CHAPTER 9

WOMEN AND OGRESSES IN THE RAMAYANA
400 BCE to 200 CE

CHRONOLOGY

c. 300 BCE-300 CE The Mahabharata is composed

c. 200 BCE-200 CE The Ramayana is composed

327-25 BCE Alexander the Great invades Northwest South Asia

c. 324 BCE Chandragupta founds the Mauryan dynasty

c. 265-232 BCE Ashoka reigns

c. 250 BCE Third Buddhist Council takes place at Pataliputra

c. 185 BCE The Mauryan dynasty ends

c. 185 BCE Pushyamitra founds the Shunga dynasty

73 BCE The Shunga dynasty ends

c. 150 BCE The monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi are built

c. 166 BCE-78 CE Greeks, Scythians, Bactrians, and Parthians enter India

THE POET, THE HUNTER, AND THE CRANE

After the poet Valmiki learned the story of Rama, he went to bathe
in a river. By the river a pair of mating cranes were sweetly singing.
A Nishada hunter, hostile and plotting evil, shot down the male of
the couple. When the hen saw her mate writhing on the ground, his
limbs covered in blood, she cried out words of compassion. And
when Valmiki saw that the Nishada had brought down the male
crane, he was overcome with compassion, and out of his feeling of
compassion he thought, “This was not dharma, to kill a sweetly singing
crane for no reason.” When he heard the female crane crying, he
said, “Nishada, you will never find peace, since you killed the male of
this pair of cranes at the height of his desire.” Then Valmiki realized
that he had instinctively spoken in verse, in a meter that he called the
shloka, because it was uttered in sorrow (shoka).

Ramayana (400 BCE to 200 CE) (1.2.81.1-17)

This vignette that the Ramayana tells about itself weaves together the themes of dangerous sexuality, the violation of dharma, compassion toward animals, attitudes toward tribal peoples, and the transmutation of animal passions into human culture—all central to the concerns of this chapter. At the same time, the story of Rama and Sita raises new questions about deities who become human and women who are accused of being unchaste. Where the Brahmanas documented a period of new, though dispersed, political stability, and the Upanishads gave evidence of a reaction against that very stability, the Ramayana (R^dw) and the Mahabharata (MB), the two great Sanskrit poems (often called epics), were composed in this period (c. 300 BCE to 300 CE) that saw the rise and fall of the first great empire in India, followed by a period of chaos that rushed into the vacuum left by that fall.

NORTH INDIA IN 400 BCE TO 200 CE

This is the moment when we have the first writing that we know how to decipher,^dx engraved in stone in the form of the Ashokan edicts, as well as other historical sources—monuments, coins—to supplement our knowledge of the Sanskrit texts. Another major new source of our knowledge of this period comes from the reports of Greeks and other visitors. There is also a wealth of art history, ranging from terra-cotta figures, both human and animal, made in villages, to polished stone pillars with capitals, for the rich and powerful in the cities.

We learn from these sources that the extension of agriculture into forested areas transformed the lives of forest dwellers; that craft specialists often emerged as distinct social groups; and that the unequal distribution of wealth sharpened social differences,¹ though new access to economic resources raised the social position of slaves, landless agricultural laborers, hunters, fishermen and fisherwomen, pastoralists, peasants, village headmen, craftspeople, and merchants.² In addition to the ongoing tension between Brahmins and Kshatriyas, new tensions arose as the lower classes gained economic and political power and began to challenge the status of the upper classes.^dy

Just as the doctrines of Buddhism and Hinduism have much in common at this period, so too the same snakes spread their hoods over the heads of the Buddha and Vishnu, the same buxom wood nymphs swing around trees in Hindu and Buddhist shrines, and both traditions carve images of the goddess of luck (Lakshmi).³ The design of some of the Hindu temples may have borrowed from the Buddhist precedent, for in some of the oldest temples the shrine, with the image in the center, was surrounded by an ambulatory path resembling the path around a stupa. Buddhism and Jainism remained friendly conversation partners, their rivalry with Hinduism often spurring both factions to borrow from each other in a positive way. But the non-Vedic religions also became more competitive, powerful rivals for political patronage as well as for the hearts of men and women, and a source of ideas that challenged the very core of emergent Hinduism. One of those ideas was a more insistent concern for the treatment of animals, leading to a great deal of soul-searching about the meaning of dharma. The attitude to animal sacrifice was also much affected by the rise of the two great male Hindu gods Shiva and Vishnu in sectarian movements that had no use for Vedic ritual.

THE RISE OF THE MAURYAS

Rajagriha (in Magadha, the present-day Bihar) and Kashi (Varanasi, in Koshala), which had come to prominence in the time of the Upanishads, remained great centers of power but were now rivaled by Kaushambi in Vatsa. There were still oligarchies at this time, about whose origins legends now began to circulate. These legends insisted that the founders were of high status but had, for one reason or another, left or been exiled from their homeland.⁴ The theme of Kshatriyas in exile is reflected in the narrative of both theMahabharata and the Ramayana, whose heroes, before they assume their thrones in the capital cities, are forced to endure long periods of exile in the wilderness, where the plot, as they say, thickens.^dz But exile is also a part of a much earlier theme embedded in the ceremony of royal consecration,⁵ a ritual of the king’s exile among the people that is in turn mythologized in the many tales of kings cursed to live among Pariahs.

Magadha controlled the river trade, forests, and rich deposit of minerals; in 321 BCE Pataliputra (the modern Patna), then said to be the world’s largest city, with a population of 150,000 to 300,000,⁶ became the capital of the first Indian Empire, the Mauryan Empire.⁷ In 327 BCE, Alexander the Great managed to get into India over the mountain passes in the Himalayas and crossed the five rivers of the Punjab, no mean accomplishments, though thousands of other visitors to India did it too, before and after him. But his soldiers refused to campaign any farther, and so, in 326, he followed the Indus to its delta and, apparently regarding that as a sufficient accomplishment, went back to Babylon, though not before allegedly slaughtering many Brahmins who had instigated a major rebellion.⁸ In India, it seems, he wasn’t all that Great.

But the Indo-Greeks remained, primarily but not only in the Gandhara region. They brought with them Roman as well as Greek trade; they imported Chinese lacquer and sent South Indian ivory west to Pompeii. In the Gandhara marketplace, in the northwest, you could buy stone palettes, gold coins, jewelry, engraved gems, glass goblets, and figurines. The art of Gandhara is heavily influenced by Greek tastes, as are the great Buddhist monuments of Bharhut and Sanchi, from the first century BCE, which powerful guilds (shrenis) endowed. The Southeast Asia and China trade (both by sea and over the Central Asian silk route) also involved manuscripts, paintings, and ritual objects. The trade in ideas was just as vigorous; Greece imported the teachings of naked philosophers, ^ea and many sects—Materialists, Ajivikas, ascetics, Jainas, and Buddhists—publicly disputed major religious questions.⁹

Out of this culturally supersaturated mix, the Mauryan Empire crystallized. Mahapadma Nanda, the son of a barber (a Shudra of a very low caste indeed, and said, by the Greeks, to have married a courtesan¹⁰), had founded a short-lived but significant dynasty, the first of a number of non-Kshatriya dynasties, during which he waged a brief vendetta against all Kshatriyas.¹¹ Chandragupta Maurya usurped the Nanda throne in 321 BCE and began to build a great empire. Buddhist texts say that the Mauryas were Kshatriyas of the clan of Moriyas (“Peacocks”) and Shakyas (the clan of the Buddha himself), while Brahmin texts say they were Vaishyas or even Shudras, and heretics. A story goes that a Brahmin named Chanakya (“chickpea”), nicknamed Kautilya (“Crooked” or “Bent” or “Devious”), was Chandragupta’s chief minister and helped him win his empire, advising him not to attack the center of the Nanda Empire but to harass the borders, as a mother would advise a child to eat a hot chapati from the edges. Chanakya is said to be the author of the great textbook of political science, the Artha-shastra, which, though it was not completed until many centuries later, may in some ways reflect the principles of Mauryan administration,¹² particularly the widespread use of spies, both foreign and domestic; the Mauryan emperor Ashoka too talks unashamedly about people who keep him informed.¹³

According to Jaina traditions, when Chandragupta, under the influence of a Jaina sage, saw his subjects dying of a famine that he had failed to counteract, he abdicated and fasted to death at Shravana Belgola, in Southwest India. Bindusara succeeded him in 297 BCE. And then Bindusara died, and Ashoka became king, ruling from 265 to 232 BCE and further extending the boundaries of the Mauryan Empire.

THE AFTERMATH OF THE MAURYAS

Let us bracket until the next chapter the details of Ashoka’s reign and move on to the subsequent history of this period.

In 183 BCE, Pushyamitra, a Brahmin who was the commander of the army, assassinated the last Maurya (who was allegedly a half-wit), took control of the empire through a palace coup, and founded the Shunga dynasty. Buddhists say that Pushyamitra persecuted Buddhists and gave increasing patronage to Vedic Brahmins, and an inscription proclaims his renewed sponsorship of sacrifices, including not one but two horse sacrifices, by which he established his dynasty. It is possible that Pushyamitra himself ^ebacted as the officiating priest.¹⁴ He is also alleged to have performed a human sacrifice in the city of Kaushambi .¹⁵ Be that as it may, by killing the last Mauryan king, he overthrew a Kshatriya ruler and established a renewed Vedic order. Like the Kshatriya sages of the Upanishads, Pushyamitra reinstated the ancient priest-king model, though from the other direction: Instead of an Upanishadic royal sage—a Kshatriya with the knowledge that Brahmins usually had—he was a warrior priest, a Brahmin who played the role of a king. A passage in a much later text implies that the Shungas were of low birth,¹⁶ but other sources identify Pushyamitra’s Shunga dynasty as an established Brahmin clan. Whatever his origins, Pushyamitra seems to have established a new Brahmin kingship and reigned for a quarter of a century (c. 185-151 BCE). On these shifting political, religious, and economic sands, Brahmins constituted the most consistently homogeneous group, because of their widespread influence in education and their continuing status as hereditary landholders.¹⁷ Long after many of the Hindu kingdoms had fallen, the Brahmin class within them still survived.

