This review of the book nails it -
How to Define Dangerous Books
Sometimes the only force that can take you through to the end of a book this bad is the sweet thought of revenge: of how you are so going to maul the author in your review once the book is done and dusted.
This is a book that is so painfully badly written (500+ pages of tripe!) that ordinarily it should not merit much thought, but the fact that it tells a story that so many would want to hear, and might believe too easily, makes it dangerous nevertheless, and worth discrediting.
Also, the idea of giving voice to the victims, of inverting the historical bias of “history is written by the victors” is quite interesting. This was the reason I could not resist picking up the book.
*The Tale Of The Vanquished: The story of the Ravanayana has never been told. Asura is the epic tale of the vanquished Asura people, a story that has been cherished by the oppressed castes of India for 3000 years. Until now, no Asura has dared to tell the tale. But perhaps the time has come for the dead and the defeated to speak.
*
Written through a distorted prism of historical victimization, this book is simplistic beyond imagination, is replete with misprisions, and makes no attempt either to capture the poetry of the original epic or show any sort of fidelity to its philosophy. Instead it mangles every aspect of it.
**The author is clearly a Dravidian fanatic and tries every angle to work his fever-pitch hatred into the epic and its ‘historical atrocities’.
In effect, the author wants to fan the North-South Divide (the Aryan Vs Dravidian political flame) and the caste divide, and is extremely vitriolic in his language throughout. The hatred is obvious in every page.
**
The two main threads running through this atrocious and fanatical novel are:
*1. Hate the North Indians, they brought all evils into society.
- Our only weakness is our lack of unity, let us band together, Brothers, we are the original rulers of India before these intruders came into our lands.*
The basic thesis is this:
India was originally ruled by the Asura kings and Tamil was their language and it was high culture and complete equality and what not - a la Mahabali’s paradise - celebrated through the Onam festival of Kerala - the book assumes that fable to be the default condition of India. In a classic nostalgic narrative, this Mahabali’s India is evoked throughout as the Golden Age of India. According to the author, then the ‘Aryan Invaders’, a bunch of uncouth barbarians came and overthrew the Asura kings (all due to their own lack of unity) and established an uncultured primitive society throughout India. Yes, the barbarians not only won every war but they conquered the whole of the sub-continent - and this is in spite of the fact that the Asuras were so advanced in technology that they even had flying chariots (the Pushpaka Vimana) and stuff. Go figure.