Asura, Daitya, Rakshasa: The Five Words English Calls 'Demon

Kubera, the god of wealth invoked every Diwali, and Ravana, who carried Sita off to Lanka, had the same father. The sage Vishrava, son of Pulastya, fathered Kubera by the daughter of the sage Bharadvaja, and later fathered Ravana, Kumbhakarna, Shurpanakha and Vibhishana by Kaikasi. Valmiki's seventh book sets both marriages out in its opening chapters, at Uttara Kanda 3 and 9. The fact lands as a shock in English because English has already sorted the cast: Kubera is a god, Ravana is a demon, and gods and demons do not share fathers.

Sanskrit never made that sort. At least five words get flattened into the single English word "demon": asura, daitya, danava, rakshasa, yaksha. They are not synonyms. They do not descend from one origin story. The texts never fuse them into a single opposing species. Two are named after a mother, two after a word spoken at the moment of creation, and one begins in the Rigveda as a title of honour applied to gods. Separate the five and this tradition turns out to have adversaries, plural and unlike each other, rather than an adversary.

Five words, three different kinds of thing

Asura is the oldest of them and the least stable. In the Rigveda it is applied to gods. Hymn 8.42 is addressed to Varuna, and its first verse opens astabhnad dyam asuro visvavedah, the all-knowing asura propped up the sky. Griffith renders it as the omniscient Asura establishing the heavens and fixing the limits of the earth. Agni, Rudra and the pair Mitra-Varuna carry the epithet elsewhere.

Wash Edward Hale's monograph Asura in Early Vedic Religion (Motilal Banarsidass, 1986) works through the attestations in the chronological order of the texts, from the family books of the Rigveda forward through the later books, the Atharva Veda and the Yajur Veda mantras. His finding about the oldest layer is precise. In the family books, asura used as a designation of gods appears only in the singular and the dual, and it is applied to gods who are elsewhere called deva. Hale points to a verse in which Rudra is addressed as devam asuram, god and asura in one phrase, at Rigveda 5.42.11. The adversarial plural, a class of beings ranged against the devas, belongs to the later material. By the time of the Puranas that is what asura means, and the older sense survives as a problem for commentators.

Daitya and danava are matronymics, and they work exactly as patronymics do. Kashyapa Prajapati married daughters of Daksha. By Aditi he had the Adityas, the gods proper. By Diti he had the daityas. By Danu he had the danavas. One father, three mothers, three sets of half-brothers. The word daitya carries no moral content on its own. It tells you who your mother was, and nothing else.

Rakshasa and yaksha come from somewhere else entirely, and the texts do not agree on where. Valmiki's Uttara Kanda gives an origin in its fourth chapter: Prajapati produced beings to guard the waters and asked them what they would do. Those who answered rakshama, we will guard, became rakshasas. Those who answered yakshama became yakshas, a verb translators handle variously, Hari Prasad Shastri rendering it "we will sacrifice". The Vishnu Purana, at Book 1 chapter 5 in Wilson's translation, does not tell the same story at all. There the beings are born of Brahma's hunger, in darkness, gaunt and hideous. Those who cried "preserve us" became rakshasas, and those who cried "let us eat" became yakshas, the name taken from a root meaning to eat. Two texts, two settings, two incompatible derivations of the same pair of words. Neither is linguistics. Both are a text playing on its own vocabulary, and both make the same point: rakshasa and yaksha begin as descriptions of what a being does.

These are not five branches of one family tree. Daityas and danavas descend from Kashyapa. Valmiki's rakshasas begin with two brothers, Heti and Praheti, who have nothing to do with Kashyapa. Asura in its Vedic use is not a lineage term at all. Combining the five into one genealogy of evil is a modern convenience, not something any of the texts do.

One father, two mothers

Pulastya is a mind-born son of Brahma and a Prajapati. His son Vishrava is a brahmarshi. Uttara Kanda 3 has Bharadvaja give his own daughter to Vishrava with the traditional rites. The chapter identifies her only as Bharadvaja's daughter; the wider tradition names her Devavarnini, and also Ilavida. Her son is Vaishravana, that is Kubera, lord of the yakshas and guardian of the northern quarter.

The second marriage came about by design. Sumali, a rakshasa chief of a line running back to Heti, sent his daughter Kaikasi to the sage with instructions to choose him, telling her she would bear sons equal to the Lord of Wealth. She approached him at dusk, breaking into his evening devotions, and Vishrava tells her what the hour will cost: she would bring forth offspring of dark aspect, delighting in the companionship of doers of evil. Then he adds an exception. The son she bears last will be like his father, and will assuredly be virtuous. That son is Vibhishana.