Yet Buddhists thrived, as their sources of income shifted to a wider base. Buddhist monuments depict many scenes of popular devotion and were often financed not by dynastic patronage but by individual benefactors, both monks and nuns within the institutions and, outside, merchants increasingly interested in the security and patronage that religious centers offered in an age of political uncertainty.¹⁸ During this period the whole community—landowners, merchants, high officials, common artisans—funded major Buddhist projects. In Orissa (Kalinga), King Kharavela, a Jaina, published a long autobiographical inscription in which he claims to have supported a Jaina monastery and had Jaina texts compiled and to have respected every sect and repaired all shrines.¹⁹ Women, including women from marginal social positions (such as courtesans), also patronized Buddhists and Jainas. The widespread public recognition of such women both as donors and as renouncers also had an impact on the role of women within Hinduism and on the development of Hindu religious rituals that came to replace the Vedic sacrifice.

Kingdoms now began to dominate the political scene and to have enough of a sense of themselves to be almost constantly at war with one another. The ancient Indian king was called “the one who wants to conquer” (vijigishu). That, together with the “circle” theory of politics, according to which the country on your border was your enemy, and your enemy’s enemy was your ally, and so forth, made for relentless aggression. Kings killed for thrones; parricide was rampant.²⁰

The historian Walter Ruben summarized the period well:

According to Buddhist tradition Bimbisara of Magadha was killed by his son Ajatasatru and the four following kings were also patricides; then the people supplanted this dynasty of murderous despots by electing the minister Sisunaga as king. The last [descendant of Sisunaga] was killed by the first Nanda, allegedly a barber and paramour of the queen. The last Nanda was killed by the Brahmin Kautalya. The last Maurya was killed by the Brahmin Pushyamitra, founder of the Sunga dynasty. Then followed centuries of war and political trouble caused by foreign invaders from the North-west. . . . Thus, in the course of five hundred years between 500 B.C. and 30 B.C., people in Northern India became accustomed to the idea that it was the right and even the duty of this or that man to assassinate a king. . . . These five hundred years were basic for the evolution of Indian civilization, for the growth of epic and Buddhist literature and for the development of Vaisnava and Saiva mythology and morals.²¹

And with that grim historical prelude, let us consider the story of Rama.

THE TRANSMISSION OF THE RAMAYANA AND MAHABHARATA

The Ramayana may have begun as a story as early as 750 BCE,²² but it did not reach its present form until between 200 BCE and 200 CE. Its world therefore begins in the North Indian world of the Upanishads (characters such as Janaka of Videha play important roles in both the Upanishads and the Ramayana) and continues through the world of the shastras (c. 200 CE). The Ramayana and Mahabharata mark the transition from the corpus of texts known as shruti, the unalterable Vedic canon, to those known as smriti, the human tradition. They are religious texts, which end with the “fruits of hearing” them (“Any woman who hears this will bear strong sons,” etc.). Hindus from the time of the composition of these poems to the present moment know the characters in the texts just as Euro-Americans, even if they are not religious, know Adam and Eve and Noah’s Ark. Hindus can ask, “What would Rama do?” This popularization also means that we now find more input from non-Brahmin authors and that new issues arise regarding the status of the lower classes. We also have more information about women, who, in these stories, at least, are still relatively free, though that freedom is now beginning to be challenged.

The Ramayana and Mahabharata were probably composed and performed first in the interstices between engagements on a battleground, to an audience that probably consisted largely of Kshatriyas and miscellaneous camp followers. The first bards who recited it were a caste called Charioteers (Sutas), probably but not certainly related to the chariot drivers who appear frequently in narratives, like Vrisha with King Triyaruna. Each Charioteer would have gone into battle with one warrior as a combination chauffeur and bodyguard. And then at night, when all the warriors retired from the field and took off their armor and had their wounds patched and got massaged and perhaps drunk, the bards would tell the stories of their exploits as everyone sat around the campfires. Thus the Charioteer served not just as a driver but as a herald, friend, and confidant, providing the warrior with advice, praise, and criticism.²³ This combination of roles^ec made the Charioteers, on the one hand, trusted counselors in court circles and, on the other, so far below the courtiers in status (being, through their connection with animals, roughly equivalent to Vaishyas) that when the warrior Karna, in the Mahabharata, was thought to be the son of a Charioteer, the princes scorned him.

Later, traveling bards no longer participated in battle, or drove chariots at all, but still recited the great poems in villages and at festivals and still retained their low social status; in addition, priestly singers praised the king in the course of royal sacrifices, while later in the evening the royal bard would sing poems praising the king’s accomplishments in war and battle.²⁴ The Mahabharata says that the Charioteers told their stories during the intervals of a great sacrifice, and the audience in this later period would have been, on the one hand, more Brahminical—for the Brahmins were in charge of both the sacrifice and the literature of sacrifice—and, on the other hand, more diverse, as the camp followers would now be replaced by men and women of high as well as low class, who would have been present at the public ceremonies where the tales were recited. At this point the texts were probably circulated orally, as is suggested by their formulaic, repetitious, and relatively simple language.²⁵

Later still, the reciters, and improvisers, were probably the Brahmins who were officiating at the sacrifice and recited the Ramayana and Mahabharata in the interstices between rituals on the sacrificial ground and probably also at shrines (tirthas) along pilgrimage routes. These Brahmins eventually committed the texts to writing. Some scholars believe that the texts were composed by Brahmins from the start,²⁶ Brahmins all the way down. But the Sanskrit tradition itself states unequivocally, and surprisingly, that non-Brahmins, people of low caste, were originally in charge of the care and feeding of the two great Sanskrit poems, which Brahmins took over only sometime later, one of many instances of the contributions of low-caste people to Sanskrit literature. And the bards really did memorize all of it.^ed27 The literate too knew the texts by heart and wrote commentaries on written versions of them.

The texts of the two great poems, originally composed orally, were preserved both orally and in manuscript form for more than two thousand years.^ee Their oral origins made it possible both for a great deal of folklore and other popular material to find its way into these Sanskrit texts and for the texts to get into the people. Scenarios in the texts may have been re-created in dramatic performance in towns and villages.²⁸ But the texts were also eventually consigned to writing and preserved in libraries; since the climate and the insects tend to destroy manuscripts, they have to be recopied every two hundred years or so if they are to survive; someone has to choose them and to go to the trouble and expense of having them copied. Buddhism and Jainism had bequeathed to Hinduism, by the seventh century CE, the tradition of gaining merit by having sacred manuscripts copied and donating them to libraries, and that is how these texts were preserved, generating merit for the patrons and income for the scribes.²⁹

THE RAMAYANA

Valmiki’s Sanskrit Ramayana, the oldest-surviving version of the tale, a text of some twenty thousand verses, establishes the basic plot:

RAMA, SITA, AND RAVANA

Ravana, the ogre (Rakshasa) king of Lanka, was a Brahmin and a devotee of Shiva. He had obtained, from Brahma, a boon that he could not be killed by gods or antigods or ogres or any other creatures—though he neglected to mention human beings, as beneath contempt. The god Vishnu therefore became incarnate as a human being, the prince Rama, in order to kill Ravana. Sita, who had been born from a furrow of the earth, became Rama’s wife. When Rama’s father, Dasharatha, put Rama’s younger brother Bharata on the throne instead of Rama, Rama went into exile in the jungle with Sita and another brother, Lakshmana. Ravana stole Sita and kept her captive on the island of Lanka for many years. With the help of an army of monkeys and bears, in particular the monkey Hanuman, who leaped across to Lanka and then built a causeway for the armies to cross over, Rama killed Ravana and brought Sita back home with him. But when he began to worry about talk that her reputation, if not her chastity, had been sullied by her long sojourn in the house of another man, he forced her to submit to an ordeal by fire. Later he banished her, but she bore him twin sons, who came to him when they were grown. Sita too returned briefly but then disappeared forever back into the earth. Rama ruled for many years, a time of peace and justice.

Rama’s brothers are fractional brothers, not even half brothers. The childless king Dasharatha had obtained a magic porridge, infused with the essence of Vishnu, to share among his queens; he gave half to his first wife, Kausalya, who gave birth to Rama; three-eighths to Sumitra, who bore Lakshmana and Shatrughna (each made of three-sixteenths of Vishnu), and one-eighth to Kaikeyi, who bore Bharata.^ef

The Ramayana, composed at a time when kingdoms like Videha were becoming powerful in a post-Mauryan era, legitimates monarchy through the vision of the golden age of Ram-raj, Rama’s Rule. This vision occurs twice in the Ramayana, once at the end of the sixth of the seven books, when Rama and Sita are united after her fire ordeal (6.130)—“There were no widows in distress, nor any danger from snakes or disease; people lived for a thousand years”—and then again at the end of the last book, when Sita has departed forever:

As the glorious and noble Rama ruled, striving for dharma, a long time passed. The bears and monkeys and ogres remained under Rama’s control, and he conciliated kings every day. The god of storms rained at the proper time, so that there was abundant food; the skies were clear. Happy, healthy people filled the city and the country. No one died at the wrong time; no living creatures got sick; there was no violation of dharma at all, when Rama ruled his kingdom (7.89.5-10).

This time of peace and prosperity became the template for a kind of theocracy that haunted Indian politics for centuries to come. But the actual historical scene, with its parricides and usurpations, also produced a royal paranoia that is revealed in the underside of Ram-raj, surfacing in palace coups such as the plot to have Bharata take the throne in place of Rama (2.8.18-27) and the machinations of the “bears and monkeys and ogres” that are said to remain under Rama’s control in Ram-raj.

THE FORGETFUL AVATAR

Valmiki’s Rama usually forgets that he is an incarnate god, an avatar (“crossing down” from heaven to earth) of Vishnu. He genuinely suffers and despairs when he’s separated from Sita, as if he had lost touch with the divine foreknowledge that he would win her back. Sometimes Valmiki too treats Rama as a god, sometimes not. For the Ramayana is situated on the cusp between the periods in which Rama was first a minor god and then a major god. Hindus in later periods often took the devotion to Rama expressed by Hanuman and Lakshmana as a paradigm for human devotion (bhakti) to a god. Yet in the Ramayana these relationships lack the passionate, often violent qualities that characterize the fully developed bhakti of the Tamil texts and the Puranas from the tenth century CE.

As the bhakti movement increasingly imagined a god who combined the awesome powers of a supreme deity with the compassion of an intimate friend, it reinforced the vision of Rama as someone who was both limited by human constraints and aware of his divinity.

