A hero who goes by the book
In Amish Tripathi's Ram Chandra series Ram writes Ayodhya's law and then keeps it when it costs him, and Raavan's last fight isn't the one I remembered.
Amish Tripathi’s four books tell the Ramayana as history, set in India around 3400 BCE. What I really liked is the studiousness of Ram, he always wants to do the right thing and by the textbook at every point in his life.
Table of contents
The studiousness of Ram
His first job is chief of police, and he finds that most people don’t know what the law is. Ayodhya has too many Smritis, written over centuries and contradicting each other. The police arrest people under one and the judge sentences them from another. He goes through every Smriti, pulls out the laws he judges fair and still fit for the times, and writes a single code to replace all of them, cut into stone tablets in every temple. One line sits at the end of the last tablet, ignorance of the law is not a legitimate excuse.
He keeps the law himself too. One night he rides back after the city gates have closed, and the gatekeeper opens them because he’s a prince. Ram tells him off, since the law says the gates don’t open after dark, and sleeps outside the walls till morning.
Roshni is a doctor and family to all four brothers, and she’s raped and murdered. The men who did it are caught, and the judges are so angry that they have them killed savagely in public. Ram says they should have been executed, because that’s the law, but he objects to it being done in anger and outside the process. The worst of them, Dhenuka, was a minor when he did it, and Ram’s own new code says minors can’t be executed. So Dhenuka stays alive in a cell, and Ram won’t let anyone touch him.
Then Kaikeyi asks for Ram to be banished for fourteen years, and Ram has nothing to say against it. In this world there are divine weapons, and Lord Rudra banned them. The punishment he set down for using one is exile for fourteen years. Ram had fired one, the Asuraastra, to save the city of Mithila. There’s a technical defence available (the thing incapacitates rather than destroys), and he doesn’t use it.
The Asuraastra was the Malayaputras’ weapon. They’re Vishwamitra’s tribe, and they exist to find and raise the next Vishnu. The joke of the whole series is that they made their own villain. Vishwamitra explains to his lieutenant that a Vishnu is only a hero people choose to follow, and a hero is nothing without a villain to be measured against, so they go looking for one. They find Raavan when he’s a teenage smuggler with a growth on his navel that will eventually kill him. They own the only medicine that keeps him alive, and they keep supplying it. They also sell him a mineral for his ships, and they spend that money building the divine weapon for the hero. The Roshni chapter and this joke too landed very well with me.
What didn’t land
What didn’t land is in the fourth book. Raavan loved a woman called Vedavati as a boy, and Sita is her daughter. My memory of it was that Raavan did not fight, he was shown as this fierce warrior since the beginning, but towards the end since he saw Vedavati in Sita, he just subdued. So I went back to the chapter. He fights, and he starts it by charging first. He gets inside Ram’s guard and punches him in the face with the rim of his shield.
He comes into the circle with one eye gone (removed, because it would have turned septic), his left arm strapped to his shield, and a bad right leg, at sixty years old. Kumbhakarna died the previous afternoon and his son Indrajit died a few hours ago, and he comes to the duel straight from watching a physician pour plaster over the boy’s face for the death mask.
Weeks before the war, over breakfast in the garden where he’s keeping Sita prisoner, Raavan works out the plan that’s been run on him for forty years and tells her so. He says his life hasn’t amounted to much and maybe his death can, and a quiet rescue won’t do, because India will never follow anyone it hasn’t watched win a spectacle. So he asks for the war, and for his own army to be destroyed in it too. Sita warns him that Ram will stop the moment he suspects his opponent is holding back, since striking a man who isn’t trying is adharma. Raavan promises he won’t hold back. While he’s bleeding out he says it again (his death will make the legend of Ram, light is the child of darkness).