THE RAVANA RATANPUR
Behind the modern political narratives of the Ramayana lie
older memories that go back 3,000 years
Sculpture of Ravana cutting of several 10 heads and offering it into sacrificial fire.
At Ratan-gad, or Ratanpur Fort, near Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh — once part of Madhya Pradesh — there exists a rare and striking sculpture of Ravana. He is shown cutting off several of his 10 heads and offering it into a sacrificial fire. This scene does not come from Valmiki’s Ramayana, but from a later imagination. The offering is made to Brahma in Mahabharata’s ‘Ramopakhyana’. And in later regional versions, to Shiva.
This particular image dates to around 1000 AD. Its location is significant, in the region that ancient texts called Dakshina (southern) Kosala. To its north lay Uttara Kosala, Ram’s homeland. To its east was the region that later came to be known as Pashchimi (western) Lanka, now called Odisha. To its south stretched the dense forests of Dandakaranya. This was the deep south of Valmiki’s imagination.
This landscape is bounded by four great rivers. The Ganga to the north, the Godavari to the south, the Mahanadi to the east, and the Narmada to the west. Within this zone grows dense sala forests. This is crucial. The Valmiki Ramayana repeatedly speaks of sala trees. Sala forests do not grow in southern India. They grow in central and eastern India, north of Chhattisgarh and closer to the Himalayan foothills. The forest Ram enters is not peninsular Tamilakam or Kerala. It is this central Indian forest belt.
Rethinking the kingdom
Alongside sal grows the Ashoka tree, especially in the wet mountainous regions of Odisha, now known as Mahendragiri. Today, it is the state tree of Odisha. In the Ramayana, Sita is held captive in a garden full of Ashoka trees. This again points to an eastern-central Indian ecology. When Valmiki speaks of Kishkindha, the land of monkeys, and Lanka, the land of rakshasas, this is the south he has in mind, south of Arya-varta, a river-island probably. Not the island we call Sri Lanka today, but the forests and mineral-rich zones of central India.
Ratanpur lies in a landscape saturated with the earliest layers of the Ramayana story. Today, we speak of the Ramayana as a national epic, but the world it describes is far older. The events it narrates belong to a memory that goes back nearly 3,000 years, in the Vedic period — even though the text itself was composed and consolidated about 2,000 years ago, between the Mauryan and Gupta empires.
The sala and Ashoka trees were closely connected with Buddhist lore. Buddha dies between two sala trees. He was born under the Ashoka tree. So, Ravana’s Lanka being linked to these two trees cannot be a coincidence. It reflects the Brahmin-Buddhist conflict in the post-Ashokan era.
Something dramatic happens after 1000 AD. The Cholas, locked in conflict with Sri Lankan kings and dependent on copper for their temple bronzes, begin to identify Sri Lanka as Ravana’s Lanka. Cities such as Anuradhapura are plundered. Sinhaladvipa becomes equated with the rakshasa kingdom.
This idea is retrospectively reinforced by the Lankavatara Sutra, a Mahayana Buddhist text that speaks of the Buddha visiting Lanka and teaching Ravana. The Lanka of this text is symbolic and philosophical, not geographical Sri Lanka. But names stick, and memories shift.
Evolving gods
By the Vijayanagara period, around 1500 AD, under the influence of Madhva Brahmins, hundreds of Hanuman temples were built across the Deccan. The Deccan itself becomes identified with Kishkindha, the land of monkeys. The older memory of Dandakaranya in Chhattisgarh and central India fades from popular consciousness.
And yet traces remain. River names such as Subarnarekha, cities like Sonpur and Ratanpur, and local legends continue to echo Ravana. The medieval Gond kings of this region, keen to distinguish themselves from Rajput lineages, minted coins claiming descent from Pulastya, an ancestor of Ravana himself. This happened around the 15th and 16th centuries.
The multi-headed Ravana image also invites another comparison. From around 500 AD, Mahayana Buddhism begins to depict Bodhisattvas with multiple heads and arms, most famously Avalokiteshvara. Early Buddhist images were restrained, with two arms and calm symmetry. Multiplicity enters Buddhist art under Hindu influence, drawing on the idea of Purusha, the cosmic being with many heads and many limbs.
When we study the Ramayana alongside sculptures such as the Ravana of Ratanpur, we see a palimpsest. Beneath modern political narratives lie older memories of forests, rivers, rival faiths, shifting geographies, and evolving gods. The epic is not fixed. It remembers what we choose to forget.
– Devdutt Pattanaik is the author of 50 books on mythology, art and culture.