Commentators argued that Rama had intentionally become ignorant³⁰ or that he merely pretended to forget who he was,³¹ and in some later retellings, Rama never does forget that he is Vishnu. But it is worth noting that though the Ramayana tells a long, detailed story to explain why the monkey Hanuman, the great general of the monkey army, forgets that he has magic powers (to fly, to become very big and very small, etc.), except when he needs them to get to Lanka (7.36), it never explains why it is that Rama (who does not have such magic powers) forgets that he is an incarnation of Vishnu. Both Rama and Krishna (who is an avatar of Vishnu in the Mahabharata) flicker between humanity and divinity in spatial as well as temporal terms; they are not only part-time gods but partial or fractional parts of Vishnu, who remains there, fully intact, always a god, while his avatars function on earth, always human. The two avatars are born of human wombs, and when they die, they merge back into Vishnu. Like Rama, Krishna sometimes does, and sometimes does not, act as if he (as well as the people with whom he interacts) knew that he was an avatar of Vishnu.

In a sense, the double nature of incarnation develops in a direct line from the Upanishadic belief that we are all incarnations of brahman but subject to the cycle of reincarnation. And some gods appear on earth in disguise already in the Veda, particularly Indra, the great shape shifter, while, later, Shiva often appears briefly in human disguise among mortals in the Mahabharata. If you put these ideas together, you end up with an all-powerful god who appears on earth in a complete life span as a human. Why do these two great human avatars appear at this moment in Indian history? Perhaps because an avatar was a way to attach already extant divinities to the growing sect of Vishnu, a way to synthesize previous strands and to appropriate other people’s stories. Not only did some of these strands and stories come from Buddhism and Jainism, but the avatar was an answer to one of the challenges that these religions now posed for Hinduism.

For by this time the Buddha and the Jina had successfully established the paradigm of a religious movement centered upon a human being.^eg But Rama and Krishna beat the Buddhists and Jainas at their own game of valorizing the human form as a locus of superhuman wisdom and power, for Rama and Krishna are humans with a direct line to divinity, drawing their power from a god (Vishnu) far greater than any Vedic god and at the same time, through the incarnations, grounded in humanity.

WOMEN: BETWEEN GODDESSES AND OGRESSES

Being human, Rama is vulnerable. Despite his divine reserves, he is tripped up again and again by women—his stepmother Kaikeyi, Ravana’s sister the ogress Shurpanakha, and, ultimately, his wife, Sita.

Sita is not only the ultimate male fantasy of the perfect woman but has as her foil a group of women and ogresses who are as Bad as Sita is Good. No one, male or female, could fail to get the point, and no one did. When Rama, the eldest, the son of the oldest queen, Kausalya, is about to ascend the throne, the youngest queen, Kaikeyi, uses sexual blackmail (among other things) to force Dasharatha to put her son, Bharata, on the throne instead and send Rama into exile: She locks herself into her “anger room” (India’s answer to Lysistrata), puts on filthy clothes, lies down on the ground, and refuses to look at the king or speak to him, and the besotted Dasharatha is powerless to resist her beauty (2.9.16-19). Kaikeyi is the evil shadow of the good queen, Kausalya. But Kaikeyi herself is absolved of her evil by having it displaced onto the old hunchback woman who corrupts Kaikeyi and forces her, against her better judgment, to act as she does. For bringing about the sufferings that will overwhelm Kausalya, Sita curses not Kaikeyi but the hunchback, whose deformation is itself, in the Hindu view, evidence that she must already have committed some serious sin in a previous life. On the other hand, when Shatrughna (Lakshmana’s twin brother) abuses the hunchback, he yells curses on Kaikeyi. In this text, even the shadows have shadows.

THE LOSS OF SITA

Sita never dies, but she vanishes four times. First she vanishes when Ravana carries her off, and Rama gets her back. Then she parts from Rama three times, into three natural elements—a fire, the forest, and the earth—as a direct result of that first estrangement: Rama keeps throwing her out now because Ravana abducted her years ago.

First, right after the defeat of Ravana, Rama summons Sita to the public assembly. Then:

SITA ENTERS THE FIRE

Rama said to her: “Doubts have arisen about your behavior. Go, then, wherever you wish. I can have nothing to do with you. What man of good family could take back, simply because his mind was so tortured by longing for her, a woman who had lived in the house of another man? How can I take you back when you have been degraded upon the lap of Ravana? Set your heart on Lakshmana or Bharata, or on Sugriva [the king of the monkeys], or [Ravana’s brother] Vibhishana, or whoever will make you happy, Sita. For when Ravana saw your gorgeous body, he would not have held back for long when you were living in his own house.” Sita replied to Rama, “You distrust the whole sex because of the way some women behave. If anyone touched my body, it was by force.” Then, to Lakshmana: “Build a pyre for me; that is the medicine for this calamity. I cannot go on living, ruined by false accusations.” As the fire blazed, she stood before it and said, “As my heart never wavered from Rama, so may the fire, the witness of all people, protect me.” And she entered the blaze. As the gods reminded Rama who he was, Fire rose up with Sita in his lap and placed her in the lap of Rama, saying, “Here is your Sita; there is no evil in her. Though she was tempted and threatened in various ways, she never gave a thought to Ravana. She must never be struck; this I command you.” Rama said, “Sita had to enter the purifying fire in front of everyone, because she had lived so long in Ravana’s bedrooms. Had I not purified her, good people would have said of me, ‘That Rama, Dasharatha’s son, is certainly lustful and childish.’ But I knew that she was always true to me.” Then Rama was united with his beloved and experienced the happiness that he deserved (6.103-6).³²

“Dasharatha’s son is certainly lustful” is a key phrase. Rama knows all too well what people said about Dasharatha; when Lakshmana learns that Rama has been exiled, he says, “The king is perverse, old, and addicted to sex, driven by lust (2.18.3).” Rama says as much himself: “He’s an old man, and with me away he is so besotted by Kaikeyi that he is completely in her power, and capable of doing anything. The king has lost his mind. I think sex (kama) is much more potent than either artha or dharma. For what man, even an idiot like father, would give up a good son like me for the sake of a pretty woman? (2.47.8-10).” Thus Rama invokes the traditional ranking of dharma over sex and politics (kama and artha) and accuses his father of valuing them in the wrong way, of being addicted to sex. He then takes pains to show that where Dasharatha made a political and religious mistake because he desired his wife too much (kama over artha and dharma), he, Rama, cares for Sita only as a political pawn and an unassailably chaste wife (arthaand dharma over kama). Rama thinks that sex is putting him in political danger (keeping his allegedly unchaste wife will make the people revolt), but in fact he has it backward: Politics is driving Rama to make a sexual and religious mistake; public concerns make him banish the wife he loves. Rama banishes Sita as Dasharatha has banished Rama. Significantly, the moment when Rama kicks Sita out for the second time comes directly after a long passage in which Rama makes love to Sita passionately, drinking wine with her, for many days on end; the banishment comes as a direct reaction against the sensual indulgence (7.41). Rama’s wife is above suspicion, but Rama suspects her. His ambivalence, as well as hers, is expressed in the conflicts between the assertions, made repeatedly by both of them, that Ravana never touched her, that he did but it was against her will, and that physical contact is irrelevant, since she remained true to him in her mind.

When Rama publicly doubts Sita and seems unconcerned about her suffering, the gods ask how he can do this, adding, “Can you not know that you are the best of all the gods? You are mistreating Sita as if you were a common man.” Rama, uncomprehending, says, “I think of myself as a man, as Rama the son of King Dasharatha. Tell me who I really am, and who my father is, and where I come from (6.105.8-10).” Rama is not thinking straight; the gods have to reveal his avatar to him and use it as an argument to catapult him out of his trivial and blind attitude to Sita. Later still, when Rama has renounced Sita, and Brahma has again reminded him that he is Vishnu, Shiva gives Rama and Sita a vision of the dead Dasharatha, who says to Sita, “My daughter, don’t be angry because Rama threw you out. He did this in your own interest, to demonstrate your purity.^eh The difficult test of your chastity that you underwent today will make you famous above all other women. My daughter, you need no instructions about your duty to your husband, but I must tell you that he is the supreme god (6.107.34-35).” And when Sita has vanished again into the earth, this time for good, and Rama is raging out of control, Brahma comes with all the gods and says to him, “Rama, Rama, you should not grieve. Remember your previous existence and your secret plan. Remember that you were born from Vishnu (7.88).”³³

Sita walks into fire determined either to kill herself or to win back the right to go on living with the very much alive Rama. The ordeal is not, however, a suicide, though she says she “cannot go on living”; on the contrary, it is an antisuttee, ^ei in which she enters the fire when her husband is very much alive, not to join him in heaven (as suttees usually do) but as a kind of threat either to leave him or to win back the right to go on living with him here on earth.^ej As a threat it works: Rama takes her back, and they plan to live happily ever after, a fairy-tale ending. But we may see a touch of irony in the closing statement that he “got the happiness that he deserved,” for it does not last; the rumors return, and Rama banishes Sita, though she is pregnant; she goes to Valmiki’s hermitage and gives birth to twin sons. That is the second time Sita leaves him after her return from Lanka.

Perhaps Valmiki^ek thought there was something unsatisfactory about this banishment that inspired him to add on another, more final and more noble departure for Sita. It begins years later, when the twins, now grown up, come to Rama’s horse sacrifice and recite the Ramayana, as Valmiki has taught it to them. The Ramayana lays great emphasis on the paternity of Rama’s twin sons, on their stunning resemblance to Rama; the crowds of sages and princes at Rama’s court “waxed ecstatic as they seemed to drink in with their eyes the king and the two singers. All of them said the same thing to one another: ‘The two of them look just like Rama, like two reflections of the same thing. If they did not have matted hair and wear bark garments, we would have no way of distinguishing between the two singers and Rama’ (7.85.6-8).” Yet Rama pointedly recognizes them^el as “Sita’s sons” but not necessarily his own (7.86.2). This is an essential episode, for male identity and female fidelity are the defining desiderata for each human gender in these texts; no one is interested in female identity or male fidelity.³⁴ These concerns play an important role in the treatment of Sita.

