Ramáyana Book III: The Forest: Ancilliaries

Introduction

1. The Problem of the Araṇyakāṇḍa

Contemporary readers of the Rāmāyaṇa, when leaving behind “Ayodhyā” (Book Two) and entering the “Forest” (Book Three), are likely to have the impression that they have suddenly fallen down the rabbit hole into the world of Wonderland. Although this is not something traditional audiences seem to have felt (the commentators certainly give no hint of feeling discontinuity), from their first acquaintance with the Rāmāyaṇa westerners have always found something highly problematic about the transition between the two books and between the two major portions of the epic they represent.

We are certainly justified in believing that the perspective has changed dramatically and the emphasis shifted. The intensely didactic, even homiletic, discourse of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa — its almost obsessive concern with the foundations of correct sociopolitical behavior, with dharma (“righteousness”) as the necessary condition of communal life, and its recognition of the human predicament before dharma’s often conflicting and always imperious demands — has given way in the Araṇyakāṇḍa to what seems the entertainment of a romance. In the “Forest” we no longer encounter the problems most humans must confront and solve, those so thoroughly explored in the prior book; we seem no longer to be in a human realm at all.

This may be overstating the case, for the Araṇyakāṇḍa maintains an interest in many of the central concerns of the previous volume. Yet the problem of what unifies these two very different sections of the poem remains a challenging one. The epic genre, at least as far as we are able to characterize it on the basis of those examples preserved for us (the Mahābhārata, Vessantarajātaka, Nalopākhyāna, Harivaṃśa), seems to have required such a transitional episode within the social, political, and ethical problematic they all share. But most scholars have paid little attention to this convention of the epic and so have not moved very far beyond highly subjective first impressions. In the case of the Rāmāyaṇa, consequently, the view persists that the poem is a fusion or amalgamation of two very different and in fact unrelated stories.

This idea was first expressed with conviction and force by the great nineteenth-century Indologist Hermann Jacobi. “One can recognize at first glance,” he tells us, “that [the saga of the Rāmāyaṇa] is composed of two utterly different and distinct parts. [In the Ayodhyākāṇḍa] everything is human, natural, totally free from fantasy. … The case is quite otherwise in the second half of the saga, where everything is marvellous and ‘fantastic.’”[Note 1] Since Jacobi had determined, with an a priori certitude that is arresting, that the epic is essentially the reworking of an ancient “nature” myth, it is not surprising that in his interpretation of the poem he was compelled to leave the first half of it entirely out of consideration.

Most discussions of the problem of Rāmāyaṇa unity since Jacobi’s time have taken as their point of departure what he had recognized “at first glance” and have only sought to provide additional evidence in support. A particularly tenacious argument of a literary-historical sort is that derived from the Dasaratha Jātaka. This text, found in the Pali collection of stories about the Buddha’s former births, recounts a tale very similar to that of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa — and nothing further. By a mechanical logic it has come to be viewed as representing an archaic version of the poem, which accordingly “must have” ended, like the Buddhist text, with the prince’s return directly from the forest and “must have” known nothing of the demon-king Rāvaṇa and his abduction of Sītā. According to this analysis, the Araṇyakāṇḍa stands revealed as exogenous to the “original” tale of Rāma.

How little cogency there is to this argument, which draws chronological inferences from what is merely thematic variation, should be apparent, although it has taken years for anyone to provide an adequate demonstration.[Note 2] Yet the dichotomous view of the structure of the Rāmāyaṇa that is derived front arguments based on the Dasaratha Jātaka, along with highly subjective impressions of what counts as narrative coherence and a conviction that an archaic nature myth formed the original foundation, remains dominant in almost all critical discussion of Vālmīki’s epic. The need to develop a unitary understanding of the poem was eliminated by eliminating the perception of the poem as a unitary work.[Note 3]

What is striking about this literary criticism, beyond the frailty of its arguments, is the cultural arrogance that underlies it. The presumption of the truth of a Western vision is coupled with an implicit dismissal of the entire tradition that produced and preserved the epic. What in this tradition has been considered the first and greatest poem, and venerated as such for two thousand years, is now declared to be, not a meaningful whole — as Indian audiences have invariably taken it to be — but a congeries of utterly distinct and unrelated materials.

Suppose we were to take seriously what generations of performers and audiences have felt, not to speak of the composer, that the monumental poem is not made up of two heterogeneous and uncombinable narratives, but forms a meaningful whole? One of our principal critical tasks would then be to ponder how the work functions as a unit, how its parts fit together to establish a large and coherent pattern of signification. A provisional readiness to posit meaningful unity of the work is at the very least a hermeneutical necessity. If we begin with the hypothesis of meaningless, irrational disunity, we cannot ask meaningful and rational questions. But we face more than a necessity. We face also a postulate authorized by the tradition itself, which has always regarded the poem as of a piece.

Another way to think of this shift in critical perspective is to distinguish between two kinds of history of the poem. If earlier criticism concentrated on the epic’s “genetic history” and dismembered the work in the search for its primal components, we might now want to take its “receptive history” more centrally into consideration: Approaching the epic as a whole, in conformity with the traditional mode of reception, and seeing how it works as a whole can reveal a dimension of the poem’s meaning easily as significant as any derived from considering the elements of its genesis. For understanding the work includes, and maybe principally so, understanding what it may have meant in Indian social, intellectual, and cultural history.[Note 4]

2. Summary of the Araṇyakāṇḍa

Soon after entering Daṇḍaka wilderness, Rāma is welcomed by the sages living in the forest. They entertain him and ask that, as king, he fulfill his obligation of ensuring their safety. Rāma pushes on deeper into the forest, on the way encountering and killing the monster Virādha, who had tried to abduct Sītā. He then makes his way to the sage Śarabhaṅga. The holy man directs Rāma to the sage Sutīkṣṇa, and before the prince sets out, he watches as Śarabhaṅga immolates himself in a ritual fire and thereupon attains the world of Brahmā. Rāma is then visited by a throng of ascetics, who again beg his protection against injury at the hands of the rākṣasas. After seeking out Sutīkṣṇa, Rāma visits the ashrams of the different sages who had been accompanying him and thus passes the first ten years of his fourteen-year forest exile (sargas 1-10).

Rāma then returns to Sutīkṣṇa and is directed by that sage to the ashram of the great seer Agastya. The prince is heartily welcomed by Agastya, who provides him with magical weapons and directs him to the lovely region of Pañcavaṭī, where he is advised to establish his ashram and live out the remaining years of banishment. En route to their new home, they encounter an old acquaintance of Rāma’s father, Daśaratha, the vulture-king Jaṭāyus, and he is invited to come live in Pañcavaṭī as well (sargas 10-14).

One day, while Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, and Sītā are living peacefully in Pañcavaṭī, they are approached by a rākṣasa woman named Śūrpaṇakhā, the sister of Rāvaṇa, king of rākṣasas. Śūrpaṇakhā is attracted to Rāma, who jokingly directs her to his brother, and he back to Rāma. Eventually, the rākṣasa woman becomes enraged and attacks Sītā. Rāma orders Lakṣmaṇa to cut off Śūrpaṇakhā’s ears and nose as punishment. Seeking vengeance, Śūrpaṇakhā hastens to her brother Khara, who dispatches fourteen rākṣasa warriors against Rāma. After these are slain in combat, Khara himself leads an army of fourteen thousand to do battle. Rāma annihilates the entire demon force, Khara and his generals included (sargas 15-29).

