www.ijellh.com 128 An Alternative Narrative: Re-reading Ramayana as Asura: Tale of the Vanquished Himanshu Parmar Assistant Professor BPS Mahila Vishwavidyalaya Haryana India Literature has been a persevering partner to the human race and has stayed a loyal companion through thick and thin. It comfortably precedes the „discovery‟ of calligraphy, which made literature „standardized‟ and increased its significance in the lives of humans. The invention of printing, definitively made literature „standard‟ as also made mass production a possibility. Alongside this perspective and point-of-view, sustained another perspective whose vestiges can be seen concretizing today: parallel literatures. It adheres to the idea that there have been two strains in literature, spatially and temporally: the dominant and the dominated. The former has been an integral part of the mainstream society while the other survived underneath it, underground. Bakhtin uses the word „Carnival‟ to bring that dominated strain of literature to the fore. The underlying principle behind the presence of these two strains has been a force that has guided the human race since times immemorial: power. Rightly so, because literature is an expression of the human race and hence it was immanent that the governing factor of human life played a decisive role in literature. This principle of “power” constructed identities on the parameters of the „self‟ and the „other‟, the “masculine and the feminine, where the former unleashes power while the latter is subjected to it. The two primary ways this power is exhibited by the „self‟ are Coercion and Hegemony. While the former relies on the “repressive apparatus”, the latter foregrounds the “ideological apparatus”. One of the salient weapons of the “Ideological apparatus” that the „self‟ directs against the „other‟ is literature. However, at the core of it works the coercive measure negating, and worse than that,