This is the moment when Rama summons Sita again, for the last time, and she herself brings about the final separation:

SITA ENTERS THE EARTH

Rama sent messengers to Valmiki to say, “If she is irreproachable in her conduct and without sin, then let her prove her good faith.” Valmiki then came with Sita, and swore by his unbroken word of truth that the two boys were Rama’s children and that he had seen Sita’s innocence in a vision. Rama replied, “I agree entirely; Sita herself assured me before, and I believed her and reinstated her in my house. But there was such public condemnation that I had to send her away. I was absolutely convinced of her innocence, but because I feared the people, I cast her off. I acknowledge these boys to be my sons. I wish to make my peace with the chaste Sita in the middle of the assembly.” Then Sita swore, “If, even in thought, I have never dwelt on anyone but Rama, let the goddess Earth receive me.” As she was still speaking, a miracle occurred: From the earth there rose a celestial throne supported on the heads of Cobra People [Nagas]; the goddess Earth took Sita in her arms, sat her on that throne, and as the gods watched, Sita descended into the earth.

His eyes streaming with tears, head down, heartsick, Rama sat there, thoroughly miserable. He cried for a long time, shedding a steady stream of tears, and then, filled with sorrow and anger, he said, “Once upon a time, she vanished into Lanka, on the far shore of the great ocean; but I brought her back even from there; so surely I will be all the more able to bring her back from the surface of the earth (7.86.5-16, 7.87.1-20, 7.88.1-20).”

But he cannot bring her back. When Sita enters the earth, she leaves the king alone, without his queen. She abandons and implicitly blames him when she leaves him, turning this second ordeal (again she asks for a miraculous act to prove her complete fidelity to Rama) into a sacrifice as well as, this time, a permanent exit.

Sita’s two ordeals prove her purity, but they are also a supreme, defiant form of protest.³⁵ Sita is no doormat. She does not hesitate to bully her husband when she thinks that he has made a serious mistake. When Rama tries to prevent her from coming to the forest with him, she says: “What could my father have had in mind when he married me to you, Rama, a woman in the body of a man? What are you afraid of? Don’t you believe that I am faithful to you? If you take me with you, I wouldn’t dream of looking at any man but you—I’m not like some women who do that sort of thing. But you’re like a procurer, Rama, handing me over to other people, though I came to you a virgin and have been faithful to you all this long time.” Rama then insists that he had said she couldn’t come with him only in order to test her (2.27.3-8, 26). Yeah, sure; she will hear that “testing” line again. Her assertion that Rama is confusing her with other, less faithful women is also one that we will hear again, for she repeats it years later, when Rama accuses her of having been intimate with Ravana.

When they first enter the forest, Sita asks Rama why he carries weapons in this peaceful place, especially when he has adopted the attire (and, presumably, the lifestyle and dharma) of an ascetic.^em Rama claims that he needs the weapons to protect her and all the other defenseless creatures in the forest. In an impassioned discourse against violence, Sita tells Rama that she fears he is by nature inclined to violence and that simply carrying the weapons will put wicked thoughts in his mind (3.8.1-29). (Indeed he kills many creatures in the forest, both ogres that deserve it and monkeys that do not. Even the ogress Shurpanakha echoes Sita’s concerns by querying Rama’s apparent commitment to the conflicting dharmas of asceticism and married life [3.16.11].)

THE GODDESS SITA

Sita is not, however, just a woman; she is very much a goddess, though never as explicitly as Rama is a god. In contrast with Rama, whose divinity increases in the centuries after the Valmiki text, Sita was a goddess before Valmiki composed her story. Sita in theRamayana is an ex-goddess, a human with traces of her former divinity that the story does not erase but largely ignores, whereas Rama is a god in the making, whose moral imperfections leave traces that future generations will scurry to erase. The two meet in passing, like people standing on adjacent escalators, Rama on the way up, Sita on the way down.

One Rig Vedic poem to the deity of the fields analogizes the furrow (which is what the word “Sita” means) to the earth cow who is milked of all foods (RV 4.57.6-7). When Rama weds Sita, he actually marries the earth, as the king always does; the goddess Earth is the consort of every king. But this time he also marries someone explicitly said to be the daughter of the Earth goddess. Sita’s birth, even more supernatural than Rama’s, is narrated several times.³⁶ On one occasion, Sita’s father, King Janaka of Videha, tells it this way:

THE BIRTH OF SITA

One day in the sacrificial grounds, I saw the ultimate celestial nymph, Menaka, flying through the sky, and this thought came to me: “If I should have a child in her, what a child that would be!” As I was thinking in this way, my semen fell on the ground. And afterward, as I was plowing that field, there arose out of the earth, as first fruits, my daughter, who has celestial beauty and qualities. Since she arose from the surface of the earth, and was born from no womb, she is called Sita, the Furrow.³⁷

Rama is well aware of the story. Grieving after Sita has entered the earth, he says to Earth, “You are my own mother-in-law, since, once upon a time, King Janaka drew Sita out of you when he was plowing.” More particularly, Sita was born when Janaka was plowing the sacrificial arena, in preparation for the ceremony of royal consecration, and she goes back down to earth during Rama’s horse sacrifice; both her birth and her death are framed by sacrifices. Like Rama, Sita becomes incarnate as part of the divine plan to kill Ravana. Sita, not Rama, is primarily responsible for the death of Ravana. Ravana’s brother Vibhishana (who eventually abandons Ravana and fights on Rama’s side) tries in vain to persuade Ravana to give Sita back to Rama and finally says to Ravana, “Why did you bring here that great serpent in the form of Sita, her breasts its coils, her thoughts its poison, her sweet smile its sharp fangs, her five fingers its five hoods?”³⁸ Shiva promises the gods that “a woman, Sita the slayer of ogres,” will be born, and that the gods will use her to destroy the ogres (6.82.34-37).

At the end of the Ramayana, when Sita keeps disappearing and reappearing in a series of epiphanies, she is scorned and insulted until she commits two acts of violence that prove both her purity and her divinity. In this pattern, she resembles a god, particularly Shiva, who vandalizes Daksha’s sacrifice when Daksha disdains to invite Shiva to it (MB 12.274). But Sita’s story more closely follows the pattern of equine Vedic goddesses like Saranyu and Urvashi: She comes from another world to a mortal king, bears him children (twins, like Saranyu’s), is mistreated by him, and leaves him forever, with only the twin children to console him. She can be set free from her life sentence on earth, her contract with a mortal man (Rama), only if he violates the contract by mistreating her.

Male succession is the whole point of the old myth of the equine goddess who comes down to earth to have human children, and female chastity is essential to that succession, another reason for the trials of Sita. Rama experiences the agonies of love in separation (viraha) that later characterized the longing for an otiose divinity; in this, as in so much of the plot, Rama is to Sita as a devotee is to a deity. His separation from Sita is also part of the divine plan to destroy Ravana: Long ago, in a battle of gods against antigods, the wife of the sage Bhrigu kept reviving the antigods as fast as the gods could kill them; Vishnu killed her, and Bhrigu cursed Vishnu, saying, “Because you killed a woman, you will be born in the world of men and live separated from your wife for many years (7.51).” So Rama has a previous conviction of abusing women even before he is born on earth. And as we will soon see, he has an even stronger track record for killing ogresses. Rama’s mistreatment of Sita creates a problem—the justification of Rama—that inspires later Ramayanas to contrive ingenious solutions.

Sita walks out on Rama in the end (as Urvashi does in the Veda but not in the Brahmanas), an extraordinary move for a Hindu wife. Moreover, unlike the paradigmatic good Hindu wife, Sita very definitely is not reunited with her husband in heaven. For while she goes down into the earth, returning to her mother, he goes (back) up to heaven when he dies years later, returning to Vishnu. Both of them revert to their divine status, but in opposite places. When Brahma is chastising Rama for doubting Sita, he reassures Rama that Sita is an incarnation of the goddess Lakshmi and will be reunited with him in heaven (6.105.25-26), but we never see that happen. Rama’s return to heaven as Vishnu is described in great detail, and the monkeys revert to their divine form, and everyone you’ve ever heard of is there to welcome him in heaven (including the ogres), but not Sita (7.100).

Yet the more Sita is a goddess, the more the pattern of the myth of equine goddesses requires her to be mistreated—as if she were nothing but a human woman. Like Urvashi, Sita is treated less like a goddess and more like a mortal as her husband takes over the position of the immortal in the couple. Her banishing is portrayed in entirely mortal terms, and she suffers as a mortal woman. Like Rama, she regards herself as a mortal and forgets her divinity; she says, when she is imprisoned on Lanka, “I must have committed some awful sin in a previous life to have such a cruel life now. I want to die but I can’t. A curse on being human, since one can’t die when one wants to (5.23.18-20).” Since she (wrongly) thinks she is a mortal, she thinks she cannot die, which goes against common sense; moreover, the ironic implication follows that if she were an immortal (as she is), she could die when she wanted to—precisely what she does in the end when she enters the earth. And just as Rama has to be mortal to kill Ravana, so Sita plays the mortality card in order to resist Ravana and hence to destroy him; Ravana’s ogress consorts remind her that she is a human woman, and she acknowledges this fact, incorporating it into her resistance: “A mortal woman cannot become the wife of an ogre (5.22.3, 5.23.3)” (a remark that could also be read as a warning against intercaste marriage).

Sita is subject to mortal desires and delusions and is vulnerable even though she is said to be invulnerable. For instance, Rama insists (when he claims that he knew all along that Sita was chaste and that he made her go through fire only to prove it to everyone else), “Ravana could not even think of raping Sita, for she was protected by her own energy (6.106.15-16).” Yet that very verb, meaning “to rape, violate, or assault,” is used when Ravana grabs Sita by the hair (3.50.9), a violation from which her chastity does not in fact protect her. When Ravana plots to capture Sita, he gets the ogre Maricha to take the form of a marvelous golden deer, thickly encrusted with precious jewels, which captivates Sita—the princess in exile is delighted to find that Tiffany’s has a branch in the forest—and inspires her to ask Rama to pursue it for her. Lakshmana rightly suspects that it is the ogre Maricha in disguise, and Rama agrees, but Sita insists that Rama get it for her. The deer leads Rama far away from Sita, and when Rama kills the deer and it assumes its true form as an ogre, Rama realizes that he has been tricked and has thereby lost Sita, whom Ravana (by taking the form of an ascetic and fooling Sita) has captured in Rama’s absence (3.40-44). So while Rama ultimately yields to the addiction of hunting, following the deer farther and farther than he knows he should, Sita falls for two illusions (the deer and the ascetic) that make her vulnerable to Ravana and, for many years, lost to Rama.