Śūrpaṇakhā in despair makes her way to Lankā, the island-fortress of her brother Rāvaṇa. She first reproaches him for his dissolute ways and utter ignorance of the assaults made upon the rākṣasas. She then explains in detail what Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa did to her and Khara, tantalizingly describing Sītā to the demon-king. Devising a plan, Rāvaṇa sets off on a sky-going chariot to the mainland and the residence of the rākṣasa Mārīca, who is living the life of an ascetic. Mārīca has had two previous encounters with Rāma and both times barely escaped alive. He listens in terror, therefore, as Rāvaṇa reveals his plan: He asks that Mārīca turn himself into a bejeweled deer, explaining that when Sītā sees the deer, she will send Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa to capture it. In their absence the demon-king will abduct Sītā and ultimately be able to slay the two brokenhearted princes. Mārīca’s attempt to dissuade Rāvaṇa proves fruitless, and he is compelled to cooperate (sargas 30-40).

Arriving at Rāma’s ashram, Mārīca takes on the form of a jewel-studded deer and wanders around the grounds. At the sight of the magical deer Sītā begs Rāma to capture it, and the prince sets out after it. Mārīca leads Rāma far from the ashram until finally, exhausted, he is within range of the prince’s arrow and is shot. As he lies dying, he cries out in Rāma’s voice for Lakṣmaṇa to come to his aid. Sītā hears the cry and in panic insists that Lakṣmaṇa go to Rāma. When Lakṣmaṇa hesitates to leave her alone and unguarded, Sītā questions his motives. He then leaves in a rage. Waiting nearby, Rāvaṇa seizes this opportunity and approaches in the guise of a wandering mendicant. She welcomes him hospitably and tells him the story of Rāma’s exile. The demon-king then reveals himself and begs Sītā to come away with him and be his queen; when she refuses, he carries her off (sargas 40-47).

The vulture-king Jaṭāyus, awakened by the commotion, rushes to Sītā’s aid. He valiantly struggles with Rāvaṇa, only to be slain in the end. Rāvaṇa flies off with Sītā, who from midair lets fall her wreath of flowers, her golden silk shawl, and her lovely ornaments — the last retrieved by five monkeys on a mountain peak. Reaching Lankā, Rāvaṇa again asks Sītā to be his wife. At her stubborn refusal, he has her confined in a grove of aśoka trees, guarded by ferocious rākṣasa women (sargas 48-54).

Rāma, meanwhile, finally recognizing the trap into which he has fallen, is filled with worry. On the way back he sees Lakṣmaṇa coming toward him despondently, and so becomes even more fearful. When he reaches the ashram he finds it empty and spots the evidence of Sītā’s struggle. He begins wildly to search the woodland for his wife, like a madman, asking the trees and animals if they know what happened to Sītā and threatening to destroy the world unless he is told. In due course he comes upon the flowers dropped by Sītā, sees the signs of the battle between Jaṭāyus and Rāvaṇa, and finally discovers the vulture-king himself. With his dying breath the bird tells him it was Rāvaṇa who abducted Sītā, but he can say nothing more. Out of filial piety Rāma cremates Jaṭāyus and then continues his search for Sītā (sargas 55-64).

In the course of their search the brothers encounter the colossal, headless Kabandha, a monster whose massive arms they sever in battle. When at his request they cremate him, Kabandha arises from the pyre in the wondrous form of a celestial being. He instructs them to go to Lake Pampā and Mount Ṛśyamūka, where the monkey-king Sugrīva is living in exile: He will help them find Sītā. The brothers accordingly set out. On the way, they encounter Śabarī, an old female ascetic who has long been awaiting Rāma’s arrival and who shows them warm hospitality. After giving them a tour of the wondrous sights in the ashram of her long-dead spiritual masters, she performs a ritual self-immolation and enters the world of Brahmā. Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, eager to find Sugrīva, push on and come at last to the shores of Lake Pampā (sargas 65-71).

3. The Rāmāyaṇa: Myth and Romance?

When I associate the Rāmāyaṇa with the genre of romance, I use the term advisedly. Perhaps the dominant critical opinion concerning the section of the epic that begins with the Araṇyakāṇḍa holds it to be primarily a fabulous adventure tale, displaying many of the features we associate with the romance genre from its beginnings in the early Greek novel. Although not actually using the word romance, the German scholar Pax was the first to look at the work morphologically and identify motifs in this book and those that follow that suggest a generic similarity with European Märchen and ultimately with romance. These include, according to Pax, the abduction of a beautiful woman by a monstrous creature (often the woman’s father), her imprisonment in a labyrinthine castle, and her rescue by a hero with the help of animals and by means of a sky-going conveyance.[Note 5]

In fact, the inventory of techniques and motifs representative of European romance and present in the Araṇyakāṇḍa and later books could be substantially extended beyond what Pax noticed.[Note 6] For example, in terms of narrative, the Araṇyakāṇḍa has the episodic quality of romance, making it quite unlike the narrative in the Ayodhyākāṇḍa with its unwavering attention to the storyline. The genre characteristics of the tīrthayātra or “tour of pilgrimage sites,” which was to find such massive expression in the forest book of the Mahābhārata, may be present here only in embryonic form (the stories of the Pañcāpsaras Pond and of Vātāpi and Ilvala, sarga 10, for instance, or that of Mataṅga’s forest, sarga 70). Yet the overall structure of the narrative, particularly in the first half of the book, reveals the fascination of all romance with the individual sensational episode, and thus employs a discontinuous, catenic way of storytelling markedly different from the previous volume.[Note 7]

More strictly thematic features of the romance genre found in the Araṇyakāṇḍa include marvels and wonders encountered only in an alien environment (sarga 4, for example, or 70); the piety of the protagonist and the idealized love relationship between himself and the heroine (and the sexual aggressiveness and deviance of the “others”, sargas 16ff., 44ff.); the loss of the beloved, the hero’s wanderings and the dimension of quest, and the gods’ role in the unfolding adventure (sargas 55ff.); tokens of recognition (Sītā’s ornaments, 52.1ff. and 4.6.1ff.; Rāma’s ring, 4.43.1ff. and 5.34.1ff.; Sītā’s hair ornament, 5.36.1ff. and 5.64.1ff.); the hero’s triumph and, what is most intriguing, his final experience of self-discovery (sargas 102-7), which in some respects forms the preeminent message of this category of literature.

So there are an appreciable number and provocative set of convergences between Books Three through Six of the Rāmāyaṇa and the European romance genre. And though they have not as yet been cataloged or analyzed, these shared characteristics have made themselves felt and have led many scholars to conclude that the Rāmāyaṇa as a whole is best understood as a form of romance.[Note 8] Nevertheless thinking of Vālmīki’s poem in this way, however justified it may appear to be by certain surface resemblances, has clear drawbacks. For one thing it stimulates inappropriate, if not false, expectations; for another, it makes some readers less receptive to the product of a very different literary culture, closing off instead of providing access to a whole range of topics in which Vālmīki seems to be deeply interested. Adventure, love, and service, staples of romance that have little broad social significance, are certainly part of his poem, but so are those patterns of “public behavior” that are the central concern of a very different species of literature.[Note 9]

How may we conceptualize this different species of literature that stands in opposition to romance? Here the reflections of Northrop Frye on the distinction between romance (“folktale”) and what is not romance — what he terms myth — are valuable:

It is this characteristic quality of “authority and social function,” of didactic interest in paradigmatic collective values (rather than idiosyncratic personal ones), that informs the Rāmāyaṇa. For all its fabulous diversions, the Araṇyakāṇḍa fully shares this interest, and we should review this briefly before turning to consider just what sort of myth Vālmīki’s great poem embodies.

