Sohini Pillai Dissertation

UC Berkeley

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Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata

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https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9dv5m9wg

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Pillai, Sohini Sarah

Publication Date

2021

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Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata

Sohini Pillai

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

South and Southeast Asian Studies

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Robert P. Goldman, Chair

Professor Munis D. Faruqui

Professor John Stratton Hawley

Professor Vasugi Kailasam

Summer 2021

Sohini Pillai.

Abstract

Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata

Sohini Pillai

Doctor of Philosophy in South and Southeast Asian Studies

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Robert P. Goldman, Chair

This dissertation examines how regional religious traditions in premodern South Asia

transformed the Mahābhārata, an epic about a catastrophic war between two sets of royal

cousins, into a narrative of bhakti or “devotion.” The two texts at the heart of this project are

Villiputtūrār’s fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s seventeenth-century

Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahābhārat. While composed more than two hundred years apart in

distinctly different regional South Asian languages, these retellings share a striking similarity.

They both revolve around Krishna, a Hindu deity who became central to flourishing Tamil and

Bhasha bhakti traditions. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh

Cauhān each reframe the Mahābhārata as a bhakti narrative poem focused on Krishna.

“Region and Religion in Retellings of the Mahābhārata” makes two broad contributions to the

study of South Asian religions. First, this dissertation offers a comparative study of bhakti poems

in two languages from opposite ends of the Indian subcontinent. Despite the plethora of

scholarship on bhakti literature, South Asian bhakti traditions have largely been examined

separately in their own regional contexts. In this study of Villiputtūrār’s Tamil Pāratam and

Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, I show how bhakti functions as a shared literary mode

in these retellings while also paying careful attention to their distinct regional differences.

Second, this project challenges an established position in South Asian Studies that relegates

devotional literature and courtly literature to mutually exclusive worlds. The Pāratam and the

Mahābhārat have been labeled as courtly texts based on patronage claims in each poem. Pushing

back against the court/temple divide in contemporary scholarship, I analyze the devotional

contexts of these Mahābhāratas and their intersections with the courtly. This dissertation reveals

that the poems of Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān were part of a pan-South Asian

development in which courtly and devotional literary cultures were closely linked.

In loving memory of three outstanding scholars:

Jaya Kothai Pillai (1926–2013),

Allison Busch (1969–2019), &

Anne Elizabeth Monius (1964–2019).

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract ...........................................................................................................................................1

Table of Contents ............................................................................................................................ii

Acknowledgements .......................................................................................................................iii

Note on Terms & Transliteration ...................................................................................................vi

Introduction .....................................................................................................................................1

Chapter One: The Epic and Bhakti Settings .................................................................................27

Chapter Two: The Story of the Bhāratas as the Deeds of Krishna:

Narrative Transformation in Villi’s Pāratam and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat ...................................58

Chapter Three: Beginning with Bhakti:

The Use of Invocations in Villi’s Pāratam .................................................................................102

Chapter Four: Remembering Rāma:

The Role of the Rāmāyaṇa in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat ................................................................134

Chapter Five: The Pāratam as a Peruṅkāppiyam:

Presenting Villi’s Poem as a Courtly Narrative ..........................................................................169

Chapter Six: A Mahābhārata for the Mughals:

Praising Aurangzeb in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat ............................................................................207

Conclusion: Larger Patterns of Retelling the Mahābhārata ........................................................228

Appendix: Glossary of Names …................................................................................................239

Bibliography ...............................................................................................................................247

iii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project would not have been possible without the support, guidance, and kindness of many

different individuals. When I began my fieldwork in India in 2018, I made a document on my

computer with a list of people to thank in the beginning of my dissertation and over the past three

years this list has grown longer and longer. I am excited to thank all these individuals now.

Let me begin with the three extraordinary women this dissertation is dedicated to. The

first is my Patti, Jaya Kothai Pillai. Patti, my paternal grandmother, was a professor of education

at Madurai Kamraj University, the Vice Chancellor of Mother Teresa Women’s University, a

Fulbright scholar, and a constant source of inspiration for me. Patti was the one who introduced

me to the Mahābhārata tradition with the different storybooks and comics she would always

bring me from India and the captivating stories from the epic I would constantly ask her to tell

and retell. Patti’s love and passion for premodern Tamil literature is also what led me to begin

my study of Tamil in graduate school. I wish she could have read this dissertation.

I was immensely fortunate to have Allison Busch as my advisor for my MA in Middle

Eastern, South Asian, and African Studies at Columbia University. Allison offered her guidance

and friendship to so many students of South Asian literature and history across the USA, Canada,

Europe, and South Asia. Even after I graduated from Columbia in 2015 and began my PhD at

UC Berkeley, Allison continued to stay in touch with me and support me. I saw her almost every

year after I left Columbia at the Early Hindi and Brajbhasha workshops and various conferences

and she would always make sure to treat me to a glass of wine and take the time to hear about

my research and offer her advice. She also continued to share precious catalogues and rare books

in Hindi and Bhasha with me. Allison passed away after a difficult struggle with cancer on

October 19, 2019. I will always remember her remarkable generosity, her deep love for Hindi

and Bhasha literature, and her unwavering commitment to supporting young scholars.

During the first year of my PhD, I found myself without an advisor for my study of

premodern Tamil literature. Anne Monius immediately came to my rescue, and she was my

guide for all things Tamil. In the fall of 2017, I went to Harvard for a semester and Anne met

with me for three hours every single week to read Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and to discuss recent

scholarship on premodern Tamil literature for my qualifying exams. When I returned to Berkeley

in 2018, Anne continued to Skype with me for an hour every week. That May, Anne flew out to

Berkeley from Cambridge for less than forty-eight hours just so that she could physically be in

the room for my qualifying exams. Anne constantly took precious time out of her own very busy

schedule to read and edit many of my fellowship applications, article and essay drafts, and

conference papers. Anne unexpectedly left us on August 3, 2019, and I still think about her every

day. She was one-of-a-kind and I am incredibly lucky that I got to work with her.

I am indebted to all of the members of my dissertation committee. I could not have asked

for a better advisor for a project on the Mahābhārata tradition than Bob Goldman and I am

immensely grateful for all the guidance, encouragement, and kindness he has given me

throughout my six years at Berkeley. Munis Faruqui taught me how to think historically and he

has watched over me from the very beginning of my time at Cal. I first met Jack Hawley as an

MA student at Columbia, and I cannot thank him enough for the tireless support and mentorship

he has provided me since the first day I met him. Vasugi Kailasam graciously stepped in to serve

on my committee after Anne’s death and I have really enjoyed our conversations about Tamil

poetry and comparative literature. Srilata Raman was not an official member of my dissertation

committee, but that did not stop her from carefully reviewing all of my Tamil translations and

reading my chapters about Villi’s Pāratam. Her generosity knows no bounds.

This project would not have been possible without years of intensive language training,

and I am so grateful to my fantastic language instructors and professors at Wellesley, Columbia,

and Berkeley: Amy Bard, Jennifer Clare, Guy Leavitt, Vasudha Paramasivan (who was also my

advisor during my first three years at Berkeley), Dalpat Singh Rajpurohit (my bhaiyā), Rakesh

Ranjan, Neelima Shukla-Bhatt (my ādiguru), D. Samuel Sudananda, and the incomparable Sally

Sutherland Goldman. Imre Bangha, Richard Delacey, Usha Jain, P. Soundara Kohila, Bharathy

Sankara Rajulu, N.M.V. Ravi, and Danuta Stasik very kindly read excerpts of Villi’s Tamil

Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat with me. At Berkeley, I would also like to thank

Kristen Brooks, Penny Edwards, Puneeta Kala, Harsha Ram, Sylvia Tiwon, and Paula Varsano

for their support. I was lucky enough to take Jeffrey Hadler’s fantastic Methods seminar before

he passed away after an intense battle with cancer on January 11, 2017. Jeff was the soul of our

department at Cal, and he was one of the first supporters of my comparative dissertation project.

The graduate students in the Department of South and Southeast Asian Studies at Cal are

the best graduate students in the entire world and I am especially thankful for the friendship of

Hannah Archambault, Katie Bruhn, Alex Ciolac (who is also Leia’s favorite puppysitter), Qiao

Dai, Iman Djalius, Nicole Ferreira, Kashi Gomez, Kim Kolor, Padma Maitland, Zim Pickens,

Omar Qashoa, Krissy Rogahn, Janet Um, Sophia Warshall, and Khenpo Yeshi. Anurag Advani

and my shishter Priya Kothari have read my work, shared countless meals with me, and always

believed in me. Kathleen Cruz Gutierrez has inspired me in so many different ways and I know

she will continue to do. I also need to thank my other incredible Berkeley grad school friends:

Aparajita Das, Sourav Ghosh, Shaivya Mishra, Brent Otto, Shivani Sud, and Chris Waldo.

Outside of UC Berkeley, I am grateful for the friendship, camaraderie, and advice of

Manasicha Akeyipapornchai, Amanda Culp, Morgan Curtis (my bestie), Christopher Diamond,

Linda Hess, Manpreet Kaur, Christine Marrewa-Karwoski, Sophia Nasti, Aarti Patel, Heidi

Pauwels, Martha Selby, Anwesha Sengupta, Vishal Sharma, Jodi Shaw, Jason Smith, Archana

Venkatesan, Anna Lee White, and Tyler Williams. Co-editing Many Mahābhāratas was one of

the most rewarding experiences of my graduate school career and it would not have been

possible without my brilliant “work wife,” Nell Shapiro Hawley. Gregory Clines has been a

wonderful mentor and friend, answering every single question I have ever asked him.

I owe special thanks to the institutions that made the language training and fieldwork for

this dissertation project possible. The Foreign Language and Area Studies program at the U.S.

Department of Education enabled five years of language training at Columbia University, the

American Institute of Indian Studies in Madurai, and UC Berkeley. My fieldwork in the United

Kingdom and India was supported by summer research funding from the Department of South

and Southeast Asian Studies at UC Berkeley, a Hart Fellowship for Tamil Studies research travel

grant administered by the Institute for South Asia Studies at UC Berkeley, and a Fulbright-Hays

Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad fellowship from the U.S. Department of Education. I was

able to dedicate the final year of my PhD to finishing my dissertation thanks to a fellowship from

the Saraswati Dalmia Graduate Student Support Fund for South and Southeast Asian Studies that

was established by Vasudha Dalmia. I am grateful that I was able to develop some of the ideas

for this dissertation in my article “The Mahābhārata as Kṛṣṇacarita: Draupadī’s Prayer in Two

Regional Retellings” in the Journal of Hindu Studies (December 2020, advance online

publication) and in my essay “Blessed Beginnings: Invoking Viṣṇu, Kṛṣṇa, and Rāma in Two

Regional Mahābhāratas” in Many Mahābhāratas (State University of New York Press, 2021).

I had been warned that fieldwork abroad can be a lonely experience, but I was fortunate

enough to have been surrounded by friends and colleagues throughout my time conducting

research in the United Kingdom and India. I am indebted to the staff of several libraires and

archives including Arani Ilankuberan and Nur Sobers-Khan at the British Library, Babu

Gunasekaran and Narenthiran Rajagopal at the French Institute of Pondicherry, Sundar G. and

Mala at the Roja Muthiah Research Library, Sadhna Chaturvedi at the Hindi Sahitya Sammelan,

and the staff at the Nagari Pracharini Sabha. Neeraj Goswami, S. Lalitha Nagesvari, Kalden

Shringla, and Maya Sundararajan of the United States-India Educational Foundation ensured that

my fieldwork in India ran smoothly. I learned so much from my time working with Kannan M.

and Prakash V. at the French Institute of Pondicherry and from Raj and Archana Kumar and their

graduate students Bidisha Chakraborty, Prachi Gupta, Kuntalika Jharimune, Phoolbadan

Kushwaha, Vivek Raj Mangal, Pallavi Mishra, and Naveen Singh, at Banaras Hindu University.

Kannan, Prakash, and Raj Sir and Archana Ma’am and their families also all welcomed me into

their homes for several lovely home-cooked meals. I was able to live at the beautiful Kriti Artists

Residency during my fieldwork in Banaras and I thank everyone there: Ajay Pandey, Navneet

Raman, Petra Mansfield, Anup, Chinta, Badal, and Bijli. I made many amazing friends during

my time in Pondicherry and Banaras including Taylor Barnhill, Kristin Bloomer, Sean Chapman,

Tejashree Gopal, Anupama Krishnamurthy, Boopathi Raj, and Danny Ziprin. I am grateful for

the loving support of my extended family in London and India during my fieldwork, especially

Aunty Ranji, Uncle Deepak, and Shingi, Chitra Athai, Badri Mama, Ammu, and Jayichi Patti,

Subha Athai and Kathir Mama, Uncle Ravi and Aunty Sabina, and Carina and Grandma.

I offer my gratitude to my friends Maya Cherayil, Josephine Ho, Lisa Jacob, Anna

Luberoff, Paolo Maloles, Shachi Phene, Meredith Ruhl, Meera Sriram, Anisha Vachani, and

Samira Vachani. I thank my Garber Girls: Gauri Subramani for being such a great roommate and

Jolie and Melodie Piliero for always making me smile. Julia Denardo Roney, Claire McRee,

Susan Miller, and Katie Parker are my rocks and I know I can always lean on them.

My beloved dog Leia has been the absolute best writing companion and I thank her for

reminding me to take breaks and for the constant snuggles and kisses. I owe everything to my

parents, Shiv Pillai and Honorine Ward Pillai, who have always supported me unconditionally.

NOTE ON TERMS & TRANSLITERATION

I use an italicized “Mahābhārata” and “Rāmāyaṇa” to refer to the Sanskrit epics attributed to

Vyāsa and Vālmīki. I use the terms “Mahābhārata” and “Rāmāyaṇa” without italics to refer to

retellings that belong to the larger Mahābhārata and Rāmāyaṇa narrative traditions.

The early-modern North Indian vernacular language used by one of the poets I examine in this

project, Sabalsingh Cauhān, is considered by many to be the ancestor of modern Hindi and hence

this language is sometimes referred to as “Old Hindi,” “Classical Hindi,” or simply “Hindi.”

Many scholars also use dialect designations like “Avadhi” and “Brajbhasha” to qualify and

describe texts in this language. Yet as Francesca Orsini points out, “the modern regional

linguistic definitions of Braj Bhasha, Avadhi, Bhojpuri and Khari Boli are not reflected in the

sources, which instead speak of a generic bhakha (bhasha) or Hindavi/Hindui/Hindi (in Persian

texts).”

Like Gregory Clines, Shreekant Kumar Chandan, and Tyler Williams,

I choose to refer

to this vernacular language as “Bhasha” (bhāṣā, literally: “language”), which is the name used by

many poets in their own compositions including Cauhān, Jāyasī, Tulsīdās, and Viṣṇudās.

I have decided to use diacritics for personal names, texts, and key terms. There are two

exceptions to this rule: “Krishna” (instead of “Kṛṣṇa”) and “Aurangzeb” (instead of

“Awrangzīb”). To make things easier for my readers, the names of Mahābhārata characters are

represented according to how their names appear in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (“Draupadī”

instead of the Tamil “Tiraupati,” “Bhīma” instead of the Bhasha “Bhīm”). I have compiled a

glossary of names of some of the characters and deities in the Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and

other South Asian narrative traditions as an appendix of this dissertation. I generally avoid

diacritics for the names of places (“Vrindavan” and “Madurai” rather than “Vṛndāvana” and

“Maturai”), languages (“Tamil” and “Bhasha” rather than “Tamiḻ” and “Bhāṣā”), and words that

have become common in English (such as “Brahmin,” “Chola,” “Rajput,” “Mughal,” etc.).

Tamil transliteration is in accordance with the system utilized in the University of Madras’s

Tamil Lexicon. The International Alphabet of Sanskrit Transliteration scheme has been used for

both Bhasha and Sanskrit transliteration.

All translations are my own unless noted otherwise.

Francesca Orsini, “How to do Multilingual Literary History: Lessons from Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century North

India,” Indian Economic and Social History Review 49, no. 2 (2012): 228.

Gregory M. Clines, “The Lotus’ New Bloom: Literary Innovation in Early Modern North India,” (PhD diss.,

Harvard University, 2018), 52; Shreekant Kumar Chandan, “Alam: A Poet of Many Worlds,” in Text and Tradition

in Early Modern North India, ed. Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 2018), 307n1; and Tyler Williams, “If the Whole World Were Paper…A History of Writing in the

North Indian Vernacular,” History and Theory, Theme Issue 56 (2018): 83n3.

INTRODUCTION

From Violence to Devotion

On April 17, 2011, Games of Thrones, a television show based on the A Song of Ice and Fire

fantasy novel series by George R.R. Martin, premiered on the American premium television

network HBO. This show, which tells the story of several noble families fighting for the control

of the fictional continent of Westeros, went on to become one of the most popular television

series of all time.

Game of Thrones fans include Beyoncé, Prince William, and President Barack

Obama (who arranged advanced screenings of certain episodes), and the finale of the eighth and

final season of the show in May of 2019 was watched by 16.9 million viewers around the world.

Along with being one of the most popular shows ever on television, Games of Thrones is

also one of the most violent. In March of 2019, Australian Red Cross volunteers analyzed the

first seven seasons of Game of Thrones to determine which character in the series committed the

most violations of international humanitarian law, such as rape, torture, and murder.

A 2018

study in Injury Epidemiology “revealed that the probability of a character dying within the first

hour after first being introduced on screen was about 14%” and that “by the end of the seventh

season, more than half of the important characters had died, with violent deaths being the most

common by far.”

Some of the most horrific deaths on Game of Thrones include a pregnant

queen being stabbed repeatedly in the stomach during a wedding, a lord being eaten alive by his

own pack of hunting hounds, a man having a pot of melted boiling gold poured over his face by

his brother-in-law, and a prince’s head exploding after a giant knight shoves his thumbs into the

depths of the prince’s eye-sockets. One of the most common phrases of dialogue on the show is

the adage in the fictional language of High Valyrian, valar morghulis or “all men must die.” By

the end of the series, Shelly Tan of The Washington Post calculated that 6,887 different

individuals were killed in the course of the seventy-three episodes of Game of Thrones.

Daniel D’Addario, “Games of Thrones: How They Make the World’s Most Popular Show,” Time, July 10, 2017,

https://time.com/game-of-thrones-2017/.

Sukriti Wahi, “16 Celebrities Who Are Just As Obsessed With ‘Game Of Thrones’ As You Are,” Elle Australia,

April 23, 2019, https://www.elle.com.au/culture/celebrities-that-are-game-of-thrones-fans-20320; and Rick Porter,

“‘Game of Thrones’ Series Finale Sets All-Time HBO Ratings Record,” The Hollywood Reporter, May 20, 2019,

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/live-feed/game-thrones-series-finale-sets-all-time-hbo-ratings-record-1212269.

“Who is Game of Thrones’ Worst War Criminal?” Australian Red Cross, March 2019,

https://www.redcross.org.au/news-and-media/news/game-of-thrones.

For any curious Game of Thrones fans, the Australian Red Cross volunteers pronounced Ramsay Bolton “the worst

war criminal” of the series with seventeen violations of international humanitarian law.

Reidar P. Lystad and Benjamin T. Brown, “‘Death is Certain, the Time is Not’: Mortality and Survival in Game of

Thrones,” Injury Epidemiology 5, no. 44 (2018): 9.

Shelly Tan, “An illustrated guide to all 6,887 deaths in ‘Game of Thrones,’” The Washington Post, May 21, 2019,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/entertainment/game-of-thrones/.

Although Westeros is clearly based on medieval Europe, Game of Thrones is immensely

popular in India.

In 2019, the first episode of the eighth season of Game of Thrones “was pirated

55 million times, of which India’s share was a whopping 10 million.”

Journalist Siddhant

Adlakha pointed out in 2019 that “Instagram data in the days leading up to this year’s eighth

season premiere suggests that India is the leading Asian nation when it comes to Thrones buzz

and online discussions, and the fourth buzziest nation globally, behind the U.S., U.K., and

Brazil.”

Adlakha added that “today, more and more Indian viewers make Game of Thrones a

part of their Monday mornings. India is nine and half hours ahead of New York during daylight

saving time, so some fans wake up at the crack of dawn to catch the show live, while others

watch it during their commute to work.”

Why was this show so beloved in India?

One possible explanation for this series’ popularity in India is the striking resemblance

Game of Thrones bears to the Mahābhārata narrative tradition. During the past two thousand

years, hundreds of Mahābhāratas have been created in the forms of poems, dramas, ballads,

novels, short stories, comic books, television shows, feature films, children’s fantasy series,

podcasts, YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, and much more.

The oldest and most famous

Mahābhārata is the ancient Sanskrit Mahābhārata (c. 400 BCE–400 CE), a massive epic poem

fifteen times the length of the Bible that focuses on the war over the Bhārata kingdom between

two sets of paternal cousins in the royal Kuru family: the five Pāṇḍavas and the one hundred

Kauravas.

Thus, as with Game of Thrones, the central plot of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

revolves around a royal succession dispute. We also find very similar individuals in the large

casts of characters in these two epic narratives. Both feature secret children who are the rightful

heirs to the thrones of their respective kingdoms (Jon Snow and Karṇa), spoiled and sadistic

The plot of much of Game of Thrones is based on the fifteenth-century civil wars in England between the members

of the House of Lancaster and the House of York that are now known as the “Wars of the Roses.” See TED-Ed,

“The wars that inspired Game of Thrones - Alex Gendler,” YouTube video, 6:00, May 11, 2015,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjO55pKuBo4.

Yagya Sachdeva, “India Becomes The Top Country To Illegally View Game Of Thrones,” The Quint, April 19,

2019, https://www.thequint.com/neon/india-piracy-game-of-thrones-maximum#read-more.

Siddhant Adlakha, “The 6 A.M. Scramble to Watch Game of Thrones in India,” Vulture, May 13, 2019,

https://www.vulture.com/2019/05/watching-game-of-thrones-in-india.html.

Adlakha, “6 A.M. Scramble.”

Games of Thrones was legally simultaneously streamed in India by the streaming service Hotstar at the same time it

was broadcast in the USA on HBO.

On the diversity of the Mahābhārata tradition, see Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai, “An Introduction

to the Literature of the Mahābhārata,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 1–34.

I have assumed that readers are familiar with the basic plot and central characters of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

For those who are unfamiliar with the story and main players of the Mahābhārata, I recommend these plot

summaries: James L. Fitzgerald, “The Story of the Mahābhārata,” Brown University, last modified May 9, 2009,

https://www.brown.edu/Departments/Sanskrit_in_Classics_at_Brown/Mahabharata/MBh2Story.html; Emily T.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma: Ethics and the Aesthetic of Suffering in the Mahābhārata (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2012), 10–20; and John D. Smith, introduction to The Mahābhārata: An Abridged Translation,

trans. John D. Smith (London: Penguin Books, 2009), xv–xviii. Also see the Appendix of this dissertation.

princes (Joffrey and Duryodhana), and headstrong heroines who literally emerge from fire

(Daenerys and Draupadī). But perhaps the biggest similarity between Games of Thrones and the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata is the immense violence that permeates these epics.

Some of the most gruesome events in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata include the Brahmin

warrior Rāma Jāmadagnya (also known as Paraśurāma) filling five lakes with the blood of

twenty-one generations of kṣatriya warriors, the Pāṇḍavas and their mother Kuntī getting an

innocent woman from the Nishad community and her five children drunk in a palace made of lac

and then killing them by setting the lac palace on fire, the Kaurava prince Duḥśāsana viciously

dragging the Pāṇḍavas’ shared wife Draupadī by her hair before trying to publicly disrobe her,

the strongest Pāṇḍava Bhīma pulverizing Draupadī’s attempted rapist Kīcaka into an

unrecognizable lump of flesh with his bare hands, and the entire Yādava clan slaughtering

themselves in an intoxicated brawl.

The most violent and devastating event in the Sanskrit epic,

however, is undoubtedly the catastrophic war waged between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas

that takes places at Kurukṣetra or the “field of the Kurus.” Robert Goldman explains that

This cataclysmic struggle is an epoch-ending, mass-extinction event. For, of the many elite heroes

who take part in the barely three-week clash of royal cousins, only ten are said to have survived

the war. Before the epic ends, most of these survivors are slain or simply die. The casualties,

which the poem itself calculates, are truly staggering. Including the (generally overlooked) rank-

and-file soldiery of the war’s eighteen legendarily vast armies, Yudhiṣṭhira [the eldest Pāṇḍava]

reckons the combined losses of both sides come to 1,660,020,000 dead and 24,165 missing—

perhaps more individuals than populated the earth at the time the epic was composed.

The death toll of 6,887 characters killed during the entire eight seasons of Game of Thrones is

almost laughable when compared to the 1.6 billion people slain in the Battle of Kurukṣetra.

Yet the pervasive violence of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata clearly did not deter premodern

poets from retelling the Mahābhārata narrative. Between 800 and 1800 CE, countless

Mahābhāratas were composed in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Konkani, Malayalam, Oriya,

Sindhi, and many other regional South Asian languages.

Notably, several of these premodern

regional retellings continue to be read, recited, and performed in contemporary South Asia. The

Telugu Mahābhāratamu is attributed to the kavitrayamu or “trinity of poets,” Nannaya (eleventh

century), Tikkana (thirteenth century), and Ĕṛṛāpragaḍa (fourteenth century), and Harshita

Mruthinti Kamath notes that the “Mahābhāratamu still holds enormous popular appeal: its verses

appear in Telugu films and are memorized by scholars and schoolchildren across South India

See MBh 3.117.5–10, 1.136, 2.60, 4.21.55–65, and 16.5.11–25. Unless noted otherwise, all references to the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata (MBh) are to the critical edition of the epic: The Mahābhārata for the First Time Critically

Edited, ed. V. S. Sukthankar et al. 19 vols. (Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1933–66).

Robert P. Goldman, “Ā Garbhāt: Murderous Rage and Collective Punishment as Thematic Elements in Vyāsa’s

Mahābhārata,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University

of New York Press, 2021), 41.

For an exhaustive list of Mahābhārata retellings in regional languages, see Gauri Shankar Singh, Mahabharata-

Krishnakatha and Bhagavatapurana: An International Literature Survey (Varanasi: Bibliographical Society of

India, 1990), 18–90.

today.”

Jñāndev’s thirteenth-century Marathi Jñāneśvarī is an expansive reworking of the most

famous section of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata: the Bhagavadgītā (Song of Bhagavān).

Christian

Novetzke points out that around the Jñāneśvarī “exists a thriving world of public religious

exposition, from small pravacana or ‘lecture’ sessions all around Maharashtra, India, and the

world, to social clubs and semiformal reading groups that recite and discuss the text.”

There are

multiple premodern Kannada Mahābhāratas including Ranna’s eleventh-century

Sāhasabhīmavijayam (Victory of Bold Bhīma), Kumāravyāsa’s fifteenth-century

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī (Essence of the Bhārata Story in Kannada), and Lakṣmīśa’s

fifteenth-century Jaiminibhāratam (Bhārata by Jaimini). Sheldon Pollock observes that “in

Kannada country Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī and Jaiminibhāratam are still

extant in hundreds of manuscripts; more important, these works were broadcast via oral

performance into every village in the region.”

In 2019, Kurukṣētra, a Kannada film based on

the Sāhasabhīmavijayam, was released in cinemas across South India.

Despite their ubiquity

and continued popularity, however, premodern regional Mahābhāratas have not received the

same dedicated scholarly attention that the Sanskrit Mahābhārata has long attracted.

This project began with two questions: (1) Why was the Mahābhārata retold in regional

languages at specific moments in premodern South Asian history? And (2) Was the Mahābhārata

retold in different regional South Asian languages for similar purposes? Based on close

comparative readings of Villiputtūrār’s fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh

Cauhān’s seventeenth-century Bhasha (Old Hindi) Mahābhārat, I demonstrate in this

dissertation how regional religious traditions transformed an exceedingly violent epic into a

narrative of ardent bhakti or “devotion” in premodern South Asia. The texts at the center of this

project were composed in two of South Asia’s most vibrant regional languages which are seen as

distinct in terms of their linguistic, geographic, and literary trajectories. Yet these premodern

retellings share a striking similarity. They both refocus the Mahābhārata story on Krishna

(Kṛṣṇa), the maternal cousin of the Pāṇḍavas and an incarnation of the Hindu deity Viṣṇu who

was central to flourishing Tamil and Bhasha bhakti traditions in premodern South Asia.

Harshita Mruthinti Kamath, “Three Poets, Two Languages, One Translation: The Evolution of the Telugu

Mahābhāratamu,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2021), 205.

Richard H. Davis describes the Jñāneśvarī as “a kind of meta-Gita” in which “the seven hundred verses of the

Sanskrit Gita are embedded in a nine-thousand-verse Marathi poem that translates, paraphrases, explains, expands,

and extols the teachings of Krishna” (The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography [Princeton: Princeton University Press,

2015], 66).

Christian Lee Novetzke, The Quotidian Revolution: Vernacularization, Religion, and the Premodern Public

Sphere in India (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 222.

Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern

India (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 559.

Manoj Kumar R., “Kurukshetra movie review: This Darshan film is a throwback to old-school mythological

dramas,” The Indian Express, August 9, 2019, https://indianexpress.com/article/entertainment/movie-

review/kurukshetra-movie-review-rating-5891784/.

For a summary of the extensive scholarship on the Sanskrit epic, see Bruce M. Sullivan, “An Overview of

Mahābhārata Scholarship: A Perspective on the State of the Field,” Religion Compass 10, no. 7 (2016): 165–75.

This dissertation makes two broad contributions to the study of South Asian religions.

