From Worship to Effigy — A Fall Engineered by NarrativeWhen effigies of Ravana go up in flames every Dussehra, the crowd often cheers without asking a single question: Who really was Ravana?
Why do we burn him? And why has this burning — especially as a pan-India ritual — become more theatrical post-1947, under a government that inherited power but not civilizational wisdom?

There is a disturbing academic claim floating around: that mass-scale Ravana Dahan as we know it began only after 1948. While regional Dussehra celebrations did exist before that — especially in North India — its spread, style, and symbolism were heavily politicized post-Independence. What was once a sacred philosophical tale became a shallow public spectacle. And the man once praised for his intellect, penance, and devotion was reduced to a cartoonish villain.

The Ravana They Never Told You About
Before colonial narratives turned our epics into moral binaries, Indians across the subcontinent recognized Ravana for his multi-dimensional brilliance. Far from being a mere antagonist, Ravana was a towering intellectual figure — a Brahmarshi born into the lineage of Pulastya Rishi, a master of the Vedas, an accomplished veena player, a scholar of Ayurveda and Tantra, and above all, a deeply devoted Bhakta of Lord Shiva. He composed the sublime Shiva Tandava Stotram, one of the most electrifying hymns to the divine, vibrating with spiritual intensity and poetic genius.

This was not the story of an evil demon king but of a complex soul — one who was brilliant beyond compare, but whose ego became his downfall. His reign in Lanka was marked by prosperity, architecture, scholarship, and unmatched political strength. Even the devas were compelled to acknowledge the power of his penance — rains would fall at his command, and divine forces would respond to his rituals. Ravana's eventual defeat was not a simplistic triumph of good over evil, but a cautionary tale of how divine devotion, if tainted by arrogance, can still end in ruin. To reduce him to an annual effigy is to strip the Ramayana of its depth and the Indian psyche of its civilizational memory.

The Congress Era and the Politics of Oversimplification
After India attained political independence in 1947, what followed was not a restoration of our civilizational roots but a subtle continuation of colonial frameworks — especially in education, cultural policy, and historical narratives. Under successive Congress governments, India’s sacred epics and historical traditions were gradually turned into instruments of political caution and ideological compromise. The stories of Rama, Krishna, and Ravana were no longer approached as layered civilizational wisdom but as potential sources of "communal tension" or "mythology unfit for rational discourse."

The Congress ecosystem, consciously or unconsciously, inherited the Macaulayan mindset — the idea that Western rationalism and secular liberalism were superior to the dharmic worldview. What was lost in the process was the richness of characters like Ravana, who couldn't be boxed into binaries. Ravana, being both a villain and a genius, was too complex for the Congress's simplistic model of historical sanitization. So, the narratives were flattened. Ravana was turned into a symbol of evil, and Rama into a non-religious "ideal man" fit for textbook summaries. Anything beyond this provoked discomfort among the political elite who feared civilizational pride might translate into political disruption. Thus, the deep dharmic truth of our epics was sacrificed at the altar of electoral anxiety.

History as a Tool of Amnesia
What Congress did at a political level, its affiliated academic machinery executed at an intellectual level — often with devastating long-term consequences. The post-Independence academic scene, especially in institutions like JNU and NCERT, became a breeding ground for Marxist historians, postmodern skeptics, and Westernized indologists who dismissed India’s epics as “myths,” undermined temple traditions as superstition, and erased the line between Itihasa and folklore. Ravana, instead of being analyzed with the respect given to tragic figures like Oedipus or Achilles in Western tradition, was caricatured — ten heads and all — into a villain who simply “kidnapped Sita” and got punished.

There was no space left to explore how his devotion to Shiva or his command over nature’s elements made him an almost cosmic force. There was no attempt to understand Lanka's prosperity under his rule, or how Ravana symbolized the shadow side of dharma — a test of Rama’s own adherence to cosmic balance. School textbooks conveniently skipped the deeper moral paradoxes, replacing them with neat bullet points, timelines, and "secular" disclaimers. In doing so, the academic establishment burned not Ravana — but our civilizational intelligence.

From Effigies to EnlightenmentRavana should no longer be a symbolic enemy burned once a year. He should be remembered, studied, questioned, and debated with the intellectual depth our civilization was once known for. Let us rediscover him — not to justify his actions, but to reclaim our capacity for nuance. Let us move beyond colonial binaries and return to dharmic insight.

Because only when we stop outsourcing our identity to political parties and start nurturing our own roots, will Bharat truly rise — not just economically or militarily, but civilizationally. And that is the only victory that matters.

“Remember always from where you belong — that is the only root of your existence.”