Ten Heads of Ravana

For long, a handful of scholars and intellectual elites, whose understanding of Bharata is disjointed from tradition and often inimical to the Dharmic way of life, have controlled India’s civilizational narrative. They analyze Bhāratīya sanskriti through a Western gaze while discarding native models. Embedded in powerful ecosystems, gilded Lankas, they are increasingly replacing traditional guru-s and ācārya-s as the modern adhikari-s of Indian knowledge systems.

‍In contemporary Indian scholarship, eminent personalities like Romila Thapar, Irfan Habib, Shashi Tharoor, Ramachandra Guha, Sheldon Pollock, Wendy Doniger, Devdutt Pattanaik, Kancha Ilaiah, and Michael Witzel are at the forefront of such India studies.

Rāvaṇa was a scholar-par-excellence, but he was on the wrong side of Dharma. Hence, Śrīrāma waged a war against him to prevent a breakdown of society. Similarly, today’s eminent scholars can be thought of as the contemporary embodiments of the historical Rāvaṇa-academically influential personalities, but grossly mischaracterizing the Dharmic way of life and history of Bhārata.

‍In this collection of essays, authors Dr. K.S. Kannan, Dr. H.S. Meera, Manogna Sastry, Subhodeep Mukhopadhyay, Sudarshan T.N, Dr. Sharda Narayanan, Anurag Sharma, and Divya Reddy have brought to light, through rigorous evidence-based research, numerous factual inaccuracies, willful misrepresentation and deliberate distortions in the scholarship of many such intellectual heads of the modern Rāvana.