Introducing Project Ravanayan

Ravanayan, in case you haven’t heard yet, is an upcoming graphic novel project that I am writing and my usual partner in crime Vivek Goel is drawing. We started off with the intention of exploring a different perspective of an age-old epic story and, I am happy to say, came up with a very interesting story. Ravanayan is being written even as we speak and a lot of concept-level art is also up at our official Facebook page if you want to look.

Buzz spreads fast on Facebook. Ravanayan has attracted quite a lot of interest and feedback. The page has more than 1000 members at the moment and the number keeps on growing. But along with the encouragement and the questions, we have also received a fair number of warnings. Most of these have come from well-wishers who do not want us to get into the sort of trouble that anyone dealing with religious myths is likely to get into. Some of these warnings have also come from… umm… people who are not exactly well-wishers. But let’s not get into that right now.

What I want to address with this is some of the misinformation that has been floating about regarding the Ravanayan project. For the record, I want to state that I do not think any of it is deliberate or spread with a malicious intent. But the rumours do hurt the cause of our story and therefore need to be addressed.

One common assumption being made is that because Ravana is our story’s “hero”, Lord Rama must be the “villain”. That’s a bit too simplistic, isn’t it? Ramayan is understood to be the ultimate good versus evil story and Ravana is considered to be the ultimate bad guy. People therefore assume that Ravana’s being anything less than utterly evil must entail that Rama was something less than absolutely perfect. To many people, the fact that Rama was something less than perfect ends up meaning that he was absolutely evil. I never get that logic.

To set the record straight, Lord Rama is NOT the villain in Ravanayan. In fact, Ravanayan doesn’t have ANY villains. I think evil is a perspective – a way of looking at the world. It manifests itself through all of us all the time. It is childish to project any one character as the ultimate embodiment of evil. Ravanayan is going to be slightly more mature than that.

Also, barring a few details, our story doesn’t change anything core to the idea of Ramayan. All I am doing is altering the angle from which people have traditionally looked at the story of Rama. The tree doesn’t become a different tree if you look at it from the other side. It just looks different. In addition, our emphasis is shifted from the trials and tribulations of Prince Rama’s life to the motivations of Ravana. Why did he do the things he did? What went one in his mind while he brought about the downfall of his glorious empire.

Both Vivek and I are of the view that India wouldn’t be the country that it is had it not been for stories like Ramayan and Mahabharat. These tales are the very backbone of our cultural identity. Ravanayan, even though it is not a simple old retelling of the Ramayan, pays homage to the Ramayan story and underscores its importance.

We welcome any kind of feedback and/or questions regarding the project. You can ask your questions on the Facebook page or right here in the comments to this blog post.