Sri Lanka’s first ever satellite is named after the ultimate villain of Hindu mythology

In the Indian subcontinent, issues and events often have a mythological subtext or context, be it in politics, science, or other fields. References to tales, characters, and messages from ancient texts and scriptures can be found sprinkled beyond the modern-day international borders of the region.

Even then, Sri Lanka’s first ever satellite, launched on June 17, stands out. The predominantly Buddhist island nation, named the 1.05 kilogram payload Ravana-1, after the biggest villain in Hindu mythology.

In the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, Ravana is the mighty king of Lanka and the leader of the Rakshasa clan. While some dispute the assumption that the Lanka mentioned in the poem is the same as today’s Sri Lanka, it has underpinned social, historical, and political views over millennia.

Ravana, according to Ramayana’s basic plot, abducts Sita, the wife of prince Rama of Ayodhya. It climaxes in a bloody battle in which the king of Lanka and most of his family are killed and Sita rescued by Rama with the help of an army of monkeys.

In short, the ferocious Ravana is seen as the symbol of evil by many Hindus, while Rama epitomises kindness, justice, and dutifulness. Dussehra, one of Hinduism’s biggest festivals, is celebrated to mark Rama’s defeat of Ravana. In many place in northern India, festivities involve the setting ablaze of giant Ravana effigies, sometimes even in the presence of the prime minister.

“Ram rajya,” or the reign of king Rama, is even held forth by modern Indian political forces as the ideal state to aspire to. Ayodhya, a small town in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, has for the past many decades been the epicentre of the Hindu nationalist movement.


However, Ravana himself is not reviled across the board. To begin with, there are multiple versions of the Ramayana—around 300 by one account (pdf)—all of which describe the primary antagonist in various shades of grey. Often the ten-headed king is deemed erudite, just, an able administrator, and an excellent musician—an ancient string-instrument, the Ravana Hattha, is considered his invention. He is also portrayed as an ardent devotee of the Hindu god Siva.

During Dussehra, minor pockets of India even mourn for their king. Though rare, Ravana is also a preferred name for sons among sections of Indians.

Not surprisingly, this paradox also informs regional politics in the country. The late Periyar EV Ramaswamy Naicker, fountainhead of the Dravidian movement of southern India, identified Ravana as a monarch of the ancient Dravidians who mostly inhabit southern India today.

“Although EVR (Naicker) neglects to provide specific textual references, he begins his praise of Ravana by listing the virtues that Valmiki attributes to Ravana: Ravana has mastered the Vedas and sastras, he protects his family and kin, he acts courageously, he practices bhakti, he is the beloved son of a god, and he has received several boons,” Paula Richman writes in the book Many Ramayanas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia. Valmiki is the poet who wrote one of the earliest versions of the Ramayana.

In many ways, this difference in perception of Ramayana and Ravana extends to Sri Lanka. While the island nation is developing its own “Ramayana trail” to woo tourists from India, Ravana himself is a hero for Sri Lankans, especially among its minority Hindus.

All this adds intrigue to the naming of the country’s first satellite.

“Are we seeing a soft power project or subtle weaponisation of myth and religion in the context of a concerted extension of a Rāvana Trail and narrative in post-war Sri Lanka where Rāvana and large Hanuman (Ramayana’s popular monkey god) statues, which are often out of sync with the softer, gentler and smaller local aesthetics and religious sensibilities are popping up in the post-war northeast of Sri Lanka, as India extends her soft power globally and locally, while grandiose Buddhist statues are also popping up?” a columnist asked in the Colombo Telegraph a few months ago.

(Source: Quartz)

The tale of Mandodari, the patient and pious wife of Ravana

The story of Mandodari, the chief wife of Ravana has been scarcely told in the Ramayana, save for a few mentions in the Uttara Khanda. There are more mentions of her in the other versions of the Ramayana like the Adbhuta Ramayana and Krittivasi Ramayana and in the Puranas like the Devi Bhagavata Purana.

Valmiki’s Ramayana describes Mandodari as a very beautiful, pious and noble woman whose appearance once led Hanumana to mistake her for Sita. She was known to be extremely patient with Ravana’s attitude towards women, but always questioning his actions and rebuking his choices.

Mandodari’s purpose in the epic is to show how even though she stood behind Ravana because of duty, she did not condone his actions or go along with them. Here are a few anecdotes that reveal an interesting personality.

