Asura: Tale of the Vanquished | The Story of Ravana and His People by Anand Neelakantan
Asura: Tale of the Vanquished | The Story of Ravana and His People by Anand Neelakantan
From the back cover: “In the pages of history, as always, it is the version told by the victors that lives on. The voice of the vanquished remains lost in silence. But what if Ravana and his people had a different story to tell?”
I am a staunch believer of ‘it takes two to tango’, ‘there are always two sides to a story’ and other such phrases. So Asura obviously excited me as it claimed to tell the other side of a story that has been passed down from generations.
I grew up learning that Ravana was an extremely wise man but even an intelligent man such as him gave in to his carnal desires and kidnapped Sita out of lust. When I picked up this book, I expected to discover this ‘wise’ side of Ravana and how a moment’s wrong decision led to his and his kingdom’s destruction.
From here on I’m going to cover the book in points in an attempt to keep this post as short as possible.)
Writing:
- The book begins with “The End” – an interesting way to start a story but it backfires immediately.
- The narrative alternates with each chapter between Ravana and Bhadra making it extremely confusing.
- Randomly shifting from the past to the present (not to mention the story is playing out backwards) adds to the confusion.
- The dialogues are extremely long – there’s a four page long dialogue (the beginning quote of which took me about five minutes to spot). There’s no difference between the narrative and a dialogue so you don’t realise when someone has started talking.
- I kept going back and forth between pages trying to understand what exactly was happening, who was narrating at the point, which point of time the narration was in, etc.
- If the writing (and editing) itself wasn’t bad enough, the entire book is peppered with typos and grammatical errors.
- Unnecessary details are covered at length while necessary points that would take the story ahead are ignored making the narrative extremely dodgy. Out of no where, there’s a mention of Ravana’s offspring and I start shuffling between pages yet again trying to figure out when did it happen?!
- Similarly, within a paragraph Ravana’s sons go from being three-year-olds to graduates.
- Throughout the book he is only losing – whether it is wars or the respect of his people. There’s a part in the book when his kingdom is prospering for years but that is covered briefly within a page.
Characters:
- The characters are not well etched – particularly Ravana – whose story it is supposed to be.
- There are so many conflicts in Ravana’s mind – it almost puts you off especially if you read the book expecting to learn about Ravana’s “non-villain” side as the book’s synopsis claims.
- He comes across as a proud and egoistic person. The book does not change your perspective about Ravana or the Asuras at all – in fact it confirms all that has already been told about him. He is full of contradictions as is apparent in this extract when his illegitimate son, Athikya and Bali, his ally are in a fight - “I felt proud of my sons. Then I caught myself. I was afraid what would happen if Athikya won. I wanted to remain Bali’s friend. He was a good friend, but good friends were dispensable. Bali was a strategic ally… such allies were not dispensable. Illegitimate sons were easily dispensed with. But he had my blood…”
- Another instance is when he goes to the land of Devas where the caste system is practiced and looks down at how the untouchables are treated and thinks to himself, “Would such a thing ever happen in my rule?” This immediately makes you scoff at him because throughout the book he treats Bhadra as an untouchable, lowly creature.
- Throughout the book, Ravana does everything against the advice of his prime minister, Prahastha – simply out of arrogance – even if he agrees with him - “I basked in the cheer that arouse (sic) from my durbar and ignored Prahastha, who shook his head in despair.”
- Another example of his hypocrisy is after Prahastha’s death, “In my heart, I was sure that he would have been a better leader of the Asuras than I.”
- At the end of every loss, he questions himself whether it’s all worth it but yet goes ahead and continues to make even stupider mistakes. He also keeps talking about second chances – “If I came out of this war alive, I would build up my empire again, but with more compassion…”
- If you didn’t already lose respect for the character of Ravana, this will do it – “Unable to control my tears, I was also angry at the monkey-man, at Prahastha, at the world at large, for bringing me to this situation.” Since when did blaming everyone else but yourself become the trait of a brave king?
Story:
- There is absolutely no story. I kept forcing myself to read the book in the hope that some plot will magically reveal itself. By page 200 I had given up completely but I still wanted to go on as the characters I knew from Ramayana had not even been introduced as yet.
- The first mention of Sita is after a painful 226 pages. <spoiler alert> It is revealed that Sita in fact is Ravana’s daughter and he kidnapped her not out of lust but because he wanted to take his daughter back to his kingdom.</spoiler alert> I should have stopped reading here itself because the tiny suspense of the story had been revealed and there was nothing worth reading beyond this point. (Ideally, I think the story should have revolved around this little known fact and a more dramatic, suspense filled plot should have been created.)
In the past couple of years, there’s been a sudden growth in the number of mythological writers in India however it’s a pity how badly written the books are and Asura is not the only example of this. I consider Devdutt Pattanaik to be my favourite mythological writer. I have heard mixed reviews about Ashok Banker but I am yet to read his work.
In conclusion, except for the cover, I did not like anything about Asura. I would definitely not recommend this book to anybody (it’s a surprise how Flipkart and GoodReads have so many positive reviews). At the same time, if you do plan on reading this book, let me know what you thought of it.