First, it offers a comparative study of bhakti poems in two languages from opposite ends of

South Asia. Despite the plethora of scholarship on bhakti literature, South Asian bhakti traditions

have largely been examined separately in their own regional contexts. In this study of the Tamil

Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat, I reveal how bhakti functions as a shared literary mode in

these retellings without failing to also pay careful attention to their distinct regional differences.

Second, this project challenges an established position in South Asian Studies that relegates

devotional/religious literature and courtly/political literature to mutually exclusive worlds. The

Pāratam and the Mahābhārat have been labeled as courtly texts based on patronage claims in

each poem. Pushing back against the court/temple divide in contemporary scholarship, I analyze

the devotional contexts of these Mahābhāratas and their intersections with the courtly.

The remainder of this Introduction proceeds as follows. I first introduce Villiputtūrār’s

Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat and explain why I use the term

“retelling” rather than “translation” to describe these two Mahābhāratas in regional South Asian

languages. Next, I summarize some of the major approaches that have been employed in

scholarship on bhakti literature and share what I mean by the term “bhakti” in my comparative

study of the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat. This leads to a discussion of the

court/temple divide in South Asian Studies in which I address how premodern Mahābhāratas in

regional languages have recently been categorized as non-religious works of courtly literature.

Finally, I provide a chapter-by-chapter summary of the trajectory of this dissertation.

The Mahābhārata Retellings of Villi and Cauhān

While Villiputtūrār’s Tamil Pāratam and Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat were

composed more than two hundred years apart in two distinctly different languages at opposite

ends of the Indian subcontinent, these two Mahābhāratas share much in common.

Let me first point out that there are other premodern Mahābhāratas composed in Tamil

and Bhasha. Tamil Mahābhāratas include Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Pārataveṇpā (Bhārata in

Veṇpā Meter), Pukaḻēnti’s thirteenth-century Naḷaveṇpā (Story of Nala in Veṇpā Meter), and

Ativīrarāmaṉ’s sixteenth-century Naiṭatam (Naiṣadha King), while Bhasha Mahābhāratas

include Lakhansenī’s fifteenth-century Virāṭparv (Book of Virāṭa’s Court), Viṣṇudās’s fifteenth-

century Pāṇḍavcarit (Deeds of the Pāṇḍavas),

Kulapati Miśra’s seventeenth-century

Śaṅgrāmsār (Nature of War), Tursīdās’s seventeenth-century Itihās Sammucay (Collection on

History), Bhagvāndās’s seventeenth-century Jaimanī Aśvamedh (Horse Sacrifice by Jaimini) and

Bulākīdās’s seventeenth-century Pāṇḍavpurāṇ (Legend of the Pāṇḍavas).

Notably, a manuscript of Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit, which was copied in 1738 in Datia by Caturbhuj Caube, was

conflated with the sixth through tenth books of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat. See Harihar Nivās Dvivedī, introduction to

Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit (Mahākavi Viṣṇudās Kṛt Mahābhārat: Pāṇḍav-carit), ed. Harihar Nivās Dvivedī (Gwalior:

Vidyā Maṃdir Prakāśan, 1973). All references to the Pāṇḍavcarit are to this edition.

See Kamil Veith Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1974), 143–46; David Shulman,

Tamil: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), 210–15, and 234–35; Imre Bangha, “The

Emergence of Hindi Literature: From Transregional Maru-Gurjar to Madhyadeśī Narratives,” in Text and Tradition

in Early Modern North India, ed. Tyler Williams, Anshu Malhotra, and John Stratton Hawley (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 2018), 13–14; R.S. McGregor, Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century

(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1984), 35–37 and 187, Allison Busch, Poetry of Kings: The Classical Hindi

Literature of Mughal India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 174; Tyler W. Williams, “Sacred Sounds

and Sacred Books: A History of Writing in Hindi,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 219–22; and Eva De

The Tamil Pāratam of Villiputtūrār (or Villi as he is often called)

and the Bhasha

Mahābhārat of Sabalsingh Cauhān (who I will henceforth refer to as Cauhān), however, are the

most widely-known premodern Mahābhāratas of their respective literary cultures and these texts

are mentioned in several major Tamil and Hindi literary histories.

The Pāratam and the

Mahābhārat have had active lives in manuscript and print culture. During my fieldwork in the

United Kingdom and India, I located thirty-three manuscripts of the Pāratam, forty manuscripts

of the Mahābhārat, and multiple different printed editions of both texts. These Mahābhāratas

have also each inspired living performance traditions. Villi’s Tamil Pāratam is an important

source for the Piracaṅkam Pāratam (Discourse on the Bhārata) recitations and the Terukkūttu or

“street theater” plays of the Draupadī goddess cult in the northern region of Tamil Nadu in South

India.

In Chhattisgarh in Central India, excerpts from Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat have been

incorporated into the Vedmatī style of the Paṇḍvānī (Speech about the Pāṇḍavas) ballad

performances of the Gond community and the chanting rituals of the Rāmnāmī religious sect.

As Gregory Clines points out, “with many pre-modern South Asian authors, few hard-

and-fast historical facts are available to scholars.”

This is certainly the case with both Villi and

Cauhān. Neither poet offers any detailed biographical information about themselves in their

regional Mahābhāratas other than references to courtly patrons. In an introduction to the Pāratam

attributed to Villi’s son Varantaruvār, Varantaruvār describes his father being commissioned to

compose a Tamil Mahābhārata by Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, the king of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, which is

the land surrounding the town of Tirukkovalur, which in turn is in the Viluppuram district in

Clercq and Simon Winant, “The Fate of Kīcaka in Two Jain Apabhramsha Mahābhāratas,” in Many Mahābhāratas,

ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 218.

Villi may be named after Srivilliputtur (Śrīvilliputtūr), the town members of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community

in South India revere as the hometown of two of the twelve Vaiṣṇava Tamil bhakti poets known as the Āḻvārs:

Periyāḻvār and Āṇṭāḷ. Archana Venkatesan kindly shared a story she heard in 2002 from a priest at the Āṇṭāḷ temple

in Srivilliputtur that paints Villi as a former hedonist and beggar who is cured of leprosy on a rainy night in

Srivilliputtur by Āṇṭāḷ in the guise of an old woman. After being saved by Āṇṭāḷ, Villi turns over a new leaf and

composes his Pāratam to demonstrate that he is a changed man. Venkatesan told me: “I was never able to find a

textual version of the story, but I am sure it exists somewhere” (personal communication, February 23, 2018).

See C. Jesudasan and Hephzibah Jesudasan, A History of Tamil Literature (Calcutta: Y.M.C.A Publishing House,

1961), 204–9; T.P. Meenakshisundaran, A History of Tamil Literature (Annamalainagar: Annamalai University,

1965), 158–59; Mu. Varadarajan, Tamiḻ Ilakkiya Varalāṟu (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1972), translated by E. Sa.

Visswanathan as A History of Tamil Literature (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 1988), 195; Zvelebil, Tamil Literature

(1974), 144; Śivsingh Sengar, Śivsinghsāroj, 1878; repr. (Lucknow: Tej Kumār Book Depot, 1966), 500; George A.

Grierson, The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1889), 78; Gaṇeśvihārī

Miśra, Śyāmvihārī Miśra, and Śukadevvihārī Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod, vol. 1 (Hyderabad: Gangā-Granthāgār,

1972; first published 1913, Hindī Granth Prasārak Maṇḍalī [Allahabad], 272–73; Rāmcandra Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya

kā Itihās, 9th ed. (Banaras: Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā, 1942), 326; and McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

Alf Hiltebeitel, The Cult of Draupadī, vol. 1, Mythologies: From Gingee to Kurukṣetra (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1988), 137–38; and Richard Armando Frasca, The Theatre of the Mahābhārata: Terukkūttu

Performances in South India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1990), 54–55.

Niranjan Mahawar, Folk Theatre Pandwani (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 2013), 32; and Ramdas Lamb, Rapt in

the Name: The Ramnamis, Ramnam, and Untouchable Religion in Central India (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 2002), 118–19.

Clines, “Lotus’ New Bloom,” 5.

present-day Tamil Nadu. At four different points in the narrative of the Tamil Pāratam, Villi

himself praises Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ. These references to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ have been used by

Tamil scholars to date the Pāratam

to the late-fourteenth or early-fifteenth century because

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ is also praised by a pair of Tamil authors known as the Iraṭṭaiyar or the “Twin

Poets” who in turn have been dated by the reign of their supposed patron, the chieftain

Rājanārāyaṇa Campuvarāyaṉ (1331–1381 CE), using epigraphical evidence.

The Bhasha Mahābhārat, like the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, is divided

into eighteen different books.

In the prologue of his sixteenth book, Cauhān describes himself

performing his poem before a king named Mitrasen and the sixth ruler of the Mughal Empire,

Aurangzeb (Awrangzīb), in Delhi.

He also praises Mitrasen in the prologue of the seventh book

and Aurangzeb in the prologues of the sixth, eighth, ninth, and seventeenth books of the Bhasha

Mahābhārat. Based on these allusions and seven of the eight different composition dates that

Cauhān gives in eight prologues to his books (the earliest date being 1661 CE and the last being

1724 CE) being within the dates accepted as Aurangzeb’s reign (1658–1707 CE), multiple Hindi

literary historians have argued that Cauhān and Mitrasen were in the service of Aurangzeb in

Delhi.

I will discuss these patronage claims in Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat in much greater detail in Chapters Five and Six of this dissertation.

In the beginning of their compositions, Villi and Cauhān both distinctly describe

themselves narrating the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in a regional South Asian language. In the

author’s own introduction (taṟciṟappuppāyiram) to the Tamil Pāratam, Villi presents his

audience with an avaiyaṭakkam, a literary device that Anne Monius defines as “the author’s

expression of modesty regarding the faults of the composition to follow.”

Along with

lamenting his lack of poetic skills, Villi praises Kṛṣṇadvaipāyana Vyāsa, the grandfather of the

Pāṇḍavas who is traditionally considered to be the author of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Villi

M.S.H Thompson, “The Mahābhārata in Tamil,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland

92, no. 3/4 (1960): 118–19; and K.V. Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 214–15.

I should point out that while the critical edition and the vulgate recension of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata consist of

eighteen books, many Telugu and Grantha manuscripts of the Sanskrit epic have twenty-three or twenty-four books.

See Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee, Philology and Criticism: A Guide to Mahābhārata Textual Criticism

(New York: Anthem Press, 2018), 367.

The Mughal emperors are usually referred to by their regnal names rather than their birth names (Akbar instead of

Jalāl al-Dīn, Jahāngīr instead of Salīm, and Shāh Jahān instead of Khurram). The sixth Mughal emperor, however, is

most frequently referred to by his birth name Aurangzeb (Awrangzīb) instead of his regnal name ʿĀlamgīr.

See Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272–73; Lala Sita Ram, ed. Other Poets with a Brief History of

the Hindi Language, vol. 6, bk. 1 of Selections from Hindi Literature (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1925), 236;

Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 326; Nagendra, ed. Rītikāl, vol 7. of Hindī Sāhitya kā Bṛhat Itihās, ed. Sampūrānand

(Banaras: Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā, 1972), 371; and McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

Anne E. Monius, “Love, Violence, and the Aesthetics of Disgust: Śaivas and Jains in Medieval South India,”

Journal of Indian Philosophy 32, no. 2/3 (2004): 139.

On the complex question of Vyāsa’s “authorship” of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, see Robert P. Goldman,

introduction to Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa (Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 1, Bālakāṇḍa), trans.

Robert P. Goldman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 29–31.

describes Vyāsa (viyātaṉār) as the composer the “long story” (neṭuṅ katai),

which is a clear

reference to the massive length of the Sanskrit epic. Villi then states that he is retelling Vyāsa’s

poem in “southern speech” (ten col) or Tamil.

This is in contrast to the Mahābhārata, which

Villi describes as a text in the “great language” (mā moḻi) or Sanskrit.

In the first chapter of the

Bhasha Mahābhārat, Cauhān praises “that great sage Vyāsa” (mahā muni jo vyāsa) and tells us

that he will “summarize” (saṅkṣepa) the Mahābhārata in Bhasha (bhāṣā).

At the very end of

Cauhān’s composition, we find the following declaration in the final couplet of the entire poem:

“Sabalsingh says, ‘I am devoid of intelligence and have said what Vyāsa has said.’”

Villi and Cauhān are not the only premodern Mahābhārata poets who pay tribute to

Vyāsa or describe their compositions as narrations of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in regional

South Asian languages. In the beginning of his tenth-century Kannada Mahābhārata, the

Vikramārjunavijayam (Victory of Heroic Arjuna), the Jain poet Pampa proclaims: “I will swim

in the nectar ocean of rich speech of the great Sage Vyāsa, but I am not so arrogant as to say, ‘I

am the Poet Vyāsa.’”

Nannaya’s portion of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu opens with an account

of the Chalukya king Rājarājanarendra (r. 1018–1061) commissioning the poet to compose the

Mahābhāratamu. Nannaya tells his audience that Rājarājanarendra told him: “with all your

learning, please compose in Tenugu [Telugu] a book that makes clear what the celebrated Kṛṣṇa

Dvaipāyana spoke, the proven meaning bound to the Mahābhārata text.”

Viṣṇudās extols the

composer of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in the opening verses of his Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit: “again

I bow my head to that Vyāsa, that man who appears to have no faults or stains.”

Viṣṇudās then

states that he will “tell the Bhārata in Bhasha” (bhāratahi bhākhaū).

Rāma Sarasvatī claims in

his sixteenth-century Assamese Mahābhārata that the last king of the Koch kingdom,

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 6. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Villi’s Pāratam (VP) are to the following

edition of the text: Villiputtūrār, Villiputtūrār Iyar

iya Makāpāratam, ed Vai. Mu. Kōpālakiruṣṇamācāriyār, 7 vols.

(Madras: 1963–68). Citations refer to the book, chapter, and verse numbers.

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 7.

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 8.

CM 1.2. Unless noted otherwise, all references to Cauhān’s Mahābhārat (CM) are to the following edition of the

text: Sabalsingh Cauhān, Sabalsingh Cauhān-Viracit Mahābhārat (Lucknow: Tej Kumār Book Depot, 2015).

Citations refer to the book and page numbers.

sabalasiṃha mati hīna vyāsa kahata tasa kaheu hama || CM 18.24 ||

Pampa, Vikramārjunavijayam 1.14, trans. Sarah Pierce Taylor in “Digambara Jainism and the Making of Old

Kannada Literary Culture,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Jainism, ed. John E. Cort, Paul Dundas, Knut A. Jacobsen,

and Kristi L. Wiley. Brill Online, 2020, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2590-2768_BEJO_COM_035073.

Nannaya, Mahābhāratamu, trans. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman in Classical Telugu Poetry: An

Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 59.

puni tihi vyāsa navani kiya sīpā tā nara rogu kalaku na dīmā || Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 1.1.34 ||

Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 1.1 dohā 2.

Naranārāyaṇa (r. 1540–1584), sent the poet “numerous grammars and commentaries” from his

palace and commanded him to “render the essence of the Bhārata into Assamese verse.”

Based on these excerpts, it might appear that Villi, Cauhān, Pampa, Nannaya, Viṣṇudās,

and Rāma Sarasvatī are all describing processes of “translating” the Sanskrit Mahābhārata into

regional South Asian languages. In her study of the sixteenth-century Razmnāmah (Book of

War), the Persian Mahābhārata that was commissioned by the third Mughal emperor Akbar (r.

1556–1605), Audrey Truschke uses the term “translation” to describe the Razmnāmah. She

explains that to create the Razmnāmah, Akbar gathered a group of Brahmin scholars who would

read from the northern recension of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and then explain the narrative in

Bhasha to a group of Persian literati who then wrote down what they heard in Persian.

This

method of composing the Razmnāmah is one that seems to fit the Western idea of “translation”

quite well. Yet as Truschke herself points out, “the Persian translation is not a line by line

rendering of the Sanskrit original, and some sections are abridged, or significantly altered.”

This is also true of both Villi’s Pāratam and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat. While the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata is traditionally said to contain 100,000 śloka couplets (about 200,000 lines), the

Tamil Pāratam is made up of roughly 4,300 viruttam quatrains (about 17,200 lines) and the

Bhasha Mahābhārat consists of approximately 1,800 ten-line stanzas in the caupāī-dohā

quatrain-couplet meter (about 18,000 lines). As we will see throughout this dissertation, there are

stories and episodes in each of these regional Mahābhāratas that are not found in any recension

of the Sanskrit epic. Moreover, unlike with the Razmnāmah, there is no definitive evidence that

either Villi or Cauhān read or heard a recension of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. These poets’

exposure to the Mahābhārata tradition may primarily have been through different oral and

performance traditions and other works of literature. Tamil scholars have identified

Peruntēvaṉār’s Tamil Pārataveṇpā and Agastya Paṇḍita’s fourteenth-century Sanskrit

Bālabhārata as two key sources of inspiration for Villi’s Pāratam.

Some of the episodes in

Cauhān’s Mahābhārat mirror those in the twelfth-century Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata,

Kumāravyāsa’s Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, Cĕṟuśśeri’s fifteenth-century Malayalam

Bhāratagātha (Song of the Bhārata), Sāraḷādāsa’s fifteenth-century Oriya Mahābhārata,

Kāśīrāmdās’s seventeenth-century Bengali Mahābhārata, and the seventeenth-century Konkani

Bhārata, which suggests that certain Mahābhārata stories were circulating across South Asia.

Neither the Pāratam nor the Mahābhārat is a line-by-line “translation” of the Sanskrit epic.

Rāma Sarasvatī, Mahābhārata 3935–37, trans. William L. Smith in “The Burden of the Forest: Two Apocryphal

Parvans from Vernacular Mahābhāratas,” Rocznik Orientalistyczny 54, no. 1 (2001): 93–94.

Audrey Truschke, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (New York: Columbia University Press,

2016), 103–7.

Truschke, 107.

C.R. Sankaran and K. Rama Varma Raja, “On the Sources of Villiputtūrār-Bhāratam,” Bulletin of the Deccan

College Research Institute 5 (1943): 231; Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 121; Kambalur Venkatesa Acharya,

Mahabharata and Variations, Perundevanar and Pampa: A Comparative Study (Kurnool: Vyasaraja Publications,

1981), 81; Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadī, 1:15; and A.A. Manavalan, “Tamil Versions of the Mahābhārata and

Studies on the Tamil Versions,” in Mahābhārata: The End of an Era (Yugānta), ed. Ajay Mitra Shastri (Shimla:

India Institute of Advanced Study, 2004), 334–35.

On the shared episodes between Cauhān’s Mahābhārat and other regional Mahābhāratas, see Chapter Two.

In the past thirty years, however, some scholars of South Asian literature have called for

a broadening of the understanding of the term “translation” beyond the simple replication of a

text from one language into another. In his well-known essay “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five

Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation” (1991), A.K. Ramanujan draws on the work of

Charles Sanders Peirce and describes three different types of translation (iconic, indexical, and

symbolic) using examples from other great epic narrative tradition of South Asia: the Rāmāyaṇa.

Where Text I and Text 2 have a geometrical resemblance to each other, as one triangle to another

(whatever the angles, sizes, or colors of the lines), we call such a relation iconic. In the West, we

generally expect translations to be “faithful,” i.e. iconic. Thus, when Chapman translates Homer,

he not only preserves basic textual features such as characters, imagery, and order of incidents,

but tries to reproduce a hexameter and retain the same number of lines as in the original Greek—

only the language is English and the idiom Elizabethan. When Kampaṉ retells Vālmīki’s

Rāmāyaṇa in Tamil, he is largely faithful in keeping to the order and sequence of episodes, the

structural relations between the characters of father, son, brothers, wives, friends, and enemies.

But the iconicity is limited to such structural relations. His work is much longer than Vālmīki’s,

for example, and it is composed in more than twenty different kinds of Tamil meters, while

Vālmīki’s is mostly in the śloka meter. Very often, although Text 2 stands in an iconic

relationship to Text 1 in terms of basic elements such as plot, it is filled with local detail, folklore,

poetic traditions, imagery, and so forth—as in Kampaṉ’s telling or that of the Bengali Kṛttivāsa.

In the Bengali Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma’s wedding is very much a Bengali wedding, with Bengali

customs and Bengali cuisine. We may call such a text indexical: the text is embedded in a locale,

a context, refers to it, even signifies it, and would not make much sense without it… Now and

then, as we have seen, Text 2 uses the plot and characters and names of Text 1 minimally and

uses them to say entirely new things, often in an effort to subvert the predecessor by producing a

countertext. We may call such a translation symbolic. The word translation itself here acquires a

somewhat mathematical sense, of mapping a structure of relations onto another plane or another

symbolic system. When this happens, the Rāma story has become almost a second language of

the whole culture area, a shared core of names, characters, incidents, and motifs, with a narrative

language in which Text 1 can say one thing and Text 2 something else, even the exact opposite.

Vālmīki’s Hindu and Vimalasūri’s Jaina texts in India—or the Thai Ramakirti in Southeast

Asia—are such symbolic translations of each other.

As with the premodern regional Rāmāyaṇas of Kampaṉ and Kṛttivāsa and Vālmīki’s Sanskrit

Rāmāyaṇa, the premodern regional Mahābhāratas of Villi and Cauhān have iconic relationships

with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata attributed to Vyāsa in terms of plot sequence and characters. But

both poems are also indexical in that they are “filled with local detail, folklore, poetic traditions,

imagery, and so forth” from their individual regional contexts and literary cultures.

In Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and

Southeast Asia (2011), Ronit Ricci also uses the term “translation” for three premodern Islamic

renderings of a narrative called the Book of One Thousand Questions that are composed in

Javanese, Malay, and Tamil. Ricci discusses a “broader” type of translation that “incorporates

elements of transmission, a process which continues to occur long after a story is first introduced

into new linguistic and cultural surroundings, and through which a story takes on unique local

A.K. Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation,” in Many

Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1991), 44–45.

characteristics in addition to the elements common to it across languages.”

Ricci also draws our

attention to moḻipeyar, a word that is found in the ancient Tamil literary treatise, the

Tolkāppiyam, and that “in modern Tamil has assumed the meaning ‘to translate.’”

She explains

that the focus of moḻipeyar is “first and foremost on making a text Tamil, in accordance with

local ideas about writing; it is an interpretation, an explanation, a meaningful expression, rather

than an equivalent using a different language; and it hints at a change, a move, a conversion.”

As I will show, neither Villi nor Cauhān are creating an “equivalent” of the Sanskrit epic.

Yet while the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat certainly have iconic and

indexical relationships with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the term moḻipeyar accurately

captures many elements of the projects of Villi and Cauhān, I still resist using the word

“translation” for these two premodern Mahābhāratas composed in regional South Asian

languages. My avoidance of the term “translation” is largely related to what John Cort describes

as “a broader cultural and academic devaluation of translation and translators” in North America

and Europe in which “translation is not considered to be ‘original,’ and so it is often dismissed as

unimportant, uncreative, and ultimately derivative and mechanical work.

To circumvent these negative connotations of the term “translation,” I instead choose to

use the term “retelling” to describe the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat. As we have

seen, several authors of premodern Mahābhāratas in regional South Asian languages, including

Villi, Cauhān, Pampa, Nannaya, Viṣṇudās, and Rāma Sarasvatī, all explicitly claim to be

narrating a story that has already been told: Vyāsa’s Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Again, it is very

possible that none of these regional poets ever read or heard a recension of the Sanskrit epic. Yet

it is also significant that all these Mahābhārata authors are distinctly placing their regional

compositions in the lineage of Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata and therefore I use the term “retelling.”

Thus far I have identified many similarities between Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān

Bhasha Mahābhārat including their active lives in manuscript culture, print culture, and living

performance traditions, their multiple allusions to courtly patrons, and their declarations of

narrating Vyāsa’s Sanskrit Mahābhārata in regional South Asian languages. The most striking

similarity, however, is that both Villi and Cauhān present their regional Mahābhāratas retellings

as works of bhakti (devotion) centered on the popular Hindu deity Krishna.

Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 33–34.

For a recent use of Ricci’s conceptualizations, see Ayesha A. Irani, The Muhammad Avatāra: Salvation History,

Translation, and the Making of Bengali Islam (New York: Oxford University Press, 2021), 137–40.

Ricci, Islam Translated, 56.

Ricci, 56.

John Cort, “Making it Vernacular in Agra: The Practice of Translation by Seventeenth-Century Jains,” in Tellings

and Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield

(Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 64.

Approaching the “Crazy Quilt” of Bhakti

Until very recently, the term “bhakti” has been inextricably linked to a pan-South Asian “bhakti

movement” that is said to have begun in South India around the sixth century before spreading

all over the subcontinent and reaching its zenith in North India nearly one thousand years later.

In his pathbreaking A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (2015),

however, John Stratton Hawley has convincingly shown that this “bhakti movement” narrative is

a “product of history” that only “fully crystallized” in the 1900s.

Hawley details how multiple

different texts and players––including the eighteenth-century Sanskrit work entitled the

Bhāgavatamāhātmya (Majesty of Bhagavān), Nābhādās’s seventeenth-century Bhasha

hagiography of bhaktas (devotees) known as the Bhaktamāl (Garland of Bhaktas), the king

Jaisingh II of Jaipur (r. 1699–1743), the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore (1861–1941), the

Irish linguist Sir George Abraham Grierson (1851–1941), and the Hindi scholar Hazārīprasād

Dvivedī (1907–1979)––were involved in the creation of this “idea of the bhakti movement.”

Yet it is also important to acknowledge (as Hawley does in detail in the final chapter of A

Storm of Songs) that there are several shared images, tropes, motifs, themes, and stories in

premodern bhakti compositions in regional languages from nearly every corner of South Asia.

Take, for instance, the poetry of Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās. While Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās are both

Vaiṣṇavas (devotees of Viṣṇu and his various forms), these bhakti poets are separated by

hundreds of centuries and miles. Periyāḻvār is one of the twelve Tamil poets known as the Āḻvārs

(those who are “immersed” in Viṣṇu) who likely lived between the sixth and ninth centuries. By

the twelfth century, the collected poems of the Āḻvārs known as the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam

(Four Thousand Divine Works) was a paramount scripture for followers of the Śrīvaiṣṇava

religious tradition in South India. Although the Vallabha sampradāya (community) in the

northern and western regions of India claim the sixteenth-century Bhasha poet Sūrdās as one of

their own, there is no evidence that he was a follower of Vallabha in any of the poems contained

within the huge corpus of poems attributed to him known as the Sūrsagar (Ocean of Sūrdās).

Yet as Hawley has observed, the compositions of Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās share much in

common: “seven hundred years before Sūr Dās and a thousand miles away, is a remarkably

comprehensive presentation of the thievish mischief of Krishna that was so to fascinate the poet

of Braj…Periyāḻvār highlights the sharp give-and-take between Yaśodā and the girls of Braj that

Sūr so loved.”

Both Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās speak of multiple different forms of Viṣṇu, but these

two bhakti poets clearly have a special fondness and preference for Krishna, specifically Krishna

as a young child. Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās also both frequently adopt the persona of Krishna’s

adoptive mother Yaśodā and speak in her voice. Consider the first two verses of a set of ten

verses in Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi (Divine Speech) in which Yaśodā calls out to the moon:

A diadem dances on his brow as he crawls;

Gold trinkets on his ankles tinkle in the dust.

John Stratton Hawley, A Storm of Songs: India and the Idea of the Bhakti Movement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2015), 8–9.

See John Stratton Hawley, “Surdas” in John Stratton Hawley and Mark Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints of

India (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), 95.

John Stratton Hawley, Krishna, the Butter Thief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 42.

Lovely young moon, if the eyes in your face are real,

Come watch the frolicking of my son, Govinda.

My little fellow, as sweet as nectar to me,

My Lord waves his little hands, points to you and calls.

If you want to play with him – dark-hued as collyrium

Don’t cower in the dark clouds, Moon. Come cheerfully; be quick!

We find a remarkably similar Bhasha poem attributed to Sūrdās in the Sūrsagar:

“Come here, Hari [Krishna], take hold of the moon,”

Yashoda says again and again.

“Look down a little, look down:

from the sky I brought it close and put it

in this water pitcher––quite some task.

Look Damodar, the nectar-bearing moon

is lying in this little dish!

All the way from the hard-to-reach heavens

it’s come––I sent a bird to bring it here––

so whenever you like, let your lotus hands take it

and give it to whomever you wish.

Listen, my pretty son, is the moon the reason why

you’ve fallen into such a nasty mood?

Sur’s Lord, my dear, how could such a trifling thing

make you act in such a trying way?”

There are, of course, differences between these compositions by Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās, the most

obvious being that in the verses in the Tirumoḻi, Yaśodā is addressing the moon and in the poem

from the Sūrsagar, Yaśodā is speaking to Krishna. Yet in both works, Yaśodā is clearly using the

moon to try and ensure the happiness of her beloved son Krishna. These excerpts are expressions

of what sixteenth-century theologians who were members of the Gauḍīya sampradāya in North

India would eventually call vātsalya-bhāva or the “emotional state of a parent.”

Examples of Yaśodā displaying vātsalya-bhāva are also found in one of the most famous

works of bhakti literature: the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Legend of Bhagavān, c. tenth

century).

As Friedhelm Hardy has convincingly argued, the Āḻvārs’ Nālāyirativiyappirapantam

was an important source of inspiration for the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, which was likely composed in

Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 1.4.1–2, trans. Lynn Ate in Yaśodā’s Songs to Her Playful Son, Kṛṣṇa: Periyāḻvār’s 9

Century Tamil Tirumoḻi, trans. Lynn Ate (Woodland Hills, CA: South Asian Studies Association, 2011), 78. All

references to poems in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam are to: Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, ed. P.P. Aṇṇaṅkarācāriyār

(Kanchi: V.N. Tēvanātan, 1967).

