Sporting a yellow tilak made of rice and turmeric, and a yellow headgear tied like a turban, ‘Raven’ enters the scene. Around 40 km from the bustling town of Chhindwara in Madhya Pradesh, where the roads slither like pythons into the interiors of Amarwada, his convoy thumps along amid loud cheers—‘Raven bhaiya zindabad’. He is neither a caricature of the ‘demonised’ asura king Raavan depicted in the Ramleela plays, performed across north India during Dussehra, nor is he the wise and ascetic Brahmin king; he is ‘Raven’—who used to represent an administrative post in the erstwhile Gond kingdom.

Dev Raven Bhalavi, 27, now the main face of the Gondwana Ganatantra Party (GGP), was not always known as Raven. His parents called him Devi ‘Ram’. But as he grew older and became aware of the ancestral relation of the Gond Adivasi with ‘Raven’, he changed his middle name. On the official Election Commission website, both his erstwhile and current names sit together at peace with an ‘urf’ delineating the past from the present—‘Deviram urf Dev Raven Bhalavi’.

In the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, Raven stood third in the Chhindwara constituency. Interestingly, he had to fight both the narratives of ‘Ram’ and ‘Hanuman’. While Vivek Bunty Sahu, the BJP leader and the current MP, banked his campaign on slogans like ‘Jo Ram ko laye hai, hum unko layenge’, former MP Nakul Nath, the son of Congress leader Kamal Nath, invoked his father’s legacy of building the tallest Hanuman statue in the state.

However, historically, for the Gond Adivasis, there was never a war waged between Ram and Raavan. Rather, the war has always been between indigeneity and cultural appropriation by ‘outsiders’. “The Aryan invaders appropriated our gods and goddesses and moulded them to represent their histories. For centuries, they have been trying to deprive us of our separate cultural identity that stands against their Brahminical interpretations,” says Raven.

In some strands of the Gond folk history, Raven is an administrative post similar to MLAs and MPs of modern-age democracy. For a few others, ‘Raven’ refers to a bird with a blue throat—the totem of the clan to which he belonged.

However, both tales converge when it comes to the question of appropriation. Scholars unanimously agree that the Aryans changed his name to ‘Raavan’ to include him in their Brahmin clan, denying him the Adivasi lineage.

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According to the Gond history, since the beginning of time, there have been 88 Sambhus or kings who ruled the world. Sambhus didn’t have any supernatural power; rather they were supreme in naturally essential aspects. “They could communicate with other animals in the jungle; they could find water resources. So, people offered them the position of immense respect,” notes Raven.

These Sambhus used to have ‘Ravens’ as their representative-administrators. According to Gond folktales, there are more than 21 Ravens. However, Ahi-Raven, whom the Gonds of this region worship, resides in a cave at Patalkot—one of the deepest valleys in India that is also one of the major tourist attractions in MP. Raven consists of the word ‘ven/wen’, which in Gondi language refers to someone who is alive.

In their version of the story, Ahi-Raven is a powerful, wise administrator who is worshipped during what they call Diwari, which is held almost at the same time as Diwali. It is the occasion when they celebrate harvesting of crops.

They make a multi-legged wooden structure on which another wooden log is placed in suspension. This structure is known as Khandera-pen. Ahi-Raven, along with his son Megnath and his wife Mandodari, are worshipped beneath this Khandera.

During this puja, people express their wishes to the resident deity and if they come true, they tie themselves to the suspended wooden log and circularly swing around the structure for hours. “This is our tradition and relation with Raven. They took the names of our characters and made their own stories to demonise us. They even started conducting Raven dahan just before this Diwari occasion, so that they could foment hatred for Raven among the Adivasis and get our rituals omitted,” laments the GGP leader.

Reference to a similar tradition could also be found in the works of anthropologist Durga Bhagvat. During his ethnography at Narbada and Tapti valleys in Chhindwara and Seoni districts around the 1960s, he noted how Gond Adivasis celebrated Holi. “A pole of wood called Khandera is erected in honour of Meghnath, the son of Raavan. Men and women gather around the pole, dance and sing extremely obscene songs. Some men try to climb up the pole and women beat them and drive them away, which is called the ‘gud todna’ or ‘the breaking of jaggery’,” he wrote.

Notably, among Raj-Gonds (a sub-tribe of Gonds) in Bastar of current Chhattisgarh, he found that Holi is the occasion of mourning for Raavan whom they lovingly call Bonaro. The Holi fire is considered the funeral pyre of the king. Not only human beings but even animals mourn his death.

A small bird called Chiral, it is believed, wails for two months and her sad tune engulfs the forest. As the Holi fire consumes Raavan, his brother Kumbhakarn and his son Megnath (in the Raj-Gond tradition, they make figurines of mud and shoot arrows), in pain and grief, sing-

The pile of wood is made,

So high it is,

Clouds have gathered thickly,

Bonaro! Oh brother! Bonaro!

The white ashes are applied,

To all that are standing around,

And also, the black soot.

In the stomach of Rayratan*,

There are all sparks of fire.

(*Rayratan is another son of Raavan who silently witnesses the burning, as per the folktales)

In Pirhapal village of Chhattisgarh, the Raavan effigy is burnt but only after it is greeted by their resident deity Sitala, notes Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, one of the renowned scholars of religion. The tradition of Sitala marking a red-tilak on Raavan’s forehead before the burning brings him to the imagination of Adivasi God; whereas, Ram remains the human actor.

However, Gond leaders think that the burning of Raavan’s effigy is a modern phenomenon. The first effigy of Raavan was burnt in 1838 in Nagpur. “But our tradition of Khandera has been going on for thousands of years,” points out Raven.

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If Raavan is plenteously prevailing in the folklore and oral history traditions in the Gond-dominated regions of central India, the evocation of his kingdom, Lanka, cannot be missed. Research by Malti Nagar and S C Nanda in the 1980s showed that in Bastar, Odisha and Andhra Pradesh, there are a few places that are either named ‘Lanka’ or the word is used as a suffix.

In the Mundari language, Lanka means an island in the sea or lake or a high, ‘solitary place-hill or plateau’. While in a few villages like Chita Lanka, a village located south of the market town of Gidam in Chhattisgarh, people are not aware of any connection to the Ramayana, in some districts like Koraput in Odisha, indigenous people of the Koya community are well aware of the connections. On Makar Sankranti, the Koyas perform a shraddha of Raavan, a ceremony for the welfare of the spirits, and distribute ber fruit/jujube as prasad. The Koyas are also a branch of the Gondi-speaking tribe.

The multiple imaginations of Raavan/Raven as an administrator, wise man, king or God open up the discursive context where the duality of Ram/Raavan is breached. The ambiguity beyond the binary of good and evil in some way or the other also determines the political future.

At a time when Ram has been resurrected as a symbol of Kamandal politics, will the alternative imagination of Raavan/Raven shape the discourse of Mandal 2.0? In the words of Raven: “The evocation of Ram to perpetrate violence on the marginalised will never be accepted by Adivasis. They are going back to their roots again and soon they will find their ancestor ‘Raven’—the forgotten king.”