Four children, one father, one mother, one inauspicious hour, and the text still refuses to let the outcome be uniform. The epic is not saying that rakshasa descent produces wickedness. It says something narrower, about an hour rather than a bloodline, and then qualifies even that.

Ravana's given name at birth is Dashagriva, the ten-necked. The name Ravana is earned later. In between comes the austerity, set out in the tenth chapter: ten thousand years without nourishment, and at the close of each thousand years he cuts off one of his own heads and offers it into the fire. Nine heads have gone in when Brahma appears. Dashagriva asks first for immortality and is refused. He then names the classes of being he wishes to be safe from: suparnas, nagas, yakshas, daityas, danavas, rakshasas and the gods. Humans are not on the list. He looks on men, he says, as mere straws. The plot of the Ramayana runs through that omission.

The mountain, and where the name came from

The best known episode in Ravana's life before the abduction is his encounter with Kailasa, at Uttara Kanda 16. Ravana mocks Nandi for his monkey face, and Nandi answers with a curse: monkeys of prodigious strength, in Nandi's own form, will be born to destroy his race. Ravana then seizes the mountain in his arms and shakes it violently. Shiva presses down with the great toe of one foot and crushes Ravana's arms beneath it. He cries out, and the cry shakes the three worlds.

What follows is the part that gets left out of the summaries. Ravana laments for a thousand years, then worships Shiva with the recitation of hymns and sacred texts. Shiva releases him, gives him the name Ravana, he who causes the worlds to cry out, and bestows on him the sword Chandrahasa and a long life. The epic's own villain gets his name and his weapon from Shiva, as a reward, in a scene of devotion accepted.

Nor is his household irreligious. In the Sundara Kanda, Hanuman searching the garden with a little of the night still left hears the Vedic sounds of brahmarakshasas well versed in the six auxiliary sciences of the Veda, and of those performing sacrifices (sarga 18). Valmiki could have written Lanka as a place of pure appetite. He wrote a city where the Veda is chanted before dawn and the king is a Shiva devotee holding a boon.

The material on Ravana's ancestry, austerities and the Kailasa episode comes from the Uttara Kanda, whose status as a later layer of the epic has been argued over since the nineteenth century. Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman devote much of the introduction to their Princeton translation (2017) to the book's controversies and to what they call its complex reception history. That is the honest position of these details: canonical within the received Ramayana, and later than the books they extend. Both halves should be said whenever they are cited.

Two daityas among the twelve who know dharma

The Bhagavata Purana goes further than the Ramayana. Its seventh canto is largely given over to Prahlada, son of the daitya king Hiranyakashipu, whose devotion survives every attempt his father makes to kill him and brings Narasimha out of the pillar. Prahlada is a daitya throughout, and nothing in the text asks the reader to hold that against him or suggests he transcended a category by being good.

The eighth canto belongs to his grandson. Bali, son of Virochana, has taken the three worlds from Indra when Vishnu appears as Vamana and asks for three paces of ground. Bali's preceptor Shukracharya sees through the disguise and tells him to refuse. Bali will not. At 8.20.3 he asks how, having once promised the brahmin that he would give, he could now refuse like a gambler; a few verses on he says he will not fight a brahmin boy even if that boy kills him. Shukracharya curses him at 8.20.14 and 15, telling him that for all his conceit of learning he will fall from his royal splendour in no time. Bali pours the water of the gift anyway.

Vishnu takes the three worlds in two paces and Bali offers his own head for the third. What he receives is not a punishment. At 8.22.31 Vishnu says that a position difficult even for the immortals to attain has been conferred on Bali, and that he will hold the office of Indra in the manvantara presided over by Manu Savarni, the eighth of the fourteen, still to come. At 8.22.32 he is settled until then in Sutala, a realm built by Vishvakarman, and the verses that follow promise him Vishnu's own presence there. The demon king is not merely forgiven. He is given the throne of the god he dethroned, on a longer timescale.

In the sixth canto, at 6.3.20 and 21, Yama names the twelve who know the dharma taught by the Lord. The list runs: Brahma, Narada, Shiva, the four Kumaras, Kapila, Svayambhuva Manu, Prahlada, Janaka, Bhishma, Bali, Shukadeva and Yama himself. Two of the twelve authorities on dharma in the Bhagavata Purana are daityas, and the text does not pause to explain the inclusion.