Sūrdās, Sūrsagar 81, trans. John Stratton Hawley in Sur’s Ocean: Poems from the Early Tradition, trans. John

Stratton Hawley, ed. Kenneth E. Bryant, Murty Classical Library of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2015) 35. All references to poems in the Sūrsagar are to this Murty Classical Library edition.

For a detailed overview of vātsalya-bhāva, see Lynn Ate, “Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi: A Bālakṛṣṇa Text from the

Devotional Period in Tamil Literature” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 1978), 92–94.

Ate, 89–92.

South India.

And while Hawley rejects the Vallabha sampradāya’s claim that Sūrdās was

“translating” the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, he does show that Sūrdās “planned for a situation in which

those who did know the Bhāgavata Purāṇa thereby gained access to a deeper appreciation of the

subtlety of his own compositions.”

Could the Bhāgavatapurāṇa be the link explaining these

similar poems involving Krishna, Yaśodā, and the moon by Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās?

Not in this case. As Hawley points out in A Storm of Songs, “within the narrative world

of Krishna, so fundamental to much that goes under the heading of the bhakti movement, we

meet an array of particular connections that cannot be explained as vernacular transubstantiations

of motifs that occur in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, that admittedly omnipresent Sanskrit text, since

they do not appear there.”

Yaśodā trying to entice Krishna with the moon is one of these

motifs. Hawley goes on to explain that this “moon-in-dish motif” of the poem in the Sūrsagar

“apparently unknown in Sanskrit, corresponds closely to appeals to the moon that Tamil poets

are required to make on behalf of mothers with small children as a part of the piḷḷaitamiḻ genre

that became so fashionable in the fourteenth or fifteenth century. There are echoes in a Telugu

poem attributed to Annamayya and we meet it in Gujarati with Narsī Mehtā as the author.”

Periyāḻvār, Sūrdās, Annamayya, and Narsī Mehtā are all Vaiṣṇava poets. But we also find

shared themes in bhakti compositions by both Vaiṣṇavas and Śaivas (devotees of the Hindu deity

Śiva). As A.K. Ramanujan, Vijaya Ramaswamy, and S. Keshavmurthy have observed, multiple

bhakti poetesses describe themselves as the brides of their chosen deity.

In her Tamil

Nācciyārtirumoḻi (Divine Speech of Women), Āṇṭāḷ, the only woman among the twelve Āḻvārs,

uses ten verses to describe a dream in which she weds Viṣṇu. In the second verse, she tells us:

They decreed, “Tomorrow is the auspicious day of your wedding!”

The proud young lion Mādhava,

that Govinda of bull-like power entered the green canopy

decorated with palm fronds and areca nut.

Such a vision I dreamed, my friend.

Friedhelm Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (Delhi: Oxford University

Press, 1983), 511–26.

John Stratton Hawley, introduction to Sūrdās, The Memory of Love: Sūrdās Sings to Krishna, trans. John Stratton

Hawley (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 15.

Hawley, Storm of Songs, 300.

Hawley, 301.

A.K. Ramanujan, “On Women Saints,” in The Divine Consort: Rādhā and the Goddesses of India, ed. John

Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff (Berkeley: Graduate Theological Union, 1982), 322; Vijaya Ramaswamy,

“Rebels — Conformists? Women Saints in Medieval South India,” Anthropos 879, no. 1/3 (1992): 140–41; and S.

Keshavmurthy, Mīrābāī, Akkamahādevī, evaṃ, Āṇḍāl kā Tulanātmaka Adhyayan (Kanpur: Annapūrṇā Prakāśan,

1996), 227–30.

Āṇṭāḷ, Nācciyārtirumoḻi 6.2, trans. Archana Venkatesan in The Secret Garland: Āṇṭāḷ’s Tiruppāvai and Nācciyār

Tirumoḻi, trans. Archana Venkatesan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 163.

Mahādevīyakkā, another female bhakti poet from South India, also speaks of herself as the bride

of a Hindu god in her twelfth-century Kannada compositions which became part of the literary

cannon of the Vīraśaiva community in Karnataka. Yet while Āṇṭāḷ’s divine husband is Viṣṇu,

Mahādevīyakkā’s celestial spouse is Śiva in his form as Mallikārjuna or the “lord white as

jasmine.” In the second half of the following poem, Mahādevīyakkā announces:

My mind is my maid:

by her kindness, I join

my Lord,

my utterly beautiful Lord

from the mountain-peaks,

my lord white as jasmine,

and I will make Him

my good husband.

A third example of a poetess calling herself the bride of a deity is found in this Bhasha poem

attributed to the Krishna bhakta Mīrābāī that mirrors the verse from Āṇṭāḷ’s Nācciyārtirumoḻi:

Sister, in a dream

I married the Protector of the Poor.

Five hundred sixty million strong the wedding party,

The beautiful Lord of Braj, the groom.

In a dream, the wedding arch was raised,

In a dream, He grasped my hand.

In a dream, my wedding came to pass,

Making me ever the auspicious bride.

Mira obtained the Mountain Bearer—

Her destiny of lives gone by.

The bhakti songs of Āṇṭāḷ, Mahādevīyakkā, and Mīrābāī emerge from very different historical,

regional, and sectarian contexts. Their similar themes and motifs, however, are striking.

In the final chapter of A Storm of Songs, Hawley identifies several other shared elements

that are found in works of bhakti from across premodern South Asia. Commenting on the

prevalence of bhakti poems about viraha or “love in separation,” he notes that “perhaps the idea

of a broken heart is so universal that it attracts no particular attention, but the fact that a male

poet takes on the voice of a woman to ask specifically why his heart does not burst is more

arresting. This happens in poems of Narsī Mehtā or Sūrdās, for example.”

Hawley adds that

“all around India” bhaktas “revel in the fact that they are ‘number one among idiots,’ as

Annamayya says, or ‘best of sinners,’ as Sūrdās boasts. Similarly, in the genre known as

nindāstuti they go on to lambast the Deity for failing to rescue them, as would be required if he

Mahādevīyakkā, vacana 328, trans. A.K. Ramanujan in Speaking of Śiva (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1973), 141.

Mīrābāī, pada 8, trans. Nancy M. Martin in “Rajasthan: Mirabai and her Poetry,” in Krishna: A Sourcebook, ed.

Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 249–50.

Hawley, Storm of Songs, 300.

were faithful to the many names by which he is touted as Savior of the Fallen.”

Hawley

proceeds to describe multiple other connections and resonances within the wide world of

premodern bhakti poetry in the Indian subcontinent which he aptly describes as “a crazy quilt.”

As Hamsa Stainton has recently pointed out, “overall, the study of bhakti in vernacular

contexts––both as a phenomenon and as an historiographical category––has been one of the most

dynamic and productive areas of scholarship on South Asian religions.”

Yet as Stainton goes

on to note (and then remedy with the rest of his monograph), bhakti scholarship has largely

ignored the key role that Sanskrit played as a language of bhakti in premodern South Asia.

Another major gap in scholarship on bhakti poetry is the lack of comparative studies of bhakti

compositions in different regional South Asian languages. Apart from the aforementioned studies

and two symposiums organized by the Regional Bhakti Scholars Network in 2016 and 2017 at

the Annual Conference on South Asia, there have been very few attempts to compare the

different patches and threads that make up the “crazy quilt” of bhakti that Hawley describes.

In his work on Jain bhakti, John Cort asserts that “bhakti is not restricted to what scholars

say it is; rather it is primarily what bhaktas have said it is, and these bhaktas include Vaiṣṇavas,

Śaivas, Śāktas, Sants, Jains, Buddhists, and others. We then find that bhakti is a highly complex,

multiform cultural category, which is differently understood and practiced in different times,

places, and sects…bhakti is not one thing.”

Similarly, Jon Keune argues that “the term [bhakti]

has taken on a deceptive aura of familiarity, although its precise definition is vitally rooted in the

contexts in which it is used. These contexts (inflected by language, tradition, social location, and

historical period) differ significantly from one another and exhibit a wide range of socio-political

dynamics.”

Keune goes to warn us that “deploying a singular notion of bhakti on early modern

history over-determines the subject, brushing over complexities and exceptions.”

Cort and Keune make excellent points about the importance of situating works of bhakti

literature in their unique historical, sectarian, and regional contexts and I take care to do this with

the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat in this project. To further refine my comparative

study of these two Mahābhāratas, I also need to clarify the type of bhakti that I am referring to

when I use this term in my dissertation since, as Cort points out, “bhakti is not one thing.”

I would categorize the bhakti of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat as what Hardy has called “emotional bhakti.” In his influential Viraha-Bhakti: The

Hawley, 301.

Hawley, 310.

Hamsa Stainton, Poetry as Prayer in the Sanskrit Hymns of Kashmir (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019),

14–15.

See Gil Ben-Herut and Jon Keune, “Workshops and Symposia,” Regional Bhakti Scholars Network,

https://www.regionalbhakti.org/workshops-and-symposia/.

John E. Cort, “Bhakti in the Early Jain Tradition: Understanding Devotional Religion in South Asia,” History of

Religions 42, no.1 (2002): 62.

Jon Keune, “Eknāth in Context: The Literary, Social, and Political Milieus of an Early Modern Saint-Poet,” South

Asian History and Culture 6, no. 1 (2015): 71.

Keune, 71.

Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India (1983), Hardy distinguishes the philosophical,

“intellectual bhakti” of the Bhagavadgītā in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata from the deeply personal,

“emotional bhakti” that pervades the Tamil Nālāyirativiyappirapantam (particularly the poems

of Nammāḻvār, the most famous Āḻvār) and the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa, as well as the

regional compositions of Nāmdev in Marathi, Vidyāpati in Maithili, and Sūrdās, Mīrābāī, and

Bihārīlāl in Bhasha.

Emotional bhakti is usually considered to be Vaiṣṇava phenomenon. Yet

while Hardy traces the first instances of emotional bhakti to the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam,

Tracy Coleman argues that emotional bhakti “is found in Sanskrit and Pāli literature much earlier

than the Āḻvārs” and that “it originates in the heterodox traditions of Buddhism and Jainism.”

Jason Schwartz and Anne Monius have also identified multiple instances of emotional bhakti in

Śaiva works that are likely as old or older than some of the poems in the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, such as the Tamil corpus of the seventh-century Śiva devotee Appar

and the eighth-century Sanskrit Śivadharmottara (Highest Dharma of Śiva).

But while the

specific origins of emotional bhakti may be unclear, this term is an accurate descriptor for the

bhakti of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat as well as other devotional

texts that I discuss in this dissertation including the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Cēkkilār’s twelfth-century Tamil Periyapurāṇam (Great Legend), and

Tulsīdās’s sixteenth-century Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas (Lake of the Deeds of Rāma).

Let me also be clear that I understand bhakti to be a literary mode, rather than a literary

genre. In his seminal Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion (1987), Norman Cutler

describes the Tamil poems of four of the Āḻvārs (Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār, Pēyāḻvār, and

Nammāḻvār) and two prominent Śaiva poets (Kāraikkālammaiyār and Māṇikkavācakar) as

members of a literary genre comparable to Sanskrit stotras or Vedic hymns.

Along with

describing these early Tamil Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva compositions as “generically unified,” Cutler

claims that “in order to apprehend the parameters that define bhakti poetry as a viable literary

genre in Tamil, one must be prepared to think about literary form not just in terms of rhyme and

meter but also as a structure of communication between author and audience.”

Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti, 36–38 and 557.

Tracy Coleman, “Dharma, Yoga, and Viraha-Bhakti in Buddhacarita and Kṛṣṇacarita,” in The Archaeology of

Bhakti I: Mathurā and Maturai, Back and Forth, ed. Emmanuel Francis and Charlotte Schmid (Pondicherry:

Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2014), 58.

It should be noted, however, that while Coleman calls Hardy’s argument about emotional bhakti “unconvincing,”

she herself states that “I do not know Tamil, and therefore cannot evaluate all of Hardy’s evidence” (35n7).

Jason Schwartz, “Caught in the Net of Śāstra: Devotion and its Limits in an Evolving Śaiva Corpus,” Journal of

Hindu Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 214–16; and Anne E. Monius, “Gesture and Emotion in Tamil Śaiva Devotional

Poetry,” in The Bloomsbury Research Handbook of Emotions in Classical Indian Philosophy, ed. Maria Heim,

Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad, and Roy Tzohar (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021), 173–87.

Norman J. Cutler, Songs of Experience: The Poetics of Tamil Devotion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1987), 6.

Yet while Cutler treats Tamil bhakti poems and Sanskrit stotras as separate genres, Stainton argues that “Sanskrit

stotras implicitly and explicitly showcase a multitude of perspectives on bhakti” (Poetry as Prayer, 291).

Cutler, Songs of Experience, 6.

While Cutler’s arguments accurately describe many of the Tamil bhakti poems that were

composed between the sixth and ninth centuries by both Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva poets in South

India, I suggest that it is more productive to think of bhakti as what John Frow calls a “mode.”

Frow defines “mode in the adjectival sense as a thematic and tonal qualification or ‘coloring’ of

genre” and “genre or kind [as] a more specific organization of texts with thematic, rhetorical,

and formal dimensions.”

There are many different genres that adopt a bhakti mode. Across

South Asia, we find short lyrical bhakti poems known as pads/padas/padams/abhangs in Bhasha,

Bengali, Maithili, Gujarati, Telugu, and Marathi. While the earliest known example of the Tamil

genre known as the kōvai or “garland,” the eighth-century Pāṇṭikkōvai (Pandya Kōvai), is in

praise of a king, two subsequent kōvais––Māṇikkavācakar’s ninth-century Tirukkōvaiyār (Divine

Kōvai) and Tirukkurukaipperumāḷ Kavirāyar’s sixteenth-century Tiruppatikkōvai (Tirupati

Kōvai)––are bhakti compositions dedicated to Śiva and Nammāḻvār respectively.

Both the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa and the Tamil Periyapurāṇam are composed in the

style of a mahākāvya (Tamil: peruṅkāppiyam), an ornate multi-chapter narrative text replete with

poetic figuration. Edwin Bryant notes that the tenth book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa “fulfils the

requirements” of the mahākāvya genre “as outlined in the fourteenth-century Sanskrit literary

treatise, the Sāhityadarpaṇa” and Monius explains that the Periyapurāṇam is a peruṅkāppiyam

“at the level of form, of poetic structure, and narrative framework.”

Most of the scholarship on

the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and the Periyapurāṇam, however, has focused on their devotional content

and ignored their identities as mahākāvyas. This is likely due to the common definition of

mahākāvyas as “court epics” and the pervasive notion in the study of premodern South Asia that

courtly literature and devotional literature were on two parallel yet separate trajectories.

Bridging the Court/Temple Divide

As Anne Monius points out, “often in contemporary scholarship” on premodern South Asian

literature “the study of the courtly and the political proceeds independently of the religious, and

vice versa.” Monius describes this dichotomy between premodern courtly/political texts and

devotional/religious texts in South Asian Studies as the “court/temple divide.”

The court/temple divide in the study of Bhasha literature can be traced back to the

colonial period. In his highly influential Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās (History of Hindi Literature, first

published in 1929), Rāmcandra Śukla presents readers with a kāl vibhāg (periodization) scheme

that defines a period of history based on what was supposedly the main type of Bhasha literature

produced during the period.

I will discuss this kāl vibhāg system in greater detail in Chapter

John Frow, Genre (New York: Routledge, 2005), 67.

Edwin F. Bryant, introduction to Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Krishna: The Beautiful Legend of God; Śrīmad Bhāgavata

Purāṇa Book X), trans. Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), lix; and Monius, “Love, Violence,

Disgust,” 139.

Just take the following monograph titles: David Smith, Ratnākara’s Haravijaya: An Introduction to the Sanskrit

Court Epic (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1985); and Indira Viswanathan Peterson Design and Rhetoric in a

Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003).

Anne E. Monius, “Rethinking Medieval Hindu Literature,” in The Oxford Handbook of Hindu Literature (Oxford:

Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 2.

Six, but for now, it is important to note that Śukla describes the years from 1318 to 1643 CE as

the “bhakti period” and the years from 1643 to 1843 CE as the “rīti period.” While the category

of rīti is most often used to refer to Bhasha compositions about or infused with the principles of

alaṅkāraśāstra (the rhetoric of poetic figuration), the word rīti has also been used to refer to any

Bhasha text that claims to have been composed in a courtly context. Allison Busch, for instance,

states that “the term ‘rīti literature’ designates a diverse repertoire of courtly genres including

elaborate praise addressed to royalty, political narratives, historical poems, lyrical styles, as well

as a robust tradition of vernacular rhetoric.”

Busch also explains that “the idea is only nascent

in Shukla’s work but a historiographical consensus grew out of it that religious literature of the

bhakti era degenerated into a courtly style during the Mughal period.”

Busch adds that the

“bifurcation of bhakti and rīti literature” persists in both international and Indian scholarship and

she remarks that “Western scholars’ startling lack of interest in Hindi court literature may stem

from a more insidious bias that puts religious questions at the heart of any study of Indian

premodernity, reinforcing a long-enduring Orientalist topos of India as ‘the spiritual East.’”

Busch’s concerns are also shared by Sheldon Pollock, especially in his pioneering work

on vernacularization in South Asia between 1000 and 1500 CE. In his magnum opus, The

Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power in Premodern India

(2006), Pollock pushes back against what he describes as the “unchallenged scholarly

consensus” in South Asian Studies that “the religious movement now called devotionalism

(bhakti) constituted the engine of the vernacular revolution.”

Instead, Pollock argues that rājya,

“the state of being, or function of, a king,” and kāvya (belles lettres) were at the heart of

vernacularization, an enterprise that took place strictly in courtly and royal settings.

Mahābhārata retellings in regional languages play a critical role in Pollock’s assertions

about vernacularization in The Language of the Gods. Pollock describes the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata as “the single most important literary reflection on the problem of the political in

southern Asian history and in some ways the deepest meditation in all antiquity on the desperate

realities of political life.”

He goes on to argue that “in vernacular narratives, the boundless

universalizing Sanskrit tale was refitted onto the perceptible, traversable, indeed governable

world of regional political practice.”

According to Pollock, regional Mahābhāratas were

literary representations of the political power of local courts. Pollock places great importance on

the first work of literature (ādikāvya) of multiple South Asian literary cultures––such as Pampa’s

Kannada Vikramārjunavijayam, Nannaya’s part of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu, and Viṣṇudās’s

Allison Busch, “Poetry in Motion: Literary Circulation in Mughal India,” in Culture and Circulation: Literature

in Motion in Early Modern India, ed. Thomas de Bruijn and Allison Busch (Boston: Brill, 2014), 188.

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 12.

Busch, 12–13.

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 28 and 423.

Pollock, 6.

Pollock, 18

Pollock, 397.

Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit

––being Mahābhāratas that proclaim to have been composed in courtly

contexts.

Pollock calls Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam, Ranna’s Kannada Sāhasabhīmavijayam,

and Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit “double narratives” because they all explicitly compare the poet’s

supposed royal patron with one of the five Pāṇḍava heroes (the Pāṇḍava warrior Arjuna in

Pampa’s poem and Bhīma in Ranna’s and Viṣṇudās’s compositions).

Pollock also argues that “religion was largely irrelevant to the origins of South Asian

vernacularization” because “vernacularization was a courtly project, and the court itself, as a

functioning political institution, was largely unconcerned with religious differences.”

Although

Pampa and Ranna are Jain, Pollock claims that “early Kannada literature often has little or

nothing to do with Jainism as such.”

He states that “the oeuvre of Viṣṇudās evinces no

particular concern with bhakti” and that “if any echo of bhakti can be said to be present, it is

remarkably muted.”

Pollock adds that the “process of vernacularization” in South India that

produced Nannaya’s Mahābhāratamu was “entirely untouched by religious concerns.”

Pollock’s characterization of Mahābhāratas in regional languages in The Language of the

Gods has been used by multiple other scholars in the past five years. In her study of the Persian

Razmnāmah, Audrey Truschke repeatedly draws on Pollock’s claims about the Mahābhārata

tradition,

100

and she argues that the Mughals saw “immense politico-cultural potential in the

Mahābhārata and through the text expressed themselves as an Indian dynasty.”

101

Pollock’s

arguments about regional Mahābhāratas have also been utilized by Cynthia Talbot in her work

on Cand Baradāī’s Pṛthvīrājrāso (Story of Pṛthvīrāj), a Bhasha poem that was earlier believed to

be a first-hand account of the life of the twelfth-century Rajput king Pṛthvīrāj Cauhān, but

scholars now generally date to the late sixteenth century. Talbot introduces the Pṛthvīrājrāso as

“an elite regional epic: an epic that was primarily meaningful for the political elite [Rajputs] of a

While Pollock describes Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit as the ādikāvya of Bhasha literature, multiple Hindi scholars

have convincingly argued that Maulānā Dāūd’s Sufi romance poem, the Cāndāyan (1379), is the ādikāvya of

Bhasha literature. Although Pollock mentions the Cāndāyan, he does not entertain the possibility that this narrative

poem could be Bhasha’s ādikāvya, likely due to the overtly Sufi message of the text. See McGregor, Hindi

Literature, 26; Allison Busch, “Hindi Literary Beginnings,” in South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements

with Sheldon Pollock, ed. Whitney Cox, Yigal Bronner, and Lawrence McCrea (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian

Studies, 2011), 208; Williams, “Sacred Sounds and Sacred Books,” 84; and Pollock, Language of the Gods, 393.

Pollock, 356–63, 381, and 394–95.

Pollock, 360, 363, and 395.

Pollock, 429 and 430.

Pollock, 426.

Pollock, 429.

In Chapter Four, however, I will discuss an episode of Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit involving the divine monkey

Hanumān that Viṣṇudās clearly presents as a bhakti tableau.

Pollock, 429.

100

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 104 and 140.

101

Truschke, 140.

single region [Rajasthan] of early modern India.”

102

Along with pointing out how this Bhasha

text frequently makes direct references to the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Talbot also observes that as

with the epic attributed to Vyāsa, Cand Baradāī’s Pṛthvīrājrāso is narrated by a character who

claims to have “participated in many of the events he recorded” and ends “with a holocaust (and

thus on a dark, ambivalent note).”

103

Building on Pollock’s assertions, Talbot then states that

“like a vernacular Mahābhārata,” the Pṛthvīrājrāso “re-inscribed a regional world so as to give it

classical epic proportions, at least in its significance for the region’s inhabitants.”

104

In her recent

study of the Mahābhāratamu, Harshita Mruthinti Kamath references Pollock throughout her

essay,

105

and demonstrates how this Telugu poem’s “elastic relationship with the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, provide us with a fruitful starting point for thinking through the complexities of

the literary-cultural transformations of the vernacular world in premodern South India.”

106

Pollock’s impressive and in-depth work on the vernacularization of South Asia offers the

only theoretical study of premodern Mahābhārata retellings in regional languages. Some of his

sweeping generalizations about the earliest regional Mahābhāratas all being non-religious,

courtly expressions of political power, however, do present some concerns. As I noted earlier,

Pollock’s analysis of the Kannada Vikramārjunavijayam and the Kannada Sāhasabhīmavijayam

does not consider the Jain identities of their authors. Pampa and Ranna have been identified as

members of the Digambara sect of the Jain religious tradition because Kannada poems about the

first two great Jain preceptors or Jinas (Ādinātha and Ajitanātha) are attributed to these poets:

Pampa’s Ādipurāṇam and Ranna’s Ajitapurāṇam. Pollock’s view that these Kannada

Mahābhāratas have “nothing to do with Jainism” is also shared by Sarah Pierce Taylor who

asserts that “by refusing to Jainize the Mahābhārata, Pampa stands out from other Jain authors

who typically did not write outside the boundaries of Jainism even when it came to the

Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa.”

107

Taylor adds that “Pampa made it acceptable––or even

unremarkable––for later Jain authors like Ranna to draw on non-Jain narratives.”

108

At first glance, the narratives of the Vikramārjunavijayam and the Sāhasabhīmavijayam

do indeed seem very different from the earliest Jain Mahābhārata, Jinasena Punnāṭa’s Sanskrit

Harivaṃśapurāṇa (Legend of Hari’s Lineage, ca. 783) in which, as Eva De Clercq notes, the

Kauravas survive the battle with the Pāṇḍavas and “all renounce the material world to go and

live as ascetics.”

109

Other Kannada scholars, however, have discerned some elements of both

102

Cynthia Talbot, The Last Hindu Emperor: Prithviraj Chauhan and the Indian Past, 1200–2000 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2016), 108.

103

Talbot, 138.

104

Talbot, 145.

105

Kamath, “Three Poets,” 192–93, 196, 197, and 210.

106

Kamath, 210.

107

Pierce Taylor, “Digambara Jainism and Old Kannada.”

108

Pierce Taylor, “Digambara Jainism and Old Kannada.”

109

Eva De Clercq, “The Jaina Harivaṃśa and Mahābhārata Tradition- A Preliminary Survey,” in Parallels and

Comparisons: Proceedings of the Fourth Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Puranas,

September 2005, ed. Petteri Koskikallio (Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2009), 404.

Pampa’s and Ranna’s Mahābhāratas that align with the key principles of asceticism and non-

violence in the Jain tradition. Kambalur Venkatesa Acharya points out that, as in Jinasena

Punnāṭa’s Harivaṃśapurāṇa, in Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam Draupadī is only married to

Arjuna and not all five of the Pāṇḍavas as in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and several other

retellings.

110

Jonathan Geen explains that Mahābhāratas produced by Digambara Jains “insist

that Draupadī married Arjuna alone, and that the rumour of her marriage to five men must be

considered absurd, scandalous, and unequivocally false.”

111

D.R. Nagaraj notes that Ranna’s

“spiritual propensity to doubt and distrust violence led him to elevate the status of [the Kaurava

leader] Duryodhana” and that since Krishna “cannot be accepted as a god by Jains,” Pampa

“transforms the religious associations into purely aesthetic ones.”

112

Similarly, Ammel Sharon

and R.V.S. Sundaram observe that both “Pampa and Ranna give little place” to Krishna in their

poems.

113

And Timothy Lorndale has recently shown that “in these Kannada texts, Duryodhana

regularly treats Kṛṣṇa as a ‘demoted’ or ‘degraded’ form of god, rather than the real thing.”

114

This scholarship on Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam and Ranna’s Sāhasabhīmavijayam calls into

question whether these Kannada Mahābhāratas are completely devoid of Jain ethics.

Pollock also largely ignores the earliest Mahābhārata in a regional South Asian language:

Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Tamil Pārataveṇpā. In his discussion of the tenth-century Kannada

Mahābhārata of Pampa, Pollock asserts that “Pampa conceived of his Vikramārjunavijayam as

the first ‘complete’ vernacular version of the Mahābhārata” before mentioning that “a version of

the Sanskrit epic had been written in Tamil at the court of a Pallava king a century earlier,

though we have it only in fragmentary form and it may never in fact have been completed.”

115

a footnote, Pollock then identifies this Tamil retelling as the Pārataveṇpā, but he also says that

“the Tamil tradition is confusing.”

116

Twenty-six pages later, Pollock admits that Peruntēvaṉār’s

Pārataveṇpā “can be placed at the Pallava court of Nandivarman III in the mid-ninth century,

which would make it the first vernacularization of the epic in South Asia” yet he does not offer

110

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 258–59.

111

Jonathan Geen “The Marriage of Draupadī in the Hindu and Jaina Mahābhārata,” (PhD diss., McMaster

University, 2001), 173.

112

D.R. Nagaraj, “Critical Tensions in the History of Kannada Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History:

Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 346 and

345.

113

R.V.S. Sundaram and Ammel Sharon, introduction to Ranna, Sāhasabhīmavijayam (Gadāyuddham: The Duel of

the Maces), trans. R.V.S. Sundaram and Ammel Sharon, ed. Akkamahadevi (Delhi: Manohar Books, 2018), xii.

114

Timothy Lorndale, “Avatāras, Goddesses, and Kauravas: Reading the Old Kannada Sauptikaparvan as an

Alternative Ending to the Mahābhārata,” Journal of Hindu Studies, advance online publication (June 2021): 7.

115

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 358.

116

Pollock, 358n63.

Pollock’s treatment of Tamil literature in this monograph is quite perplexing. In the beginning of the book, he

discusses Tamil and Persian alongside three “cosmopolitan,” transregional languages: Sanskrit, Prakrit, and

Apabhramsha (26). Later on, however, Pollock seems to treat Tamil as a “vernacular” language with a historical

trajectory similar to Kannada or Telugu and he dismissively describes the history of Tamil as “complicated” (100),

“uncommonly obscure” (292), “historiographically convoluted” (304), and “complex and contested” (383).

any more information about this Tamil retelling.

117

Pollock’s choice to exclude the Pārataveṇpā

from his discussion of regional Mahābhārata retellings might be because we only have access to

three out of a possible eighteen books of this text, but it might also be because Peruntēvaṉār’s

work is filled with bhakti. As I will show in much greater detail in Chapter Three, Peruntēvaṉār’s

Tamil Pārataveṇpā is a distinctly Śrīvaiṣṇava poem centered on Viṣṇu.

In the final paragraphs of his discussion of “epic vernacularization,” Pollock tells us that

to the list of the “vernacular epics” of Pampa, Ranna, Nannaya, and Viṣṇudās “could be added a

wide array of others” including the Mahābhāratas of Haribar Bipra (c. fourteenth century) in

Assamese and Sāraḷādāsa in Oriya (c. fifteenth century).

118

Neither of these poets from the

eastern region of South Asia, however, fit neatly into Pollock’s argument about vernacularization

in South Asia being a non-religious, courtly process. Haribar Bipra is thought to have been

patronized by the Chutiya king Durlabhanārāyaṇa.