SHADOW WOMEN: OGRESSES

When Sita defends herself against accusations that she has broken her marriage vows, and earlier, when she scolds Rama in the forest, she explicitly contrasts herself with “some women” who behave badly, unnamed shadows who may include not only Kaikeyi and the hunchback woman but also, perhaps, the lascivious ogre women as well as mythological women like Ahalya, the archetypal adulteress, whose story the Ramayana tells not once but twice.³⁹ The polarized images of women in the Ramayana led to another major split in Hinduism, for though the Brahmin imaginary made Sita the role model for Hindu women from this time forward, other Sanskrit texts as well as many vernacular versions of the Ramayana picked up on the shadow aspect of Sita, the passionate, sexual Sita,⁴⁰ an aspect that is also embedded in this first text, only partially displaced onto other, explicitly demonic women. Yet the later Brahmin imaginary greatly played down Sita’s dark, deadly aspect and edited out her weaknesses to make her the perfect wife, totally subservient to her husband. How different the lives of actual women in India would have been had Sita as she is actually portrayed in Valmiki’s Ramayana (and in some other retellings) been their official role model. The Valmiki Ramayana thus sowed the seeds both for the oppression of women in the dharma-shastric tradition and for the resistance against that oppression in other Hindu traditions.

Rama’s nightmare is that Sita will be unchaste, and the sexually voracious ogresses that lurk inside every Good Woman in the Ramayana express that nightmare. In a later retelling, the Bala-Ramayana, the ogress Shurpanakha takes the form of Kaikeyi, and another ogre takes the form of Dasharatha, and they banish Rama; Dasharatha and Kaikeyi have nothing to do with it at all! The entire problem has been projected onto ogres, and the humans remain pure as the driven snow. In Valmiki’s text, however, Kaikeyi and Sita still have their inner ogresses within them, expressed as the natural forces that prevent women from realizing the ideal embodied in the idealized Sita. The portrayals of rapacious ogresses hidden inside apparently good women make us see why it was that Sita’s chastity became a banner at this time while the other aspects of her character were played down; they help us understand why women came to be repressed so virulently in subsequent centuries: to keep those ogresses shackled.

There are three particularly threatening ogresses in the Ramayana. Rama kills the ogress Tataka (1.25.1-14), after a sage reminds him of the mythological precedents for killing a woman (1.24.11-19). Lakshmana cuts off the nose and breasts and ears of Ayomukhi (“Iron Mouth”) after she suggests to him, “Let’s make love (3.65.7),” and he cuts off the nose and ears of Shurpanakha when she similarly propositions Rama (3.16-17).^en This multilation is the traditional punishment that the dharma texts prescribe for a promiscuous woman, an adulteress.

The mutilation of Shurpanakha is the only assault against a woman that has serious consequences for Rama, because she is Ravana’s sister. When she attempts to seduce Rama, he teases her cruelly: “I am already married and couldn’t stand the rivalry between co-wives. But Lakshmana is chaste, full of vigor, and has not yet experienced the joys of a wife’s company; he needs a consort. You can enjoy him and you won’t have any rival (3.17.1-5).” That’s when Lakshmana cuts off her nose.^eo She flees in agony and humiliation and tells Ravana about Sita, praising her beauty and thus triggering the war, for Ravana takes the bait (Sita) as the gods intended from the start. Shurpanakha’s attempt to replace Sita in Rama’s bed, which Rama and Lakshmana mock, exposes a deep resemblance between the two women and a deep ambiguity in the text’s attitude to Sita’s sexuality. On the one hand, Sita is the epitome of female chastity. On the other hand, she is, like Shurpanakha, a highly sexual woman,⁴¹ a quality that may explain not only why Ravana desires her but also why he is able to carry her off.

ANIMALS

THE HORSE SACRIFICE

Sita’s final disappearance takes place on the occasion of a horse sacrifice. This is appropriate, for she herself lives out the paradigm of an equine goddess, and she is brought to the horse sacrifice by her twin sons, who are bards, related to the Charioteer bards who perform in the intervals of the ritual. The names of the sons, Kusha and Lava, are the two halves of the noun kushilava, designating a wandering bard, as if one son were named “po-” and the other “-et.” By coming to Rama’s horse sacrifice, Kusha and Lava preserve Rama’s family, and as the kushilava they preserve the story of Rama’s family. So too Valmiki both invents the poetic form, the shloka, and raises the poets.

The horse sacrifice plays a crucial role at both ends of the Ramayana. At the start King Dasharatha, childless, performs the horse sacrifice not for political and martial aggrandizement but to have a son, another express purpose of the ritual. Yet the list of kings whom he invites to the sacrifice constitutes a roll call for the territories that had better come when he calls them, and it is a wide range indeed, from Mithila and Kashi to the kings of the east and the kings of the south (1.12.17-24). The stallion roams for a year and is killed, together with several aquatic animals, while three hundred sacrificial animals, reptiles, and birds are killed separately. Queen Kausalya herself cuts the stallion open with three knives and then lies with him for one night, as do the two other queens (1.13.27-28). The king smells (but does not eat) the cooked marrow. The sacrifice, described in great detail, is a total success: Vishnu becomes incarnate in Rama and his half brothers.

Years later, after Rama has banished Sita, he resolves to perform a ceremony of royal consecration, but Lakshmana tactfully persuades him to perform, instead, a horse sacrifice, “which removes all sins and is an infallible means of purification (7.84.2-3).” To persuade him, Lakshmana tells him stories of two people who were restored by a horse sacrifice: Indra was purged of Brahminicide after killing a Brahmin antigod,^ep and a king who had been cursed to become a woman regained his manhood. Thus Rama performs the ceremony to expiate his sins, which are never mentioned, but which surely include his killing of Ravana (a necessary Brahminicide, but Brahminicide nonetheless, for Ravana, though an ogre, is not only a Brahmin but a grandson of Prajapati), corresponding to Indra’s killing of several Brahmin antigods, and the banishing of Sita, a sin against a woman that corresponds, roughly, to the error of the king who became a woman. Lakshmana follows the horse as it “wanders” for a year. But since Rama has banished Sita, there is no queen to lie down beside the stallion or to bear the king an heir.^eq It is therefore necessary for Sita (and the heir[s]) to return, and they come to the horse sacrifice (7.86-8).

These two horse sacrifices are successfully completed, though the second one is flawed by the absence of the queen, who reappears only to be lost again. This second sacrifice, intended to produce offspring, does so indirectly (by attracting Kusha and Lava), but it is also intended to give the king, through the queen, the fertile powers of the earth.^er In the end Rama loses both the queen and his connection, through her, with the earth, her mother.

MONKEYS

The central characters of this text—Rama, the perfect prince; Sita, his perfect wife, and Lakshmana, his perfect half brother (later to form the template for the perfect worshiper of the fully deified Rama)—were born to be paradigms, squeaky clean, goody-goodies (or, in the case of the perfectly ogric ogre Ravana, a baddy-baddy). If that were all there were to the Ramayana, it would have proved ideologically useful to people interested in enforcing moral standards or in rallying religious fanatics, as, alas, it has proved all too capable of doing to this day in India, but it would probably not have survived as a beloved work of great literature, as it has also done. We have seen how the ogresses express the shadow side of Sita. The bears and monkeys, the two species often said to be closest to the human in both their appearance and their behavior, give the male characters their character. Let us concentrate on the monkeys, as the bears play only a minor role.

Neither so glamorous as horses nor so despised as dogs, the monkeys are the star animal act in the Ramayana. The Ramayana draws a number of parallels, both explicit and implicit, between the humans and the monkeys.⁴² The appropriateness of these parallels is supported by such factors as the human characters’ assumption that though they cannot understand the language of the deer (Rama explicitly laments this fact when he runs off after the golden deer that he suspects—rightly—of being an ogre in disguise), they do not comment on the fact that they can understand the language of monkeys, who are called the deer of the trees. Hanuman not only speaks a human language, but he also speaks Sanskrit. When he approaches Sita on the island of Lanka, he anxiously debates with himself precisely what language he will use to address her: “Since I’m so small, indeed just a small monkey, I’d better speak Sanskrit like a human. I must speak with a human tongue, or else I cannot encourage her. But if I speak Sanskrit like a Brahmin, Sita will think I am Ravana, who can take any form he wants [as she mistook the real Ravana, a notorious shape changer, for a Brahmin sage]. And she’ll be terrified and scream, and we’ll all be killed.” He finally does address her in Sanskrit (he begins to tell a story: “Once upon a time there was a king named Dasharatha . . . ”), and she is suitably impressed. She does not scream (5.28.17-23, 5.29.2).

Special monkeys are the sons of gods, as special people are. Sugriva is the son of Surya (the sun god), Valin is the son of Indra (king of the gods), and Hanuman is the son of Vayu, the wind. (Hanuman later became a deity in his own right, worshiped in temples all over India.⁴³) But monkeys also unofficially double for each of the major human characters of the Ramayana. These monkey doubles are, ironically, more flesh and blood, as we would say, more complex and nuanced, indeed more human than their human counterparts. Or rather, added to those original characters, they provide the ambiguity and ambivalence that constitute the depth and substance of the total character, composed of the original plus the shadow. All the fun is in the monkeys.

After Ravana has stolen Sita, Rama and Lakshmana meet Sugriva, who used to be king of the monkeys and claims that his brother Valin stole his wife and throne. Rama sides with Sugriva and murders Valin by shooting him in the back when he is fighting with Sugriva, an episode that has continued to trouble the South Asian tradition to this very day. Why does Rama kill Valin at all? Apparently because he senses a parallel between his situation and that of Sugriva and therefore sides with Sugriva against Valin. But Rama sides with the wrong monkey. The allegedly usurping monkey, Valin, is, like Rama, the older half brother, the true heir; the “deposed” king, Sugriva, the younger brother, originally took the throne (and the monkey queen) from the “usurping” brother, and Valin just took it back. Valin, not Sugriva, is the legal parallel to Rama. Yet Rama sympathizes with Sugriva because each of them has lost his wife and has a brother occupying the throne (and the queen) that was his. The plots are the same, but the villains are entirely different, and this is what Rama fails to notice. Moreover, unlike Sita, but in keeping with Rama’s fears about Sita, Valin’s wife was taken by the brother who took the throne. On another occasion, Rama says he would gladly give Sita to Bharata (2.16.33). Does he assume that you get the queen when you get the throne? He kills Valin because the rage and resentment that he should feel toward his half brother and father, but does not, are expressed for him by his monkey double—the “deposed” monkey king, Sugriva—and vented by Rama on that double’s enemy, Valin. We have noted that when Bharata is given the throne instead of Rama, the half brothers graciously offer each other the kingdom (2.98). But the monkeys fight a dirty battle for the throne, and for the queen too.