The opponents are given arguments

A tradition can honour a converted enemy and still write its enemies as fools. The epics do not. Their adversaries argue, and the arguments have weight.

Malyavan comes before the Lanka council in the Yuddha Kanda, at sarga 35, and makes a case for returning Sita. The text there calls him Ravana's maternal grandfather, though some genealogies make him Sumali's brother and so a grand-uncle. His reasoning is political before it is theological. A king should make peace or wage war according to whether he is weaker, equal or stronger, and Ravana is not stronger. He catalogues the omens standing against Lanka and tells Ravana that unrighteousness has consumed the kingdom while sages and celestials favour Rama. He is not a mouthpiece for the heroes. He is a rakshasa elder giving a rakshasa king sound counsel, and Ravana dismisses him.

Vibhishana had already made the same case and been thrown out for it. Kumbhakarna, woken for the war, does something more uncomfortable. At sarga 63 he tells his brother that the bad consequence now on him is the exact one the council foresaw, and that it came about through his utter disregard of the words of his well-wishers. A king who disregards an enemy and fails to protect himself, Kumbhakarna says, loses his position. Then, in the same speech, he says he will go out and kill Rama, Lakshmana, Sugriva and Hanuman, and tells Ravana to be free of fear. The epic gives its most notorious glutton a clear head, a correct analysis and a loyalty that overrides both.

Bali argues his own preceptor into silence on the duty of keeping a promise, and the tradition afterwards quotes that argument with approval rather than as a villain's sophistry. Prahlada answers his father with a theology his father cannot refute. These are not strawmen. They are positions, held by people the narrative is about to destroy.

What happens at the funeral

Ravana dies. Vibhishana grieves over the body, and Rama tells him that a warrior killed in battle does not deserve to be mourned, that being the ascertainment of the scriptures. Vibhishana then asks leave to perform the funeral rites. Rama's reply is short.

"Hostilities end with death. Our purpose has been accomplished. Let his funeral rites be performed."

Rama to Vibhishana, Valmiki Ramayana, Yuddha Kanda, sarga 109 in the numbering used by valmikiramayan.net. The Sanskrit adds a clause the English translations render variously, to the effect that Ravana is now as much Rama's to bury as Vibhishana's.

The rites are described at length two chapters later, at sarga 111 in the same numbering, the chapter Hari Prasad Shastri's translation numbers 114. Vibhishana balks again there and is talked round. A pyre is built of logs of sandalwood, moistened with the perfumes called padmaka and koshira. Brahmins of the rakshasa race stand about the body. A goat fit for sacrifice is offered. And the sacrificial fires are carried in earthen pots in front of the body as it goes.

That last detail is the one to hold on to. Ravana maintained ritual fires, and when he died those fires walked ahead of his corpse in the proper order. The epic that spends six books killing him spends its last pages burying him correctly, on the stated grounds of his valour and Vibhishana's kinship.

What the retellings smoothed away

Several of the most repeated things about Ravana are not in Valmiki, and a site that argues from texts has to say which is which.

The reading of the ten heads as the six shastras plus the four Vedas is a devotional gloss of much later date. Valmiki calls him Dashagriva and treats the heads as heads: he cuts them off one at a time and burns them, and Brahma's boon restores them.

The scene in which the dying Ravana instructs Lakshmana in statecraft, with Rama sending his brother to sit at the feet of the fallen king, is not in Valmiki either. It belongs to later retellings and to the modern stage and screen, where it has become one of the most quoted moments in a story it does not occur in.

Ravana as master of the veena and singer of the Sama Veda belongs to Adbhuta Ramayana, Ananda Ramayana and Tamil and Sri Lankan tradition rather than to Valmiki, whose Kailasa scene has him worshipping with hymns and sacred texts and names no instrument and no Sama chant. The stories of expiation for brahmin-slaying attached to Rama after the war, including the sand lingam at Rameswaram, likewise belong to later texts. What Valmiki positively says is that the funeral honours rest on valour and kinship.

None of this makes the later material worthless. It makes it later, and a reader who wants the earliest surviving telling is owed the distinction. Valmiki's Ravana is the harder of the two to put to use: cursed by Nandi and named by Shiva inside one chapter, given sound counsel in open council and unable to hear it, and carried to the pyre with his own fires going before him in earthen pots.