119

His three Mahābhārata poems, however,

the Babhruvāhanar Yuddha (Battle with Babhruvāhana), the Lavakuśar Yuddha (Battle with

Lava and Kuśa), and the Tāmradhvajar Yuddha (Battle with Tāmradhvaja), are all retellings of

episodes from the Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata, a Mahābhārata that Petteri Koskikallio and

Christophe Vielle describe as having “an explicit tendency towards Kṛṣṇa-bhakti.”

120

Satyendra

Nath Sarma points out that the Tāmradhvajar Yuddha tells “the story of Mayūradhvaja, an ardent

devotee of Kṛṣṇa and his heroic son Tāmradhvaja… the poet depicts the ardent devotion of

Mayūradhvaja to Kṛṣṇa and his steadfastness to truth in the face of serious misfortune.”

121

Meanwhile, Sāraḷādāsa does not make any courtly patronage claims in his Oriya

Mahābhārata and William Smith notes that “by his own account he was a farmer and was

ploughing a field when commanded by the goddess [Śāraḷā] to render the Mahābhārata into

Oriya.”

122

B.N. Patnaik observes that throughout his retelling, Sāraḷādāsa describes his poem as

the purāṇa of Biṣṇu or the “legend of Viṣṇu.”

123

Bijoy Misra adds that the linking of the local

deity “Jagannatha of Puri and Krishna of Dvaraka is thought to have originated” in Sāraḷādāsa’s

retelling and that this text has made the city of Puri “a prime center of the Vaishnava faith.”

124

Although several of the earliest regional Mahābhāratas that were composed before the

end of what Pollock calls the “vernacular millennium” in 1500 CE––such as the retellings of

Peruntēvaṉār, Pampa, Nannaya, Viṣṇudās, and Haribar Bipra––are associated with courtly

patrons, this is not the case for the ādikavi or “first poet” of Oriya literature, Sāraḷādāsa.

117

Pollock, 384.

118

Pollock, 396.

119

See Maheswar Neog, Early History of the Vaiṣṇava Faith and Movement in Assam: Śaṅkaradeva and His Times

(Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1980), 40.

120

Petteri Koskikallio and Christophe Vielle, “Epic and Puranic Texts Attributed to Jaimini,” Indologica

Taurinensia 27 (2001): 67.

121

Satyendra Nath Sarma, Assamese Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 48.

122

Smith “Burden of the Forest,” 93.

123

Anand Mahanand and B.N. Patnaik, “A Conversation with Professor B.N. Patnaik,” Lokaratna 5/6 (2013): 4.

124

Bijoy M. Misra, “Orissa: Shri Krishna Jagannatha; The Mushali-parva from Sarala’s Mahabharata,” in Krishna:

A Sourcebook, ed. Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 141 and 142.

Moreover, the premodern regional Mahābhārata retellings of Peruntēvaṉār, Haribar Bipra, and

Sāraḷādāsa are all imbued with elements from local Vaiṣṇava traditions. Finally, the Tamil

Pārataveṇpā and the Assamese Tāmradhvajar Yuddha are clearly linked to both courtly and

religious milieus. In this dissertation, I will show in detail how both Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and

Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat (like Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā and Haribar Bipra’s

Tāmradhvajar Yuddha) have a distinct overlapping of courtly and devotional concerns.

In the past ten years, there have been a number of studies that challenge the court/temple

divide in South Asian Studies. Sarah Pierce Taylor’s dissertation offers a close examination of

Pampa’s Kannada Ādipurāṇam (Legend of Ādinātha), a text that Pollock only mentions in two

footnotes in The Language of the Gods.

125

Taylor argues that Pampa’s narration of the life of

Ādinātha, the first of the Jinas in the Jain tradition, “proposes a connection between erotic love

and religious devotion mediated through the figure of the king and the site of the court.”

126

In his

monograph on the two earliest works of Marathi literature, Cakradhār’s Līḷācarita (c. 1278) and

Jñāndev’s Jñāneśvarī (c. 1290), Christian Novetzke states that he shares Pollock’s “concern that

‘religion,’ and in particular bhakti or ‘devotionalism,’ too often functions as the epistemological

limit point for all non-Western and premodern cultural context.”

127

But Novetzke also

complicates Pollock’s vernacularization model in his book and tells us that “where Pollock

examines power configured by courts, I examine power configured by publics outside (though

not exclusive of) the royal court, which, in the Marathi case, involves the field of religion.”

128

Srinivas Reddy and Heidi Pauwels have both drawn attention to royal figures who

composed works of bhakti in courtly settings. Reddy’s dissertation introduces readers to the

sixteenth-century Telugu Āmuktamālyada (Giver of the Worn Garland) of Kṛṣṇadevarāya (r.

1509–1529), one of the most famous rulers of the Vijayanagara Empire. Reddy explains that this

mahākāvya about the life of the Tamil bhakti poetess Āṇṭāḷ “stands out as a landmark in Telugu

literary history, not only for its poetic beauty, but also because of the unique religious and

political themes embedded within its central narrative.”

129

Pauwels describes her monograph on

the Bhasha compositions of Prince Sāvantsingh of Kishangarh (1694–1764) as a book “about

movements between temples and courts, about the interconnections between the religious and the

political in early modern India.”

130

Pauwels demonstrates that works attributed to the poet-prince

Sāvantsingh, also known by the pen name Nāgarīdās, have a distinctly Vaiṣṇava bhakti ethos.

Yet while each of these studies dismantle the court/temple divide in South Asian Studies,

they all focus on examples from a single regional literary culture. In the spirt of Pollock’s work

on the vernacularization of premodern India and Ronit Ricci’s study of the circulation of an

Islamic narrative across South and Southeast Asia, this dissertation project goes beyond regional

125

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 340n18 and 426n96.

126

Sarah Pierce Taylor, “The Aesthetics of Sovereignty: The Poetic and Material Worlds of Medieval Jainism,”

(PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 2016), 240.

127

Novetzke, Quotidian Revolution, 17.

128

Novetzke, 7.

129

Srinivas G. Reddy, “The Āmuktamālyada of Kṛṣṇadevarāya: Language, Power & Devotion in Sixteenth-Century

South India,” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011), 1.

130

Heidi R.M. Pauwels, Mobilizing Krishna’s World: The Writings of Prince Sāvant Singh of Kishangarh (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 2017), 8.

exceptionalism. My study of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat suggests

that these two regional Mahābhārata retellings were part of a premodern pan-South Asian

development in which courtly and devotional literary cultures were closely linked.

Chapter Overview

Chapter One provides readers with necessary background information about the epic and bhakti

settings of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat. As I noted earlier, at the

start of each of their Mahābhāratas both Villi and Cauhān praise Vyāsa and describe themselves

narrating the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in regional languages. Yet Villi and Cauhān also both go on

to classify their retellings as kṛṣṇacaritas or works that relate “the deeds of Krishna.” Although

the divine Krishna does play a vital role in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata as the Pāṇḍavas’ most

trusted advisor and the bestower of the Bhagavadgītā, Krishna’s deeds are by no means the

primary focus of the Sanskrit epic. Chapter One begins with an account of the rather perplexing

depiction of Krishna in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata to lay the foundation for my analysis of

Krishna’s character in the Pāratam and the Mahābhārat in Chapter Two. Next, I turn to a brief

discussion of how two intellectuals writing in Sanskrit––the ninth-century Kashmiri literary

theoretician Ānandavardhana and the thirteenth-century South Indian Vaiṣṇava philosopher

Madhva––each assert that Krishna is the most important figure in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Given that I describe the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat as bhakti narrative

poems throughout my dissertation, the remainder of Chapter One offers a theorization of bhakti

narrative poems. With examples from devotional texts from both Villi’s and Cauhān’s literary

cultures (Cēkkilār’s Tamil Periyapurāṇam and Tulsīdās’s Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas) and one of

the most influential works of Vaiṣṇava poetry in South Asia (the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa), I

identify four shared features of bhakti narrative poems: (1) the eminence of “all along” devotees,

(2) the frequency of devotees singing hymns in praise of the main deity, (3) the depiction of the

main deity as a god who greatly cares about his devotees, and (4) the way in which the main

deity pervades the entire text even when he is not physically present in the narrative.

In Chapter Two, I examine the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat side-by-side

and reveal the shared narrative strategies that Villi and Cauhān use to reframe the tale of the war

between the two factions of the Bhārata dynasty into a bhakti narrative poem focused on the

deeds of Krishna. I demonstrate in this chapter how all four of the shared features of bhakti

narrative poems that I discussed in Chapter One are utilized by Villi and Cauhān throughout their

retellings by performing close readings of four excerpts from both texts: (1) the introduction of

Krishna, (2) the prayer Draupadī delivers to Krishna during her attempted disrobing, (3) the

entire fifth book (the Book of Effort), and (4) the departure of Krishna at the end of the story.

Chapters Three and Four investigate how Villi and Cauhān each anchor their

Mahābhāratas in specific regional Vaiṣṇava bhakti literary cultures that speak to local audiences.

Chapter Three focuses on the different invocations to Krishna and other forms of this deity that

are the opening verses of thirty-seven of the fifty total chapters of the Tamil Pāratam. I contend

that these invocations mark Villi’s retelling as a poem that is grounded in the literary corpus and

traditions of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community in South India in four different ways: (1) they alert

audiences that the Pāratam is a Śrīvaiṣṇava example of the peruṅkāppiyam/mahākāvya genre,

(2) they place this text in the lineage of Peruntēvaṉār’s earlier Śrīvaiṣṇava Tamil Mahābhārata

retelling, (3) they position Villi’s poem in a markedly Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti context, and (4) they

help transform the narrative of the epic into a distinctly Śrīvaiṣṇava kṛṣṇacarita.

In Chapter Four, I discuss the prevalence of allusions to the Rāmāyaṇa tradition

throughout the Bhasha Mahābhārat. I propose that the different Rāmāyaṇa references in this

Mahābhārata retelling strongly suggest that Cauhān is a devotee of Rāma (a popular incarnation

of Viṣṇu and the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa) and a connoisseur of the Rāma-centric Bhasha bhakti

poetry of Tulsīdās. I show this by carefully examining three types of Rāmāyaṇa allusions in the

Mahābhārat: (1) invocations to Rāma and other Rāmāyaṇa figures in the opening prologues of

the different books of the Bhasha poem, (2) episodes in Cauhān’s narrative in which Rāma’s

most beloved devotee, the divine monkey deity Hanumān, comes to the aid of Arjuna, and (3)

passages in which Cauhān equates Krishna with his earlier incarnation of Rāma.

The final two chapters turn to the intersections of devotional and courtly spheres in

Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat. Drawing on the work of the

intellectual historian Dominick LaCapra, I suggest that the multiple references to Varapati

Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the Pāratam and to Mitrasen and Aurangzeb in the Mahābhārat might not be

documenting historical patronage relationships. But while I question whether Villi and Cauhān

were actually patronized by royal rulers, I also demonstrate that both poets are clearly placing

their Mahābhāratas in courtly milieus. Chapter Five is about how Villi presents the Pāratam in

the style of a genre of South Asian literature that is consistently associated with courtly and royal

contexts: the peruṅkāppiyam/mahākāvya. I reveal how Villi claims the peruṅkāppiyam genre for

the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community by closely analyzing: (1) the verses in praise of the king

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ that are in the introduction to the Pāratam that is attributed to Villi’s son

Varantaruvār and in the narrative of the poem itself, (2) the seventh chapter of the first book of

the Pāratam in which Arjuna undertakes a type of a pilgrimage known as a tīrthayātra, and (3)

the description of Krishna’s arrival in the Pāṇḍavas’ capital city of Indraprastha for the eldest

Pāṇḍava Yudhiṣṭhira’s royal consecration ceremony in the second book of this Mahābhārata,

which Villi presents in the style of a Tamil genre known as the ulā or “procession.”

As I noted earlier, in six of the eight dated opening prologues in the different books of his

Bhasha Mahābhārat, Cauhān makes references to two different courtly patrons: a (presumably)

Hindu king by the name of Mitrasen and the sixth Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. Chapter Six

focuses on these eight dated prologues. I begin the chapter by reviewing earlier (primarily

colonial-era) scholarship on the dated prologues of Cauhān’s poem and discussing the

assumptions that prominent Hindi scholars have had about the courtly context of the Bhasha

Mahābhārat. I then analyze each of the eight dated prologues in detail. My close readings of

these prologues reveal a deep intertwining of bhakti and courtly concerns in Cauhān’s text.

While Cauhān praises Mitrasen and Aurangzeb in six of the eight dated prologues, all eight of

these prologues also contain eulogies to Vaiṣṇava deities and figures and/or references to

auspicious festival associated with the worship of Krishna or Rāma. This chapter also considers

the significance of Cauhān repeatedly extolling Aurangzeb––a Mughal ruler who is remembered

in contemporary India as a Muslim tyrant who demolished Hindu temples and brutally

persecuted non-Muslims––in this overtly devotional Mahābhārata retelling.

In the Conclusion, I discuss the main insights and implications of this comparative

project and show how the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat are participating in larger

patterns of retelling the Mahābhārata in both premodern and modern South Asia.

CHAPTER ONE

The Epic and Bhakti Settings

In her study of the aesthetics of suffering in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Emily Hudson explains

that this ancient poem attributed to Vyāsa “is a story about a war, a brutal, fratricidal, apocalyptic

war between two sets of cousins, the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas, who are fighting over the

kingdom of the Bhāratas––hence the title of the epic, the Mahābhārata or ‘The Great Story of

the Bhāratas.’”

While the fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam and the seventeenth-century Bhasha

Mahābhārat share the same name as the Sanskrit epic, neither Villi nor Cauhān describe their

retellings as the story of the violent war of the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas in their prologues.

Instead, both Villi and Cauhān present their Mahābhāratas as the carita (deeds) of

Krishna, an incarnation of Viṣṇu who is the Pāṇḍavas’ maternal cousin and closest advisor.

Quoting Monier Monier-William’s definition of carita, Philip Lutgendorf explains that:

The Sanskrit word carita (from the verbal root car, “to move”) is a perfect participle

connoting “going, moving, course as of heavenly bodies,” and by extension, “acts, deeds,

adventures” …Yet carit[a] is not random movement but expresses the inherent qualities of the

mover; in Sanskrit literature the word has been used in the titles of biographies of religious

figures and idealized kings (e.g., the Buddhacarita of Asvaghosa; the Harṣacarita of Bana).

In the author’s own introduction (taṟciṟappuppāyiram) to the Pāratam, Villi states:

I do not perceive the excellence of the Bhārata in the great language (Sanskrit)

praised by the foremost, great, hidden Vedas, the sages, the gods, and others.

But I agree to utter this out of my desire for the carita of the eternal Mādhava,

who appears intermittently in it.

Similarly, in the beginning of the first chapter of the Bhasha Mahābhārat, Cauhān proclaims:

I cannot comprehend any of the mysteries of the carita of Hari,

but I will summarize some of it in Bhasha and thus sing

what was told by that great sage Vyāsa,

knower of the carita of illustrious Bhagavān.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 10.

I should point out that the names of Krishna that Villi and Cauhān use in their opening prologues (Mādhava, Hari,

and Bhagavān) are all also associated with Viṣṇu.

Philip Lutgendorf, The Life of a Text: Performing the Rāmcaritmānas of Tulsidas (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1991), 19.

muṉṉum māmaṟai muṉivarum tēvarum piṟarum

paṉṉum mā moḻi pāratam perumaiyum pārēṉ

maṉṉum mātavaṉ caritamum iṭai iṭai vaḻaṅkum

eṉṉum ācaiyāl yāṉum ītu iyamputaṟku icaintēṉ || VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 8 ||

hari caritra kou bheda na pāvahiṃ kai bhāṣā saṅkṣepa kachu gāvahiṃ

mahā muni jo vyāsa bakhānā śrībhagavanta carita jina jānā || CM 1.2 ||

The term kṛṣṇacarita or the “deeds of Krishna” is usually used to describe the detailed narratives

of Krishna’s infancy, adolescence, and adulthood in three Sanskrit texts that were all likely

composed during the first millennium of the common era: the Harivaṃśa (Lineage of Hari), the

Viṣṇupurāṇa (Legend of Viṣṇu), and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Legend of Bhagavān). The

kṛṣṇacarita designation could also easily be applied to later Sanskrit poems, such as the

Yādavābhyudaya (Rise of the Yādavas) by the Śrīvaiṣṇava poet-philosopher Vedāntadeśika

(traditional dates: 1268–1369 CE), as well as to compositions in regional languages like the Sufi

poet Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī’s Bhasha Kanhāvat (Story of Kānha, c.1540 CE).

Yet one poem that would rarely be described as a kṛṣṇacarita is the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. While the Mahābhārata “is generally accepted as the oldest text that features

Krishna on any scale,” the Sanskrit epic primarily focuses on the Pāṇḍavas, not their divine

advisor.

In fact, multiple Mahābhārata retellings bear the name Pāṇḍavacarita (Deeds of the

Pāṇḍavas), such as the Sanskrit Pāṇḍavacarita (1214 CE) by the Śvetāmbara Jain mendicant

Devaprabhasūri and the Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit (1435 CE) of Viṣṇudās.

How then does a poet

retell the story of the catastrophic war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas as the carita of

Krishna? How does a poet retell the Mahābhārata as a bhakti narrative poem?

Before answering these questions, we must first delve into the epic and bhakti settings of

Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat. I begin with an overview of Krishna’s

character in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata to lay the groundwork for my analysis of the depictions of

Krishna in the Pāratam and the Mahābhārat in Chapter Two. I then briefly discuss how two

premodern intellectuals, Ānandavardhana and Madhva, argue that Krishna is the most important

character in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Finally, with examples from the Sanskrit

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Cēkkilār’s Tamil Periyapurāṇam, and Tulsīdās’s Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas, I

outline four shared features of bhakti narrative poems: (1) the eminence of “all along” devotees,

(2) the frequency of devotees singing hymns in praise of the main deity, (3) the depiction of the

main deity as a god who greatly cares about his devotees, and (4) the way in which the main

deity pervades the entire text even when he is not physically present in the narrative.

Krishna in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Multiple scholars of Vaiṣṇava literature have pointed out that there are two very different forms

of the Hindu deity Krishna.

The form of Krishna that is worshiped throughout South Asia is the

young lovable cowherd of Vrindavan (Vṛndāvana) whose story is told in narrative texts like the

Harivaṃśa, the Viṣṇupurāṇa, and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, as well as in the regional bhakti

compositions of poets such as Periyāḻvār in Tamil, Eknāth in Marathi, Narsī Mehtā in Gujarati,

Vidyāpati in Maithili, Caṇḍīdās in Bengali, and Sūrdās in Bhasha. The other Krishna is the

Edwin F. Bryant, “Introduction,” in Krishna: A Sourcebook, ed. Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2007), 8. Bryant explains that there are earlier brief references to Krishna in Sanskrit texts composed before

the common era, such as the Chāndogyopaniṣad, Pāṇini’s Aṣṭādhyāyī, and the Baudhāyanadharmasūtra.

Commenting on the Jain Mahābhārata tradition, Eva De Clercq points out that “between the 13th and 17th century

we find a tradition of texts called Pāṇḍavacarita or -purāṇa, composed by Digambaras as well as Śvetāmbaras from

Gujarat and Rajasthan” (“Jaina Harivaṃśa and Mahābhārata Tradition,” 413).

For example, see Edwin F. Bryant, introduction to Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Krishna: Beautiful Legend), ix; Hawley,

introduction to Sūrdās, Memory of Love, 3; Davis, Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, 43–44; and Christopher R. Austin,

Pradyumna: Lover, Magician, and Scion of the Avatāra (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), 7.

enigmatic advisor of the Pāṇḍava princes from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Popular mythologist

Devdutt Pattanaik describes the first Krishna as an “adorable prankster with a butter-smeared

face” and the second as “a shrewd strategist covered in blood.” Pattanaik elaborates that:

One is the winsome cowherd. The other a wise charioteer. One lives in the village, surrounded by

cows, cowherds, and milkmaids. The other lives in the city, surrounded by horses, elephants,

kings, and queens. One is admonished by his mother and seeks adventure. The other gives advice

to friends and family and goes on missions. One submits to the demands of Radha and 16,100

gopis, a relationship bursting with clandestine eroticism. The other fulfils his husbandly

obligations to his eight senior and 16,100 junior queens. One can be seen playing the flute on the

banks of the Yamuna, surrounded by women dancing in joyous abandon. The other can be seen in

the middle of Kurukshetra on a chariot, whip in hand, blowing the conch-shell war trumpet,

surrounded by the dead bodies of hundreds and thousands of warriors. The two Krishnas could

not be more different from each other.

The Krishna of the Mahābhārata is a rather perplexing deity. Consider this passage by an

unnamed critic that V.S. Sukthankar, the general editor of the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic,

quotes in his posthumously published work, On the Meaning of the Mahābhārata (1957):

“A bizarre figure!” exclaims the critic. “A Yādava chieftain who looks and acts uncommonly like

a mortal––and a very ordinary mortal at that––and who has the incredible effrontery to say that he

is a god! A cynic who preaches the highest morality and stoops to practise the lowest tricks, in

order to achieve his mean ends! An opportunist who teaches an honest and god-fearing man to

tell a lie, the only lie he had told in his life!

A charlatan who declares himself to be the god of

gods, descended from the highest heaven for establishing righteousness on earth, and advises a

hesitating archer to strike down a generous foe who is defenceless and is crying for mercy!”

This unforgiving assessment of Krishna in the Mahābhārata reflects the opinions of several

Euro-American Sanskrit scholars in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of

these Sanskritists, such as E. Washburn Hopkins, Hermann Jacobi, Hermann Oldenberg, and

Walter Ruben, were so baffled by Krishna’s actions in the Mahābhārata that they believed that

the earliest version of the Sanskrit epic was a Krishna-less narrative.

While Alf Hiltebeitel has

since convincingly shown that “a Kṛṣṇaless epic gains absolutely no support from the Critical

This adult Krishna also plays an important role in the second half of the tenth book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. See

Robert P. Goldman, “A City of the Heart: Epic Mathurā and the Indian Imagination,” Journal of the American

Oriental Society 106, no. 3 (1986): 480–83; and Neeraja Poddar, “Krishna in his Myriad Forms: Narration,

Translation and Variation in Illustrated Manuscripts of the Latter Half of the Tenth Book of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa,”

(PhD diss., Columbia University, 2014), 20–26.

Devdutt Pattanaik, “Butter or Blood,” First City Magazine, December 2005, http://devdutt.com/articles/indian-

mythology/butter-or-blood.html.

This refers to Krishna encouraging Yudhiṣṭhira to lie to Droṇa about the death of Aśvatthāman (MBh 7.164).

Sukthankar, Meaning of Mahābhārata, 95. The last sentence of this passage is a reference to Krishna convincing

Arjuna to kill Karṇa when he is unarmed (MBh 8.67).

See Alf Hiltebeitel, “Kṛṣṇa and the Mahābhārata (A Bibliographical Essay),” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental

Institute 60 (1979): 89–92; and John Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 52–55.

Edition’s reconstituted text,”

Krishna remains a perplexing character for many Mahābhārata

scholars.

As Sukthankar states, the epic Krishna is “a paradox, a riddle, to say the least.”

One of the main reasons why Krishna’s character in the Sanskrit epic is so confounding is

because the Mahābhārata frequently provides readers with paradoxical representations of his

divinity. As Hudson points out, although Krishna is “portrayed as the omnipotent creator of the

universe in some passages, in others he is depicted as possessing limited power.”

Throughout

the critical edition of the Mahābhārata, we find many scenes in which Krishna is extolled as the

supreme deity of the universe.

For example, in the very first chapter of the first book of the

critical edition, the Book of the Beginnings (Ādiparvan), in the epic’s outermost frame story, the

bard Ugraśravas begins his recitation of the entire Mahābhārata by praising Viṣṇu/Krishna:

First, I bow to the Lord, the primeval being, invoked, and praised by many, the true, one

and imperishable, eternal brahman, manifest and unmanifest, existent and non-existent,

universal and beyond existence or non-existence, creator of high and low, ancient, supreme, and

endless, Viṣṇu, who confers bliss and is bliss, lovely, pure, and immaculate, lord of the senses,

preceptor of the moving and the still, Hari.

Ugraśravas’s invocation unequivocally presents Viṣṇu/Krishna as the most powerful god of all

gods. Two other well-known passages in the Sanskrit epic that depict Krishna as the all-powerful

godhead are the Bhagavadgītā, in which Krishna famously reveals his divinity to Arjuna right

before the Battle of Kurukṣetra, and the Nārāyaṇiya, which is the part of the Kuru patriarch

Bhīṣma’s lengthy lesson to his great-nephew Yudhiṣṭhira in the Book of Peace (Śāntiparvan) in

which Krishna is distinctly identified as Nārāyaṇa (Viṣṇu).

In the Bhagavadgītā after

witnessing Krishna’s omnipotence, an embarrassed Arjuna apologizes to the deity:

Hiltebeitel, “Kṛṣṇa and the Mahābhārata,” 99.

For example, see Bimal Krishna Matilal, “Kṛṣṇa: In Defense of a Devious Divinity,” in Essays on the

Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 410–18; Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics, 258–89; Nicholas

Sutton, Religious Doctrines in the Mahābhārata (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2000), 175–78; and Hudson,

Disorienting Dharma, 198–205.

Sukthankar, Meaning of Mahābhārata, 96.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 199.

To illustrate this, Sutton directs us to the following MBh passages: 2.33.10–20, 3.13.10–20, 3.86.21–24, 3.187.54,

5.22.10, 5.46.82, 5.88.103, 7.9.72, 7.59.8–13, 8.22.49, and 9.64.28 (Religious Doctrines, 144).

MBh 1.1.20–22, trans. John D. Smith in Mahābhārata: Abridged Translation, 2.

MBh 6.14–40 and 12.321–39.

While the Bhagavadgītā is, as Richard Davis notes, “frequently taken as the first and most representative work for

those first seeking to understand Hinduism” (Bhagavad Gita: A Biography, 9), and the subject of multiple

commentaries by premodern Hindu philosophers, including Śaṅkara, Abhinavagupta, Rāmānuja, and Madhva, it is

worth remembering that the Bhagavadgītā makes up less than one percent of the whole Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

I was in ignorance about your majesty when I said hastily “O Krishna of the Yadu, O Friend

[sakhā]!” I was thinking as a friend would –in confusion, and also love.

If you were badly treated,

in jest, eating or sitting, lying in bed or in play, alone or even in front of others,

I ask your pardon, Immeasurable, Unspeakable One!

Arjuna’s admitting his ignorance of Krishna’s role as the supreme being of the universe at this

point in the narrative is curious given that this is not the first time Arjuna has been informed of

Krishna’s divinity. During Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya (royal consecration) ceremony in the Book of

the Assembly Hall (Sabhāparvan), Bhīṣma tells everyone present (including Arjuna):

For Kṛṣṇa alone is the origin of the worlds as well as their dissolution, for Kṛṣṇa’s sake is all that

exists here offered. He is the Unmanifest Cause and the Sempiternal Doer, higher than all

creatures; it is thus that Acyuta is the eldest, Spirit, mind, and the Large One, wind, fire, water,

ether, and earth, and the fourfold creation, all rest upon Kṛṣṇa. The sun, the moon, the stars, the

planets, the points of the compass and the intermediate points—it all rests on Kṛṣṇa.

Later in the critical edition of the epic, in the Book of the Forest (Āraṇyakaparvan or

Vanaparvan), Krishna meets with the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī three times throughout their

twelve years of exile in the forest. During Krishna’s first visit, Arjuna explicitly calls him

Nārāyaṇa and lists his divine feats.

Krishna’s third visit coincides with the arrival of the sage

Mārkaṇḍeya and this time Krishna himself tells the Pāṇḍavas and their shared wife that he is

Nārāyaṇa and the source of everything in the universe. Mārkaṇḍeya then confirms all of this and

praises Krishna extensively.

The Book of the Assembly Hall and the Book of the Forest are the

second and third books of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, while the Bhagavadgītā takes place at the

beginning of the sixth book of the epic, the Book of Bhīṣma (Bhīṣmaparvan). Has Arjuna

forgotten about all these earlier proclamations of Krishna’s divinity, including his own? Even

more perplexing is the fact that, as John Brockington points out, after Krishna’s “self-revelation

in the Bhagavadgītā, he continues to be treated as a human ally rather than a deity.”

Bhagavadgītā 11.41–42, trans. Laurie L. Patton in The Bhagavad Gita, trans. Laurie L. Patton (London: Penguin

Books, 2008), 134.

MBh 2.35.22–24, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen in The Mahābhārata, vol. 2, 2. The Book of the Assembly Hall, 3. The

Book of the Forest, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 95.

As Thennilapuram Mahadevan has shown, in the southern recension of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, there is a much

more extensive version of this scene in which Bhīṣma reveals the true divine identify of Krishna (“The Southern

Recension of the Mahābhārata, the Harivaṁśa, and Āḻvār Vaiṣṇavism,” in Ways and Reasons for Thinking about

the Mahābhārata as a Whole, ed. Vishwa Adluri [Pune: Bhandarkar Oriental Institute, 2013], 63–117).

MBh 3.13.10–36.

MBh 3.187.

Brockington, The Sanskrit Epics, 259.

For more on the “blindness” to Krishna’s divinity in the Sanskrit epic, see David Gitomer, “King Duryodhana: The

Mahābhārata Discourse on Sinning and Virtue in Epic and Drama,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 112,

no. 2 (1992): 224–32.

Arjuna’s inconsistent awareness of Krishna’s role as the absolute godhead is part of a

larger trend in both Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa and the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which most

of the characters in these epics are oblivious to the divine identities of Rāma and Krishna. Robert

Goldman observes that “the supporters, friends, and kinsmen of these gods on earth are at best

only occasionally aware of their true divinity, frequently forgetting about it immediately after a

revelation or demonstration.”