Born in Mandore (near present day Jodhpur, Rajasthan) to the king of asuras, Mayasura and his wife Hema, Mandodari was the only daughter among three children.

As a child, her brothers– Mayavi and Dundubhi– were always at each other’s throats. Once, over a trivial incident, the two were engaged in a violent argument. Mandodari, peace-loving as ever, calmly separated the brothers by physically stepping in-between them, and clutching both of them by the hair, she said, “You both are a disgrace to the family. Nobody in the world will come to help, save your family, when you really need it. Too many people in the world are evil and out to get you, the one person you can rely on is your brother and you chose to fight with him. Stop fighting and go to your rooms!”

Even as a child of 10, Mandodari spoke eloquently with maturity. So much so, that this happened to be the last time Mayavi and Dundhubi fought.

Of her marriage to Ravana, it so happened, that one day, Ravana visited the kingdom of Mayasura. He saw Mandodari and fell immediately enamoured, as he did with most women.

He approached Mayasura and said, “I am a man of great family riches. My lineage can be traced back for generations, and you will never find a greater devotee of Shiva than I. Would you give me your daughter, Mandodari’s hand in marriage?”

Mayasura, taken in by the many accomplishments listed by Ravana agreed, and Mandodari and Ravana were married under complete Vedic rituals. It was only after their marriage, that Mandodari found out about Ravana’s penchant for women and the size his ego.

When Ravana kidnapped Sita, Mandodari was the first one to tell him that must repent and take Sita back to Rama, or face dire consequences.

Ravana, Mandodari and Sita in Ashoka Vatika

When Hanuman was sent to Lanka to find Sita, he accidentally entered Mandodari’s bedchambers. For a moment, looking at Mandodari praying ardently to Parvati, he mistook her for the virtuous Sita. However, realising his mistake he scurried out quickly.

When he did locate Sita, he observed, from behind the bushes, how Ravana was trying to coerce Sita into marrying him, “You must know how I have fallen in love with you, Sita. You must agree to marry me.”

“That will never happen as long as I and my husband are alive, Ravana. Why don’t you let me leave, and go back to your devoted wife?” declared Sita.

Ravana’s having had enough niceties, finally got annoyed and unsheathed his sword to kill Sita, however as soon as he raised his sword, Mandodari arrived and held him by the wrist.

“Let me go, Mandodari. I will end Rama’s precious wife’s life right here and now,” snarled Ravana.

“Killing of a woman is a heinous sin upon dharma, husband,” replied Mandodari without a trace of fear, “Listen to Sita and let her go.”

Ravana dropped his sword, “Fine. I won’t kill her, but she will be mine,” he said striding out.

Almost toward the end of the war between Rama and Ravana, when all of Ravana’s sons, brothers and warriors had been vanquished by Rama’s army, the Lankan king organised a yajna to assure victory.

Rama sent a troop of vanaras, headed by Hanuman and Angada, to make sure that Ravana’s yajna would fail. The vanaras created complete chaos in Ravana’s palace, but the latter refused to stop and carried on with the fire sacrifice.

Angada had dragged Mandodari by her hair to the court, much like Dushasana had dragged Draupadi in the Mahabharata. Mandodari, begged her husband, “Look at how they’re treating your wife, Ravana. Won’t you set aside your grudge and your ego to even save me?”

Enraged, Ravana had abandoned his yajna and struck Angada with his sword. However, Rama’s purpose of disrupting the yajna had been successful and he immediately left Mandodari and escaped.

Mandodari, having been ill-treated by Sita’s representatives, looked at Ravana with tears in her eyes, “Is it worth it? The fight to claim Sita? I beg you, dear husband. Abandon this madness. Let Sita return. No good can come of this.”

Ravana had disregarded all her requests, and it is said that because Ravana could not complete his yajna to win, it ensured the opposite– Rama’s victory.

(Source: Blush.me)

A feminist reading of Sita sings the blues

Nina Paley created the unapologetically quirky, irreverent, and unconventionally animated film Sita Sings the Blues after her own divorce from her husband. She saw in the tale of Ramayana, which the film juxtaposes with the story of Nina’s own divorce, “the greatest break-up story ever told.” The film tells the tragic story of Sita, who was first kidnapped by Ravana and then cast away (twice) by her husband Rama on suspicions of infidelity.

