The Native King and the War That Never Happened

In some strands of Gond folk history, Raven is an administrative post similar to MLAs and MPs of modern-age democracy.

- Abhik Bhattacharya

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.