Goldman further explains that this sharply contrasts the two

Sanskrit epics with later Vaiṣṇava bhakti narrative poems “such as the Rāmcaritmānas,

Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, and Bhāgavata Purāṇa, [in which] all the characters including the epic

antagonist are often fully aware of the divinity and salvific power of their foe.”

Along with Arjuna continuously forgetting about Krishna’s divine identity, there are

several passages of the Mahābhārata that depict the god Śiva as the true supreme deity of the

universe.

In the Book of Droṇa (Droṇaparvan), for instance, Arjuna has a dream in which he

and Krishna travel to heaven to obtain Śiva’s Pāśupata weapon so that Arjuna can avenge the

death of his son, Abhimanyu. Upon seeing Śiva, Krishna elaborately praises him:

Śiva is the origin of the world, the creator of all things, the unborn, immutable master. He is the

supreme source of the mind, he is space, he is the wind and in him all the luminaries are

contained. He is the maker of the rains, the ultimate form of matter and the object of worship for

gods, Dānavas, yakṣas, and men. For yogins he is manifest as the supreme spirit, brahman, and he

is the very essence for those who know the Veda. He is the creator and destroyer of both moving

and non-moving beings.

We find a similar scene in the Book of Instruction (Anuśāsanaparvan) when Krishna tells

Yudhiṣṭhira about how he once journeyed to the Himalayas and prayed to Śiva in hopes that Śiva

would bless Krishna and his wife Jāmbavatī with a son.

Brockington notes that this episode in

which Krishna describes himself ardently worshiping Śiva “may broadly be seen as a Śaiva

equivalent of the Nārāyaṇiya.”

Nicholas Sutton adds that in this part of the Book of Instruction

“it is apparent that Śiva is the Supreme Deity here and he is repeatedly glorified as such in all the

terms familiar from passages that praise the supremacy of Nārāyaṇa.”

At the conclusion of an

Robert P. Goldman, “Gods in Hiding: The Mahābhārata’s Virāṭa Parvan and the Divinity of the Indian Epic

Hero,” in Modern Evaluation of the Mahābhārata: Prof. R.K. Sharma Felicitation Volume, ed. S.P. Narang (Delhi:

Nag Publishers, 1995), 81.

Goldman, 82.

See Brockington, Sanskrit Epics, 249–56; and Sutton, Religious Doctrines, 183–91.

As Sutton points out, several Sanskrit scholars, including Joseph Dahlmann, Sylvain Lévi, Jacques Scheuer,

Madeleine Biardeau, and Alf Hiltebeitel, have discussed the prominence of Śiva in the Mahābhārata (Religious

Doctrines, 183).

MBh 7.57.40–42, trans. Sutton in Religious Doctrines, 185–86.

MBh 13.14–18.

Brockington, Sanskrit Epics, 254.

Sutton, Religious Doctrines, 187.

episode in which Arjuna wrestles with Śiva in the guise of a hunter (kirāta) in the Book of the

Forest, Arjuna praises Śiva in great detail.

This kirāta episode was the source of inspiration for

several premodern Śaiva bhakti retellings in Kannada.

The multiple depictions of Śiva as the

supreme godhead in the Sanskrit epic also allowed the sixteenth-century South Indian poet-

scholar Appayya Dīkṣita in his Sanskrit Bhāratasārasaṃgrahastotra (Hymn of Praise that

Gathers the Meanings of the Bhārata) to create “an ingenious reading of the Mahābhārata that

made it into a text of Śivādvaita, that is, of a soft or qualified version of non-dualism, in which

Śiva was the ultimate, abstract Being (brahman).”

That Śiva is sometimes presented as more

powerful than Krishna in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata highlights a major difference between the

epic and the bhakti narrative poem, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, which, as Edwin Bryant points out, “is

unambiguously a Vaiṣṇavite text (that is, adhering to Viṣṇu as supreme).”

There are also scenes in the Mahābhārata that present Krishna as a limited god who is

capable of being cursed. In the Book of the Women (Strīparvan), after walking amongst the

corpses of all those killed during the Kurukṣetra War, Gāndhārī angrily tells Krishna:

Since I have come to have some ascetic power because of my obedience to my husband, I will

curse you with that, O bearer of discus and club, you who are so enigmatic. Since you ignored

your kinsmen, the Kurus and the Pāṇḍavas, as they were killing each other, Govinda, you shall

slay your own kinsmen. Even you, O Slayer of Madhu, when the thirty-sixth year is at hand, shall

wander in the woods having slain your own kinsmen, having slain your own family, having slain

your sons. You shall arrive at your end by ignominious means. And your wives, their sons killed,

their affines and kinsmen killed, will be running around just as these Bharata women are doing.

Thirty-six years later, in the Book of the Clubs (Mausalaparvan), Gāndhārī’s curse comes to

fruition when all the members of Krishna’s clan, the Yādavas, murder each other in a drunken

brawl and Krishna is accidentally killed by a hunter.

It should be noted that right after Gāndhārī

curses Krishna, he smilingly tells Gāndhārī that he is the only one who can kill the Yādavas and

that they will bring about their own destruction.

Yet despite this declaration by Krishna,

Gāndhārī’s terrible curse still distorts our perception of Krishna’s divinity. As Tamara Reich

remarks about this scene in the Book of the Women, “how to distinguish between causation, fate,

and divine intention? There is obviously no such clear distinction.”

MBh 3.40.55–60.

Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 162.

C. Minkowski, “Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mahābhārata,” Seminar 608 (2010), http://www.india-

seminar.com/2010/608/608_c_minkowski.htm.

Bryant, introduction to Bhāgavatapurāṇa (Krishna: Beautiful Legend), xiii.

MBh 11.25.39–42, trans. James L. Fitzgerald in The Mahābhārata, vol. 7, 11. The Book of the Women, 12. The

Book of Peace, Part One, trans. James L. Fitzgerald (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 70–71.

MBh 16.4–5.

MBh 11.25.43–45.

Tamara C. Reich, “Ends and Closures in the Mahābhārata,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 15, no. 1

(2011): 25.

In the Book of the Horse Sacrifice (Āśvamedhikaparvan), Krishna is faced with the

prospect of being cursed yet again, this time by the sage Uttaṅka when Krishna is returning to his

kingdom of Dwarka (Dvārakā) after the war.

Uttaṅka, like Gāndhārī, believes that Krishna is

responsible for not preventing the battle between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. Krishna

manages to calm Uttaṅka down and explains that he tried to reason with the one hundred

Kauravas: “Being a human, I begged them piteously, but they were full of delusion and did not

accept my good words.”

Hudson explains that “the Uttaṅka episode explicitly raises the

question of Kṛṣṇa’s omnipotence and responds negatively. According to this passage, Kṛṣṇa did

not stop the war because he lacked the power to do so. Limited by his human form, all that he

could do was attempt to counsel the Kauravas.”

After Krishna tells Uttaṅka why he was unable

to stop the war, Uttaṅka asks to see Krishna’s divine form and Krishna acquiesces.

Notably,

Krishna also grants Arjuna a vision of his celestial form in the Bhagavadgītā.

Yet the

juxtaposition of Krishna saying that he could not prevent the war due to his limited human

powers with the magnificent theophany he then bestows upon Uttaṅka only raises more doubts

about the extent of Krishna’s divine abilities in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

In her analysis of the exchange between Krishna and Uttaṅka, Reich notes that a

“nagging question remains: did Kṛṣṇa ‘really’ (within the universe of the text) try to prevent the

war, or did he act deceitfully, as Uttaṅka suspects?”

The question of whether Krishna actually

desires peace between the two rival factions of the Kuru family haunts much of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. Take the first dice match in the Book of the Assembly Hall which is commonly

regarded as the primary catalyst of the Battle at Kurukṣetra. As David Shulman explains,

“memories of their defeat and humiliation in the dicing sabhā propel the Pāṇḍavas forward in

their struggle for restoration, which ends in war.”

In the critical edition of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, Krishna is noticeably absent from this episode. As I will discuss in greater detail

in Chapter Two, even in the versions of the dice game in the northern and southern recensions of

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which Krishna saves Draupadī from being disrobed by the Kaurava

prince Duḥśāsana, the deity makes no effort to stop the gambling match in any way.

If Krishna really is the most powerful god in existence, why does he allow this crooked

game of dice that leads to the horrific Bhārata War? In the Book of the Forest, after Draupadī

describes the suffering she endured in the assembly hall, Krishna assures the Pāṇḍavas’ joint

wife that if he had been in Dwarka during the dice game, he would have come and stopped this

MBh 14.52–53.

MBh 14.53.19, trans. Reich in “Ends and Closures,” 34.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 201.

MBh 14.54.

Bhagavadgītā 11.

Reich, “Ends and Closures,” 35.

D. Shulman, “Devana and Daiva,” in Ritual, State and History in South Asia: Essays in Honour of J.C.

Heesterman, ed. A.W. van den Hoek, D.H.A. Kolff, and M.S. Oort (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 350.

catastrophe.

Yet if we turn back to the very first chapter of the Book of the Beginnings, we find

Ugraśravas claiming that Krishna intentionally turned a blind eye to the disastrous dice match:

Thereupon Dhṛtarāṣṭra approved the gambling match, since he loved his son; and Vāsudeva,

hearing this, waxed greatly angry. Being none too pleased, he encouraged the quarrels and looked

away from the lawless and ghastly events of the gaming and so forth as they increased.

These conflicting statements by Ugraśravas in the Book of the Beginnings and Krishna in the

Book of the Forest illustrate a larger pattern in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which we find

“passages suggesting that Kṛṣṇa either actively endeavors to bring about the war or stands back

and allows it to happen” as well as “episodes where we see Kṛṣṇa actively trying to bring about

peace.”

This is particularly visible in the fifth book of the epic, the Book of Effort

(Udyogaparvan). The “Mission of Bhagavān” (Bhagavadyāna) chapter is dedicated to Krishna’s

peace envoy to Hastinapura (Hastināpura). In the beginning of the chapter, Yudhiṣṭhira asks

Krishna for his advice about whether the Pāṇḍavas should go to war with their paternal cousins:

At these words, Janārdana replied to King Dharma, “I myself shall go to the assembly of the

Kurus in the cause of both of you. If I make peace without hurting your cause, I shall gain very

great merit, king, and the action will have great consequences. I shall free the Kurus and the

Sṛñjayas from the noose of death, free the Pāṇḍavas and Dhārtarāṣṭras, and all of the earth.”

Yet as the “Mission of Bhagavān” chapter progresses, it becomes unclear if Krishna actually

wants to “free the Pāṇḍavas and Dhartarāṣṭras, and all of the earth” or whether he desires war.

While Krishna occasionally describes the benefits of peace with the Kauravas,

he also

repeatedly claims that war is inevitable.

Krishna’s contradictory statements in the “Mission of

Bhagavān” chapter contribute to a larger “sense of confusion and foreboding” that Patricia Greer

describes permeating the entire Book of Effort in the Mahābhārata.

Greer asks if the word

“effort” in this book’s title refers to “Kṛṣṇa’s efforts to prevent war? Why do these efforts not

succeed? Does Kṛṣṇa really want peace? If not, why not? What does he want?”

MBh 3.13–14.

MBh 1.1.92–93, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen in The Mahābhārata, vol. 1, The Book of the Beginning, trans. J.A.B.

van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973), 24.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 201.

MBh 5.70.79–81, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen in The Mahābhārata, vol. 3, 4. The Book of Virāṭa, 5. The Book of

the Effort, trans. J.A.B. van Buitenen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 346.

For example, see MBh 5.75.16, 5.81.5, and 5.91.19–20.

For example, see MBh 5.71.1–25, 5.77.15, and 5.80.45.

Patricia M. Greer, “Ethical Discourse in Udyogaparvan,” in The Mahābhārata: What is Not Here is Nowhere Else

(Yannehāsti na Tadkvacit), ed. T.S. Rukmani (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 2005), 214.

Greer, 212.

By the end of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, we are left with several contradictions involving

Krishna. While he is depicted as the supreme being of the universes at some points in the

narrative, at other points he is presented as a limited deity who is capable of being cursed and

who is subordinate to Śiva. While some characters like Bhīṣma are well-aware of Krishna’s

celestial identity, others such as Arjuna (who is one of Krishna’s closest friends) frequently

forget that Krishna is an omnipotent god. While Krishna sometimes encourages peace between

the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas, he also frequently pushes these two sets of cousins closer to war.

Ānandavardhana and Madhva on Krishna in the Mahābhārata

It is important to recognize, however, that some intellectuals in premodern South Asia did not

seem to be fazed by these conflicting depictions of Krishna’s divinity in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata and even argued that devotion to Krishna/Viṣṇu was the main purpose of the epic.

The most well-known and only complete extant commentary on the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata is the seventeenth-century Bhāratabhāvadīpa (Light on the Inner Significance of

the Bhārata) by Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara, a Brahmin scholar from present-day Maharashtra who

was based in Banaras in North India. Christopher Minkowski points out that “Nīlakaṇṭha

designed his commentary as a properly non-dualist or Advaitin reading of the text, but a reading

in which the ultimate, abstract Being was embodied as Viṣṇu in the form of Kṛṣṇa, as an aid to

the understanding of the spiritually undeveloped.”

We also see an emphasis on Viṣṇu in the

earliest extant commentary on the Mahābhārata, the Jñānadīpikā (Lamp of Knowledge) of

Devabodha who likely lived in North India around the eleventh or twelfth century. Basil Leclere

notes that Devabodha “undoubtedly gives preeminence to Viṣṇu” in the Jñānadīpikā.

Leclere

further observes that “it is probably because he was convinced of Viṣṇu’s supremacy over the

other gods that Devabodha decided to comment at length on the homage to Nārāyaṇa situated at

the very beginning of the Mahābhārata: otherwise, he would have not delayed the explanation of

the epic text properly speaking by what he presented himself as an excessively detailed gloss.”

The earliest discussion of the role of Krishna/Viṣṇu in the Sanskrit epic was by the ninth-

century Kashmiri literary theorist Ānandavardhana, who was “one of the first recorded readers

and literary critics” of the Mahābhārata.

Ānanda is most remembered today for his theory of

dhvani (poetic suggestion) that is expounded in his literary treatise, the Dhvanyāloka (Light on

Poetic Suggestion). In the Dhvanyāloka, Ānanda writes that: “the ultimate meaning of the

Mahābhārata thus appears very clearly: the two subjects intended by the author as primary are

Minkowski, “Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mahābhārata.”

Basile Leclere, “New Light on Devabodha, the Earliest Extant Commentator on Mahābhārata,” Asiatische

Studien/Etudes Asiatique 70, no. 2 (2016): 498.

Leclere, 501.

The “homage to Nārāyaṇa” that Devabodha comments on is found at the very beginning of the critical edition of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata (1.1.0) and commences every book of Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara’s “vulgate” version of the epic

(which is generally identified with the northern recension): “Honour first Nārāyaṇa and Nara, the most excellent of

men; honour too Sarasvatī the goddess; then proclaim the Tale of Victory!” (trans. Smith in Mahābhārata: Abridged

Translation, 1).

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 51.

the rasa of peace [śāntarasa] and the human goal of liberation [mokṣa].”

Ānanda then

elaborates that the importance of śāntarasa and mokṣa in the Mahābhārata is shown by the

dhvani of the following line from the Book of the Beginnings: “And the blessed Vāsudeva, the

everlasting, is here glorified.”

Naama Shalom notes that Ānanda “subsequently claims that,

contrary to expectation, the main subject of this long story is not the Pāṇḍavas, or their deeds

[pāṇḍavādicaritaṃ], or, in fact, any other theme around which the MBh revolves. Rather, it’s

real artha (‘aim; purpose; meaning’) is mokṣa and the removal of avidyā (‘ignorance; nescience;

illusion’) by means of cultivating devotion [bhakti] to Kṛṣṇa Vāsudeva.”

We find something similar in the Sanskrit Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya (Determination

of the Purport of the Mahābhārata), an extensive treatise by Madhva, the thirteenth-century

Vaiṣṇava philosopher and proponent of Dvaita Vedānta from present-day Karnataka. Vishal

Sharma explains that in the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya, Madhva presents his audience with a

“Kṛṣṇa-centric reading of the epic’s core narrative.”

Sharma also notes that according to

Madhva, the tātparya (purport) of the Mahābhārata “is the glory of Vāsudeva.”

Ānanda and Madhva’s shared assertion that Krishna/Viṣṇu is the central figure of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata may seem surprising given the previously discussed paradoxical

representations of this deity’s divinity and simply because Krishna is at best a supporting

character in the Sanskrit epic. While Krishna makes some sort of appearance in each of the first

sixteen books of the Mahābhārata (recall that he dies in the sixteenth book, the Book of the

Clubs), Hiltebeitel explains that Krishna’s “prominence reaches its peak from books 5 to 11.”

Krishna is certainly a major player in the four war books of the epic (books six–nine) with his

Dhvanyāloka 4.5, trans. Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, and M.V. Patwardhan in The

Dhvanyāloka of Ānandavardhana with the Locana of Abhinavagupta, trans. Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Jeffrey Moussaieff

Masson, and M.V. Patwardhan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 691.

MBh 1.1.193 (Dhvanyāloka 4.5), trans. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan in Dhvanyāloka, 691.

Naama Shalom, Re-ending the Mahābhārata: The Rejection of Dharma in the Sanskrit Epic (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2017), 89. For the Sanskrit passage from the Dhvanyāloka that Shalom is

summarizing, see Re-ending the Mahābhārata, 203.

Gary Tubb, on the other hand, warns us that “it is important not to misinterpret the role of God in Ānanda’s

interpretation of the Mahābhārata” and asserts that Ānanda believes that that “Vāsudeva is important in the

Mahābhārata not primarily because of his appearance in the form of the individual incarnation known as Kṛṣṇa,

whom one may worship, but because he is the impersonal, absolute Brahma[n], the reality behind this vain world, to

be reached through the cultivation of dispassion” (“Śāntarasa in the Mahābhārata,” in Essays on the Mahābhārata,

ed. Arvind Sharma [Leiden: Brill, 1991], 196–97).

Vishal Sharma, “Reading the Mahābhārata as Śāstra: The Role of the ‘Righteous’ Pāṇḍavas and ‘Villainous’

Kauravas in Madhva’s Dvaitavedānta,” Journal of Hindu Studies, advance online publication (July 2021): 5.

Sharma, 2.

As Srilata Raman has shown, in the very first verse of his commentary, the Gītārthasaṃgraha, the Śrīvaiṣṇava

philosopher Yāmuna (traditional dates: 916–1036 CE) makes a very similar argument. See Self-Surrender (Prapatti)

to God in Śrīvaiṣṇavism: Tamil Cats and Sanskrit Monkeys (New York: Routledge, 2007), 47.

Alf Hiltebeitel, “Krishna in the Mahabharata: The Death of Karna,” in Krishna: A Sourcebook, ed. Edwin F.

Bryant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 23.

orchestration of the deaths of several major Kaurava warriors including Bhīṣma, Droṇa, Karṇa,

Bhūriśravas, and Duryodhana. It is thus unsurprising that Hiltebeitel describes Krishna as the

“ringmaster on the text’s center stage.”

Yet, as noted earlier, the narrative of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata primarily focuses on the lives of the Pāṇḍava princes, not the life of Krishna. As

Bryant states, “although Krishna’s role in the epic as statesman and friend of the five Pandavas is

pivotal to the development of the narrative, he is not the protagonist of the story.”

To convincingly argue that Krishna/Viṣṇu is the primary figure of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, both Ānanda and Madhva must rely on references to kṛṣṇacaritas. The

kṛṣṇacarita that Ānanda depends on is the Harivaṃśa, a text about Krishna and other members

of the Yādava clan that the Mahābhārata labels a khila or “appendix” in the “Summaries of the

Books” (Parvasaṃgraha) sub-book of the Book of the Beginnings.

The Book of Viṣṇu

(Viṣṇuparvan) of the Harivaṃśa contains the earliest detailed account of Krishna’s life

beginning with his birth and ending with the adult Krishna’s rescue of his grandson Aniruddha

from the demon Bāṇa and their subsequent return to Dwarka. In the Dhvanyāloka, Ānanda

explains that while the Mahābhārata’s true sense of śāntarasa and mokṣa is hidden:

The poet-creator Kṛṣṇadvaipāyana [Vyāsa] has made it [the sense of śāntarasa and mokṣa]

perfectly clear, however, by composing the Harivaṃśa as a conclusion to his Mahābhārata. Since

this sense stirs us toward an intense devotion (bhakti) to that other truth that lies beyond worldly

life, all worldly activity appears now a preliminary goal, to be rejected.

For Ānanda, “the Harivaṃśa brings out the Mahābhārata’s subtextual Kṛṣṇa-centricity.”

It is important to pause here and briefly discuss the lack of a consensus on whether the

Harivaṃśa should be treated as an intrinsic component of the Mahābhārata. Some scholars such

as Simon Brodbeck argue that “the Mahābhārata’s lists of contents show that whatever the

nuances of the relationship, the Harivaṃśa is definitely part of the Mahābhārata.”

Brockington

adds that “in its opening verse the Harivaṃśa refers back to the Mahābhārata (mahābhāratam

ākhyānam 1.8a) in a way that is clearly intended to place it in a direct line with it.”

In premodern South Asia, there were multiple intellectuals and poets like Ānanda who

viewed the Harivaṃśa as part of the Mahābhārata. In the fourteenth century, Nācana Somanātha

“claimed to have completed” the thirteenth-century poet Tikkana’s portion of the Telugu

Hiltebeitel, 23.

Bryant, “Introduction” (2007), 8.

MBh 1.2.69.

Dhvanyāloka 4.5, trans. Ingalls, Masson, and Patwardhan in Dhvanyāloka, 692.

Hawley and Pillai, “Introduction to the Mahābhārata,” 13.

Simon Brodbeck, “Harivaṃśa” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu,

Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Brill Online, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2212-

5019_BEH_COM_1010069028. See also André Couture, Kṛṣṇa in the Harivaṁśa, vol. 1, The Wonderful Play of a

Cosmic Child (Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2015), 12–21.

Brockington, Sanskrit Epics, 313.

Mahābhāratamu by composing the Uttaraharivaṃśamu.

The Harivaṃśa is also contained

within some Mahābhāratas such as the eleventh-century Sanskrit Bhāratamañjarī (Essence of the

Bhārata) of Kṣemendra and the Persian Razmnāmah.

Finally, Nīlakaṇṭha Caturdhara includes

the Harivaṃśa in his extensive Bhāratabhāvadīpa commentary on the Mahābhārata.

There were also, however, several individuals in premodern South Asia who understood

the Harivaṃśa to be a distinct entity from the Mahābhārata. Multiple Mahābhārata retellings

including those by Villi and Cauhān along with Agastya Paṇḍita’s Bālabhārata, Sāraḷādāsa’s

Mahābhārata, Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, and Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit, do

not contain a separate Harivaṃśa section.

Although the fourteenth-century Telugu

Harivaṃśamu was composed by Ĕṛṛāpragaḍa, one of the authors of the Mahābhāratamu, the

Harivaṃśamu is not considered part of the Mahābhāratamu.

There were many other stand-

alone premodern regional Harivaṃśas such as those by Kaviśekhara Vidyācandra Bhaṭṭācharya

and Bhavānanda in Assamese, Acyutānanda in Oriya, and Manbodh Jhā in Maithili.

A number of modern scholars have stressed the importance of treating the Harivaṃśa as

a separate work of literature from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Daniel Ingalls suggests that the

Harivaṃśa is distinct from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata because the Harivaṃśa is one of the

earliest examples of the mahākāvya genre.

Freda Matchett maintains that the Harivaṃśa

“asserts its discontinuity [from the epic] by adding something radically new: the complete story

of Kṛṣṇa, from his birth at Mathurā, through his childhood and youth among the forest-dwelling

cowherds, to his triumph in Dvārakā as a mature warrior and statesman.”

Narayana Rao and Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, 112.

Geen “Marriage of Draupadī,” 300; and Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 107.

Minkowski, “Nīlakaṇṭha’s Mahābhārata.”

See Agastya Paṇḍita, Bālabhārata (Bālabhāratam of Agastya Paṇḍita), ed. K.S. Ramamurthi (Tirupati: Sri

Venkateswara University Oriental Research Institute, 1983); Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī

(Kumaravyasa Mahabharata (Abridged): An English Transcreation of Kumaravyasa's Karnata Bharata

Kathamanjari), trans. D. Seshagiri Rao (Bangalore: Parijatha Publications, 1986); Mahendra K. Mishra,

“Mahabharata and Regional Variations: Sarala Mahabharata in the Folklore of Odisha,” in Aesthetic Textures:

Living Traditions of the Mahabharata, ed. Molly Kaushal and Sukrita Paul Kumar (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National

Centre for the Arts, 2019), 131; and Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit.

Narayana Rao and Shulman, Classical Telugu Poetry, 106. The same is true for Nācana Somanātha’s Telugu

Uttaraharivaṃśamu despite the poet’s own claim to be completing Tikkana’s Mahābhāratamu.

Sarma, Assamese Literature, 68; Dipti Ray, Prataparudradeva, the Last Great Suryavamsi King of Orissa (AD

1497 to AD 1540) (Delhi: Northern Book Centre, 2007), 141; and George Abraham Grierson, An Introduction to the

Maithili Dialect of the Bihari Language as Spoken in North Bihar (Calcutta: The Asiatic Society, 1909), xiv.

See Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti, 68–70; and Norvin Hein, “A Revolution in Kṛṣṇaism: the Cult of Gopāla,” History of

Religions 25, no.4 (1986): 298–99.

Daniel H.H. Ingalls, “The Harivaṃśa as a Mahākāvya,” in Mélanges d‘Indianisme à la mémoire de Louis Renou,

ed. Louis Renou (Paris: Éditions de Boccard, 1968), 382.

Freda Matchett, Kṛṣṇa: Lord or Avatāra; The Relationship Between Kṛṣṇa and Viṣṇu (New York: Routledge,

2001), loc. 7372 of 8584, Kindle.

There are convincing arguments on both sides of the modern debate about the

relationship between the Harivaṃśa and the Mahābhārata. The main take-away for us here,

however, is that without the “radically new” kṛṣṇacarita contained within the Harivaṃśa,

Ānanda is unable to make his argument about Krishna being the main purpose of the

Mahābhārata. We see a similar process in Madhva’s Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya. In the first

chapter of this treatise on the Mahābhārata, Madhva proclaims to his audience that: “Hari [that

is, Viṣṇu] is the master for all eternity. [All] are under the control [of the] Highest [One].”

K.T.

Pandurangi notes that in this first chapter of the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya Madhva also

asserts that the “Mahābhārata declares the Supremacy of Nārāyaṇa emphatically,

unconditionally and as the total purport of the entire scripture.”

Yet in order to support this

claim about Nārāyaṇa being the true meaning of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Madhva frequently

draws from one of the most popular kṛṣṇacaritas in South Asia: the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

As Anusha Sudindra Rao points out, the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya “is a simultaneous

narration of the events from the Rāmāyaṇa, Mahābhārata, and portions of the Kṛṣṇa story from

the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, brought together into a single timeline as Madhva sees it.”

For example,

while parts of the twelfth chapter of the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya discuss the births of the

five Pāṇḍavas, Madhva uses the rest of this chapter to describe the imprisonment of Krishna’s

parents, Vasudeva and Devakī, and the births of Krishna and his elder brother Balarāma.

The

thirteenth chapter of the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya is solely dedicated to Krishna’s

upbringing amongst the cowherds of Vrindavan and his defeat of his wicked relative, Kaṃsa.

None of these episodes from Krishna’s youth are discussed in detail in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

itself. As Brockington notes, apart from “brief allusions” to Krishna’s childhood deeds such as

the slaying of the demoness Pūtanā and the lifting of Mount Govardhana, the epic has “very little

on his early life” and “just a few traces of Kṛṣṇa’s pastoral background.”

Some of the events from Krishna’s life that Madhva discusses, such as the deity’s

slaying of the horse demon Keśī, are found in multiple kṛṣṇacaritas, including the Harivaṃśa,

the Viṣṇupurāṇa, and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

Certain deeds of Krishna that Madhva expounds

upon in the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya, however, such as Krishna and Arjuna traveling to

heaven to retrieve the corpses of the four children of a Brahmin sage, are clearly from the

Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya 1.79, trans. Deepak Sarma in An Introduction to Mādhva Vedānta (Aldershot:

Ashgate Publishers Ltd., 2003), 88–89.

K.T. Pandurangi, Philosophic Vision of Sri Mahabharata Tatparyanirnaya and Bhagavatatatparyanirnaya of Sri

Anandateertha Bhagavatpadacharya’s Sarvamoola Grantha (Bangalore: Akhila Bharata Madhwa Mahamandala,

2015), 13.

Anusha Sudindra Rao, “Of Deities and Demons: Madhva’s Doctrine of Hierarchy in the

Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya,” (Master’s thesis, University of Calgary, 2019), 34.

Pandurangi, Philosophic Vision, 53–59.

Pandurangi, 59–61.

Brockington, Sanskrit Epics, 260.

On the slaying of Keśī in the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya, see Pandurangi, Philosophic Vision, 61. On Keśī in

the Harivaṃśa, the Viṣṇupurāṇa, and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, see Benjamín Preciado-Solís, The Kṛṣṇa Cycle in the

Purāṇas: Themes and Motifs in a Heroic Saga (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 95.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

Madhva’s familiarity with this kṛṣṇacarita is evidenced by another of his

works entitled the Bhāgavatatātparyanirṇaya (Determination of the Purport of the Bhāgavata).