Even if we can understand why Rama kills Valin, why does he shoot him in the back? The monkeys’ access to human language also grants them access to human ethics, or dharma. The dying Valin reproaches Rama, saying, “I’m just a monkey, living in the forest, a vegetarian. But you are aman. I’m a monkey, and it’s against the law to eat monkey flesh or wear monkey skin (4.17.26-33).” Rama defends himself against the charge of foul play by saying, “People always use snares and hidden traps to catch wild animals, and there’s nothing wrong about this. Even sages go hunting. After all, you’re just a monkey, but kings are gods in human form (4.18.34-38).” Rama is on thin ice here; the text judges him to have violated human dharma in his treatment of the monkey. And the monkeys remind him that he is a man (i.e., higher than a monkey), just as the gods elsewhere remind him, when he behaves badly, that he is a god (i.e., higher than a man).

Valin also takes on the displaced force of Rama’s suspicions of another half brother, Lakshmana. The text suggests that Rama might fear that Lakshmana might replace him in bed with Sita; it keeps insisting that Lakshmana will not sleep with Sita. It doth protest too much. (Recall that when Rama kicks Sita out for the first time and bitterly challenges her to go with some other guy, he lists Lakshmana first of all.)

The tension between the two half brothers, over Sita, is a major motivation for the plot. When Rama goes off to hunt the golden deer and tells Lakshmana to guard Sita, Sita thinks she hears Rama calling (it’s a trick) and urges Lakshmana to find and help Rama. Lakshmana says Rama can take care of himself. Sita taunts Lakshmana, saying, “You want Rama to perish, Lakshmana, because of me. You’d like him to disappear; you have no affection for him. For with him gone, what could I, left alone, do to stop you doing the one thing that you came here to do? You are so cruel. Bharata has gotten you to follow Rama, as his spy. That’s what it must be. But I could never desire any man but Rama. I would not even touch another man, not even with my foot! (3.43.6-8, 20-24, 34).” Lakshmana gets angry (“Damn you, to doubt me like that, always thinking evil of others, just like a woman [3.43.29])” and stalks off, leaving Sita totally unprotected, and Ravana comes and gets Sita. When Rama returns, Lakshmana reports a slightly different version of what she said to him: “Sita, weeping, said these terrible words to me: ‘You have set your evil heart on me, but even if your brother is destroyed, you will not get me. You are in cahoots with Bharata; you’re a secret enemy who followed us to get me.’ ” Rama ignores all this and simply says to Lakshmana, “You should not have deserted Sita and come to me, submitting to Sita and to your own anger, just because an angry woman teased you (3.57.14-21).”

But why would Sita have said such a thing if she didn’t fear it on some level? And why would it have made Lakshmana so mad if he did not fear it too? When Rama, hunting for Sita, finds the cloak and jewels that she dropped as Ravana abducted her, he says to Lakshmana, “Do you recognize any of this?” And Lakshmana replies, “I have never looked at any part of Sita but her feet, so I recognize the anklets, but not the rest of her things.” Yet, evidently, Rama had expected him to recognize the jewels that had adorned higher parts of Sita’s body. So too, though the text, insisting on Rama’s infallibility, displaces the error onto Sita and insists that Rama knew it was an ogre all along, the vice of hunting carries him along in its wake nevertheless: Rama follows the ogre as deer too far and so is unable to protect Sita from Ravana, thus inadvertently engineering his own separation from her. Just as Sita was prey to her desire for the deer, and Rama to his desire to hunt it, so Lakshmana too is vulnerable to Sita’s taunts about his desire for her; their combined triple vulnerabilities give Ravana the opening he needs.

At the very end of the Ramayana, Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. This happens as the result of an elaborate (but not atypical, in this text) set of vows and curses. Death incarnate comes to talk with Rama, to remind him that it is time for him to die. Death makes Rama promise to kill anyone who interrupts them; Lakshmana guards the door. An ascetic arrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won’t let him see Rama; Lakshmana, caught between a rock and a hard place, chooses the lesser of two evils, his own death rather than the destruction of the world. He interrupts Rama and Death, whereupon Rama says that for Lakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be the equivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana, who then commits suicide. Does this episode represent a displaced, suppressed desire of Rama to kill Lakshmana? If so, it is thoroughly submerged, one might even say repressed, on the human plane, but it bursts out in the animal world when Rama kills Valin, the monkey who took away his brother’s wife.

This is the sense in which the monkeys are the side shadows of the human half brothers:⁴⁴ They suggest what might have been. They function in some ways as the human unconscious; both Valin and Sugriva (4.28.1-8; 4.34.9) are said to be addicted (sakta) to sensual behavior, to women, and to drinking. There is no monkey gambling or hunting to speak of, but the monkeys as a group get blind drunk in one very funny scene that resembles a frat party out of control. The monkeys are not merely Valmiki’s projections or projections from Rama’s mind; they are, rather, parallel lives. The monkey story is not accidentally appended; it is a telling variant of the life of Rama. But it does not mirror that life exactly; it is a mythological transformation, taking the pieces and rearranging them to make a slightly different pattern, as the dreamwork does, according to Freud. Animals often replace, in dreams, people toward whom the dreamer has strong, dangerous, inadmissible, and hence repressed emotions.⁴⁵ Or to put it differently, the dreamer displaces emotions felt toward people whom he cannot bear to visualize directly in his dreams and projects those emotions onto animals. In the Ramayana, poetry has the function of the dreamwork, reworking the emotions repressed by political concerns (such as the need to deny Rama’s all too obvious imperfections) and projecting them onto animals. When Rama’s cultural role as the perfect son and half brother prevents him from expressing his personal resentment of his father and half brother, the monkeys do it for him. In the magical world of the monkey forest, Rama’s unconscious mind is set free to take the revenge that his conscious mind does not allow him in the world of humans.

TALKING ANIMALS, BESTIAL HUMANS

Monkeys are not the only talking animals who stand in for humans in the Ramayana.⁴⁶ In a related corpus of myths, hunters mistake people for animals in sexual (or quasisexual) situations. These myths offer yet another set of implicit arguments for the growing movement in favor of vegetarianism.

The underlying theme is the interruption of sexuality. The Ramayana briefly narrates such an incident, in the story of Shiva and his wife, Parvati:

THE GODS INTERRUPT SHIVA AND PARVATI

Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain [Himalaya]”) won Shiva’s heart and they married. Shiva joyously made love to her night and day—but without ever shedding his semen. The gods were afraid that Shiva and Parvati would produce a child of unbearable power, and so they interrupted them. The god of fire took up Shiva’s seed, from which the six-headed god Skanda, general of the gods, was born. But Parvati, enraged, cursed the wives of the gods to be barren forever, since they had thwarted her while she was making love in the hope of bearing a son (1.34-35).

Shiva places his seed in Fire, rather than in Parvati, as an anthropomorphization of the ritual act of throwing an oblation of butter into the consecrated fire that carries the oblation to the gods, acting out the Upanishadic equation of the sexual act and the oblation. The curse of childlessness that the frustrated Parvati gives to the wives of the gods has resonances throughout Hindu mythology. As a result of Parvati’s curse, many children of the gods (including Sita) are born from male gods or sages who create children unilaterally merely at the thought, or sight, of a woman, ejaculating into some womb substitute—a flower, a female animal, a river, a furrow—to produce a motherless child, “born of no womb” (a-yoni-ja).^es Another variant of the interruption theme appears at the end of theRamayana, in the passage we have just considered, when Lakshmana is forced to interrupt Rama and Death when they are closeted together under strict instructions not to be interrupted. This is the ultimate fatal interruption, interrupting Death himself.

At the same time, interrupted sexuality is often conjoined with the theme of addictive, excessive, careless hunting. Human hunters mistake other humans (or ogres) for animals, particularly when the humans as animals are mating, a mistake that has fatal consequences not only for the human/animals but for the unlucky hunter. In the Mahabharata, Pandu, the father of the heroes, is cursed to die if he makes love with any of his wives, his punishment for having killed, while he was hunting, a sage who had taken the form of a stag and was coupling with a doe^et and whom Pandu mistook for a stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). So too five years after Dasharatha has banished Rama, he suddenly wakes Kausalya up in the middle of the night and tells her about this episode, which he has only now remembered:

DASHARATHA SHOOTS AN ELEPHANT

“When I was young I was proud of my fame as an archer who could shoot by sound alone. We were not married yet, and it was the rainy season, which excites lust and desire. I decided to take some exercise and went hunting with bow and arrow. I was a rash young man. I heard a noise, beyond the range of vision, of a pitcher being filled with water, which sounded like an elephant in water. I shot an arrow.” He had shot an ascetic boy, on whom an aged, blind mother (a Shudra) and father (a Vaishya) depended. The father cursed Dasharatha to end his days grieving for his own son. And as Dasharatha now remembered that curse in bed with Kausalya, he died (2.57.8-38, .58.1-57).

The connection between blindness (aiming by sound alone at the child of sight-less parents) and desire (hunting as the equivalent of taking a cold shower to control premarital desire) indicates that desire was already Dasharatha’s blind spot long before Kaikeyi manipulated him by locking him out of her bedroom. He is as addicted to sex as he is to hunting.

Another tale in the Ramayana also ties together the themes of the interruption of sexuality, the curse of separation from a beloved, and the deadly nature of erotic love but now adds the element of the language of animals, particularly birds:

THE BIRD’S JOKE

A king had been given the boon of understanding the cries of all creatures, but he was warned not to tell anyone about it. Once when he was in bed with his wife, he heard a bird say something funny, and he laughed. She thought he was laughing at her, and she wanted to know why, but he said he would die if he told her. When she insisted that he tell her nevertheless, he sent her away and lived happily without her for the rest of his life (2.32).⁴⁷

Significantly, the man in this story is allowed to understand the speech of animals, and the woman is not. (As the king happens to be the father of Kaikeyi, sexual mischief runs in the family.) This is in keeping with the underlying misogyny of the Sanskrit mythological texts that depict men as more gifted with special powers than women; it may also reflect the sociological fact that men in India were allowed to read and speak Sanskrit, while in general women were not, as well as the custom of patrilocal marriage, so that a woman often did not speak the language of her husband’s family. These stories express the idea that sexuality makes some humans into animals, while language makes some animals into humans.

