Week 5: Sita's Abduction (Reading Diary B)

This section of Buck's Ramayana was very similar to Narayan's, most likely because this is the section that Narayan went into the most detail during.

My favorite part of this reading was Ravana's encounter with Maricha. I thought that Maricha's character was interesting in Narayan's version, and in Buck's we seemed to go into much more detail with Ravana and Maricha's conversation about Sita and Rama. I like how after Maricha survives the fight with Rama, unlike the other rakshasas, he takes a step back and realizes that he should just walk away from the fighting and live. If other demons had done that, Rama would have had a much easier job and their world would have been pretty peaceful. In this section, Maricha is one of the only people telling Ravana the truth honestly trying to help him. He even tells him that Surpanaka isn't someone who should be trusted and that Ravana would lose everything if he went on this stupid mission.

When Maricha finally agrees to help, after Ravana threatened to kill him, I thought his line "It is better to be killed by the better person" was very interesting. With that statement, it shows that, while Maricha is helping Ravana, he thinks Rama is person who should (and will) win in the end. I understand why he does this, he doesn't want Ravana to kill him, but it would have been interesting if Maricha had warned Rama before he was killed.

Rama stalks the Demon Maricha. Wikimedia

Another section that Buck expanded on was the story that Indra tells Sita about Ravana's curse and how it came to be.  I thought that this story added to the overall narrative, by explaining Ravana's actions towards Sita.