As with Villi and Cauhān, Ānanda and Madhva both clearly think that Krishna/Viṣṇu is

the most important figure in the Mahābhārata narrative. To make this case about Krishna in the

Mahābhārata, Ānanda and Madhva need to refer to and discuss different kṛṣṇacaritas (the

Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa) in their respective treatises, the Dhvanyāloka and the

Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya. Unlike these two intellectuals who extensively comment on the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata, however, Villi and Cauhān try to demonstrate Krishna’s prominence in

the epic by retelling it in a South Asian regional language as a bhakti narrative poem. Before

closely examining how these two poets transform the Mahābhārata into a devotional kṛṣṇacarita,

we must first understand what exactly makes a text a bhakti narrative poem.

Common Features of Bhakti Narrative Poems

Based on a skimming of The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature (2011), a non-specialist

reader might assume that all bhakti compositions are short poems since the majority of the

selections in this collection are rarely longer than a page or two.

Indeed, as John Stratton

Hawley astutely observes, “on the genre side, the remarkable fact with which to reckon with is

the way the relatively short sung lyric known as the pad, pada, padam, or abhang came to define

the field [of bhakti literature] more or less throughout the subcontinent by the end of the

sixteenth century.”

Several beloved bhakti poets, including Annamayya and Kṣetrayya in

Telugu, Nāmdev, Janābāi, Tukārām, and Eknāth in Marathi, Narsī Mehtā and Dayārām in

Gujarati, Vidyāpati in Maithili, Caṇḍīdās in Bengali, and Kabīr, Sūrdās, Nandadās, Hit

Harivaṃś, and Mīrābāī in Bhasha, composed in the pada form. Hawley notes that use of the

pada can be traced back to the padāvalī (a sequence of padas) in Jayadeva’s twelfth-century

Sanskrit Gītagovinda (Song of Govinda), which in turn has analogues with earlier Tamil verse

sets known as patikams and tirumoḻis that are seen in the works of Tamil bhakti poets such as

Kāraikkālammaiyār, Cuntarar, Periyāḻvār, and Nammāḻvār.

Given the prevalence of the

pad/pada/padam/abhang form across premodern South Asia, it is not surprising that most of the

theoretical work on bhakti literature has focused on short poems, songs, and lyrics.

On this story in the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya, see Pandurangi, 97–98. This story is found in 10.89 of the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa. All references to the Bhāgavatapurāṇa are to: Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahāpurāṇa: With Sanskrit

Text and English Translation, trans. C.L. Goswami, 2 vols. (Gorakhpur: Gita Press, 2003).

Nammāḻvār also describes Krishna and Arjuna rescuing the sons of the Brahmin in his Tiruvāymoḻi (3.10.5). Given

the importance Madhva places on the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, however, it is unlikely that he is drawing on Nammāḻvār.

Andrew Schelling, ed., The Oxford Anthology of Bhakti Literature (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2011).

Hawley, Storm of Songs, 298.

Hawley, 299. See also Ate, “Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi,” 41–61.

For example, see Kenneth E. Bryant, Poems to the Child-God: Structures and Strategies in the Poetry of Sūrdās

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 43–71; Cutler, Songs of Experience, 19–38; and Neelima Shukla-

Bhatt, Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat: A Legacy of Bhakti in Songs and Stories (New York: Oxford University Press,

2015), 33–95.

There are, however, multiple lengthy narrative compositions that have also been

categorized as bhakti texts.

Cēkkilār’s twelfth-century Tamil Tiruttoṇṭarpurāṇam (Legend of

the Divine Servants) or Periyapurāṇam (Great Legend) narrates the stories of the sixty-three

Tamil Śaiva saints known as the Nāyaṉmār or “leaders” in more than 4,200 quatrain verses.

Indira Peterson points out, “Cēkkilār’s hagiography remains one of the great popular texts of

Śaiva bhakti in the Tamil region.”

Tulsīdās’s sixteenth-century Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas (Lake

of the Deeds of Rāma) retells the Rāmāyaṇa in “roughly 12,800 lines divided into 1073

‘stanzas.’”

Vasudha Paramasivan explains that the Rāmcaritmānas is “considered the

quintessential text of Ram bhakti in North India, as it was the first North Indian vernacular work

to place the Ram katha [story] within a devotional framework.”

The most famous and

lengthiest narrative text that has been labeled a bhakti poem is the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, which is

comprised of more than 14,000 verse couplets.

Barbara Holdrege describes this text as “the

consummate textual monument to Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions, which is generally held to have

originated in the Tamil region of South India between the eighth and tenth centuries CE.”

100

At first glance, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Rāmcaritmānas

appear to be three very different religious texts. The Bhāgavatapurāṇa is a purāṇa, “a well-

established genre of trans-Indic Sanskrit literature dealing with universal or cosmic time, stories

of the gods and their exploits on earth, and the ritual practices of their devotees,”

101

the

My following discussion of the features of bhakti narrative poems is restricted to the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa,

Cēkkilār’s Tamil Periyapurāṇam, and Tulsīdās’s Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas. There are, however, many other narrative

poems that are longer than the typical bhakti pada but much shorter than the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam,

and the Rāmcaritmānas, that have also been classified as works of bhakti. Examples of these shorter bhakti narrative

poems include Māṇikkavācakar’s ninth-century Tamil Tirukkōvaiyār, Jayadeva’s twelfth-century Sanskrit

Gītagovinda, and Harirāmvyās’s sixteenth-century Bhasha Rāspañcādhyāyī.

Monius notes that “estimates of its [the Periyapurāṇam’s] proper length ranges from 4253 quatrains to 4286”

(“Love, Violence, Disgust,” 119).

Indira Viswanathan Peterson, “Tamil Śaiva Hagiography: The Narrative of the Holy Servants (of Śiva) and the

Hagiographical Project in Tamil Śaivism,” in According to Tradition: Hagiographical Writing in India, ed. Winand

M. Callewaert and Rupert Snell (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1994), 192.

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 13.

Vasudha Paramasivan, “Between Text and Sect: Early Nineteenth Century Shifts in the Theology of Ram,” (PhD

diss., University of California: Berkeley, 2010), 2.

There are conflicting accounts of the number of verses in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. Bryant states that “the Bhāgavata

is said to have 18,000 verses, both in its own colophons, and in other Purāṇas. In fact it has 16,256” (introduction to

[Bhāgavatapurāṇa] Krishna: Beautiful Legend, lxxn13). Ravi Gupta and Kenneth Valpey, however, describe the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa as a work of “more than fourteen thousand Sanskrit verses” (introduction to Bhāgavata Purāṇa:

Selected Readings, trans. Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey [New York: Columbia University Press, 2017], 1).

100

Barbara A. Holdrege, “The Dynamics of Sanskritising and Vernacularising Practices in the Social Life of the

Bhāgavata Purāṇa,” Journal of Hindu Studies 11, no. 1 (2018): 21.

101

Anne E. Monius, “Purāṇa/Purāṇam: Modes of Narrative Temporality in Sanskrit and Tamil,” in Passages:

Relationships between Tamil and Sanskrit, ed. Kannan M. and Jennifer Clare (Pondicherry: Institut Français de

Pondichéry, 2009), 217.

Periyapurāṇam is a hagiography,

102

and the Rāmcaritmānas is a Rāmāyaṇa retelling. A closer

examination of these narrative poems, however, reveals that they share four distinct features.

The first of these four features is the prevalence of devotees in these three texts who, in

the words of Kenneth Valpey, have been bhaktas “all along.”

103

Monius observes that throughout

the Tamil Periyapurāṇam, multiple members of the Nāyaṉmār are depicted as being “born with

love of Śiva in their hearts.”

104

This is illustrated clearly in the beginning of Cēkkilār’s account

of the life of the Tamil Śaiva saint and poetess Kāraikkālammaiyār:

Her birth graced and enhanced the community of merchants. With time she gently grew,

taking her first faltering steps and learning to speak so that she could express the love that

overflowed in her heart without end and become a devotee who serves the feet

of the Lord who is adorned with the snake.

105

Yet in the stories of several other Nāyaṉmār, Cēkkilār simply introduces these characters as

devotees. At the beginning of the tale of the generous merchant Iyaṟpakai, Cēkkilār tell us:

In the city of Pumpūkār there lived a man called Ulakiyaṟpakaiyār. He was a prominent member

of the merchant caste. He owned untold wealth and lived in luxury. He was a devoted servant of

the Lord Siva. When any other devotee of the Lord asked him for anything, he would never say

“no,” but always willingly came forward to give them what they wanted.

106

While Cēkkilār does not directly say that Iyaṟpakai was born a Śiva bhakta, this introduction to

Iyaṟpakai strongly implies that he has been a devotee of Śiva “all along.” If we turn to the

Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas, we find that several of the characters that Rāma meets during his

adventures are also introduced as devotees. For example, at the beginning of his fourteen-year

exile, Rāma crosses paths with Guha, the king of the Nishad tribal community. While Guha is

102

Although the Tiruttoṇṭarpurāṇam/Periyapurāṇam has the word purāṇa in its title, Monius notes that this text “is

not typical, either in terms of the Sanskritic versions of the genre or the later Tamil tradition of sthalapurāṇa

(talapurāṇam)” (Purāṇa/Purāṇam, 219). Jay Ramesh, however, dedicates considerable space to a discussion of the

Periyapurāṇam in his work on talapurāṇams or “place legends” and asserts that “the Periyapurāṇam is the first

Tamil Śaiva literary work to anchor a sense of Śaiva collective memory to individual places and to the region that

they constituted” (“Abodes of Śiva: Monuments and Memory in Medieval and Early Modern South Indian Purāṇas,”

[PhD diss., Columbia University, 2020], 71).

103

Kenneth R. Valpey, “The Bhāgavatapurāṇa as a Mahābhārata Reflection,” in Parallels and Comparisons:

Proceedings of the Fourth Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit Epics and Puranas, September 2005,

ed. Petteri Koskikallio (Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts, 2009), 264.

104

Anne E. Monius, “Śiva as Heroic Father: Theology and Hagiography in Medieval South India,” The Harvard

Theological Review 97, no. 2 (2004): 188.

105

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1719, trans. Karen Pechilis in “The Story of the Classical Tamil Woman Saint,

Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār: A Translation of Her Story from Cēkkiḻār’s Periya Purāṇam,” International Journal of Hindu

Studies 10, no. 2 (2006): 180. All references to the Periyapurāṇam are to Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam Eṉṉum

Tiruttoṇṭar Purāṇam, ed. C.K. Cuppiramaṇiya Mutaliyār, 7 vols. (Coimbatore: Kōvai Tamiḻ Caṅkam, 1964–75).

106

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 405, trans. Alastair McGlashan in Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam (The History of The Holy

Servants of Lord Siva: A Translation of the Periya Purāṇam of Cēkkilār), trans. Alastair McGlashan (Victoria:

Trafford Publishing, 2006), 53.

first described as “a friend of Rāma and precious to him as life” in Vālmīki’s Sanskrit

Rāmāyaṇa, there is no mention of a prior friendship between Guha and Rāma in the

Rāmcaritmānas.

107

Instead, when Guha learns of the arrival of Rāma, Tulsī states that:

When Guha of the Nishad tribe heard of this,

he was delighted and summoned his dear kinsmen.

With great loads of fruit and tubers as gifts,

he went to meet Ram, his heart overjoyed.

Laying down his gifts, he fell at Ram’s feet,

and gazed with adoration at the Lord.

108

Even though this is their first meeting in the Rāmcaritmānas, Guha’s reaction to Rāma suggests

that he has been a Rāma bhakta “all along.” This is true of many of the characters that Rāma

encounters such as the sages Atri and Sutīkṣṇa and the tribal female ascetic Śabarī.

109

As with Kāraikkālammaiyār in the Periyapurāṇam, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa describes some

devotees who have been bhaktas from a young age such as the five-year-old demon Prahlāda:

As a child he was not interested in toys, and acted like a simpleton, on account of his mind being

absorbed in God. His mind appeared possessed [as if] by the planet Kṛṣṇa, and so he did not

perceive the world as it is conventionally perceived. While sitting, wandering about, eating, lying

down, drinking, and eating, he was not consciously planning these [activities], as he was in the

embrace of Govinda.

110

Yet the Bhāgavatapurāṇa also introduces bhaktas like Iyaṟpakai in the Periyapurāṇam and Guha

in the Rāmcaritmānas who are implied to have always been devotees even if the text does not

state this explicitly. Valpey notes that examples of characters in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa who are

“resignified by implication as having been Kṛṣṇa’s devotees ‘all along’” include several

individuals from the Mahābhārata tradition such as the Pāṇḍavas, Draupadī, and Kuntī.

111

The Bhāgavatapurāṇa has a complex intertextual relationship with the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. Wendy Doniger has shown that through its main frame story in which Śuka (the

son of the Mahābhārata’s compiler Vyāsa) narrates the story of Krishna to Parikṣit (the grandson

107

Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa 2.44.9, trans. Sheldon I. Pollock in Vālmīki, The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient

India, vol. 2, Ayodhyākāṇḍa, trans. Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 175.

108

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 2.88.1–2, trans. Philip Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, The Epic of Ram, vol. 3, trans. Philip

Lutgendorf, Murty Classical Library of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018), 157 and 159. All

references to the Rāmcaritmānas are to: Tulsīdās, Śrirāmcaritmānas, ed. Hanumānprasād Poddār (Gorakhpur: Gita

Press, 1966).

109

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.4, 3.10, and 3.34.

110

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.4.37–38, trans. Edwin F. Bryant in Bhakti Yoga: Tales and Teachings from the Bhāgavata

Purāṇa (New York: North Point Press, 2017), 414.

111

Valpey, “Bhāgavatapurāṇa as Mahābhārata Reflection,” 264.

of Arjuna), the Bhāgavatapurāṇa explicitly “situate[s] itself within the Epic itself.”

112

Multiple

other characters from the Mahābhārata including Ugraśravas, Vidura, and Yudhiṣṭhira also

appear as narrators and interlocuters throughout the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

113

Moreover, the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa incorporates “its own shortened versions of episodes from the Mahābhārata

into the narrative”

114

including the slaying of Śiśupāla, the death of Bhīṣma, the destruction of

the Yādavas, and the final journey of the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī.

115

It is no wonder that Vishal

Sharma asserts that “in many ways, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa is a commentary on the Mahābhārata

hiding in plain sight” and that Matchett argues that the Bhāgavatapurāṇa makes an “implicit

claim to be a new Mahābhārata, focused upon Kṛṣṇa rather than upon the Pāṇḍavas.”

116

As Angelika Malinar points out, “true to the bhakti reinterpretation of the epic… [in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa] all the heroes [of the Mahābhārata] are more or less turned into bhaktas of

Kṛṣṇa.”

117

From the first description of the Pāṇḍavas greeting Krishna in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa,

it is evident that the five princes are bhaktas who have been Krishna devotees “all along.”

Those heroes, the sons of Pṛthā, arose simultaneously when they saw Mukunda, the Lord of

everything, approaching, like the five vital airs upon the return of the principal [vital air]. The

heroes embraced Kṛṣṇa, and their sins were removed by contact with his body. Gazing into his

face, which was smiling affectionately, they became ecstatic.

118

Unlike in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which Arjuna frequently forgets Krishna’s divine

identity, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa consistently presents the Pāṇḍavas as steadfast devotees of

Krishna. As we will soon see, Villi and Cauhān also both depict these five brothers as

unwavering, “all along” Krishna bhaktas throughout their regional Mahābhārata retellings.

Of course, not all the devotees in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the

Rāmcaritmānas have been bhaktas all their lives. These three texts contain some examples of

characters who are either transformed into bhaktas in the course of the narrative or who

temporarily veer off the devotional path. After being defeated by Rāma while trying to disrupt a

sacred sacrifice, the demon Mārīca becomes a Rāma bhakta in the Rāmcaritmānas.

119

The

112

Wendy Doniger, “Echoes of the Mahābhārata: Why is a Parrot the Narrator of the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the

Devībhāgavata Purāṇa?” in Purāṇa Perennis: Reciprocity and Transformation in Hindu and Jaina Texts, ed.

Wendy Doniger (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 35.

113

See Valpey, “Bhāgavatapurāṇa as Mahābhārata Reflection,” 260.

114

Matchett, Kṛṣṇa: Lord or Avatāra, loc. 3582 of 8584, Kindle.

115

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.72–75, 1.9.43–46, 11.30, and 1.15.

116

Vishal Sharma, “Svargakāmo Garheta: Rebuking Kṛṣṇa in the Mahābhārata Commentaries” (paper presented at

the Annual Conference on South Asia, Madison, WI, October 18, 2019); and Matchett, Kṛṣṇa: Lord or Avatāra, loc.

3597 of 8584, Kindle.

117

Angelika Malinar, “How Purāṇas relate the Mahābhārata: The Case of King Parikṣit,” in Epics, Khilas, and

Purāṇas: Continuities and Ruptures; Proceedings of the Third Dubrovnik International Conference on the Sanskrit

Epics and Puranas, September 2002, ed. Petteri Koskikallio (Zagreb: Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts,

2005), 481.

118

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.58.2–3, trans. Bryant in Krishna: Beautiful Legend, 248.

119

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.25.2–3.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa relates the tale of the accidental bhakta Ajāmila, a sinful Brahmin who attains

liberation on his deathbed when he calls out the name of his son who happens to be named

Nārāyaṇa.

120

In the Periyapurāṇam, Cēkkilār tells the stories of Śaiva devotees who used to be

the followers of different divinities such as Appar, who joined a Jain monastery after the death of

his parents, and Cākkiya, who once engaged in the study of Buddhist scriptures.

121

The pervasiveness of the tales of “all along” bhaktas in these three narrative poems,

however, is significant. The stories of life-long devotees in the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa,

Cēkkilār’s Tamil Periyapurāṇam, and Tulsī’s Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas show audiences the

importance of unwavering bhakti. Despite their profound love for their god, “all along” devotees

such as Kāraikkālammaiyār in the Periyapurāṇam and Prahlāda in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa do not

necessarily lead easy lives. Kāraikkālammaiyār is abandoned by her husband and Prahlāda’s

father Hiraṇyakaśipu repeatedly tries to kill him. Thanks to their resolute bhakti, however,

Kāraikkālammaiyār and Prahlāda are always protected by their chosen deity.

122

Also, while

many “all along” bhaktas like Guha in the Rāmcaritmānas have multiple meetings with their

divine lord, these devotees never cease to be delighted and amazed each time they encounter

him.

123

The extensive renderings of the stories of “all along” bhaktas in these three narrative

poems therefore show audiences the rewards of leading a life of constant devotion.

The second important shared feature of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and

the Rāmcaritmānas is the frequency of devotees breaking out into song and praying to the main

deity. Ravi Gupta and Valpey observe that “the Bhāgavata takes every opportunity to burst forth

in praise, pausing its narrative to describe the Lord’s beauty or to offer him verses of

reverence… the Bhāgavata takes its time to savor the words of praise spoken by devotees to their

Lord.”

124

The hymns of bhaktas in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa often take up entire chapters in the text.

We see this with the elaborate prayer to Bhagavān that the elephant Gajendra recites after he

finds himself in the deadly grasp of a crocodile and the detailed eulogy that the god Brahmā

offers after he tests Krishna by making all his calves and cowherd friends vanish.

125

Kuntī is one

of the first characters in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa to sing a lengthy hymn to Krishna. In the eighth

chapter of the first book of the text after Krishna saves the unborn Parikṣit from the vengeful

Aśvatthāman, Kuntī praises the god in a song of twenty-six verse couplets.

126

She begins:

120

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 6.1.29.

121

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1303–343 and 3636–643.

122

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1717–1781; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.4–10.

123

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 2.88–89 and 6.121.

124

Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey, “Introduction: Churning the Ocean of Līlā Themes for Bhāgavata

Study,” in The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Sacred Text and Living Tradition, ed. Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 7.

125

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8.3.2–29 and 10.14.1–40.

126

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.8.18–43.

I shall bow down to you, the primordial supreme person, master of material nature. You exist

within and outside all beings, and yet they do not recognize you. Like an actor wearing a

costume, you are covered by the veil of māyā, imperceptible to the ignorant. You are unchanging

and yet you are not recognized by the foolish observer. Your purpose is to teach bhakti yoga to

the most excellent ascetics and sages with flawless character. How then can we women see you?

Obeisance to Krishna, son of Vasudeva and Devakī. Obeisance to Govinda, the boy of Nanda and

the cowherds (of Vṛndāvana village). Obeisance to the Lord with a lotus navel! Obeisance to him

who wears a lotus garland! Obeisance to the one with lotus eyes! And obeisance to you whose

feet are lotuses! Lord of the senses! You liberated (your mother) Devakī, who had been

imprisoned for a long time by the cruel King Kaṁsa. Likewise, omnipresent Lord, it was you

who saved me and my children from constant danger.

127

In the beginning of her prayer, Kuntī’s description of Krishna as the ultimate godhead is not very

specific and could be referring to a number of different deities. After Kuntī asks Krishna how she

is able to see him despite her status as a woman, however, her eulogy progressively becomes

more and more personal. With her use of epithets such as Vāsudeva (son of Vasudeva) and

Govinda (tender of cows), Kuntī invokes a particular image of the young Krishna of Vrindavan

that is the focus of the first half of the tenth book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the longest and most

popular book of this text. Kuntī then directly brings herself and the Pāṇḍavas into her hymn by

comparing how Krishna has protected her and her sons to how he rescued his mother Devakī.

While Kuntī and Krishna have a close relationship in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

128

Kuntī’s

passionate prayer to Krishna in this scene in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa signals that in this devotional

kṛṣṇacarita, Kuntī is not merely Krishna’s maternal aunt, but his devout bhakta.

Tulsī frequently uses a type of meter called the harigītikā chand or “meter of short songs

to Hari” for the prayers that devotees sing to Rāma. As Lutgendorf notes, “verses in this meter

seem to be inserted at moments of heightened emotion…appropriately, it is the chands among all

the verses of the Mānas that are most often set to melodies and sung as devotional hymns.”

129

Throughout the Rāmcaritmānas, multiple characters including both deities (like Brahmā, Indra,

and Śiva) and humans (such as Ahalyā and Guha) praise Rāma using the harigītikā chand

meter.

130

Even mere minutes before he dies from wounds he sustained while trying to save Sītā

from Rāvaṇa, the divine bird Jaṭāyū directly extols Rāma with harigītikā chands:

Hail to you, Ram, of incomparable beauty, formless [nirguṇa]

and with form [saguṇa], sole instigator of all attributes.

You bear angry arrows to sever the mighty arms

of ten-headed Ravan, and are earth’s ornament,

with cloud-dark body, lotus-like face,

and eyes like larger, full blooming lotuses.

I ever adore you, compassionate Ram,

127

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.8.18–23, trans. Gupta and Valpey in Bhāgavata Purāṇa (2017), 31–32.

128

For example, see MBh 5.88 and 5.130–35.

129

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 16.

130

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.186.1–4, 6.113.1–8, 7.13.1–6, 1.211.1–4, and 6.121.1–2.

long-armed liberator from rebirth’s dread.

131

In this hymn, Jaṭāyū describes some of Rāma’s most famous attributes such as his dark

complexion, his skills as an archer, and his destiny as the slayer of the demon king Rāvaṇa.

Jaṭāyū also alludes to the compatibility of Rāma’s nirguṇa (aniconic) and saguṇa (iconic) forms,

which is one of the central themes of Tulsī’s Rāmcaritmānas.

132

The immense love that Jaṭāyū

personally feels for Rāma also comes across in the above harigītikā chand verse as the celestial

bird directly proclaims his profound adoration for Rāma with his final dying breaths. In the

Rāmcaritmānas, we also sometimes see characters, such as the sages Atri and Sutīkṣṇa, sing

Sanskrit stutis or stotras to Rāma.

133

Lutgendorf points out that “several of these [stotras from

the Rāmcaritmānas] are widely used in worship today.”

134

In the Periyapurāṇam, Cēkkilār describes the lives of several Śaiva devotees who were

poets themselves including Aiyaṭikaḷ Kāṭavar Kōṉ, Appar, Campantar, Cuntarar,

Kāraikkālammaiyār, and Nampi Āṇṭār Nampi. Therefore, it is unsurprising that in the

Periyapurāṇam Cēkkilār directly “quotes verses from the hymns”

135

of three of the most

prominent Nāyaṉmār: Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar, who are known as “the ‘First Three

Saints’ (mūvar mutalikaḷ) of the Tamil Śaiva sect.”

136

Other hymns to Śiva in the Periyapurāṇam

seem to be Cēkkilār’s own compositions like the one in the story of the axe-wielding Śaiva saint

Eṟipattar in which the elephant of the Chola king Pukaḻccōḻar attacks the pious elderly sage

Civakāmiyāṇṭār and destroys the flowers Civakāmiyāṇṭār has gathered to worship Śiva.

Devastated that he is too old to catch and punish the elephant, Civakāmiyāṇṭār calls out to Śiva:

Lord Siva, clothed in the elephant’s skin!

Lord Siva, strength of the defenseless!

Lord Siva, wisdom of your devotees [aṭiyār]!

Lord Siva, nectar of the enlightened!

The flowers to adorn your matted locks,

the elephant has scattered in the street!

Lord Siva, in your wrath

you burnt the cities of your enemies.

When once a poor lad came to you for refuge,

Pursed by Yamaṉ, like a thunder-cloud

Lord Siva, you saved him from his plight,

131

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.32.2, trans. Philip Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, The Epic of Ram, vol. 5, trans. Philip

Lutgendorf, Murty Classical Library of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 93.

Jaṭāyū’s prayer continues on for two more verses in the harigītikā chand meter. See Rāmcaritmānas 3.32.3–4.

132

See Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 36–39.

133

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.4.1–24 and 3.11.3–16.

134

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 17.

135

Karen Pechilis Prentiss, The Embodiment of Bhakti (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 6.

136

Indira Viswanathan Peterson, Poems to Śiva: The Hymns of the Tamil Saints (Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 1989), 15.

and drove off Yamaṉ with a kick.

First of all beings, endless one,

who am I among the devotees [aṭiyār] that do you service?

Lord Siva, hasten to my aid!

137

In Civakāmiyāṇṭār’s prayer, we see references to some of Śiva’s common iconographic features,

such as his dreadlocks and the hide of the elephant demon Gajāsura that he wears a cloak, as well

as allusions to popular mythological stories about Śiva like his destruction of the three demonic

cities. This hymn by Civakāmiyāṇṭār, however, also emphasizes Śiva’s role as the protector of

his aṭiyār (devotees) especially with the reference to the purāṇic story of how Śiva saves his

young bhakta Mārkaṇḍeya from Yama, the god of death. Civakāmiyāṇṭār’s impassioned praise

of Śiva thus highlights the centrality of Śiva’s devotees in the Periyapurāṇam.

What is the significance of all of these prayers and hymns in these three lengthy bhakti

narrative poems? Karen Pechilis notes that “one of the most important commonalities” within the

wide world of premodern bhakti literature is the use of the “first-person voice.”

138

Directly

addressing the divine is a very common element of the pad/pada/padam/abhang form discussed

earlier and other short bhakti compositions. Bhakti poets from across premodern South Asia

speak in the first-person voice to praise, petition, thank, question, reprimand, and even insult

their chosen personal god in their devotional songs. While we do hear the first-person voices of

Cēkkilār and Tulsī in the Periyapurāṇam and the Rāmcaritmānas (especially in the prologues of

each of these texts),

139

we do not see an authorial, devotional first-person voice in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

140

The continuous presentation of hymns and prayers by bhaktas within the

larger narratives of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Rāmcaritmānas therefore

provides audiences with multiple opportunities to witness ardent personal displays of devotion in

the first-person voice that are similar to those commonly seen in shorter bhakti poems and lyrics.

Along with devotees frequently vocalizing their bhakti through songs and prayers, these

three narrative poems also all repeatedly emphasize that the bhaktas’ overflowing love for their

chosen god is equally matched by the deity’s affection for his devotees. This is particularly

evident in Cēkkilār’s rendition of the tale of Caṇṭīcaṉ (also known as Vicāra), a seven-year-old

Brahmin boy who slices off his father’s legs after he kicks the sand liṅga Caṇṭīcaṉ built for

worshipping Śiva. Cēkkilār describes Śiva appearing before Caṇṭīcaṉ after he attacks his father:

The one whose matted locks are crowned with a garland

of koṉṟai blossoms

saw and lifted up the one who had fallen in the shade

of his two feet [and said]:

“You hacked and felled your father today for my sake.

From now on I am your father.”

[Thus] he blessed [Vicāra], graciously embraced him,

137

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 566–69, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 67.

138

Pechilis Prentiss, Embodiment of Bhakti, 6.

139

See Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1–10; and Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.1–43.

140

As with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the seventeen other Sanskrit mahāpurāṇas, Vyāsa is traditionally

regarded as the author of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

anointed him with overflowing compassion,

kissed the top of his head,

and rejoiced.

141

Monius has convincingly shown that “among the Periyapurāṇam’s most obviously favored

images of Śiva is that of father figure.”

142

Śiva’s brimming love for Caṇṭīcaṉ in this episode is a

prime example of Cēkkilār’s presentation of Śiva as a doting father and protector of his devotees.

The stories of Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar also showcase Śiva’s fondness for his bhaktas.

Peterson explains that “in the narratives of the three saints, Śiva unfailingly comes to the

Nāyaṉār’s aid when he is in need… in all these episodes Cēkkilār portrays Śiva as the poets’

benefactor and protector, emphasizing Śiva’s loving concern for his chosen saints.”