However, this tale of woe is narrated anything but tragically. Sita’s story is peppered with the wildly anachronistic jazz songs of 1920s singer Annette Hanshaw. An impossibly curvy Sita thus sings of her woes to the upbeat tempo of Hanshaw’s numbers, like when she sultrily croons “My Man Don’t Love Me No More” when Rama abandons her. Paley’s Sita reacts to her tragedy with trills instead of tears, abandoning a woe-is-me approach in favour of waist-shaking foot-tapping jazz numbers, which are, let’s face it, way more fun. (Also, this film gave me the rather valuable information that calling one’s lover “daddy” is not a modern-day sexy black woman thing, because Annette Hanshaw beat Beyoncé to it by decades. Paley’s Sita parrots Hanshaw in a plaintive song titled “Daddy, Won’t You Please Come Home?” whilst waiting for Rama to rescue her from Lanka.)

Now we all know that the Ramayana is no feminist masterpiece. Sita follows her husband Rama to the forest, and then remains devoted to him despite the horrible way he treats her, volunteering for an agni pariksha (trial-by-fire) to prove her purity when he questions her faithfulness to him. (She does kind of kick ass as a single mom in the forest though, when she raises the two sons of the husband who banished her when she was pregnant.) Rama however, in popular cultural opinion, is held up as the absolute icon of dharma and virtuousness. His flaws as a husband are excused as the sacrifices required for kingship, where of course, treating women kindly isn’t a priority. And Sita’s submissive nature has long been held up as a model of wifeliness in India. Nationalist leaders have often urged Indian women to adopt her virtues of pativrata (devotion to husband) in order to attain that “Perfect Wife” status that Sita endorsed so well in her multiple sacrifices for her husband.

However, Paley, like millions of other women in India, found in Sita a resonance of her own marital frustration. In a culture where divorce is hardly ever an option, and women are often given little to no power in the fate of their marriages, Sita occupies the status of an everywoman. Like the many women who have retold the Ramayana, Paley deals with her grief at her hurtful husband by channelling a fierce sympathy for Sita’s treatment at the hands of Rama.

Paley does this by subtly criticizing Rama, stripping him of his much-touted “divine virtue”. Well, actually not so subtly. Rather hilariously, Rama’s estranged sons, Lava and Kusha sing a song in praise of their absentee father, as taught to them by the poet-sage Valmiki. This song, starting out nice and well with “Rama’s great, Rama’s good, Rama does what Rama should,” quickly descends into a nursery-rhyme style singalong where the twins dutifully intone:

“Sing his love, sing his praise,
Rama set his wife ablaze.
Got her home, kicked her out,
To allay his people’s doubt.”

Paley’s light-hearted jabs at Rama are an act of resistance towards male-dominated narratives of the Ramayana that paint Rama as the ultimate man of dharma. By making an antagonist out of the usually infallible Rama, Paley launches a critique of his deeply patriarchal and unfair behaviour towards Sita.

But Paley’s critique of the Ramayana goes beyond simply championing Sita’s story over Rama’s. In the gentle, irreverent, humorous way she tells this story, she’s also criticizing the monolithic, heavy-handed and hegemonic version of the Ramayana that have been espoused by the Hindu right in the country. The Ramayana is a myth, passed on through oral traditions, from grandmother to grandchild in countless households in India. Yet, when scholar A. K. Ramanujam wrote an essay on the 300 Ramayanas that he believed existed in the Indian subcontinent, it was banned by the Hindutva right for being sacrilegious. The very nature of mythologies is its plurality. They arise from hundreds of different sources and interweave with local beliefs and traditions in delightfully interesting manifestations. The enforcement of a unitary notion of the Ramayana strips away at these multitudes.

Sita Sings the Blues loosely follows the dominant Valmiki version of the epic. However, the story is narrated and commented upon by three faceless narrators, who recount the story of the epic from memory – completely unscripted. These narrators sound much like my friends and me – urban, educated Indians having a chat over cups of chai and Marie biscuits. And much like my friends and me, they are often iffy about the details of the epic. The film starts with them arguing over when the Ramayana was supposed to have happened. One says the 14th century, while the other scoffs at her and says that that’s when the Mughals were probably in India, so it ­must have been in the BC. Eventually, they settle on “a long, long, time ago.”

They jokingly allude to this sacrosanct nature of the Ramayana that they might accidentally be defiling with their ignorance. One of the narrators says, “I’m messing up the names… God, they’re going to be after me!” And on another occasion, the narrators all wonder why Sita couldn’t just go back with Hanuman, instead of waiting for Rama to come save her, thereby avoiding this huge, messy war. They end with, “Don’t challenge these stories, yaar!” (And if Hindutva hell is a thing, these narrators definitely earned their place in it when they wondered if Rama and Sita were part of the Mile-High Club, considering Sita became pregnant so quickly after her airborne voyage back home from Lanka.)

