera. And he conquered it from him. Now the Rakshasas live at different places, wherever they grab power and they get power.
So in that sense, to say that he’s a South Indian is wrong because he was from a different species itself. Now, if somebody doesn’t want to accept the idea that, oh, some people say that the Ramayana is true, but all this idea of Rakshasas and Vanaras, this is mythology. So, OK, somebody says, OK, Ravan was there itself.
Even if for argument’s sake, accept that like that, that argument. But still, the point is, there was no geographical consideration in that attack. If you want to configure South Indians and North Indians, then the Vanaras, they were South Indians.
Kishkindha is definitely not a North Indian. So it’s not an attack of North Indians or South Indians. So basically what has happened, that narrative was there, that there are North Indians and South Indians.
There are different ways to try to counter that narrative. So there is another historian who has tried to problematize that narrative. This is actually not a conflict between North Indians and South Indians because Ravan was also North Indian.
So what happens once you start getting into that, that frame of reference, it’s very important to put the Ramayana in the right frame of reference. Basically, the Ramayana is not regional. It is not a regional conflict.
It is an ethical conflict. And it is primarily, it is ethical lessons that are to be, ethical and spiritual lessons that are to be learned from it. So if you keep the focus on that, then that is the best.
But sometimes some people try to reinterpret everything in their own ways. So it’s best to, not necessarily we reject those interpretations, but we don’t highlight those interpretations. We understand where those interpretations are coming from and then tell them that is not the way the Ramayana has been historically understood.
And that is not the Ramayana that has inspired millions of people. Now how much do you see Ramayana has caused conflict between North Indians and South Indians? See, it is among South Indians also, there are so many Ramayana commentary that have been written. There is the Kamba Ramayana, there is Ananda Ramayana and there is so many commentators, they have written so much about the Ramayana.
So this idea of the South Indian, North Indian conflict, this is primarily a leftist, Anglican kind of reinterpretation for breaking India, you could say. So you don’t have to give too much credit to that. Thank you.
Thank you.