What most strongly suggests to us the element of romance in the Araṇyakāṇḍa is the situating of the action in the forest. This locale is almost emblematic of romance, supplying an “ancient symbol of uncertain fate,” as one of the foremost contemporary scholars of romance puts it.[Note 11] For the traditional India of Sanskrit literature, the forest has additional, more complex connotations. As we saw in the introduction to the Ayodhyākāṇḍa, the forest is viewed in stark opposition to the town or city; it is a place prior to, or at least exterior to, many of the claims and obligations of the social world. Life in the forest is not bounded by the confines of family existence; on the contrary, it is precisely where those escaping such confines come to find peace and transcendence — the renouncer, the ascetic, the seer — and, indeed, those who are forced out of collective existence, exiles like Rāma himself. There is in India an ancient link between the spiritual quest and the forest (perhaps crystallized in the name given texts of the later vedic corpus, the Āraṇyakas, “Forest Books,” which pondered doctrines too holy or dangerously mysterious for village life).[Note 12] In this place outside the socialized and the humanized, all that a human is not can be found — monstrous subhuman creatures as well as beings of an almost superhuman spirituality; it is a place where demons, men, ṛṣis, demigods, and gods all mingle. More than anything, it is these “interrelated layers of integral powers” that serve to create the “restless and imaginative world” of romance.[Note 13]

Yet certain features of the forest that are almost archetypal in the West are noticeably absent from the Rāmāyaṇa. Meditating on the literary image of the wilderness, W. H. Auden speaks of it as “the place where there is no community, just or unjust, and no historical change for better or for worse. … Therefore the individual [in the wilderness] is free from both the evils and the responsibilities of communal life.”[Note 14] For the ancient Indian king, whether he is on the throne or in exile, there is no freedom from the “responsibilities of communal life.” There remains incumbent upon Rāma the obligation of protecting the sages of the wilderness. The ascetics themselves declare this in the very first sarga and thereby set the tone for the rest of the book:

From the very beginning of the “Forest” there is a continuous “intrusion” of the central problems of the “Ayodhyā,” so resolutely antiromantic in their fundamental significance, so heavily laden with “authority and social function.” This in part is what makes it difficult to agree that the Araṇyakāṇḍa and what follows is romance in any but a superficial sense.

Just as there is nothing intrusive about the appeal of the ascetics, so there is nothing intrusive about the Araṇyakāṇḍa in the epic as a whole. Far from signaling a departure from the previous narrative, let alone generic discontinuity, this book provides an essential complementarity that helps identify its function in the larger whole of the Rāmāyaṇa. One of the more productive ways to think of this unitary product — that is, one producing more interesting and denser layers of meaning — is as a sustained and elaborate “myth” exploring the nature of king, the character and quality of his powers, and every domain in which these powers are manifested. The forest was one such domain, where a fundamental dimension of the kingly function could be illuminated. To appreciate the vision of the king in the forest. however, we need to know how kingship was thought of in traditional Sanskrit culture. And this leads us to confront the basic question of the interpretation of the Rāmāyaṇa, the divinity of the hero. For the divinity of Rāma and the nature of the king are inseparably related problems, and together they reveal not only principal concerns of the Araṇyakāṇḍa but also a major structural feature of the Rāmāyaṇa.

4. The Divine King of the Rāmāyaṇa

The Problem of Rāma’s Divinity

The traditional readings of the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki — including both the countless literary adaptations and the interpretations of the medieval commentators — never questioned the epic’s fundamental “organic” unity. Consequently, there was never any doubt that the divinity of the hero formed an integral and authentic feature of the poem and, as such, a fundamental condition of its meaning. Although a wide range of other kinds of interpolations were identified, and a good deal of the narrative itself was felt to pose serious problems of exegesis, nowhere in the history of the indigenous artistic or scholarly appreciation of the poem are arguments ever raised against the divine status of the hero; never, for example, was the suspicion ever voiced that those portions of the epic explicitly positing Rāma’s status as an incarnation of Viṣṇu were deliberate, and unassimilable, sectarian interpolations.

Such, however, were the arguments and suspicions of Western scholars from their earliest acquaintance with the poem. Wilson in 1840 noted quizzically, and with evident impatience at the inconsistency, that “Rāma, although an incarnation of Viṣṇu, commonly appears in his human character alone.” The first editor of the epic in Europe, A. W. von Schlegel, questioned the authenticity of those passages that recount the avatāra, and his student Lassen argued the matter on far wider narrative grounds, commenting,

Predictably, attention was soon directed to these interpolations, which Lassen had felt to be self-incriminating. Homeric analysts had already shown how much easier it is to drop a given passage without harm to the “story” than to demonstrate its legitimacy, not to say necessity (for little in the end is necessary).[Note 17] In the same spirit, John Muir marshaled a host of examples that by their contrariety, narrative inconsequentiality, illogicality, or redundancy were thought to prove that the divinity of Rāma could not have formed part of the “original” poem.[Note 18]

If Gorresio and Weber could still call the question an open one, with the publication of Jacobi’s book on the Rāmāyaṇa in 1893 the issue was to be decided once and, apparently, for all.[Note 19] The theme of Rāma’s being a divine incarnation, we are told, was not an original part of the poem but a later addition restricted to the “attached” passages and in no way informing the entire work. Jacobi attributes the deification of Rāma to a process of euhemerization whereby the hero of a (quasi-historical) saga is merging with a popular local divinity, the resulting demigod finally coming to be reckoned an avatāra of Viṣṇu. But the divinity of the hero remains a conception that cannot be demonstrated for the five “real” books of the poem; “quite the contrary, there Rāma is thoroughly human.”[Note 20]

This in brief is the opinion that has been generally embraced in Western scholarship with respect to the central problem of interpretation bearing on Vālmīki’s poem.[Note 21] It is a notion of peculiar tenacity and prevalence, which now, through the operations of what is referred to rather darkly as wirkungsgeschichtliche Bewusstsein (that interpretive consciousness shaped by past interpretations), conditions the response many readers will have to the text.

There is no denying that portions of the Rāmāyaṇa as we find it in the medieval manuscripts upon which the critical edition is based are later interpolations. Perhaps as much as one-quarter of this vulgate did not form part of the monumental oral poem of “Vālmīki,” from which all our recensions and versions derive.[Note 22] For all that, it is striking that a substantial number of the passages long under suspicion have received text-historical vindication from the critical edition. Far from corroborating prevailing scholarly opinion, this edition raises questions about the development and interpretation of the poem that are more complex than earlier scholars realized and that cast serious doubt on the interpretations they offer.