The story itself, when not being narrated, is told with these 2-D animations, wherein the animation styles keep varying – sometimes psychedelic, sometimes old-school Indian art, sometimes cartoon-like. In these animations, the characters of the Ramayana speak to each other in painfully ornate tones, keeping in character of ‘a long, long, time ago’, but occasionally break character to deliver golden lines like, “Your ass is grass.” For example, when Dasaratha banishes Rama, he delivers a long, sonorous speech on how he must keep his word to his wife Kaikeyi. After he’s done, Kaikeyi dryly adds, “Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out!”

Paley’s irreverence with the handling of this epic gently mocks the strict unilateral understanding of the Ramayana championed by right-wing groups. Far from being blasphemous, what Paley does is reclaim the narrative for herself. She dislodges it from its status as religious doctrine and brings it back to the realm of myth, which is malleable to imagination. She takes this reclamation one step further, reclaiming it not just for herself, but every single viewer. The film’s opening credits read, “Your Name Here presents…” and then goes on to display its producers, “Funded by You”. The audience thus become stakeholders in the narrative. Paley actively encourages the audience to make the story our own, reminding us that the Ramayana can be ours as much as it was Valmiki’s or Tulsidas’.

(Source: Feminism in India)

The mystery and secrets of Mansarovar Lake

There's always a mystery surrounding Lake Mansarovar near Mt Kailash. I just can't wait to visit this place when my little one grows up. Speaking Tree throws some light on the mystery surrounding this amazing lake:

Located at about a height of 4,590 metres, Mansarovar is the largest freshwater lake of the world situated at that high. The captivating scenery presented by this lake is incomparably superb. The origin of the word Mansarovar is from two roots namely manas and sarovar meaning mind and lake respectively. It is said in the scriptures that initially Brahma conceived this lake in his mind and later it go the visible manifestation and thus the name ensued.

Hinduism believes that initially Lord Brahma created this lake for meditation and he sat here in meditation for several ages that culminated in the beginning of the creation process. It is from this spot that the entire world was created. Earlier during that time, Mansarovar was even vaster and eventually it was reduced to its present size. This theory is supported by several religions and the concept of lake Tethys, which is the source of all creation points out to Mansarovar.

Very interestingly, this lake together with Mount Kailash rising adjacent to it are considered holy by several religions at once including Hinduism, Jainism, Buddhism and Bon.

Hinduism views Mount Kailash as the form of Lord Shiva and Mansarovar as the form of Mother Parvati, the male and female aspects of the supreme energy. The total circumferance of this lake is 80 km and it takes about three days to go around it. The depth is about 300 feet and stretches over an area of about 320 square kilometres.

It is believed that some celestial bodies and sapta rishis (the seven sages) descend on to this lake in the form of some visible light everyday during Brahmamuhurt time to take a holy dip and then leave back. Interesting and highly mysterious phenomenon has been conspicuously observed by a lot of people with reverence, wow and wonder. Legends in Buddhism state the Queen Maya was given a holy bath in the Mansarovar lake before she gave birth to Lord Buddha. Earlir there were eight famous Buddhist monasteries around this lake.

To the west of the Mansarovar lake, we can find yet another lake namely Raksas Tal. The two lakes are connected by Ganga Chhu channel. Mansarovar is a round shaped freshwater lake and Rakshas Tal is crescent shaped and is a salt water lake. This start contrast is inexplicable by science. In Buddhism, the two lakes are symbolically interpreted as the lightness and darkness respectively. Hinduism says Mansarovar is the god's lake and Rakshas tal is the devil's lake.

Yet another baffling fact even for scientists is that even during adverse weather conditions, the Mansarovar lake constantly remains calm and undisturbed. Whereas the much smaller crescent shaped Rakshas Tal is constantly turbulent regardless of the weather conditions. While Mansarovar presents an inviting appearance and bounteously gives away its water for bathing and drinking, no one even dares to come near the adjoining Rakshas Tal lake being scared by the very turbulent appearance of it. Even touching the water of the Rakshas Tal lake is strictly prohibited. Mansarovar's mysteries are unresolved and strongly attest the religious beliefs of people.