In the Mahabharata a king who has been cursed to become a man-eating ogre devours a sage who is making love to his wife (still in human form), and the wife, furious because she had not yet achieved her sexual goal, curses the king to die if he embraces his own wife (MB 1.173), a combination of Pandu’s curse and Parvati’s curse of the wives of the gods. Nor are these hunting errors limited to the sexual arena. Krishna, in the Mahabharata, dies when a hunter fatally mistakes him for a deer:

THE DEATH OF KRISHNA

Angry sages predicted that Old Age would wound Krishna when he was lying on the ground. Krishna knew that this had to happen that way. Later he realized it was the time to move on, and he obstructed his sensory powers, speech, and mind and lay down and engaged in terminal yoga. Then a fierce hunter named Old Age [Jara] came to that spot greedy for deer and mistook him for a deer and hastily pierced him with an arrow in the sole of his foot. But when he went near him, to take him, the hunter saw that it was a man with four arms, wearing a yellow garment, engaged in yoga. Realizing that he had made a bad mistake, he touched the other man’s two feet with his head, his body revealing his distress. Krishna consoled him and then rose up and pervaded the two firmaments with his glory (MB 16.2.10-11, 16.5.18-21).

Three different stories seem to be told here at once. In one, Krishna, a mortal, is wounded by a hunter, like an animal or, rather, as a human mistaken for an animal. In another, Krishna seems to die of old age.^eu In the third story, Krishna, an immortal, decides to leave the world by withdrawing his powers, like a god or a very great yogi. But he didn’t need the hunter or old age if he really just died by his own will. Are traces of one story left ghostlike in another?

These stories from the Mahabharata argue that humans are different from animals and must rise above animal sexuality and, sometimes, animal violence; the Ramayana adds that it is language, particularly poetry, that makes this possible. ^ev The theme of language appears in this corpus on the outside frame of the Ramayana, in the vignette of “The Poet, the Hunter, and the Crane” cited at the beginning of this chapter, about the invention of the shloka meter (the meter in which both the Mahabharata and theRamayana are composed). In that story, the female crane (they are Indian sarus cranes) is so moved at the sight of her dying mate that she utters words of compassion (karunam giram). (Some later commentaries suggested that it was the female crane who died and the male crane who grieved, foreshadowing the disappearance of Sita and the grief of Rama.⁴⁸) Compassion at the sight of the dying bird inspires Valmiki too to speak. He sees a crane who is killed in a sexual situation, hence separated from his mate, making him cry and inspiring him to invent an unusual language of humans. This story is in many ways the inversion of the story of the king who hears a bird talking when he is in a sexual situation and laughs, exposing him to the danger of death and separating him from his mate.

But it is the grief of the female crane and Valmiki’s fellow feeling with her—as well as, perhaps, the touching example of the cranes, who are said to be “singing sweetly” (immediately equated with “at the height of desire”) as the hunter strikes—that inspire Valmiki to make his second, more significant utterance; the birdsong turns to compassionate speech and then inspires human poetry. As a result, the Nishada, a member of a tribal group regarded as very low caste, is cursed, and poetry is born. The text treats the Nishada as a nonperson, hostile and evil, a man who violates dharma, kills for no reason, and is cursed to be forever without peace; in direct contrast with the compassionate crane hen and the compassionate poet, the Nishada never speaks. Since the animal he killed was just an animal, not a human in animal form, he receives only a relatively mild punishment—restlessness, perhaps guilt—prefiguring the more serious curse of Dasharatha in the story that is to follow, the tale of the boy mistaken for an elephant. With this link added to the narrative chain, the corpus of stories combines five major themes: succumbing to the lust for hunting; mistaking a human for an animal and killing the “animal”; interrupting the sexual act (by killing one or both of the partners); understanding the language (or song) of animals; and creating a poetic language. Killing an animal interrupts the sexual act, the animal act, killing sex, as it were, and producing in its place the characteristic human act, the making of language.

What binds the humans and animals together is compassion, a more nuanced form of the guilt and concern for nonviolence that have colored Hindu stories about animals from the start. The Ramayana is compassionate and inclusive in its presentation of animals, including Jatayus, an old vulture, a scavenger, who is to birds what dogs are to mammals, normally very inauspicious indeed. But Jatayus bravely attacks Ravana when Ravana is carrying off Sita; when Jatayus lectures Ravana on dharma, Ravana responds by cutting off Jatayus’s wings and flying away with Sita, and the dying vulture tells Rama where Ravana has taken Sita. Rama says that he holds the old vulture, Jatayus, in the same esteem that he holds Dasharatha (3.64.26) (which may also be a backhanded indirect dig at Dasharatha), and he buries him with the full royal obsequies as for a father. Rama does, however, use balls of stag’s flesh in place of the balls of rice that are usually part of these rituals (3.64.26, 32-33), a reversal of the historical process that led many Hindus to use balls of rice in place of a sacrificial animal.

Another unclean bird plays a role in Rama’s story, and that is a crow. When Hanuman visits Sita and asks her for a sign that will prove to Rama that Hanuman has seen her, she tells him of a time when a crow attacked her until his claws dripped with blood; Rama had the power to kill the bird but, in his compassion, merely put out his right eye and sent him away (5.36.10-33). The crows are said to be eaters of offerings, greedy for food, terms often applied to dogs, and Manu (7.21) explicitly links crows and dogs. The crow is a Pariah. Sita compares the crow with Ravana, and the scene foreshadows the abduction of Sita by Ravana. Yet Rama has compassion for the crow, merely taking out his eye, a mutilation that will become part of the vocabulary of bhakti, when a devout worshiper willingly gives his own eye to the god.

Dogs too occupy a moral space here. During the period of Sita’s exile, a (talking) dog comes to Rama and complains, first, that dogs are not allowed in palaces or temples or the homes of Brahmins (whereupon Rama invites him into the palace) and, second, that a Brahmin beggar beat him for no reason. Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog in anger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, the dog went only a short distance and stayed there, and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog to suggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin, whom he describes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma, be made the leader of a Tantric sect. (The dog himself had this position in a former life and regarded it as a guaranteed road to hell.) This granted, the Brahmin feels certain he has been given a great boon and rides away proudly on an elephant, while the dog goes to Varanasi and fasts to death (7.52).⁴⁹ Clearly, the dog is morally superior to the Brahmin, and Rama treats him with great respect throughout this long and rather whimsical episode.

SYMBOLIC OGRES

Dogs in these stories stand both for dogs (a cigar is just a cigar) and sometimes for Pariahs or Nishadas (more than a cigar), often for both at once. Tribal people stand for themselves (a Nishada is just a Nishada), but can Nishadas stand for anyone else? (Apparently not.) On the other hand, can anyone else, besides dogs, stand for Nishadas? More precisely, can ogres stand for Nishadas?

Unlike dogs and Nishadas, ogres and antigods cannot represent themselves because, in my humble opinion, they do not exist; they are imaginary constructions. Therefore they are purely symbolic, and the question is, What do they symbolize? Later in Indian history, they are often said to symbolize various groups of human beings: tribal peoples,⁵⁰ foreigners, low castes, Dravidians, South Indians, or Muslims. Various Hindus have named various actual human tribes after ogres and antigods and other mythical beasts (such as Asuras and Nagas), and others have glossed ogres such as the ogress Hidimbi, who marries the human hero Bhima, in the Mahabharata, or the Naga princess Ulupi, who marries Arjuna, as symbolic of tribal people who marry into Kshatriya families. One scholar identified the ogres of Lanka as Sinhalese Buddhists, oppressed by hegemonic Brahmins represented by Rama;⁵¹ another argued that the ogres represented the aboriginal population of Australia,⁵² a loopy idea that has the single, questionable virtue of correlating well with the Gondwana theory that Australia and India were once linked. Indeed writers have used the ogres as well as other characters of the Ramayana^ew throughout Indian history to stand in for various people in various political positions. But what role do the ogres play in Valmiki’s Ramayana?

There is no evidence that the ogres represent any historical groups of human beings or that the conquest of the ogres of Lanka represents any historical event. On the other hand, just as dogs can symbolize general types of human beings (castes regarded as unclean), so too, particular types of ogres and antigods can symbolize general types of human beings. Ogres and animals belong to social classes (varnas), just like human beings; Ravana, a king born of a Brahmin father and an ogress mother, is often regarded as a Brahmin/Kshatriya/human/ ogre mix (though sometimes as a Brahmin, making Rama guilty of Brahminicide), and the vulture Jatayus, a Kshatriya, is buried both as a king and as a vulture (with pieces of meat that would not be given to a king). There are many other Kshatriya ogres and antigods, as well as Brahmin ogres.⁵³

Ogres are also symbolic of dark forces outside us that oppress us and sometimes of dark forces within us, the worst parts of ourselves, the shadows of ourselves. In Freudian terms, Ravana is a wonderful embodiment of the ego—proud, selfish, passionate—while Vibhishana (Ravana’s pious brother, who sermonizes Ravana and finally defects to Rama) is pure superego, all conscience and moralizing, and Kumbhakarna (Ravana’s monstrous brother, who sleeps for years at a time and wakes only to eat and fight) is a superb literary incarnation of the bestial id. The triad is even more significant in Indian terms, in which they might be viewed as representations of the three constituent qualities of matter (the gunas): Ravana is rajas (energy, passion; ego), Vibhishana sattva (lucidity, goodness; superego), and Kumbhakarna tamas (entropy, darkness; id).

But the major function of the ogres in the Ramayana, apart from their role as the Bad Guys, a role not to be underestimated, is as the projected shadows of individual human figures. Lakshmana says this explicitly to Rama, regarding the ogre Viradha: “The anger I felt towards Bharata because he desired the throne, I shall expend on Viradha (3.2.23).” We have seen how the ogresses cast a shadow on the unrelenting goodness of Sita, and how the monkey brothers illuminate the relationship of the human brothers; the male ogres do much the same. The thorny questions of dharma that the humans express from time to time (in Bharata’s outburst, or Sita’s scolding) are echoed in the arguments of the monkeys and ogres (when Valin upbraids Rama or Vibhishana preaches to Ravana).

More specifically, just as Rama, Lakshmana, and Bharata form a sort of triad,^ex so too Ravana, Vibhishana, and Kumbhakarna form a parallel triad.^ey Ravana remarks, after Kumbhakarna’s death, that Kumbhakarna had been his right arm and that Sita is no use to him with Kumbhakarna dead (6.56.7-12), precisely what Rama says about Lakshmana and Sita when he thinks Lakshmana is dead. But the parallels are often contrasting rather than identical: Whereas Lakshmana and Bharata love Rama, both Vibhishana and Kumbhakarna revile Ravana.