143

Similarly, in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa Krishna is depicted as being immensely affectionate

to his devotees. Take the description of Krishna greeting Śrīdāmā,

144

an impoverished Brahmin

who is a childhood friend and devotee of Krishna, in the tenth book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa:

Acyuta was seated on a couch with his beloved, but saw the brāhmaṇa from a distance. He

immediately rose up, went towards the brāhmaṇa and embraced him joyfully with two arms. The

delighted lotus-eyed Kṛṣṇa was ecstatic from the bodily contact with his dear friend, the

brāhmaṇa sage, and shed tears from his eyes.

145

Bhakti poetry from all over the sub-continent is filled with descriptions of the intense bodily

reactions that devotees have when they encounter or even merely think about their deity. As

Krishna instructs his friend Uddhava in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa: “Where is bhakti without the hairs

standing on end in ecstasy, without the heart melting, and without tears of joy?”

146

With

Śrīdāmā, however, it is not Krishna’s bhakta but Krishna himself who cries with happiness.

Krishna’s overjoyed response to seeing Śrīdāmā in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa demonstrates the

immense affection this deity has for his devotees. Accordingly, the text repeatedly refers to

Krishna as bhakta vatsalaḥ, “one who is fond of his bhaktas.”

147

Danuta Stasik has shown that throughout the Rāmcaritmānas, Tulsī presents Rāma as “a

God who is compassionate and brimming with infinite love for his devotees.”

148

In Vālmīki’s

141

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1259, trans. Monius in “Śiva Heroic Father,” 173.

142

Monius, “Śiva Heroic Father,” 170.

143

Peterson, “Tamil Śaiva Hagiography,” 206.

144

In regional retellings of this story, Śrīdāmā is often named Sudāmā. As Rupert Snell points out, “the colophon [of

the Bhāgavatapurāṇa] dubs the protagonist as Śrīdāman, but the text itself is silent on the question of his name”

(“Devotion Rewarded: The Sudāmā-Carit of Narottamdās,” in The Indian Narrative: Perspectives and Patterns, ed.

Christopher Shackle and Rupert Snell [Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1992], 175).

145

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.80.18–19, trans. Bryant in Krishna: Beautiful Legend, 339.

146

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 11.14.23, trans. Bryant in Bhakti Yoga, 188.

147

See Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.8.11, 1.11.10, 1.14.34, and 6.4.35.

148

Danuta Stasik, The Infinite Story: The Past and Present of the Rāmāyaṇas in Hindi (Delhi: Manohar, 2009), 234.

Rāmāyaṇa, the primary reason for Rāma’s human incarnation is the destruction of Rāvaṇa.

149

While Rāma also descends to the earth in order to end Rāvaṇa’s tyranny in the Rāmcaritmānas,

Stasik notes that Tulsī also repeatedly states that Rāma “assumes human form and thus becomes

a personal god out of his love for devotees.”

150

In his Sanskrit stotra in the third book of the

Rāmcaritmānas, Atri begins by celebrating Rāma’s fondness for his bhaktas: “I venerate you,

who cherish your devotees [bhakta vatsalaṃ], who are by nature compassionate and tender.”

151

When Rāma first meets Hanumān, who is one of Rāma’s most beloved bhaktas, Rāma himself

tells the monkey that he loves his devotees more than anyone else in the world:

Then the Raghu lord lifted him into his own embrace,

soothing him with the water of his own tears.

“Monkey, listen: do not think yourself worthless.

for you are twice as dear to me as Lakshman.

Everyone declares me to be impartial,

yet I love my servant who relies on no other.”

152

Why do the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Rāmcaritmānas all

emphasize the deep love that their main deity has for his devotees? As we observed earlier, the

use of the first-person voice is quite common in shorter bhakti poems and songs. The presence of

the first-person voice, however, often means that the audiences of these short devotional

compositions are only able to see one side of the devotional relationship between the bhakta and

the deity. Nearly every popular regional bhakti poet, including Basavaṇṇa in Kannada,

Annamayya in Telugu, Tukārām in Marathi, Narsī Mehtā in Gujarati, and Sūrdās in Bhasha,

speak of their intense yearning for union with the divine.

153

While some of these poets adopt the

persona of a lover longing for his or her beloved, others simply vocalize the desire to see his or

her chosen deity. For example, in the very first verse of the Aṟputattiruvantāti (Divine Linked

Verses of Wonder), Kāraikkālammaiyār asks Śiva:

Ever since I was born in this world, and learned to speak,

with overwhelming love I have always remained at

Your beautiful feet.

O God of the gods, whose blue-suffused throat

shines incandescently,

when will You take away my sorrows?

154

149

See Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa 1.14.2–21. I am following Robert Goldman’s translation of Vālmīki’s Bālakāṇḍa.

150

Stasik, Infinite Story, 234. Stasik directs us to Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.116.1, 1.122.1, 1.192, and 2.219.3.

151

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.4.1–2, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 5:9.

152

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 4.3.3–4, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 5:137.

153

See Basavaṇṇa vacana 111, trans. Ramanujan in Speaking of Śiva, 75; Annamayya, God on the Hill: Temple

Poems from Tirupati, trans. Velcheru Narayana Rao and David Shulman (New York: Oxford University Press,

2005), 61; Tukārām, Says Tuka: Selected Poetry of Tukaram, trans. Dilip Chitre (Delhi: Penguin Books, 1991), 12;

Shukla-Bhatt, Narasinha Mehta of Gujarat, 61; and Sūrdās, Sūrsagar 274.

154

Kāraikkālammaiyār, Aṟputattiruvantāti 1, trans. Elaine Craddock in Śiva’s Demon Devotee: Kāraikkāl Ammaiyār

(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2010), 115.

Unsurprisingly, we never hear Śiva’s reply to Kāraikkālammaiyār in the Aṟputattiruvantāti. In

Cēkkilār’s Periyapurāṇam, however, we not only see Śiva speak to Kāraikkālammaiyār, but we

see him grant her desire to be united with him. At the end of her story, Cēkkilār tells us:

The Lord who is attained by those who worship him gave her his grace and said:

“You will see our dance and you will experience bliss (āṉantam), forever singing to us,

in resplendent Ālaṅkāṭu, an ancient town that is both renowned and fertile that lies in

the brilliant southern region.”

155

Unlike several shorter bhakti songs and poems, especially those narrated solely in the first-

person voice, lengthy bhakti narrative poems like the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and

the Rāmcaritmānas explicitly show that the devotional relationship between the deity and the

bhakta is one of reciprocity. The divine lord loves his devotees just as much as they love him.

The final crucial shared feature of these three narrative poems that I will discuss is the

way in which the primary deity looms over the entire text even when he is not physically present

in the narrative. Consider the first half of the Book of Childhood (Bālakāṇḍ) of the

Rāmcaritmānas. Although the title of this Rāmāyaṇa means the “Lake of the Deeds of Rāma,”

the actual carita of Rāma does not begin until the one hundred and seventy-sixth stanza of the

Rāmcaritmānas with the story of the demon king Rāvaṇa’s rise to power. Yet while it takes a

considerable amount of time for Tulsī to begin his narration of Rāma’s life story, Rāma is by no

means absent from the beginning of the Rāmcaritmānas. In the first forty-three stanzas of the

Rāmcaritmānas, Tulsī provides his audience with an extensive prologue in which he proclaims

his own personal devotion to Rāma. The one hundred twenty-fifth through one hundred seventy-

fifth stanzas of the Book of Childhood consist of “tales of curses and boons that set the stage for

Ram’s advent.”

156

The forty-fourth through one hundred and twenty-fourth stanzas of the Book

of Childhood, however, do not tell a story associated with Rāma but with another deity: Śiva.

As with the fifteenth-century Sanskrit Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa (Esoteric Rāmāyaṇa), an

important source of inspiration for Tulsī that I would also describe as a bhakti narrative poem,

the Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas presents Śiva as the composer of the narrative and his consort Pārvatī

as his audience.

157

Unlike the Adhyatmarāmāyaṇa, however, Tulsī dedicates a solid chunk of the

Book of Childhood to telling the popular purāṇic story of the suicide of Śiva’s first wife Satī and

her subsequent reincarnation as Pārvatī. In most versions of the tale of Satī, Satī takes her life

because she cannot bear the way her father Dakṣa insults Śiva at a sacrificial ceremony, and this

is certainly part of the reason why Satī kills herself in the Rāmcaritmānas.

158

But Tulsī adds

another contributing factor to Satī’s depression in his poem. Following the rendering of this

155

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1777, trans. Pechilis in “Tamil Woman Saint,” 183.

156

Philip Lutgendorf, introduction to Tulsīdās, The Epic of Ram, vol. 1, trans. Philip Lutgendorf, Murty Classical

Library of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016), xxiii.

157

Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa 1.1.18–20. I am following: Adhyātma Rāmāyaṇa, trans. Ajai Kumar Chhawchharia, 2 vols.

(Varanasi: Chaukhamba Surbharati Prakashan, 2010).

158

See Wendy Doniger, The Hindus: An Alternative History (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 392–93 and 415–

16; and Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.64.

episode in the Sanskrit Śivapurāṇa,

159

Tulsī describes Śiva abandoning Satī after she takes the

form of Rāma’s wife Sītā in an attempt to trick Rāma right before she goes to Dakṣa’s sacrificial

ceremony.

160

Thus in the Rāmcaritmānas, Rāma plays a pivotal role in the story of Satī.

Tulsī also has Rāma help bring Śiva and Pārvatī together. After hearing of Satī’s death,

the heartbroken Śiva roams around chanting Rāma’s name. Rāma then comes and tells Śiva of

Satī’s rebirth as Pārvatī. Note how Tulsī describes Rāma manifesting himself before Śiva:

A long time passed in this way,

as he [Śiva] felt ever-fresh love for Ram’s feet.

Beholding Shankar’s discipline and love

and devotion’s [bhagati (bhakti)] indelible mark on his heart,

Ram appeared to him, gratified and gracious,

treasury of beauty, virtue, and immense radiance.

161

In the verses above, Tulsī does not present Śiva as deity but as a devout Rāma bhakta. In fact,

throughout the entire rendering of the story of Satī/Pārvatī (and the rest of the Rāmcaritmānas),

Tulsī emphasizes Śiva’s deep love for Rāma.

162

While Rāma only makes two physical

appearances in this part of the text (when Satī fails to trick him and when he appears before

Śiva), his presence is felt throughout this section of the Rāmcaritmānas. Both Śiva and

Satī/Pārvatī are continuously described as meditating on Rāma, chanting his name, and

expounding his virtues.

163

Tulsī also finds other subtle ways to insert references to Rāma into this

episode. When Pārvatī is born to Himavat, the personification of the Himalayas, Tulsī tells us:

“The mountain shone at his daughter’s coming like one who has found devotion to Ram [rāma-

bhagati].”

164

When describing the powerful display that Kāmadeva, the god of love, produces in

the world to try and make Śiva break his penance and fall in love with Pārvatī, Tulsī states that:

“No one held to forbearance, for the mind-born god had conquered every mind. Only those

whom the Raghu hero protected remained safe during that time.”

165

Many scholars have speculated about the reason why Tulsī included the story of Śiva and

Satī/Pārvatī in his devotional Rāmāyaṇa. Possible explanations include Tulsī’s identity as a

member of the smārta Brahmin community that worships Viṣṇu, Śiva, Sūrya, Gaṇeśa, and Durgā

and the assumption that Tulsī composed at least part of the Rāmcaritmānas in Śiva’s city of

159

See chapter 24 of the Satīkhaṇḍa of the Rudrasaṃhitā in Śivapurāṇa (The Śiva-Purāṇa), trans. J.L. Shastri, 4

vols. (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publishers, 1950). On the dating of the Śivapurāṇa, see Doniger, The Hindus, 370.

160

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.52–64.

161

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.76. 2–3, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:157.

162

See Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 43–44.

163

See Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.48, 51, 57, 59, 75, 82, and 89.

164

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.66. 2, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:141.

165

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.85 dohā, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:175.

Banaras.

166

While we will likely never know why Tulsī placed this Śaiva tale in the

Rāmcaritmānas, it is clear that Tulsī imbued this Śiva-centric story with ardent Rāma bhakti.

As noted earlier, the kṛṣṇacarita contained in the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa is easily

one of the most famous renderings of Krishna’s life story in South Asia. Yet while Krishna is

introduced in the first book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa through the narration of a few episodes

from the Mahābhārata tradition, the detailed account of Krishna’s youth in Vrindavan and

adulthood in Dwarka does not take place until the tenth of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa’s twelve books.

The first nine books of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa are dedicated to the stories of earlier incarnations

of the “blessed lord” Bhagavān and his exemplary devotees or bhāgavatas.

167

Notably, in many of the stories in the first nine books of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Bhagavān

makes only one physical appearance in the narrative. We see this with the tales of the five-year-

old bhakta Dhruva, in which the deity grants the prince a vision of his true form in the middle of

the story, and the elephant Gajendra, in which Bhagavān is only seen at the end of story when he

rescues his devotee.

168

Commenting on the story of Narasiṃha, the man-lion incarnation of

Bhagavān, in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Valpey explains that Prahlāda takes “center stage as an ideal

bhakta of Bhagavān, a model bhāgavata. As one of the text’s outstanding bhāgavatas, Prahlāda,

arguably more than Nṛsiṃha, is the hero of this episode.”

169

As with the narration of Gajendra,

Bhagavān in the form of Narasiṃha makes his sole physical appearance at the conclusion of the

story when he comes to save Prahlāda from his father Hiraṇyakaśipu.

170

Yet while Bhagavān may not be the hero of this section of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, his

presence is felt throughout this entire episode. Prahlāda spends most of this story telling others

about the glory of Bhagavān. When Hiraṇyakaśipu asks his son to share what he thinks is the

highest learning, Prahlāda replies with a description of navadhā bhakti or “ninefold devotion”:

The nine characteristics of bhakti that people can offer to Viṣṇu are: hearing about Him, singing

about Him, remembering Him, serving His feet, worshipping Him, glorifying Him, considering

oneself His servant, considering oneself His friend, and surrendering completely to Him. When

these are offered to Bhagavān, then I think this to be the highest learning.

171

166

See Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 43–44; Diana L. Eck, “Following Rama, Worshipping Siva,” in Devotion

Divine: Bhakti Traditions from the Regions of India; Studies in Honor of Charlotte Vaudeville, ed. Diana L. Eck and

Françoise Mallison (Groningen: Egbert Forsten, 1991), 49–72; and Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 46.

167

Gupta and Valpey explain that while in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the name Bhagavān sometimes refers to “any

superhuman being,” it primarily refers to “the supreme divinity, identified as Krishna or one of his many forms.

Unlike other texts, such as the Viṣṇu Purāṇa, which identifies Krishna as a form or ‘expansion’ of Vishnu, the

Bhāgavata (specifically in 1.3.28) identifies Krishna as the origin of Vishnu, Nārāyaṇa, and all the avatāras”

(introduction to Bhāgavata Purāṇa [2017], 227n3).

168

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 4.9.2 and 8.3.33.

169

Kenneth R. Valpey, “Purāṇic Trekking Along the Path of the Bhāgavatas,” in The Bhāgavata Purāṇa: Sacred

Text and Living Tradition, ed. Ravi M. Gupta and Kenneth R. Valpey (New York: Columbia University Press,

2013), 30–31.

170

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.8.19.

171

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.5.23–24, trans. Bryant in Bhakti Yoga, 420.

Later in this episode, Prahlāda lectures his fellow demon classmates about Bhagavān:

A wise person should practice the dharma of Bhagavān from childhood. A human birth is rare,

and even though it is temporary, it can bestow the true goal of life. Therefore, a person born into

this world should approach the feet of Viṣṇu: He is one’s Īśvara [lord], the dearest friend,

and beloved of all beings.

172

The story of Prahlāda and Narasiṃha thus illustrates how Bhagavān always remains at the center

of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa even when he is not physically present in the narrative of this text.

As Monius notes, the Tamil Periyapurāṇam is “quite unique in its emphasis on human

devotees of the lord rather than on the deeds of the god himself, as is typical of the earlier

Sanskrit Mahāpurāṇas.”

173

The Periyapurāṇam bears little resemblance to the Sanskrit

Śivapurāṇa, which narrates the adventures of Śiva and his family members, or to Parañcōti’s

seventeenth-century Tamil Tiruviḷaiyāṭaṟpurāṇam (Legend of the Divine Games), a talapurāṇam

or “place legend” about Śiva’s sixty-four sacred exploits in the city of Madurai (Maturai).

174

Monius points out that, as with Bhagavān in the stories of Gajendra and Prahlāda in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, in the Periyapurāṇam “in most stories, he [Śiva] appears only in the final

verses of the narrative, ready to reward the saint for his display of devotion.”

175

This is seen in

Cēkkilār’s telling of the story of Kōṭpuli, the commander of the army of a Chola king who uses

all of his money to purchase paddy for Śiva temples. Although Kōṭpuli tells all his relatives that

all of his paddy is dedicated to Śiva, his family members end up using the paddy to feed

themselves during a famine. The furious Kōṭpuli then massacres all his relatives not even sparing

an infant. Cēkkilār uses twelve quatrain verses to describe this gruesome tale of Kōṭpuli’s

extreme devotion to Śiva.

176

Śiva only shows up in the penultimate verse of the story:

In that way, the Lord Śiva stood before the devotee and said:

“With the sword in your hand,

you have cut away the fetters (pācam) of your family;

entering into the world above the golden world [of the gods],

they will reach us.

Oh glorious one! You come to us even now!”

Commanding [him thus], [the lord] graciously disappeared.

177

In some stories, such as that of Cattiyār, Śiva does not even make a single appearance:

172

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.6.1–2, trans. Bryant in Bhakti Yoga, 420.

173

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 120.

174

For summaries of the contents of the Śivapurāṇa and the Tiruviḷaiyāṭaṟpurāṇam, see Ludo Rocher, The Purāṇas

(Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1986), 223–28; and William P. Harman, The Sacred Marriage Of A Hindu Goddess

(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989), 21–43.

175

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 143.

176

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 4134–45.

177

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 4144, trans. Monius in “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 158.

The land watered by the river Kāveri was ruled by the Cōḻa kings, who extended their rule and

erected columns commemorating their victories at every point of the compass. In that land was

situated the town of Variñcaiyūr, where the tanks were filled with the honey that poured from the

lotus plants pulled by farmers. It was at Variñcaiyūr that Cattiyār was born for the glory of the

Vēḷāḷar caste. He served the feet of the Lord, which Tirumāl, Ayaṉ, and the other gods could

never comprehend. He was called Cattiyār because of the force with which he would cut out the

tongue of anyone who spoke of the devotees of the Lord with disrespect. He would use an

implement to pull out the tongues of such slanderous miscreants, then cut them off with a sharp

knife. By virtue of this loving service, he won enduring fame. He walked in the way of the Lord

for many a long day, performing this violent form of service with courage and devotion in this

wide world. This heroic servant of the Lord rendered his unique service without any hesitation,

and finally attained the shade cast by the feet of the dancing Lord. We have paid homage to the

feet of Cattiyār, who cut out the tongues of those who spoke ill of the servants of the Lord.

178

Cēkkilār’s narration of the tale of Cattiyār is one of the shorter episodes in the Periyapurāṇam.

Yet even though Śiva does not make an appearance in this story, his presence is still felt in these

seven quatrain verses. Cēkkilār alludes to two popular purāṇic stories about Śiva in his narration

of Cattiyār’s life. When Cēkkilār states that Cattiyār “served the feet of the Lord, which Tirumāl

(Viṣṇu), Ayaṉ (Brahmā), and the other gods could never comprehend” he is referring to the myth

in which Śiva demonstrates to Viṣṇu and Brahmā that he is the supreme deity by assuming the

form of a fiery, never-ending liṅga.

179

The description of Śiva as the “dancing lord” is an

allusion to Śiva as Naṭarāja, the lord of dance whose cosmic performance sustains the universe.

Cēkkilār draws on well-known purāṇic divine feats of Śiva throughout the

Periyapurāṇam. As Elaine Craddock observes, “the four most common myths of Śiva's heroic

deeds in the Periya Purāṇam are the destruction of the three demon cities, the flaying of the

rutting elephant, the kicking of Yama, and the incineration of Kāma.”

180

While the Śivapurāṇa

use ninety-seven verses to relate the story of Śiva burning Kāmadeva to ash,

181

Cēkkilār is able

to remind his audience of this same myth just with the epithet “the One who opened [the third

eye in his] forehead to destroy Kāma” in his account of the life of Campantar.

182

In her

discussion of Cēkkilār’s presentation of Śiva as a loving father in the Periyapurāṇam, Monius

notes that “like a good father, he spends much of his time in the background, allowing his human

devotees to take center stage.”

183

What we need to remember, however, is that while Śiva might

be in the background for the most of the Periyapurāṇam, he is never truly absent from this text.

178

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 4039–45, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 344.

179

On this myth, see Peterson, Poems to Śiva, 343

180

Craddock, Śiva's Demon Devotee, 80.

181

See chapters 18–19 of the Pārvatīkhaṇḍa of the Rudrasaṃhitā in the Śivapurāṇa

182

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 2307, trans. Monius in “Śiva Heroic Father,” 186.

183

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 143.

* * * * *

As we saw in the Introduction, John Cort has aptly noted that “bhakti is not one single thing.”

184

The same is true for bhakti narrative poems. The Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the

Rāmcaritmānas are three extremely different compositions. Yet, as I have just demonstrated,

these three lengthy narrative poems share four salient features: (1) the prominence of “all along”

devotees, (2) the prevalence of devotees breaking out into song in praise of the primary deity, (3)

the presentation of the primary deity as a god who cares deeply about his devotees, and (4) the

way in which the primary deity looms over the entire text even when he is not physically present

in the narrative. In the next chapter, I will show how both Villiputtūrār and Sabalsingh Cauhān

utilize these four features of bhakti narrative poems in their regional Mahābhārata retellings.

184

Cort, “Bhakti in Early Jain Tradition,” 62.

CHAPTER TWO

The Story of the Bhāratas as the Deeds of Krishna:

Narrative Transformation in Villi’s Pāratam and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat

Let us remind ourselves once again of how both Villi and Cauhān categorize their Mahābhāratas

as kṛṣṇacaritas. Villi makes the following declaration in his introduction to the Pāratam:

I do not perceive the excellence of the Bhārata in the great language (Sanskrit)

praised by the foremost, great, hidden Vedas, the sages, the gods, and others.

But I agree to utter this out of my desire for the carita of the eternal Mādhava,

who appears intermittently in it.

And in the beginning of the first chapter of the Mahābhārat, Cauhān tells his audience:

I cannot comprehend any of the mysteries of the carita of Hari,

but I will summarize some of it in Bhasha and thus sing

what was told by that great sage Vyāsa,

knower of the carita of illustrious Bhagavān.

In this chapter, I demonstrate how Villi and Cauhān transform the story of the war of the

Bhāratas into a bhakti narrative poem centered on the deeds of Krishna. In Chapter One, I

outlined four shared features of bhakti narrative poems: (1) the eminence of “all along” devotees,

(2) the frequency of devotees singing hymns in praise of the main deity, (3) the depiction of the

main deity as a god who greatly cares about his devotees, and (4) the way in which the main

deity pervades the entire text even when he is not physically present in the narrative. In this

chapter, I reveal how all four of these features are utilized by Villi and Cauhān throughout their

devotional Mahābhāratas by carefully analyzing four examples from both narratives: (1)

Krishna’s introduction, (2) Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna during her attempted disrobing, (3) the

whole fifth book (the Book of Effort), and (4) the departure of Krishna at the end of the story.

Introducing Krishna

From the very beginnings of the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat, both Villi and

Cauhān make it abundantly clear that they are each reframing the Mahābhārata as a devotional

kṛṣṇacarita. Krishna first appears in the narrative of the critical edition of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata as a spectator at Draupadī’s svayaṃvara (self-choice) ceremony. Villi and Cauhān,

however, introduce Krishna much earlier in the narratives of their respective Mahābhāratas. In

the Tamil Pāratam, we meet Krishna right after the deaths of Pāṇḍu and Mādrī when Kuntī and

muṉṉum māmaṟai muṉivarum tēvarum piṟarum

paṉṉum mā moḻi pāratam perumaiyum pārēṉ

maṉṉum mātavaṉ caritamum iṭai iṭai vaḻaṅkum

eṉṉum ācaiyāl yāṉum ītu iyamputaṟku icaintēṉ || VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 8 ||

hari caritra kou bheda na pāvahiṃ kai bhāṣā saṅkṣepa kachu gāvahiṃ

mahā muni jo vyāsa bakhānā śrībhagavanta carita jina jānā || CM 1.2 ||

the Pāṇḍavas return to Hastinapura, and in the Bhasha Mahābhārat, Krishna makes his first

appearance when he rescues Kuntī and the Pāṇḍavas from the fire in the lac palace. Yet even

before each of these scenes, Krishna is constantly seen in the background of these two regional

Mahābhāratas, much like Rāma in the beginning of the Rāmcaritmānas, Bhagavān in the first

nine books of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and Śiva throughout the Periyapurāṇam.

After the introduction to the text attributed to Villi’s son Varantaruvār and Villi’s own

introduction, the actual narrative of the Tamil Pāratam commences with the first chapter of the

Book of the Beginnings (Ātiparuvam), the “Lineage of the Kurus Chapter”

(Kurukulaccarukkam). Notably, the very first words of the first verse of this opening chapter are

eṅkaḷ mātavaṉ, “our Mādhava.” In a display of humility similar to the avaiyaṭakkam in his own

introduction to poem that we saw in the Introduction, Villi states in the first verse of the

“Lineage of the Kurus Chapter” that “I will compose this great story to the best of my

knowledge.”

Yet Villi also takes care to begin this first verse of his narrative by paying homage

to “our Mādhava from whose great lotus heart there appears the rising moon.”

Similarly, after invoking Gaṇeśa, the elephant-headed remover of obstacles,

Cauhān

dedicates the first stanza of his first chapter to a description of Krishna as the ādipuruṣa or

“primordial being” that echoes Ugraśravas’s praise of Krishna/Viṣṇu from the first chapter of the

critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata that we examined in Chapter One.

Cauhān extols

Krishna as the one “by whose name one is saved from the cycle of rebirth and by whose name all

sorrow and grief is destroyed.”

Cauhān also declares that “Hari and Hara (Śiva) are branches of

you, Krishna,” a statement that unequivocally present Krishna as the ultimate godhead.

While the “Lineage of the Kurus Chapter” in the Pāratam relates the stories of the

prominent ancestors of the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas such as Yayāti, Bharata, Śaṃtanu, and

Bhīṣma, Villi still manages to insert several references to Krishna/Viṣṇu into his first chapter.

For example, in between his renderings of the stories of Hastin and Kuru, Villi uses a verse to

relate the tale of Gajendra that is found in the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa as well as in the Tamil

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, the collected poems of the twelve Āḻvārs.

As with the Āḻvārs, who

refer to Gajendra over fifty times in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam,

Villi (who is remembered

today as Villiputtūrāḻvār or “Villiputtūrār the Āḻvār”) inserts multiple allusions to Gajendra in his

Tamil Mahābhārata.

In his third chapter, for instance, Villi compares Arjuna saving Droṇa

mā katai yāṉ aṟi aḷavaiyiṉ camaikkēṉ || VP 1.1.1 ||

eṅkaḷ mātavaṉ itayam mā malar varum utayam tiṅkaḷ || VP 1.1.1 ||

It should be noted that Villi also begins his taṟciṟappuppāyiram with an invocation to Gaṇeśa. For an analysis of

this invocation, see Chapter Three.

CM 1.1; and MBh 1.1.20–22.

jāke nāma tarata saṃsārā jāhi nāma dukha śoka saṃhārā || CM 1.1 ||

harihara kṛṣṇa tau śākhā bhayaū || CM 1.1 ||

VP 1.1.30.

Vasudha Narayanan, The Way and the Goal: Expressions of Devotion in Early Śrī Vaiṣṇava Tradition

(Washington, D.C.: Institute for Vaishnava Studies, 1987), 163.

For example, see VP 1.4.1, 3.5.109, 5.4.43, and 6.3.17.

from a crocodile to Neṭumāl (a particularly Tamil name of Viṣṇu) rescuing Gajendra from the

crocodile who tried to kill him.

Other Vaiṣṇava allusions in the “Lineage of the Kurus Chapter”

and the next chapter, the “Origins Chapter” (Campavaccarukkam), include Ambā saying that she

will defeat Bhīṣma just as Garuḍa, the eagle mount of Viṣṇu, defeats snakes and Villi comparing

the newborn Bhīma to his half-brother and Rāma’s most cherished devotee, Hanumān.

Villi

also begins the “Origins Chapter” with an elaborate invocation to the infant Krishna who slayed

the demoness Pūtanā, which I will discuss in much greater detail in Chapter Three.

Similarly to Villi, Cauhān inserts several references to Krishna in the beginning of his

Mahābhārat. The first chapter of this Bhasha composition ends with a phalaśruti (literally,

“hearing the fruits”) in which Cauhān declares the rewards of listening to his poem:

Listen, king! Sabalsingh Cauhān says that the expanse of the auspicious fruit

of the Bhārata story are the attributes of the infinite Govinda.

While phalaśrutis are found in a variety of different works of South Asia literature, including the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

they are particularly prominent features of religious texts and are

accordingly utilized throughout the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the

Rāmcaritmānas.

The use of a bhaṇitā (signature) or chāp (seal)––a very common element of

bhakti poems from across South Asia––in this phalaśruti makes Cauhān and his own personal

devotion to Krishna a distinct component of this Mahābhārata.

Throughout the rest of his

composition, Cauhān continues to invoke Krishna with phalaśrutis.

Cauhān also alludes to Krishna/Viṣṇu by mentioning this deity when he introduces other

characters in the first chapters of his Mahābhārat. In the second chapter of Cauhān’s Book of the

Beginnings (Ādiparv), Vyāsa states that “I was born from the māyā of Viṣṇu.”

