Ravana and Oedipus Rex

I saw 'Hanuman' a couple of days back. It's a cute movie with a few thought bytes randomly thrown to the people. I am fond of animation movies so I bothered myself to ride to the theater after around 4-5 months. I find them so beautiful! And even surrealistic sometimes!

Before I digress let me come to the point I wish to talk about. Let me first brief you about what Aristotle has said about Greek Tragedies in his Poetics. He has conceptualized it and postulated three main elements of tragedy; 1.Hubris, 2.Hamartia, and 3.Catharsis. Hubris is excessive pride and arrogance, hamartia means the fatal mistake which causes the fall of the protagonist, and catahrsis is the purgation of negative emotions.

I had read Oedipus Rex by Sophocles in my last year at IITD. Yeah he is the same Oedipus of 'Oedipus complex' fame who kills his father and marries his mother and later on gets popularised by Freud.

Oedipus is a gifted child with extraordinary abilities. But he is accursed and doomed to bring terrible disasters upon his father, the king. He is sent away to be killed in a jungle but the kind hearted servant spares him. He is raised by someone else and grows as an man of strength and values. One day he gets to know about his accursed fate that he is to kill his father and marry his mother. Absolutely shaken, he decides to leave his parents as well as the city. In the way he encounters his real father, the old king, and thoroughly disturbed he was, gets into a scrap with the king. Fuming with anger he kills the old king. Then he comes to know the custom of the city- one who kills the king gets the throne and marries the queen. See how his destiny finally catches him despite so much human protest. Terrible things follow later on..

This is representative Greek tragedy. The protagonist is a man of high stature endowed with the best qualities but one weakness- hubris. This hubris prompts him to commit an act far below his dignity, the last error which opens the doors to hell- hamartia. The simple audience, fully in awe of the man, realizes what can hubris do to them if such tragedies befall such great men. Their negative, distructive emotions gets purged, fully or partially, and they feel a cathartic experience. Also, it demosntrate divine superiority over human beings.

Now I think I am done with the background.

Lets come back to Hanuman. Perhaps our ancient philosophers were aware of this technique of purgation. But they could not theorize it as Aristotle. I found striking similarities between the characters of Ravana and Oedipus. Ravana was not a petty man, a backstreet rapist. He was a man of knowledge, power and principles. He was a devout Shaiv brahmin who could rock the Singhasan of Indra too. Let us ignore mythological details and just say that he was an elevated man. Not selected by Sita in her swayamvar, he was seething with anger and at last his hurt vanity made him do the lowliest act- abducting a woman for amorous fulfillment. (This is one of the many versions of mythology but this is what they showed in the movie.) That ultimately becomes the cause of his fall.

Can you find the similarity? I found it so amazing!!