THE GOOD OGRE

Some ogres stand for human beings of a particular type rather than a particular class. Some powerful, and often virtuous, ogres and antigods amass great powers through generating inner heat (tapas) and usurp the privileges of the gods, following the pattern of the second alliance. The throne of Indra, king of the gods, is made of twenty-four-carat gold, a notorious conductor of heat. When an ascetic on earth generates too much tapas through a non-Vedic do-it-yourself religion, the heat rises, as heat is wont to do, and when it gets to Indra’s throne, he finds himself literally sitting on a hot seat. At that point he usually sends a celestial nymph (an Apsaras) to seduce the ascetic, to dispel his heat either through desire or through anger.⁵⁴

Ravana is a major player in the second alliance. He wins the boon of near invincibility from Brahma by generating extreme tapas. (It is only because Ravana fails to take seriously the fine print in his contract, specifying every creature but humans, that Rama is able to defeat him.) Sita inspires Ravana with both desire and anger. Indeed, in terms of the mythological paradigm, it is Sita, as celestial nymph (or, in Vibhishana’s view, great hooded serpent), who defeats Ravana.

Such ogres may stand for humans who, through precisely that sort of religious activity, unmediated by priestly interventions, usurped the privileges of the Brahmins. As shape shifters who pretend to be what they are not, the ascetic ogres are (super)natural metaphors for people who try to become more powerful than they have a right to be, the wildcat yogis who are not members of the Brahmin union. Vibhishana is an early instance of this paradoxical figure. He remains an ogre, indeed becomes king of the ogres after Ravana’s death, thus maintaining his own particular dharma, still going into the family business, as it were, but he fights on the side of Rama against Ravana and the other ogres, thus supporting more general dharma (sadharana dharma). Maricha, the ogre who takes the form of the golden deer, tries hard, in vain, like Vibhishana, to dissuade Ravana from going after Sita. But Maricha also confesses to Ravana that after an earlier encounter with Rama, he began to practice yoga and meditation and now is so filled with terror of Rama that he sees him everywhere he looks: “This whole wilderness has become nothing but Rama to me; I see him in my dreams, and think of him every time I hear a word that begins with an ‘R’ (3.38.14-18).” This emotion is what bhakti theologians later describe as “hate-love” (dvesha-bhakti), which allows other demonic opponents of the gods (such as Kamsa, the enemy of Krishna) to go straight to heaven when the god in question kills the demon. The reference to the R also foreshadows (hindsight alert!) the importance of the name of Rama in later bhakti.

The Ramayana does not worry about the paradoxes involved in these clashes between sva-dharma and sadharana dharma. When the antigod Bali defeats the gods, including Indra, and performs a great sacrifice, in which he gives away anything that anyone asks him for, Vishnu becomes a dwarf and begs as much land as he can cover in three paces; he then strides across the three worlds, which he takes from Bali and gives back to Indra (1.28.3-11). Bali’s name, significantly, denotes the offering of a portion of the daily meal—or taxes, the portion of the crop paid to the king. That it is Bali’s Vedic virtue of generosity that destroys him may signal a challenge to that entire sacrificial world. But the Ramayana, remaining firmly within the second alliance, does not ask why Bali’s virtue had to be destroyed. The later Puranas, in retelling this story, will tackle head-on the paradox of the good antigod.

CHALLENGES TO THE CLASS SYSTEM

The gods (and Brahmins) are also threatened from the other side by human beings who are not too good but too bad, including people highly critical of Vedic religion. When Rama is arguing with Bharata about honoring his father’s wishes, the Brahmin Jabali presents the atheist position, satirizing the shraddha, the ritual of feeding the ancestors, as well as the idea of the transfer of karma: “What a waste of food! Has a dead man ever eaten food? If food that one person eats nourishes another person, then people who journey need never carry provision on the way; his relatives could eat at home for him.” He anticipates the Marxist argument too: “The scriptures with their rules were invented by learned men who were clever at getting other people to give them money, tricking the simple-minded. There is no world but this one (2.108.1-17).” When Rama objects violently to this, others assure him that Jabali has presented the atheist argument only to persuade Rama to do what was best for him, that he wasn’t really an atheist, that it was allmaya (“illusion”) (2.102.1).” Jabali’s argument is the standard Materialist critique of the Veda, as well as the straw man set up in order to be refuted.

A more serious threat to the social order is posed by Shambuka:

RAMA BEHEADS SHAMBUKA

A Brahmin’s child died of unknown causes, and the father blamed Rama for failing to maintain dharma, accusing Rama of being guilty of Brahminicide. The sage Narada warned Rama that a Shudra was generating tapas, a practice permitted to Shudras only in the Kali Age, and that this violation of dharma was causing disasters such as the death of the child. Rama gave instructions to preserve the child’s body in oil. Then he explored the country and found, south of the Vindhyas, a man generating tapas, hanging upside down. Rama asked him his class (“Are you a Brahmin, or a Kshatriya, or a Vaishya, or a Shudra?”) and the purpose of his tapas, and the man replied, “I was born in a Shudra womb, and I am named Shambuka. I am doing this in order to become a god and to conquer the world of the gods.” Rama drew his sword from his scabbard and cut off Shambuka’s head while he was still talking. And at that very moment, the child came back to life (7.64-67).

Shambuka is upside down, both as a form of tapas and because a world in which a Shudra generates tapas is topsy-turvy. The central episode of mutilation of an uppity low-caste man is framed, indeed justified, by another story, the stock narrative of a hagiographical miracle, usually used in the service of Brahmins (like Vrisha) rather than of kings, the death and revival of a child. Was there enough pressure on the caste system at the time of the Ramayana’s recension to force the narrator to invent this frame to justify Rama’s action? Perhaps. We learn nothing at all about Shambuka but his class and the fact that he lives south of the Vindhyas, the no-man’s-land of North Indian mythology; he is dehumanized.

Rama also had an uncomfortable relationship with Nishadas, including a hunter named Guha, chief of the Nishadas. When Rama came into the jungle, Guha met him and offered him things to eat and drink; Rama declined for himself, arguing that as an ascetic he could not accept gifts and ate only fruit and roots (an assertion directly contradicted by the fact that after killing the ogre Maricha in the form of a deer, he killed another deer and took home the meat [3.42.21]), but he gladly accepted fodder for the horses, which were the pride of Dasharatha’s stable (2.44.15-22). Yet, when Bharata later came looking for Rama, Guha came to meet him too, bringing him fish, flesh, and liquor (2.78.9), and his guide said to Bharata, “He’s an old friend of your brother’s (2.78.11).” Bharata, unlike Rama, accepted the food, and when Guha told Bharata about his meeting with Rama, he said, “I offered Rama a variety of foods, but Rama refused it all, because he was following the dharma of a Kshatriya, and Kshatriyas must give but never receive (2.82.14).” There are too many excuses, and conflicting excuses at that, to explain why Rama will not eat Guha’s food, and the commentaries on this episode are troubled by it.⁵⁵

A famous story about a king’s relations with Nishadas and other tribals, as well as Pariahs, is only loosely connected with Rama (it is told to him):

TRISHANKU HALFWAY TO HEAVEN

Vishvamitra was a great and just king. One day he tried to steal from the Brahmin Vasishtha the wish-fulfilling cow, who could produce anything that one asked her for. At Vasishtha’s request, she produced armies of Persians and Scythians and Greeks, and then aliens (mlecchas) and tribals (Kiratas), who destroyed the king’s armies and his sons. Realizing that the power of a Brahmin was greater than that of a Kshatriya, Vishvamitra resolved to become a Brahmin himself. He generated great inner heat but merely became a royal sage, still a Kshatriya.

Meanwhile a king named Trishanku wanted to go to heaven in his own body. Vasishtha told him it was impossible, and Vasishtha’s sons in fury cursed Trishanku to become a Pariah (Chandala), black and coarse, wearing iron ornaments, his hair all uncombed, his garlands taken from the cremation ground. His people ran away from him, and he went to Vishvamitra. Vishvamitra promised to help him get to heaven, and to do this, he prepared a great sacrifice for him. When Vedic scholars refused to attend a sacrifice performed by a Kshatriya for a Pariah patron, Vishvamitra cursed them to become reviled, pitiless tribals (Nishadas) and hideous Pariahs (Mushtikas), living on dog meat in cemeteries.

The gods refused to attend the sacrifice, but Vishvamitra used his inner heat to raise Trishanku toward heaven. Indra commanded Trishanku to fall back to earth, but Vishvamitra stopped his fall, so that Trishanku was stuck halfway up in the sky. Vishvamitra created a new set of constellations for him and was about to create a new pantheon of gods as well, but the gods persuaded him to stop. And so Trishanku lives forever like that, upside down, in his alternative universe (1.51-59).

What begins as a conflict between members of the two upper classes leads to an unsatisfactory compromise: Vishvamitra becomes both a Kshatriya and a sage. When he then takes on the entire Brahmin academic establishment and, finally, the gods themselves, this results in yet another uneasy compromise, Trishanku suspended between heaven and earth. Along the way, however, the fallout from these high-class wars creates first a passel of foreigners (the usual Central Asian suspects), then even more alien (mlecchas) and tribals, and finally a combination of Pariahs and other tribals. When the dust settles, the moral seems to be that although, as Vishvamitra believes, Brahmins are better than Kshatriyas in some ways (the gods come to their sacrifice), inner heat--the religious power available to non-Brahmins and non-Vedic sacrificers--can do what even sacrifice cannot: Like sacrificial merit, or karma in general, it can be transferred from sacrificer to patron, but unlike them, it can get your body at least halfway to heaven, which the Brahmin Vasishtha said could not be done at all. At least one Kshatriya, moreover, Vishvamitra, makes many Brahmins into Pariahs and forces the gods to meet him literally halfway. This story, well known both in India and in Europe and America,^ez provides us with yet another vivid image of liminality, fusion, and the partial resolution of irresolvable conflicts.

Just as the alternative universe that Vishvamitra creates is entirely real to Trishanku, so the world of the Ramayana that Valmiki created is very real indeed to the many Hindus who have heard it or read it, and Sita and Rama continue to shape attitudes to women and to political conflict in India to this day.