Even though the critical edition reveals interpolations in Books Two through Six touching on the divinity of the hero, they are still strikingly rare.[Note 23] The complete textual history of the epic, therefore, tends only to strengthen an argument made by Walter Ruben more than fifty years ago (though wholly ignored thereafter): Since so many interpolations in Books Two through Six that are clearly later than the presumed late deification of Rāma say virtually nothing of his divine status, its absence from the five “authentic” books need not indicate its late date. A more cogent explanation might be that mention of it was suppressed in those books “for one reason or other.”[Note 24] Below I will discuss what some of these possible reasons might be. A number of them are already identified in the traditional interpretation of the epic. What this interpretation richly demonstrates is that the commentarial tradition — the closest thing we have to an original audience — was entirely aware of the necessity of eliminating explicit reference to the divine identity of Rāma.[Note 25] This suggests that Ruben’s hypothesis cannot be dismissed by assuming that “some unspoken but uniformly observed agreement among generations of Rāmāyaṇa scribes and reciters” is unwarranted or inherently implausible.[Note 26]

If text criticism leaves open the question whether Rāma’s divinity is original to the monumental poem, “higher criticism” as usually practiced has not brought us much closer to a solution. In the first place, the reasons for identifying as insertions materials authenticated by manuscript testimony have never been clearly spelled out. What seems detachable need not, of course, have been attached, for little of this or any other poem is not finally detachable. Anyway, who decides on the criteria for judging what is narratively essential and appropriate in a Sanskrit epic? Moreover, the nature of interpolation itself is complicated (though this has yet to be adequately theorized), and different kinds of motivations underlie it. Interpolation often serves, not to introduce altogether new narrative material, but instead to expand or make manifest the elliptical or latent; what at first sight might appear to be innovation may in reality be amplification or elucidation. The interpolations referring to Rāma’s divinity might thus be elaborations of themes embedded in the text — perhaps deeply or structurally embedded, but there nonetheless — which we have been ignoring or doubting because of suspicion provoked by materials that are, admittedly, later insertions. This would provide one reasonable answer to a basic question, though one rarely raised, about the history of the poem: Why should it have proved so perfectly easy to “transform” fundamentally a “heroic epic” according to a later theological program, and to do this without a trace of resistance?”[Note 27] Perhaps it has not been transformed at all.

The meaning of a text, as we know, is not just a function of its most literal signification, of what is directly expressed in any given set of verses (unstable as they are). The meaning is also inscribed in higher-order (and more stable) narrative features, in the logic of the story, for example, or in larger motifs and themes. These can generate meaning by their implications, for instance (in the case of narrative logic), or (in the case of motifs) by their literary-historical associations. If there is any truth to this observation, then the divinity of the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa cannot be eliminated by the facile excision of any portions of the text. It pervades the tale and is constitutive of it.

Much of the argument against the divinity of Rāma, furthermore, is based on a sense of the “divine” that is unthinkingly ethnocentric. What is “contradictory” in the behavior of “human incarnations,” as Lassen would have it, may be so only according to a narrow theological rationalism. What, again, are the standards for deciding whether behavior is reasonable and logical in the case of a being so resolutely unreasonable and illogical as a human embodiment of divinity? Even in passages that are widely held to be interpolations, such as Rāma’s interview with his long-dead father, Daśaratha, a curiously ambivalent, “contradictory” attitude is entertained toward the hero: The old king, at the same time as he acknowledges that Rāma is in fact “the heart of the gods, their deepest secret” (6.107.31; cf. verse 30), can still speak to him as if he were nothing more than his human son, wishing him “long life” (107.23; similarly Śiva, 107.4-6).[Note 28] Unless we are obstinate enough to postulate interpolations in our “interpolation” here, we must rethink our own sense of what constitutes contradiction and propriety in a text at times very foreign to a modern western reader. It is worth remembering, too, that it was precisely these “contradictory” aspects in the nature of Rāma that have so often been the source of religious mystery and the object of theological reflection.[Note 29] In the Indian tradition, at least, the unity of the “divine savior” and the “ideal human” was easily accommodated.[Note 30]

If the theme of the divine king is authentic to the monumental poem of Vālmīki, obviously it will fundamentally change the way we understand the work as a whole and the Araṇyakāṇḍa in particular. We may come closer to deciding the issue in question if we direct our attention to the poem’s “structured” message residing in certain higher-order narrative features. One of these is the boon of Rāvaṇa, which is inextricably meshed with the divine status of the hero.[Note 31] The logic of the terms of the boon necessitates the agency of a transcendent entity, one both god and man, for only such a being can confront the power of cosmic evil Rāvaṇa embodies. This is confirmed by the poem itself in various explicit references to the divine plan underpinning the whole action. It is also the conclusion we are compelled to draw by the morphology of the boon motif throughout the history of Indian mythology. The nature of the divine king in ancient India and its historical connection with early Vaiṣṇavism provide further evidence and suggest some new interpretations of the poem on a more global level.

The meaning of a literary text is admittedly not a set of brute facts waiting to be assembled, but neither can it be said to be totally, let alone arbitrarily, constituted by the receiver. Texts make promptings and suggestions, have claims of logic and literary-historical associations, and all of this takes place within a finite and to a degree accessible cultural context. The text seems sometimes to be speaking to us on its own and to raise its own questions. Perhaps it is possible to discover these questions and listen to this speech rather than drowning it out with our own querulous presuppositions.

Rāvaṇa’s Boon in The Rāmāyaṇa

The first mention of Rāvaṇa’s boon in Books Two through Six of the Rāmāyaṇa occurs here in the Araṇyakāṇḍa, when the rākṣasa is introduced to us for the first time:

The causal connection between these two verses will be obscure to the reader unfamiliar with the whole story. It remains so throughout the poem, illuminated elsewhere only dimly, as in the sixth book:

There may well have been aesthetic reasons for the partial, almost grudging revelation of Rāvaṇa’s boon; nowhere in Books Two through Six is the whole story told consecutively and straightforwardly.[Note 34] This is what has misled many scholars into doubting the authenticity of the theme. But in addition to manuscript testimony, which is unanimous in those places I have already cited, the boon is mentioned in passing at strategic junctures in the story. Indeed, we are never permitted to forget the conditions under which the hero is operating. Sītā, for example, says to Rāvaṇa in the dramatic moment after he has abducted her, “Even if asuras or gods cannot kill you, Rāvaṇa, you have now aroused the bitter enmity of someone you cannot escape alive.”[Note 35] In fact, Rāma himself knows of the boon, for prior to his battle with Rāvaṇa he sends him the following message: “Surely today, at last, your pride has been crushed that came from the gift of Brahmā’s boon. For here I stand at the threshold of Lankā, bearing a staff to punish you who gave me such sorrow by carrying off my wife.”[Note 36]

The theme of the boon functions in part to elevate the narrative to the realm of mythic event. It does this by the structural affinity it bears to the many other epic boons that require a divine solution, and I shall come back to this. What I want to consider now are the terms of the boon itself, in isolation from its literary-historical associations. What do these terms imply?

