Ravana's defeat is commemorated across much of North India as Dussehra, or Vijayadashami, the culmination of the nine night Navaratri festival, marked in many cities by the public burning of large effigies of Ravana, often alongside his brother Kumbhakarna and son Meghnad, in dramatic staged performances known as Ramlila that reenact the Ramayana's story across the preceding days.
The Ramayana narrative itself, however, is not told identically across every region and tradition that holds it sacred. Several regional and vernacular retellings, including versions current in parts of South India and among some communities that trace cultural affinity from Lanka, present Ravana with considerably more moral complexity, emphasizing his learning, his devotion to Shiva, and his standing as a legitimate if flawed king, rather than treating him purely as an unredeemed villain, and some communities decline to celebrate his defeat with the same unambiguous festivity found in the dominant North Indian tradition.
This range of interpretation reflects the Ramayana's long and genuinely plural transmission history across South and Southeast Asia, where the epic has been retold in numerous regional languages and traditions, including Tulsidas's influential Awadhi Ramcharitmanas and Kamban's Tamil Ramavataram, each shaping how audiences in different regions have understood the story's central conflict and its resolution.