Asura Is Not a Species

Start with a fact that the tradition states plainly and that retellings almost always lose: the devas and the asuras are brothers.

Not rivals from different orders of creation. Half-siblings, in the ordinary domestic sense, with the same father. Kashyapa was a rishi, a brahmin, of the line descending from Brahma through Marichi, and he married daughters of Daksha. By Aditi he fathered the Adityas, who are the gods. By her sister Diti he fathered the Daityas, who are called asuras. Same father, same house, two mothers who were sisters.

So every quarrel in the Puranic corpus between gods and demons is a quarrel between cousins. In a brahmin family.

And the tradition never once pretends otherwise.

Follow the genealogies further and the pattern holds everywhere you look.

Ravana is a brahmin. His grandfather was Pulastya, one of Brahma's own mind-born sons and one of the Saptarishi; his father was the sage Vishrava. Ravana was a Vedic scholar of the first rank. A master of the veena.

And the composer of one of the most beautiful hymns in the language. He is also the antagonist of the Ramayana. Both are true and neither cancels the other.

Prahlada was an asura, son of Hiranyakashipu, grandson of Diti's line, and is the benchmark against which the tradition measures devotion itself.