Sameer Gudhate Presents the Book Review of Ravan by Sharad Tandale

There are some characters we inherit, not choose.

Their meanings are handed to us early, wrapped in certainty, repeated until curiosity feels unnecessary. Ravan arrived in my life that way — already concluded, already named, already sealed. Evil was not something to be examined; it was something to be defeated. The story had taught me where to stand long before I knew how to ask why.

So when I picked up this book, I didn’t do so with reverence or rebellion. I came carrying a quiet suspicion — that this might be another attempt to polish darkness, to soften a figure we are taught to keep sharp. I was prepared to resist it.

The book sensed that resistance and didn’t rush to disarm it.

Instead of beginning where the epic makes us look, it kept returning me to places we usually skip — the slow years, the formative silences, the moments where nothing heroic or villainous is happening yet. Where a person is simply being shaped. Watching that unfold felt strangely intimate, like being asked to sit with a memory that isn’t yours and not interrupt it with conclusions.

What unsettled me early on was not what the book revealed, but how patiently it stayed with becoming. There was no dramatic insistence on sympathy. No clever re-framing meant to shock. Ravana here does not plead his case. He exists. He works. He learns. He devotes himself. He accumulates discipline the way others accumulate fear.

And somewhere in that accumulation, something begins to tilt.

I found myself slowing down — not because the prose demanded it, but because my own instincts did. I kept waiting for grandeur, for spectacle, for the familiar roar of power. Instead, the narrative kept returning to effort. To hunger. To the need to be seen and taken seriously. To the long patience of devotion that does not yet know what it will demand in return.

That was uncomfortable to witness.

Because effort is easy to admire. Discipline earns respect almost automatically. And before I realized it, admiration had arrived quietly, without permission. Not for what Ravana becomes — but for how rigorously he builds himself. The book allows that admiration to form, and then refuses to protect it.

What follows is not a fall, but a tightening.

Intelligence begins to justify itself. Power starts feeling familiar enough to feel deserved. Devotion, once expansive, narrows into transaction. The transformation from Dashagriva to Ravan doesn’t arrive as a moral rupture — it arrives the way it does in real life. Through small permissions. Through certainty hardening. Through the inability to hear no without feeling diminished.

That gradualness stayed with me more than any dramatic turning point could have.

There were moments where the narrative lingered longer than I wanted it to. Certain stretches felt heavy with detail, and my attention wavered. I noticed the impatience in myself — the desire to move forward, to reach the part I already “knew.” Sitting with that impatience felt instructive. It mirrored the very excess the book was charting: the refusal to stay with restraint once power has tasted movement.

What the book does quietly — and effectively — is deny you the comfort of clean categories. This Ravana is capable of compassion and capable of cruelty without contradiction. He is learned, disciplined, and deeply flawed. His love is real and selective. His ethics are situational. His devotion is sincere and yet increasingly entangled with ego.

The book doesn’t ask you to forgive him.

It asks you to witness him fully.

And that is far more unsettling.

Because once you allow that fullness, the story refuses to stay confined to mythology. It begins to echo elsewhere — in leadership, in ambition, in the ways intelligence can excuse itself, in how power rearranges the inner furniture without announcing the renovation.

By the time the familiar end approaches, it feels almost secondary. Not because it has lost importance, but because the damage has already been done — not to the story, but to certainty. The verdict you inherited no longer sits as comfortably as it once did.

When I put the book down, I didn’t feel enlightened or provoked. I felt quieter around judgement. More cautious with conclusions. More aware of how easily we accept finished narratives because they spare us the work of attention.

This book didn’t change what I believe about Ravana.

It changed how willing I am to look at anyone — mythological or otherwise — only after the ending has already been written.

And that hesitation, that pause before naming, has stayed with me longer than the story itself.

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