By means of his ascetic mortifications Rāvaṇa has forced the hand of Brahmā and been awarded a boon that makes him invulnerable to all divine and semi-divine beings. The inference to be drawn from the terms of the boon, therefore, is that given by Rāvaṇa’s general Prahasta in the Yuddhakāṇḍa: “Gods, dānavas, gandharvas, piśācas, divine birds, and serpents are utterly incapable of harming you in battle — what of monkeys!” (6.8.2): And what indeed of men? In Book Seven and elsewhere in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition it is stressed that Rāvaṇa did not bother to request invulnerability from men and other lower forms of life; it was superfluous. They were harmless in his eyes, nothing more than food.[Note 37] But what is excluded from the boon is, of course, the only thing that could become the means of his destruction. Therefore Hanumān’s inference is the very opposite of Prahasta’s. He warns Rāvaṇa, “Because you are invulnerable to gods, dānavas, gandharvas, yakṣas, and rākṣasas, you could defeat them. Still, monkeys pose a danger to you.”[Note 38] Yet the true conclusion of the inference, already hinted at in the passage cited above (3.30.18), is drawn in the fifth book, when Hanumān again addresses Rāvaṇa:

In the end, with clear if futile insight, Rāvaṇa himself grasps this bitter fact:

If for the moment we consider just the terms of Rāvaṇa’s boon and the gradual revelation of its single yet critical flaw, only two interpretations seem possible: (a) Rāvaṇa with fatal hubris underestimated the power of man, and he learned this in the hardest way possible, by being killed by one; (b) Rāvaṇa’s view of man’s power was correct; such creatures, along with all other lower forms of animal life, had no possibility of slaying him: Men are weak and powerless by nature, but especially in the face of the magnitude of evil Rāvaṇa represents, and consequently, he who killed the overlord of rākṣasas could not have been a man at all.

It is worth stressing the importance of this central paradox, whichever interpretive option we choose, that runs like a red thread through the poem. Man was not included in the wish because he was judged too insignificant to count. His association with other animals only enhances this estimation. But by that very exclusion, man becomes the sole being who might destroy Rāvaṇa and, in that respect at least, becomes more powerful than the gods themselves.

Both explanations of the boon motif entail larger interpretations of the poem. The first one implies that the Rāmāyaṇa is offering us a celebration of human potentiality, a paean to man’s endurance and triumph over superhuman adversity in an almost Sophoclean mode (“So many awful wonders, yet none more wonderful than man,” etc.). This presupposes a man-centered cosmos, since it is exclusively to man that, in the poem’s central, insistent question, all efficacy in the struggle against evil is ascribed. But there is no evidence elsewhere in the epic to support this supposition and nothing in traditional Indian culture that would make such an interpretation credible.

If Rāvaṇa’s boon does not implicitly exalt the powers of man, then what is it telling us? To my mind it implies that we cannot be dealing with the simple story of a mortal hero, however powerful he may be, struggling with and overcoming a demonic creature (as a genetic literary history of “Indo-European epic,” comparing the stories of Theseus, Beowulf, or Siegfried, might urge). If that had been the conception of the composer of the Rāmāyaṇa, there would have been no reason whatever to build into the story the motif of the boon. This theme serves no other purpose than to “problematize” the human dimension of the hero. In addition to linking the narrative and its hero with the ancient mythic paradigm I describe below, the motif raises questions about the hero’s nature that never would be raised were this nature not intended as matter for speculation, interrogation, and wonder in itself. Everywhere the poem indicates that Rāvaṇa’s assessment was correct; we are continually reminded that a man can never slay Rāvaṇa and the other rākṣasas. What the events of the story are forcing us to conclude is that Rāma cannot, in fact, be a man.

In the Rāmāyaṇa allusion is constantly made to the presumed mortality of the hero. This is partly a function of the boon itself, but the effect of the repeated reference to Rāma’s human limitations is to engender incredulity in the audience, as in the characters themselves, about his status as a human:

Gradually, from passages such as these, the mystery of Rāma’s nature begins to emerge. “It makes no sense” that Rāma, “a mere mortal,” should destroy Rāvaṇa in combat. Of course it makes no sense. This is the conclusion the characters gradually draw:

If such references as these served only to show that Rāma is in fact a god, then the terms of the boon come into play, and Rāvaṇa need have had nothing to fear: A god cannot slay him. A mere man, pure and simple, could not possibly kill Rāvaṇa, but neither could a god, pure and simple — and yet Rāvaṇa lies dead. By the logic of the narrative we are encouraged if not compelled to conceive of some intermediate being that partakes of both existential realms, combining the nature derived from each into a new, superordinated power — to conceive, in fact, of a god-man.

There are explicit statements in the poem, in addition to its narrative logic, that foster this conception. When Śūrpaṇakhā describes Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa to her brother Khara, saying, “Two handsome young men have arrived, delicate yet powerful. … They are the image of the king of gandharvas and bear all the signs of royalty. Whether they are gods or men I cannot tell for certain” (3.18.11-12); when Sītā refers to Rāma as having “divine powers” (3.54.14) or Lakṣmaṇa speaks of him as “my brother, who has the powers of a god” (3.66.11), we might be inclined to dismiss it as so much epic hyperbole, like the many tags (devopama-, “godlike,” and so on) that have been generally viewed as mere ornamental epithets. But it becomes increasingly difficult not to take these statements at face value when we encounter more pointed expressions of this idea, as for example Lakṣmaṇa’s words to Rāma later in the Araṇyakāṇḍa when he is ready to destroy the worlds in a rage over the loss of Sītā: “Your thoughts are too profound for even the gods to fathom, wise brother … Be aware of your powers, which are as much divine as human.”[Note 44]

To be sure, we encounter in other epic traditions frequent reference to what might be judged no more than a semi-divine status of the hero — theoeikelos axilleus (“godlike Achilles,”), for example, to go no further afield than the “Iliad”. Yet in such cases the descriptions are purely rhetorical, and this is made quite clear when Homer is compelled to explain, “The first of men [Achilles], but not a match for Gods” (“Iliad” 21.264, in Pope’s epigrammatic version). It is precisely the asymmetry between the hero’s aspiration to divinity and his irreducible humanity that lies at the core of Homeric and much other epic poetry. As one of the wisest of contemporary Hellenists put it in describing just this contrariety (what he has termed “the heroic paradox”), allusions such as these epithets frame “imply a kind of absolute status which the hero strives to gain,” although at the same time he possesses “a desperate self-knowledge” that he is ineluctably mortal.[Note 45] The comparable passages in the Rāmāyaṇa, taken in the all-important context of Rāvaṇa’s boon, which categorically debars gods and implicitly debars men, acquire a peculiarly mythic resonance absent from the Greek epic with its pervasive tragic humanism. And although there are moments when Rāma’s human frailties are stressed, much of the narrative of the Rāmāyaṇa serves principally to amplify this mythic resonance till such point as Rāma’s unique status as a being of a second order — part god, part man — forces itself unmistakably upon our awareness.

The Morphology of the Boon Motif

The theme of Rāvaṇa’s boon, considered morphologically, opens a similar window, through which we see more than a simple human aspect in Rāma, more too than a “superhuman” aspect. He eludes both because, as the unfolding narrative itself urges us to recognize, he must be a new order of being.

Just as the thematic structure of the Rāmāyaṇa moves the narrative to the level of mythic struggle, so too does the very character of the antagonist. In no other respect does Vālmīki’s poem so depart from the conventions of the epic as represented by the Mahābhārata as in the dimensions of the struggle in which the hero is engaged. The demonic power of the foe is formidable and vast, on an altogether unearthly scale:

The scale of evil envisioned by the poet, spanning the universe from the nether regions to the heavens, is well beyond the familiar world of most epic literature, where the powers of the antagonist generally retain recognizably human dimensions. The lord of rākṣasas exceeds the human capacity for evil to an even greater degree than he exceeds, with his ten heads and twenty arms, the physical power of human beings:

In Indian intellectual and cultural history, the question of evil seems generally to be conceived and represented as a mythic problem on a cosmic plane. The demonic is hardly formulated in human terms at all; it defines itself only against the divine, as the latter defines itself only against the demonic.[Note 48] The struggle against such evil, in Indian mythology, lies as a rule outside the sphere of human participation. This is plainly the case with Rāvaṇa, whose existence imperils the universal no less than the terrestrial order of things, and whose extermination is therefore a matter of divine concern and intervention. This is something of which the poet takes pains to remind us at critical moments throughout the narrative.

