This week, for my make-up reading, I finished up Narayan’s take on the Ramayana. Again, I focused more on snippets for use in my reading notes than on the overall material itself.
The first line that caught my interest was when someone reminds Rama, “After all, you are on a mission to wipe out the asura class; and in spite of his noble speech, this person really is an asura.” The description conjures up a trickster figure or a silver-tongued villain with an ace up his sleeve and an easy grin, and I think it’d be fun to explore that character’s dynamic with the protagonist, probably through some sort of forced team-up.
I also loved the part where Ravana realizes things are getting dire and goes to wake up his secret weapon—his big brother, Kumbakarna, who’s “famous for his deep sleep.” After a ton of difficulty, they manage to wake K from what sounds like some kind of long, supernatural sleep; Ravana’s lieutenants have to reorient K to where he is and the situation at hand. Last semester, I optioned a story that involved waking someone from an enchanted sleep in order to use them in some crisis, and this lines up really well; it might be a great chance to revisit that idea and follow through on it this time.
Out of all the characters in the Ramayana, the one that interested me most was Indrajit, one of Ravana’s sons. Especially when K has just died and Ravana is upset, and Indrajit tells his dad, “What have you to fear when I am alive?” Narayan goes on to explain that Indrajit “had the power to remain invisible and fight, and accounted for much destruction in the invader’s camp. He also created a figure resembling Sita, carried her in his chariot, took her before Rama’s army and killed her within their sight.” I love the idea of this calmly loyal, self-assured son, a star in his father’s battlefield with a sharp mind for warfare mind tricks, and I’d love to transplant that into a different story. Probably through someone else’s POV, because that’s apparently how I roll.
I was also really interested in the following passage about Rama and his state of reincarnation, and I’m interested in exploring the idea of his humanity muddling and obstructing his underlying divinity: “The gods, who had watched this in suspense, were now profoundly relieved but also had an uneasy feeling that Rama had, perhaps, lost sight of his own identity. Again and again this seemed to happen. Rama displayed the tribulations and the limitations of the human frame and it was necessary from time to time to remind him of his divinity.”
Finally, a line from Brahma caught my eye, too. He explains that he, Shiva, and Vishnu make up a trinity, as the creator, destroyer, and protector, respectively—and that they “are subject to dissolution and rebirth.” I found that concept interesting, of a group of powerful people connected to each other in some deep way, who are constantly being unmade and remade again in different ways but similar patterns.
Image Credit: "Ramayana Dance Performance at Prambanan Temple" by Maria Ismawi. Source: Wikimedia Commons.
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