Storybook Styles Brainstorm

For my storybook, I am going to focus on Rakshasas from the epics we read. I think I will focus on lesser known rakshasas than like, Ravana, as there will be more options for storytelling.  I will focus on a different rakshasa per story, most likely two from Ramayana and two from Mahabharata. While I haven’t decided for sure which rakshasas I will focus on, I think from Ramayana I will tell a story about Maricha, and maybe Tadaka.

So far my bibliography is:

Narayan, R. K. (1972) The Ramayana.

I've begun looking at the full translation of Ramayana by Valmiki

Wikipedia about Rakshasas and Asuras.

Specific Wikipedia articles about Tadaka and Maricha.

Of the storytelling ideas I had, I like the first and the second the most, so far. 

For my first storytelling option, I had considered doing a Rakshasa Newspaper.  The stories would probably be either included in obituaries , after Rama or the other heroes killed the Rakshasas, or in crime stories, warning of dangerous men, armed with bows and arrows and monkeys, attacking the rakshasa people. 

A second option could be a diary idea. The person who the intro focuses on would find a very old diary in some sealed vase hidden in a temple in India. In that diary, there would be stories about rakshasas, as if the person who wrote it had observed the happenings.  I think this could be interesting because it is different than a lot of stories I’ve seen and it could include the ancient stories, seen through a more modern day context of the person who finds the diary.

Another type of storytelling would be Vishnu telling others his stories from defeating different rakshasas, as Rama and his other avatars, and what he learned since about the rakshasas in his stories. It will be a little bit of a first person narrative, since he remembers the events, but it will also be a little omnipotent, as since he is divine again, he can see and understand the entire story, not just what he saw when he was living as a human. 

Vishnu. Wikimedia

The last storytelling idea I had was to modernize the stories, and make it almost like school yard stories, with Ravana being the leader of a bullying gang of kids, but the stories focusing on the lower ranking members. Rama would be the strong kid who takes on the bullies. The stories would be told by other kids, to one another, about the bullying gang and how Rama defeats them, ridding the school of mean bullies.