Ravana is the great antagonist of the Ramayana, and one of the most complex villains in world epic, because the poem grants him genuine grandeur. He is a rakshasa, the ten-headed demon-king of Lanka, but he is also a formidable scholar, a master of the Vedas and of music, and a supreme devotee of Shiva, from whom his fierce austerities won boons of near-invincibility, he asked for immunity from gods and demons, contemptuously omitting mere men, which is why the divine must be born as the man Rama to destroy him.
The epic's action turns on his abduction of Rama's wife Sita, carried off to Lanka in revenge for an insult to his sister, an act of pride and desire that dooms him despite his greatness. His fall is the fall of a being of enormous gifts undone by ego and lust. The tradition's attitude to him is not simple: in parts of the Ramayana's vast afterlife across South and Southeast Asia, and in some regional communities that trace descent or affinity to him, Ravana is remembered with a measure of admiration or even reverence, the learned king, the great Shiva-devotee, as much as with condemnation. He embodies the epic's recurring lesson that knowledge and power, without restraint, destroy their possessor.