The first intimation that Rāma’s personal tragedy — his exclusion from succession to the kingship and his banishment — is part of a greater plan occurs in the second half of the Ayodhyākāṇḍa. En route to visit Rāma, Bharata meets the seer Bharadvāja, who admonishes the young prince, saying, “Bharata, you must not impute any fault to Kaikeyī. The banishment of Rāma will turn out to be a great blessing.”[Note 49] The notion that any “great blessing” could come about as a result of the tragic events in Ayodhyā — the death of the king, the bitter divisions in the palace, the disaffection of the entire populace — had to strike an “original” audience as paradoxical. Not until the end of the second book is some clarification offered, when for the first time in Books Two through Six Rāvaṇa’s name is mentioned. Bharata has stubbornly refused to accede to Rāma’s wishes to accept the kingship, in contrast to Rāma, who is prepared to accept his own lot. It is the intervention of semi-divine beings that seems to turn the balance: “Then all at once the hosts of seers, eager for the destruction of ten-necked Rāvaṇa, spoke to Bharata, tiger among kings.”[Note 50]

What had appeared to be a localized. circumscribed, self-contained set of social and political problems in “Ayodhyā” is now seen to be part of a divine initiative made necessary by the periodic recrudescence of demonic evil. The Ayodhyākāṇḍa, given the peculiar focus of its social vision, was an inappropriate arena for anything more than fragmentary revelations. The present book, where Rāma finds himself in a realm that transcends the human world to the same degree that it descends to the demonic, is quite different. The gods themselves acknowledge the heavenly plan that the hero’s sufferings advance; and the demons present themselves to permit the plan’s advancement.

While proceeding to the ashram of the sage Śarabhaṅga,

Besides suggesting a crucial point that the traditional interpretation has always understood — the incarnate god is, or in this particular case must be, ignorant of his divinity — this passage increases our suspicion of a vaster, even cosmic, background of the action of the Rāmāyaṇa. This suspicion is finally confirmed by what happens when Sītā is abducted:

Sītā herself will later tell Rāvaṇa, “I know for certain I could never have been stolen away from the wise Rāma, were it not that Fate had destined it — to bring about your death.”[Note 54]

In light of these passages it is worth reconsidering two others that, although unimpeachable on textual grounds, have often been called into question on the grounds of “higher” criticism, as being somehow out of keeping with the overall character and concerns of Books Two through Six.[Note 55] The first occurs late in the sixth book: After the defeat of Rāvaṇa, Rāma’s long-dead father appears before him on a celestial chariot and says, “Now at last I understand, dear son, how it was by the gods’ doing that [you], supreme among men [puruṣottama],[Note 56] were destined for this, for bringing about the death of Rāvaṇa. … You have completed your stay in the forest, and kept your promise; you have fulfilled the wishes of the gods by killing Rāvaṇa in battle.”[Note 57] The second forms part of the lament of the rākṣasa women, just before Rāvaṇa is slain:

In the total context of Books Two through Six, there is clearly little that argues against the authenticity of these last two passages, and much that speaks in their favor. Viewed comprehensively, they show themselves to be, not afterthoughts or isolated allusions, but part of a design. The cumulative impact of such periodic revelations is to transform the perspective from which we view the story. Once more the assumption is encouraged that the human narrative is intricately meshed with, and finally subsidiary to, a divine plan in which Rāma (along with Sītā) has for some reason been appointed the principal actor.[Note 60] The character of Rāvaṇa, as we have seen, reinforces this assumption, as does the boon motif. For the formula by which this motif is constituted posits this signification, and at the same time clarifies why this “mere man” should have become the instrument of a cosmic purpose.

The boon was granted to Rāvaṇa by Brahmā in consequence of the intense asceticism the rākṣasa had performed over thousands of years, and it provided that he could never be slain “by gods, dānavas, gandharvas, piśācas, great birds, or serpents.” In Sanskrit epic and purāṇic literature the performance of austerities almost mechanically compels the gods to fulfill any demand of the claimant. They are invariably asked to grant the gift of immortality, but they themselves won this only with great effort when they churned the empyreal ocean, and it is the one gift they cannot bestow.[Note 61] Yet like so many others, Rāvaṇa seeks to achieve the same result by a gambit widely familiar in folklore: attempting to frame the perfect wish. The sheer impossibility of an exhaustive catalog, however (in this case overdetermined by Rāvaṇa’s scornful dismissal of man), immediately implies that a solution is assured; the very provisions of the boon make it inevitable that a proxy will be found. Not a god, since the gods have become, so to speak, contractually impotent nor yet a man, men being constitutionally impotent, the “food” of rākṣasas. Instead it must be an unprecedented combination of the two.

These thematic implications are in part manifested in the divine plan sketched above. In addition, the way the boon is formulated — which turns out to be an ancient building block of Indian myth — necessarily entails this: The formulation ensures that the boon will be counteracted, and what will counteract it is a previously nonexistent being, either a purely deceptive being or, more usually, one entirely outside the catalog of natural possibility. Before tracing the roots of this “morpheme” into the vedic tradition and the special association it later comes to have with the corpus of Vaiṣṇava mythology, let us examine its function as a structural feature in epic myth-making.[Note 62]

In MBh 1.201 is found the “old tale” (itihāsa purātana) of Sunda and Upasunda, brothers born in the line of the “great asura” Hiraṇyakaśipu. Inseparable companions and deeply devoted to one another, they resolve to conquer the universe, and set off for the Vindhya Mountains to practice austerities. The gods come to fear their growing ascetic power and try to disrupt their mortifications by tempting them with precious objects, women, and the like. But the gods are unsuccessful, and in the end the Grandfather must appear before the two and grant them a boon. In addition to magic powers, they seek immortality, the one thing Brahmā must withhold. “But,” says Brahmā, “you may choose some way of dying that will make you as good as deathless.”[Note 63] They reply, “Let us have nothing to fear from anything existing [bhūtam] in the three worlds, anything that moves or does not move — anything, Grandfather, but ourselves.”[Note 64] There must of course be an omission in their request for invulnerability, otherwise they would indeed be immortal, and so they choose what alone seems to them unthinkable as a source of danger. Brahmā agrees, and in the possession of their boon the demons attack the gods, conquer heaven and the netherworld, and, coming to earth, slaughter kings and brahmans, on whose sacrifices the power of the gods depends. The seers appeal to Brahmā, who reveals the way to slay the demons. Viśvakarman is asked to create a woman, and gathering “every existing thing in the three worlds, everything that moves and does not move that was beautiful,” the divine craftsman fashions a new creature whose beauty was unlike that of any female in the three worlds.[Note 65] Sunda and Upasunda see her, fall to fighting over her, and so kill each other.

