Roundtable on Justin Henry's "Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below" (OUP, 2023)

Justin Henry's _Ravana's Kingdom: The Ramayana and Sri Lankan History from Below_ (OUP, 2023), shortlisted for the AAR Best First Book in the History of Religions 2023 prize, offers an innovative study of the reception of the Ramayana, the famed Hindu epic, among Sri Lankan Buddhists spanning from the medieval period to the present day. In this roundtable, Henry will respond to comments from three established scholars, each offering a critical perspective informed by their respective disciplinary and area expertise. Scholar 1 is a historian of pre- and early modern Sri Lanka and an expert in Buddhist literary and cultural exchange in the Indian Ocean world. They will comment on the position of Henry's work amid the theoretical spectrum of the History of Religions discipline, contextualizing _Ravana's Kingdom_ alongside other recent monographs marrying rigorous, text-critical philological research with theoretical interventions related to contemporary "lived religion," populist movements, and religion and politics. Scholar 2, an expert on Indian Prakrit literature, will address the relevance of Henry's work to the "many Ramayanas" scholarly genre. Examining the role of long-form and short-form Tamil and Sinhala renditions of the Ramayana in _Ravana's Kingdom_, scholar 2 will offer comments on "many Ramayanas" at the margins of the Indic world, including the significance of the popularity of the epic among non-Hindus. Scholar 3 is an ethnographer and expert on Buddhist relationships with minority religions in Sri Lanka. They will speak to the relevance of Henry's work to ongoing issues of religious antagonism and interreligious cooperation in Sri Lanka, offering remarks on potential "new directions for future research" for historians and ethnographers based on the unresolved questions and ongoing social dynamics highlighted by _Ravana's Kingdom_. The roundtable will be a loosely structured response-based discussion between the author and three panelists, with the expectation of ample audience engagement. The multidisciplinary composition of the panel, reflecting the methodological variety of Henry's work, anticipates a broad audience. Monograph summary: Ravana, the demon-king antagonist from the Ramayana, the ancient Hindu epic poem, has become an unlikely cultural hero among Sinhala Buddhists over the past decade. In _Ravana's Kingdom_, Justin Henry delves into the historical literary reception of the epic in Sri Lanka, charting the adaptions of its themes and characters from the 14th century onwards, as many Sri Lankan Hindus and Buddhists developed a sympathetic impression of Ravana's character, and through the contemporary Ravana revival, which has resulted in the development of an alternative mythological history, depicting Ravana as king of the Sri Lanka's indigenous inhabitants, a formative figure of civilizational antiquity, and the direct ancestor of the Sinhala Buddhist people. Henry offers a careful study of the literary history of the Ramayana in Sri Lanka, employing numerous sources and archives that have until now received little to no scholarly attention, as well as the 21st century revision of a narrative of the Sri Lankan people--a narrative incubated by the general public online, facilitated by social media and by the speed of travel of information in the digital age. Ravana's Kingdom offers a glimpse into a centuries-old, living Ramayana tradition among Hindus and Buddhists in Sri Lanka--a case study of the myth-making process in the digital age.