The cosmic dimension of the story is worth singling out first. The boon activates a power that throws the universe — the triple world of heaven, earth, and the underworld — into turmoil, making divine intervention unavoidable. The catalog of conditions in the boon requested by the asuras is familiar, as is the use of a ruse to obviate them. The demons had aimed at and nearly achieved the exhaustive list; what they neglected to include was a combination of already existing substances into some hitherto nonexistent being, emanating from the gods and yet not one of them. And it is this, and this alone, that is able to trigger the necessary yet seemingly unattainable event, the fratricidal conflict.

A second epic example of the motif is contained in the well-known story of the demon Tāraka and the birth of Skanda.[Note 66] When after their marriage the divine couple Śiva and Ūmā begin their lovemaking, the gods grow fearful lest the offspring of such a union bring about universal destruction and therefore implore Śiva to withhold his seed. He agrees, but Ūmā, furious that the chance of her bearing children is ruined, curses the gods to be childless themselves. Agni, the god of fire, was absent at the time of the curse. A drop of Śiva’s seed, moreover, had fallen from him and into Agni, where it grew great. Now, at this time, oppressed by the demon Tāraka, the gods and all other divine creatures seek the aid of Brahmā, explaining, “The Blessed One gave the daitya a boon, and he has become overweening in his power. The gods cannot kill him. How then is he to be quelled? For the boon he acquired from you, Grandfather, was this: ‘Let me be invulnerable to gods, asuras, rākṣasas.’ And the gods have now been cursed by Rudrāṇī when we ruined her chance of bearing children. She said, ‘You shall never have offspring,’ lord of the universe.”[Note 67] And Brahmā replies, “Agni was not there at the time of the curse, best of gods. He shall produce a child to slay this enemy of the gods. And that shall be a creature transcending the gods, dānavas, and rākṣasas, gandharvas, men, serpents, and birds” (84.8-9). Skanda is later born and slays Tāraka.

As before, in addition to the boon, the catalog of exclusions, and the cosmic peril, a being of an entirely new order is required, different from and greater than any existent divinity, since its origin is unique and in fact is antinomic: It is the seed of Śiva, borne by Fire (Agni), fertilizing Water (the Ganges), and brought forth simultaneously by six different mothers, whereupon its several parts miraculously merge.

Especially suggestive is the myth of the asura Hiraṇyakaśipu and his death at the hands of Viṣṇu in the form of a man-lion.[Note 68]

Demonic evil on a cosmic scale can be neutralized by none of the available divine powers.[Note 70] The supreme god Viṣṇu must contrive “an embodiment that had never before existed,” again a miraculous life form necessitated by the comprehensive exclusions of the boon.

We can now see that these narratives are offering us an established constellation of mythological components: a boon awarded as a result of ascetic practices; an ensuing threat of cosmic evil; the intervention of the divine and its transmutation into a preternatural form that circumvents the boon’s apparent all-inclusiveness — implying above all how impossible it is to contain the divine within any ordinary category of life.

That this has to be seen as a very ancient and invariant pattern of expectation is made probable by the evidence of vedic mythology. One example attesting to the existence of the formula from earliest Indo-Aryan times, as well as an ancient association with Viṣṇu, will suffice.[Note 71] The narrative of the dwarf incarnation of Viṣṇu is alluded to frequently in the earliest strata of vedic literature, although the first connected narrative is that of the Maitrāyanī Saṃhitā:[Note 72]

The vedic texts are very spare in their narratives and do not tell how the demons had acquired the power to seize control of the universe. Early epic and purāṇic literature supplies the necessary background. Here the demon Bali replaces the anonymous horde of asuras, and the standard motif resurfaces:

The motif is thereupon subject to a slight inversion; it is now the demon Bali who dispenses a boon to Viṣṇu. The dwarf is given as much land as he can cover in three steps, and as the Mahābhārata tradition puts it, “Hari took on a divine, utterly miraculous form as he strode out, and with three strides he took all the earth.”[Note 76]

From the beginning, this act of Viṣṇu’s has been associated with his divine mission. Concomitantly, Bali — exactly like Hiraṇyakaśipu and Rāvaṇa — is regularly represented as a power of cosmic dimensions.”[Note 77] And the miraculous transformation, far from being a trickster’s “stratagem to avert the suspicion of the asuras,” fits squarely into the pattern I have been tracing.[Note 78] In that environment the pattern recovers something of its centrality to ancient myth and to the understanding of the divine in early Indian thought: As in the case of the man-lion and all the others, an attempt is made to give expression to the incomprehensible character of the divine, whereby we can begin to understand that it does not exist within the world of nature, “the realm of necessity,” that it is not constrained by the limits of the possible. No inventory of the physical world, however exhaustive, can subsume the capabilities of what transcends all natural categories. On the one hand, then, the divine may be what it certainly seems not to be (the dwarf, for example), and on the other, it can indeed be what has never been seen to be (the man-lion).[Note 79]

I suggest that the figure of Rāma, from the time the full narrative took shape in the monumental Rāmāyaṇa, has been conceived after the model furnished by these ancient morphemes of Indian myth.[Note 80] Neither a man nor even a “simple” god, he incorporates the two and so, in a sense, transcends them both.

When I use the term “myth” here, I have in mind a patterned representation of the world, with continuing and vital relevance to the culture, which furnishes a sort of invariable conceptual grid upon which variable and multifarious experience can be plotted and comprehended. It is this essential power to interpret and explain reality — and I mean social reality in the first instance — that has gone largely unappreciated in previous mythic interpretations of the Rāmāyaṇa.[Note 81] Having assembled the essential building blocks, we are in a position to explore the mythological map of experience charted by the Rāmāyaṇa, to discover what Frye might call the myth’s “authoritative social function,” how, that is, it “tells a culture what it is.” A point of entry is provided in the last example of the theme I want to look at.

In the tale of Dhundhumāra the protagonist is an earthly king (in fact, like Rāma, a member of the Ikṣvāku dynasty) but stands in a special and intriguing relationship to divinity:[Note 82] The aged Ikṣvāku king Bṛhadaśva, having set his son Kuvalāśva on the throne, retires to the forest. The sage Uttaṅka tries to stop him, seeking the king’s protection from the rākṣasa Dhundhu, who lies beneath the sands of the ocean Ujjanaka practicing austerities in order to destroy the worlds, the thirty gods, and Viṣṇu himself. “For the gods cannot slay him,” Uttaṅka explains, “nor can daityas or rākṣasas, great serpents, yakṣas, or gandharvas — no one, for he once received a boon from the Grandfather of the world.” The king is asked to slay the demon “for the good of the worlds,” and Uttaṅka tells him further that Viṣṇu shall augment his power by means of his own divine might, thanks to a boon the god once granted the sage. But the aged king, having renounced all violence, declines to do the deed himself and directs the sage to his son. Kuvalāśva and Uttaṅka proceed to the ocean and then, “The Blessed One, Lord Viṣṇu, entered into Kuvalāśva with his fiery power at the direction of Uttaṅka, and for the good of the world.” By drinking up the tidal wave caused by the demon’s earthquake, and with the water putting out the fire within it, the king, “a great yogin by means of Viṣṇu’s yoga,” kills the volcanic Dhundhu (and so receives the name Dhundhumāra).

Once again a situation is contrived that points up the incapacity of the gods, or of any other divine or semi-divine being, to confront and master evil on their own (whether moral or natural evil makes no difference). Another creature — man — is required; but being naturally powerless man needs the infusion of Viṣṇu’s power. Filled with the divine potency, this extraordinary new creature, the earthly king — and only he, no god or man — can protect the brahmanical world order (here represented by Uttaṅka) by destroying evil.[Note 83]

Here as in other versions of the motif, the catalog of the boon does not imply that the slayer can be merely a creature inadvertently omitted from the list. If explicitly excluded, he must then be charged with divine potency; if not, he must belong to a new order of being, in substance not comparable to any hitherto conceivable life forms. Dhundhumāra, like Rāma, is clearly not the sort of hero familiar to us from Western epic, for such heroes are men who do more than ordinary men, not more than gods. These two, by contrast, are men who do what, for some reason, gods cannot. Not merely more than human, they are in some way more than divine. Finally, what makes the adaptation of the ancient motif particularly suggestive, complex, and powerful in the Rāmāyaṇa is that this second-order being, this divine human or mortal god, is here coupled with a sociopolitical representation of everyday life in traditional India: Such intermediate beings, gods who walk the earth in the form of men, are kings.

The Ancient Indian King

The divine nature of the earthly king has been a matter of dispute among students of early Indian thought. Most contemporary scholars, however, agree that the conception was present from the time of the vedas and continuously gained in importance thereafter.[Note 84]

There is no need to invoke the strong concomitance between authority and the supernatural in pensée sauvage in order to establish this, nor the sacred status of the king elsewhere in the Indo-European cultural domain.[Note 85] In the vedic hymns kings, or better chiefs, share certain major activities with the gods, Indra in particular, and they play as well a role of cosmic significance; they are called not only “half gods” (ṚV 4.42.8-9) but also “gods among men” (AV 6.86.3).[Note 86] Additional evidence is provided by the ritual prose texts discussed below. By the time of the epics, lawbooks, and, later, the first purāṇas, the documentary evidence becomes overwhelming. We can look at one representative epic text from our most important source of traditional Indian political theology, the Rājadharma section of the Mahābhārata. This offers a strikingly forthright expression of attitudes and beliefs about kingship, and in several respects seems almost a gloss on the story of the Rāmāyaṇa:

Passages like this make it evident that kings — or more precisely, righteous kings — were invested with the status, the powers, all the ontological meaning and significance of divinity. But can we be certain the author of the Rāmāyaṇa shared this conception? For though the Rājadharma discourse seems representative for much of the epic period, it has often been noted that stony silence if not outright contradiction with respect to the king’s divinity can be found elsewhere; some early lawbooks, for example, seem indifferent or even hostile to the notion.[Note 88]

The silence encountered in the early dharmaśāstras need not, of course, be interpreted negatively, and the denials of a king’s divinity need not belong to the historical period of the monumental poet. And even if contemporary with him, denial of kingly divinity indirectly implies that for some it was an article of belief (a verse from the Ayodhyākāṇḍa discussed below makes this clear). In any case, the orientation of the Rāmāyaṇa is hardly in doubt. Whether or not this reflects widespread consciousness may be a matter of secondary importance. At times, Vālmīki’s poem leaves the impression that the political theology is a doctrine in the making and that its consolidation is a principal objective of the poet.

Although we cannot expect to find in a poetic text like the Rāmāyaṇa the discursive plenitude of the śāstra portions of the Mahābhārata, we can still assemble sufficient evidence to determine its understanding of the divinity of kings. A passage strategically placed at the beginning of the Araṇyakāṇḍa, for example, setting the tone for all that follows, nicely expresses the bivalent nature of the earthly king. Here the seers are addressing Rāma: “As guardian of righteousness and glorious refuge of his people, a king is worthy of reverence and esteem. He is a guru who wields the staff of punishment. A king is a fourth part Indra himself and the protector of his subjects, Rāghava. Therefore he enjoys the choicest luxuries and is held in honor by the world” (3.1.17-18).

These verses imply a divinity of a “functional” sort, referring in particular to the king’s protectorship through his exercise of legitimate force. Something similar occurs in the Ayodhyākāṇḍa. Here Bharata is urging Rāma to return to the city and take up the duties of kingship, which he sees himself incapable of shouldering. For, he argues, “some say a king is but a mortal; I esteem him a god. His conduct in matters of righteousness and statecraft, it is rightly said, is beyond that of mere mortals” (2.95.4). If the divine status of the king may have been subject to public questioning, its existence would by the same token be confirmed, and its truth, too, in the eyes of the authorial arbiter whose voice is plain to hear in these lines. But there is more than just inferential evidence. In the Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa the poet flatly states his own view, through the character of Rāma himself: “It is kings — make no mistake about it — who confer righteous merit, something so hard to acquire, and precious life itself. One must never harm them, never criticize, insult, or oppose them. Kings are gods who walk the earth in the form of men”[Note 89] (4.18.37-38).

What does it signify to make this claim of divinity? What does it mean that the king is a god? The few scholars who do not ignore it have been prone to minimize the importance of divine kingship in ancient India. For one thing, it is claimed that the element of divinity inheres in the office, not the person, of the king.[Note 90] For another, kings were not the only such beings in existence. Brahmans, too, were “gods on earth.” Thus in a way comparable to no other culture India was “prolific of human gods.” In fact, as though we were in the grip of a market economy of the sacred, divinity in India is said to be “cheap.”[Note 91]

Neither of these claims has much force. First, the dichotomy between king and kingship finds little support in Indian epic texts. That distinction itself is a juristic concept belonging primarily to the European medieval period and derived ultimately from Christian symbolism.[Note 92] Moreover, even though there is no suggestion whatever in Books Two through Six of the Rāmāyaṇa that the divine king has any competition from a divine brahman, who is simply ignored, I do not believe such a law of supply and demand is applicable in the domain of political theology; the question of quantity need have no impact whatever on the value of the representation. This value is constituted by, and directly proportional to, the quality of being of the divine king, irrespective of its quantity. And the quality of his being is unique in two respects: the king’s function and his origin.[Note 93] The king is functionally a god because like a god he saves and protects; he is existentially or ontologically a god because he incorporates the divine essence.

The king, we are told in the Rājadharma section of the Mahābhārata, is the root of the three ends or needs of human life (the trivarga): dharma itself is “rooted” in the king. The exercise of kingship is thus the highest manifestation of dharma and the refuge of every living soul on earth. All beings depend on dharma, and dharma depends on the king. But what is the core of Rājadharma? “The age-old dharma of kings consists of protection, and it is this that maintains the world itself.” The king provides security, in particular to brahmans and ascetics, who are usually, as in the Araṇyakāṇḍa, represented as those most threatened with violence. This is a “gift of life” (cf. Rām 4.18.37, cited above, p. 46), equal to no other, and by means of it alone the entire brahmanical order and the sacrificial cult by which it sustains the universe are preserved.[Note 94]

Although the king has other functions besides protecting his subjects (which his possession of other divine substances enables him to execute),[Note 95] it is his providing welfare, in the widest sense of the term, that remains his special trait. The god who increasingly in Indian religious history comes to discharge this soteriological function and whose substance is later said to be fused with that of the earthly king is Viṣṇu. For although Viṣṇu does not himself occupy the position of king in the Indian pantheon — that is held by Indra — he has a unique role in the preservation of the cosmos that proved to be a far more compelling political-theological determinant. From the time of the earliest hymns of the Ṛgveda and with growing frequency thereafter, Viṣṇu’s preeminent task is to aid suffering mankind by reestablishing the righteous brahmanical organization of society.[Note 96