As Bruce

Sullivan has shown, while Vyāsa is only briefly described as an incarnation of Viṣṇu in the Book

VP 1.1.30.

VP 1.1.144 and 1.2.76.

bhārata kathā puṇya phala rājā sunu bistāra

sabalasiṃha cauhāna kaha guṇa gobinda apārā || CM 1.5 ||

For example, see MBh 1.90.96 and 5.134.18–20.

For example, see Bhāgavatapurāṇa 3.33.37, 4.31.31, and 10.81.41; Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 790, 1898, and

4281; and Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.361 soraṭhā, 2.326 soraṭhā, and 5.50 dohā.

On the use of the bhaṇitā/chāp in bhakti poems, see John Stratton Hawley, “Author and Authority in the Bhakti

Poetry of North India,” Journal of Asian Studies 47, no. 2 (1988): 269–90.

For example, see CM 1.9, 5.137, and 6.64.

biṣṇū māyā janma hamārā || CM 1.7 ||

Māyā is usually translated as “illusion.” Yet as Sally Sutherland Goldman points out, “the term māyā, like the vast

majority of Sanskrit words, is polysemic and has a range of meanings that include but are not limited to, “fraud,

deceit, trick,” “witchcraft, an illusion of magic,” “phantom, unreal apparition,” “pseudo-” “pity,” and “extraordinary

power, wisdom” (“Illusory Evidence: The Construction of Māyā in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa,” in Epic and Argument in

Sanskrit Literary History: Essays in Honor of R.P. Goldman, ed. Sheldon Pollock [Delhi: Manohar, 2010], 210).

of Peace in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, “the Hindu tradition in the centuries after the epic’s

composition, has been both explicit and consistent in identifying Vyāsa as an incarnation of

Nārāyaṇa.”

When Cauhān introduces Kuntī, he says that her father Śūrasena was Krishna’s

grandfather.

After making love to the servant woman who will give birth to Vidura, Cauhān

has Vyāsa tell her that her son will be “a great bhakta of Bhagavān” (mahābhakta bhagavāna).

This presentation of Vidura as a devotee of Krishna from birth (or an “all along” bhakta”)

corresponds with the way this character is depicted in the third book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa as

well as in the works of later Vaiṣṇava traditions such as the Svāmīnārāyaṇ sampradāya.

It is important to acknowledge that we do find allusions to other Hindu deities in the

opening chapters of both the Pāratam and the Mahābhārat. In the first chapter of Villi’s poem,

when Śaṃtanu sees his grown son Bhīṣma for the first time, he wonders if this young warrior is

Kumaraṉ (Murukaṉ), a distinctly Tamil deity.

The eighth and ninth chapters of Cauhān’s

retelling present an episode that is also found in Sāraḷādāsa’s Oriya Mahābhārata and

Kāśīrāmdās’s Bengali Mahābhārata, in which Gāndhārī and Kuntī enlist their sons in a

competition to determine which of these two queens has the right to worship in a certain Śiva

temple.

The references to Krishna/Viṣṇu and other Vaiṣṇava figures and myths in both the

Pāratam and the Mahābhārat, however, far outnumber those to other Hindu gods.

Let us now turn to the actual introductions to Krishna in the narratives of Villi’s and

Cauhān’s texts. In the Tamil poem, Krishna makes his first appearance in the narrative directly

after Kuntī brings the Pāṇḍavas to Hastinapura after the demise of Pāṇḍu and Mādrī in the

“Lineage of the Kurus Chapter” in the Book of the Beginnings. Krishna does not show up in this

same scene in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

But in the Pāratam, immediately following a verse

about the first meeting of the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas in which the two sets of cousins are

compared to two different types of lotuses trying to co-exist in one pond,

Villi describes the

arrival of Krishna’s father Vasudeva to Hastinapura in a verse rich with poetic imagery:

Bruce M. Sullivan, Seer of the Fifth Veda: Kṛṣṇa Dvaipāyana Vyāsa in the Mahābhārata (Delhi: Motilal

Banarsidass, 1999), 80.

CM 1.15.

CM 1.14.

See Sravani Kanamarlapudi, “Vidura Speaks: A Study of the Viduranīti and its Reception History,” (Master’s

thesis, University of Washington, 2019), 69–84.

VP 1.1.83.

See Pathani Patnaik, “Sarala’s Oriya Mahābhārata: ‘A Vox Populi’ in Oriya Literature,” in Mahābhārata in the

Tribal and Folk Traditions of India, ed. K.S. Singh (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1993), 175; Pradip

Bhattacharya, “Variations on Vyasa: The First Bengali Mahabharata,” in Aesthetic Textures: Living Traditions of the

Mahabharata, ed. Molly Kaushal and Sukrita Paul Kumar (Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, 2019),

96–97; and CM 1.27–33.

MBh 1.117.

VP 1.2.110.

In this way, at the time of [the Pāṇḍavas’] upbringing,

the king (Vasudeva) arrived.

He produced the hero,

he who will end the concerns (of the Earth),

grieving over the destruction of her beauty

with her loin surrounded by the blowing ocean,

her waist like lightning, her mountain breasts,

her soft bamboo shoulders, and her color like gold.

While the word “hero” (talaivaṉ) could be used for a number of different Mahābhārata

characters, the epithet “he who will end” (muṭippāṉ) alerts audiences versed in the Tamil

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam that Villi is referring to Krishna/Viṣṇu since Kulacēkarāḻvār,

Periyāḻvār, and Nammāḻvār all use this name for the deity in their compositions.

The story of

Nārāyaṇa incarnating as Krishna in order to protect the goddess Earth is also found in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata, but there are some salient differences. First, in the Sanskrit epic, in order

to help Earth who is being harassed by demons, not just Nārāyaṇa, but several celestial figures

all use portions of themselves to take birth as humans. The Pāṇḍavas are the partial incarnations

of the five Vedic gods who fathered them and Draupadī is a portion of Viṣṇu’s consort Śrī.

the Tamil text, Nārāyaṇa is the only divine being who comes to Earth’s aid.

The place in each text where Viṣṇu is described coming to assist Earth is also significant.

In the Mahābhārata, the account of Viṣṇu and the other celestials descending as humans to save

Earth is found in the “Partial Incarnations” (Aṃśāvatāra) sub-book of the Book of the Beginnings

when Arjuna’s grandson King Janamejaya asks the sage Vaiśampāyana to tell him about his

forefathers. Vaiśampāyana’s narration of the Mahābhārata to Janamejaya is one of the four

major frame stories of the Sanskrit epic. Yet in the Pāratam, Villi tells us that Krishna came to

Earth’s aid immediately after he describes the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas meeting for the first

time. Villi thus directly equates the pain of Earth with the imminent pain the Pāṇḍavas will soon

endure at the hands of their one hundred malicious paternal cousins.

The Pāratam goes on to detail Krishna’s arrival in Hastinapura alongside his brother

Balarāma, his mother Devakī, and the rest of the Yādavas with three more quatrain verses:

As if many Indras came down to earth itself,

the members of the own divine clan of Kuntibhoja

approaching the son of Gaṅgā (Bhīṣma)

soaked with the excellent fragrance of koṉṟai flowers,

came and entered Hastinapura,

which is like never-ending heaven.

iṉṉaṇam vaḷarum kālai eṟi kaṭal uṭutta alkul

miṉ eṉum maruṅkul koṅkai veṟpu uṭai vēykoḷ meṉtōḷ

poṉ eṉum niṟattiṉōṭum poṟpu aḻi ākulattāḷ

taṉ eṇam muṭippāṉ vanta talaivaṉai tanta kōmāṉ || VP 1.2.111 ||

Kulacēkarāḻvār, Perumāḷtirumoḻi 4.8; Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 3.6.5, 4.9.9; and Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 6.10.11 and

8.7.11.

MBh 1.58.

kuntipōcaṉ taṉ teyvam kulattu uḷōrkaḷum aṉēka

intirar avaṉi taṉṉil eytiṉar ākum eṉṉa

The young man like the color of the white moon (Balarāma)

and the one the color of a black cloud (Krishna)

and the woman (Devakī) who gave birth from her own divine womb to the benevolent one,

approaching Kuntī with limitless joy and

reflecting on all merits and virtues,

they also recounted the manner of ruling the world.

Our lord, the primordial cause,

the master of Indra and all the deities,

looked at the god Dharma brought forth by Pāṇḍu and said:

“We ourselves,

removing the suffering that comes here

in all the lands surrounded by waters,

will fulfill all wishes.”

The final verse is of particular importance to us. As Emily Hudson observes, the narrative of the

Sanskrit epic “leaves open the question of whether or not Kṛṣṇa is actually on the side of human

beings or if he is plotting against them, driving everyone toward an apocalyptic doom.”

The

proclamation about “removing the suffering” might make it seem like Villi’s Krishna is indeed

“driving everyone toward an apocalyptic doom.” Yet this verse in which Villi intimately refers to

Krishna as empirāṉ, “our lord,” actually sets the stage for the presentation of Krishna as the

steadfast protector of the Pāṇḍavas in the Pāratam. Recall that Krishna has entered the narrative

right at the point where Villi introduces the conflict between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. The

very first thing Krishna does in this verse is look at Yudhiṣṭhira. The nōy or “suffering” that

Krishna speaks of in this verse does not just refer to the suffering of Earth, but also the

impending suffering of the Pāṇḍavas. As the narrative of the Pāratam progresses, it quickly

becomes clear that Krishna’s primary concern in this text is the Pāṇḍavas’ safety.

Krishna makes his first appearance in Cauhān’s narrative during the fire in the lac palace.

While there is no mention of Krishna in this episode in the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic,

Krishna’s rescue of the Pāṇḍavas from the fire is found in different Vaiṣṇava bhakti poems. In

Kuntī’s prayer in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa that we examined in Chapter One, Kuntī thanks Krishna

for saving her and her sons from numerous dangerous situations including the fire in the lac

house: “You saved us from poison, the great fire, the uncivilized assembly, from meeting with

kantam vāṉ koṉṟai tōyum kaṅkaiyāḷ kumaraṉ vaikum

antam il cuvarkkam aṉṉa attiṉāpuri vantu uṟṟār || VP 1.2.112 ||

veḷ niṟam matiyam aṉṉa viṭalaiyum kariya mēkam

vaṇṇaṉum vaḷḷal taṉṉai tiru vayiṟu uyirtta mātum

eṇ ilā uvakaiyōṭum kuntiyai eyti ellām

puṇṇiyam nalamum eṇṇi pūmi āḷ muṟaiyum kōttār || VP 1.2.113 ||

empirāṉ ātimūlam intiraṉ mutalōrkku ellām

tampirāṉ pāṇṭu īṉṟa trauma tēvaikaiya nōkki

ampu rācikaḷ uḷpaṭṭa avaṉikaḷ aṉaittum nāmē

impar nōy akaṟṟi ellā eṇṇamum muṭittum eṉṟāṉ || VP 1.2.114 ||

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 198.

cannibals, and from the travails of life in the forest.”

Similarly, in a pada attributed to Sūrdās,

the Bhasha poet describes multiple different instances of Krishna aiding the Pāṇḍavas in the

Mahābhārata beginning with the lacquer house: “he rescued the Pandavs from the trials they

bore: the house of lac, the wilderness, their enemies’ armies.”

The choice to incorporate

Krishna into this episode signals that Cauhān, like the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and Sūrdās, understands

the main relationship between Krishna and the Pāṇḍavas as one between deity and devotees.

In this episode in Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, upon finding himself engulfed in flames

in the lacquer palace, Yudhiṣṭhira’s mind instantly goes to Krishna:

The distressed Dharmaraja called out to Krishna,

“Hey lord of the Yadus, we are surrounded by fire.

Protect us lord, remover of sorrow.

We are helpless and take refuge in you.”

[Krishna] showed compassion to his bhakta, dispelling his fear.

Dharmaraja was filled with courage.

This is the first encounter between Yudhiṣṭhira and Krishna in the Bhasha Mahābhārat. But even

though Yudhiṣṭhira has never met his divine cousin before, the Pāṇḍava is clearly aware of

Krishna’s power. Unlike Arjuna in the start of the Bhagavadgītā in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

Cauhān’s Yudhiṣṭhira knows that Krishna is the supreme deity. Cauhān also distinctly describes

Yudhiṣṭhira as Krishna’s bhakta. Given that Yudhiṣṭhira’s first impulse in this scene is to call out

to Krishna, Yudhiṣṭhira is implied to have been a bhakta “all along.” In turn, Krishna’s instant

response to Yudhiṣṭhira’s cry for help demonstrates the deity’s concern for his devotee.

As in the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic, the Pāṇḍavas and Kuntī proceed to escape

the fire through an underground tunnel in the Bhasha poem.

Cauhān then tell us:

In this way the house of lac burned,

but Krishna saved the burning Pāṇḍavas.

The illustrious Hari always protects his bhaktas

and destroys their sins, ferrying them across to the other side.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.8.24, trans. Gupta and Valpey in Bhāgavata Purāṇa (2017), 32.

Sūrdās, Sūrsagar 380, trans. Hawley in Sur’s Ocean, 655.

Note that in the previous pada of the Sūrsagar (379), Sūrdās also states that Krishna “saved the sons of Pandu from

the burning house of lac” (trans. Hawley in Sur’s Ocean, 653).

dharmaraja bikala kṛṣṇa ko ṭeryo he yadunātha agni se gheryo

rakṣā karahu nātha dukha hārī hama anātha haiṃ śaraṇa tumhārī

kīnheṃ kṛpā bhakta bhayahārī dharmarāja bharosa bhayo bhārī

These three lines and six other lines are absent from this episode in the Tej Kumār edition. These lines are found in

the following editions of Cauhān’s text: Sabalsingh Cauhān, Śrīsabalsingh Cauhān Kṛt Mahābhārat: Manmohaṇī

Bhāṣā Ṭīkā Sahit, ed. Rāmjī Śarmā (Allahabad: Śrī Durgā Pustak Bhaṇaḍār, n.d.), 1.88; and Sabalsingh Cauhān,

Śrīsabalsingh Cauhān Kṛt Mahābhārat: Manohāriṇī Bhāṣā Ṭīkā Sahit, ed. Rāmlagn Pāṇḍey (Varanasi: Rupeś

Ṭhākur Prasād Prakāśan, 2014), 1.87. Citations from these two editions refer to the book and stanza numbers.

MBh 1.136.15–19; and CM 1.38–39.

yahi bidhi lākṣā bhavana jarāvā jarata pāṇḍavana kṛṣṇa bacāvā

These verses affirm that as with Krishna in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Śiva in Periyapurāṇam, and

Rāma in the Rāmcaritmānas, the Krishna of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat cares deeply about his

devotees. As in Villi’s Pāratam, the place in the narrative where Cauhān chooses to introduce

Krishna is significant. While Villi has Krishna enter the plot right after the Pāṇḍavas meet the

Kauravas for the first time, Cauhān brings Krishna into the narrative during the Kauravas’ first

major attempt to kill all five of the Pāṇḍavas. Both choices signify that Villi and Cauhān are

reframing the entire Mahābhārata as the story of how Krishna saved the Pāṇḍavas.

As noted earlier, Krishna makes his first appearance in the narrative of the critical edition

of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata during Draupadī’s bridegroom choice ceremony. Alf Hiltebeitel

calls this scene in the epic, in which Krishna recognizes the Pāṇḍavas in their disguises as

Brahmins and then tells Balarāma, an “almost casual introduction” to the deity.

Both Villi and

Cauhān, however, drastically transform this episode in their retellings and bring Krishna to the

forefront. Right before Draupadī’s svayaṃvara, Cauhān inserts a scene into his poem that is not

found in the Sanskrit epic in which Krishna dispatches Garuḍa to find the Pāṇḍavas and send

them to Draupadī’s bridegroom choice ceremony. In both the Mahābhārata and Cauhān’s poem,

Vyāsa meets the Pāṇḍavas in the forest and urges them to take part in the competition for

Draupadī’s hand.

Why then does Cauhān add another sequence in which Krishna orders

Garuḍa to give the Pāṇḍavas the same information that Vyāsa did just a few stanzas earlier?

As with Krishna’s inclusion in the lac house episode, this additional scene increases

Krishna’s presence in the Bhasha text and gives Cauhān the chance to praise the god’s

magnanimity towards his bhaktas. Cauhān highlights Krishna’s deep dedication to his devotees

throughout this scene with Garuḍa which begins with Krishna thinking in Dwarka:

The controller from within knows everything.

For the sake of his bhaktas, the lord of the earth took birth.

In this way, Bhagavān considered and described the mountain of the sins of the Kauravas:

“If evil men take birth, then the good will always be in trouble.”

Thus the lord of Śrī contemplated the death of the wicked and the protection of saints:

“My bhaktas have obtained misfortune and their hearts express anxiety.”

Then the lord of Śrī called Garuḍa and the beautiful darling of Nanda said to him:

“The five brothers are my bhaktas. Go and see which forest they are in.”

In this passage, Cauhān repeatedly emphasizes that the Pāṇḍavas are Krishna’s bhaktas (the

word bhakta appears three times in these seven lines) and that the deity cares about his devotees

immensely. For audiences familiar with prominent kṛṣṇacaritas, Krishna’s choice to send

śrīhari sadā bhakta rakhavārā nāśahiṃ pāpa utārahiṃ pārā || CM 1.39 ||

Hiltebeitel, “Krishna in the Mahabharata,” 23. See MBh 1.177–78.

MBh 1.157; and CM 1.46.

saba jānata haiṃ antaryāmī bhakta hetu janme jagasvāmī

yahi prakāra śocata bhagavānā kurudala pāpa pahāḍa bakhānā

duṣṭa manuṣya janma jo pāvaiṃ sādhuna kaṣṭa sadā manabhāvaiṃ

ese śrīpati karaiṃ bicārā mārata duṣṭa santa pratipārā

mora bhakta jana saṃkaṭa pāvai tāte mana udvega janāvai

śrīpatī tabai garuḍa haṃkārā tāsoṃ kahata su nandadulāre

bhakta mora haiṃ pāṃcau bhāī kaunau bana haiṃ dekhahu jāī || CM 1.48 ||

Garuḍa to the Pāṇḍavas is a salient one. When Bhagavān answers Gajendra’s call for help in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, he arrives on Garuḍa’s back.

Krishna also rides Garuḍa when he steals the

magical pārijāta tree in the Harivaṃśa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

The epithet nandadulāre or

the “darling of Nanda” also reminds us instantly of the lovable young Krishna of Vrindavan.

Cauhān then demonstrates that the love Krishna has for his bhaktas is matched by the

Pāṇḍavas’ devotion to him. Moments before Garuḍa arrives, Yudhiṣṭhira reminds his siblings:

Brothers! The lord of Śrī is our companion, so what reason is there to worry?

He is the savior of all the worlds. He saves saints and destroys demons.

Yudhiṣṭhira’s words of encouragement to his younger brothers reaffirms their identity as “all

along” bhaktas of Krishna. After Garuḍa conveys Krishna’s desire for the Pāṇḍavas to attend

Draupadī’s svayaṃvara, Cauhān tells us that “the heart of Dharmarāja became joyful.”

While Krishna does not direct the Pāṇḍavas to Draupadī’s bridegroom choice ceremony

in the Tamil Pāratam as he does in the Bhasha Mahābhārat, his presence is still felt throughout

this episode in Villi’s text. As I will discuss in greater detail in Chapter Five, Villi’s Pāratam is a

peruṅkāppiyam (mahākāvya in Sanskrit). As with many other peruṅkāppiyam authors, Villi takes

his time to describe different landscapes and cities in his poem. When Villi details how the

Pāṇḍavas enter the capital of Drupada’s kingdom where Draupadī’s svayaṃvara will be held in

“Draupadī’s Bridegroom Choice Ceremony Chapter” (Tiraupatimālaiyiṭṭacarukkam), he

compares the magnificence of Drupada’s capital city and its features to Māyavaṉ (Viṣṇu):

[The Pāṇḍavas] saw a fort,

surrounded by a moat with many noisy water birds,

of great splendor,

with a rare excellence for anyone to speak of,

shining with sacrificial pots and golden pinnacles,

like the form of Māyavaṉ surrounded by his obscuring māyā.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 8.3.31–32.

Harivaṃśa 93.2; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.59.2. For the Harivaṃśa, I am following: Krishna’s Lineage: The

Harivamsha of Vyāsa’s Mahābhārata, trans. Simon Brodbeck (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019).

hamare śrīpati haiṃ jo sahāī kāraṇa kauna śociye bhāī

sabai jagata ke tāraṇa hārā santa tāri dānava saṃhārā || CM 1.49 ||

dharmarāja harṣita mana bhayaū || CM 1.49 ||

This part of the verse bears a strong resemblance to the opening verse of the ten verses in Āṇṭāḷ’s

Nācciyārtirumoḻi in which she describes the dream in which she weds Viṣṇu that we saw in the Introduction. In her

description of Viṣṇu’s bridegroom procession, Āṇṭāḷ says “every threshold was decked with bright banners and

auspicious gold pots” (Āṇṭāḷ, Nācciyārtirumoḻi 6.1, trans. Venkatesan in Āṇṭāḷ, Secret Garland, 163).

vāraṇam māyai cūḻnta māyavaṉ tōṟṟam pōla

pēr oḷi pampi yārkkum pēcu arum ciṟappiṟṟu āki

pūraṇa kumpam poṉ kōpuraṅkaḷāl polintu tōṉṟum

āravam mikunta pal puḷ akaḻi cūḻ puricai kaṇṭā || VP 1.5.17 ||

Villi thus expertly weaves an allusion to Viṣṇu into this descriptive verse. We see something

similar in yet another verse about the splendor of Drupada’s capital city.

That great city indeed was like the belly

into which were compressed the entire world of beings,

that exists by beginning and growing,

devoid of faults,

from that beginning

and then is destroyed

at the time when it enters

the mouth of Mukunda

with his bow in his red hand.

In this verse about the splendor of Drupada’s city Villi draws on a popular story that the Āḻvārs

refer to over two hundred times in the Tamil Nālāyirativiyappirapantam in which during the

floods of dissolution, Viṣṇu floats on banyan leaf in the form of a baby.

Vasudha Narayanan

notes that in this myth, the infant Viṣṇu is said to have “swallowed the worlds, contained them in

his stomach, and then spewed them out again.”

The words “mouth of Mukunda” also bring to

mind a scene found in both the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa in which

Krishna’s adoptive mother Yaśodā forces her son to open his lips after she hears that he has been

eating mud and then sees that the entire universe is contained in Krishna’s mouth.

The fact that

the Pāṇḍavas are reminded of Viṣṇu/Krishna as they enter the capital of Drupada’s kingdom

points to these characters being “all along” bhaktas of this deity.

We find even more allusions to Krishna right before the svayaṃvara ceremony begins in

the Pāratam when Draupadī’s cevilittāy or “foster mother” (an important figure in the ancient

classical “Caṅkam” corpus of Tamil literature) tells Draupadī about the different princes and

kings who have come to compete.

In many of the cevilittāy’s accounts of Draupadī’s suitors,

she describes the candidate for Draupadī’s hand by pointing out his relationship to Krishna.

When the cevilittāy talks about King Śiśupāla, she notes he is the “younger brother of the one

with tulsī (basil)” (tuḷavōṉ taṉakku iḷaval) which is a reference to Krishna being Śiśupāla

maternal cousin. She also foreshadows Śiśupāla’s death when she mentions the “slander”

(puṉcol) he directs at Kaṇṇaṉ (Krishna).

Similarly, in her description of King Jarāsandha, the

toṭaṅkiyum toṭakkam toṭṭu tukaḷ aṟa vaḷarntu mīḷa

maṭaṅkiyum cellukiṉṟa maṉ uyir ulakam ellām

muṭaṅkiya cārṅkam cem kai mukuntaṉ vāy pukunta kālattu

aṭaṅkiya utaram pōṉṟatu anta mā nakari ammā || VP 1.5.19 ||

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 164.

Narayanan, 170.

See Narayanan, 159; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.8.33–39.

On the role of the cevilittāy in the Caṅkam corpus, see Elizabeth Rani Segran, “Worlds of Desire: Gender and

Sexuality in Classical Tamil Poetry” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2011), 89–98.

VP 1.5.40.

On the story of the slaying of Śiśupāla, see Chapter Three.

cevilittāy says that he is the one who has driven “the dark rain cloud” (kārvaṇṇaṉ) from Mathura

(Mathurā), an allusion to the fierce enmity between Jarāsandha and Krishna.

The cevilittāy’s

description of Krishna himself paints a very specific image of the deity:

They say that this nobleman

is the jewel of the entire Yadu clan.

Having come, having been born,

and having been brought up amongst herdsmen,

he is the mischievous, magnificent Māyaṉ.

He is the one who earlier destroyed

the life breath of his maternal uncle Kaṃsa.

The cloud is his vehicle and the harem his pleasure garden,

the harem his pleasure garden.

With this account of Krishna as the master of māyā (Māyaṉ) who was raised amongst cow

herders, then defeated Kaṃsa, and who now roams around romancing women, it is clear that the

cevilittāy is not describing the shrewd diplomat of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, but the youthful

and playful god who pervades the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

When we come to the actual competition portion of Draupadī’s svayaṃvara in both the

Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat, we find a salient similarity. In both regional

retellings, Krishna has a hand in securing Arjuna’s victory. After Krishna recognizes the

Pāṇḍavas in their Brahmin disguises in the Tamil poem, he tells Balarāma, and other members of

the Yādava clan not to participate in the competition in order to ensure that Arjuna will emerge

the champion.

These instructions, while absent from this episode in the critical edition of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata, are also found in Agastya Paṇḍita’s Sanskrit Bālabhārata.

This

fourteenth-century Mahābhārata mahākāvya, which may have been composed at the court of the

king Pratāparudra Deva II (r. 1294–1325 CE) in present-day Telangana in South India,

has

been identified as an important source of inspiration for Villi’s Pāratam.

In the Bhasha

Mahābhārat, Krishna’s intervention during the competition is a bit more direct. When the kings

VP 1.5.41.

In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Kaṃsa is the cousin of Krishna’s mother, Devakī, and in the Harivaṃśa, Devakī is

Kaṃsa’s aunt. In the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and many other Vaiṣṇava bhakti compositions, however, Devakī is Kaṃsa’s

sister. See Preciado-Solís, Kṛṣṇa Cycle, 52.

inta kuricil yatu kulattukku ellām tilakam eṉum āṟu

vantu uṟpavittu potuvaruṭaṉ vaḷarum kaḷḷam mā māyaṉ

munta kañca māmaṉ uyir muṭittāṉ ivaṟku mukil ūrti

anta purattil ārāmam anta purattil ārāmam || VP 1.5.41 ||

VP 1.5.49.

K. Ghanasyamala Prasada Rao, Agastya Paṇḍita’s Bālabhārata: A Critical Study (Amalapuram: K.S.

Mahalakshmi, 1992), 93.

See Shalom, Re-ending the Mahābhārata, 77.

See C.R. Sankaran and K. Rama Varma Raja, “On the Sources of Villiputtūrār-Bhāratam,” Bulletin of the Deccan

College Research Institute 5 (1943): 231; and Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 121.

at the svayaṃvara try to take part in the archery test, Cauhān’s Krishna uses his māyā and his

discus Sudarśana to obscure the target so that they will fail.

Krishna also uses a similar trick in

Kāśīrāmdās’s Bengali Mahābhārata.

In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Arjuna wins the

svayaṃvara competition solely based on his own skills as an archer. In Villi’s Pāratam and

Cauhān’s Mahābhārat (as well as in Agastya Paṇḍita’s Bālabhārata and Kāśīrāmdās’s

Mahābhārata), however, Krishna is the mastermind behind Arjuna’s triumph.

Soon after the svayaṃvara ends, Cauhān describes the first meeting between the

Pāṇḍavas and Krishna. Cauhān tells us that after the Pāṇḍavas brought Draupadī to Kuntī:

Then at that time Krishna arrived.

Then [the Pāṇḍavas] experienced multiple types of joy

and joyfully worshipped the feet of Bhagavān.

Compare this scene to its counterpart from the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic:

Said Vāsudeva upon approaching to Kuntī’s son, best bearer of Law [dharma].

“I am Kṛṣṇa,” and touched with his hands the feet of King Yudhiṣṭhira Ājamīḍha.

The image of the Pāṇḍavas blissfully worshiping Krishna in Cauhān’s Bhasha retelling stands in

stark contrast to the one of Krishna respectfully touching Yudhiṣṭhira’s feet in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. This scene in Cauhān’s poem therefore firmly confirms that these cousins’

relationship is one between the supreme being and his “all along” bhaktas.

As we have seen, both Villi and Cauhān ensure that their audiences know the importance

of Krishna in their regional Mahābhāratas right from the start of each of their texts with frequent

allusions and references to the deity. With Krishna’s arrival in Hastinapura in the Tamil Pāratam

and his intervention during the fire in the lacquer palace in the Bhasha Mahābhārat, Villi and

Cauhān introduce Krishna as the Pāṇḍavas’ constant protector by inserting him into scenes from

which he is absent in the Sanskrit epic. With their renditions of Draupadī’s svayaṃvara,

however, Villi and Cauhān take an episode from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which Krishna

makes a small appearance and then transform the entire episode to bring Krishna into the

spotlight. We see a similar transformation in Villi’s and Cauhān’s presentations of one of the

most famous scenes from the Mahābhārata tradition: the attempted disrobing of Draupadī.

CM 1.51.

Bhattacharya, “Variations on Vyasa,” 96.

A. Harindranath and A. Purushothaman note that in the svayaṃvara episode of Cĕṟuśśeri’s fifteenth-century

Malayalam Bhāratagātha “Karna fails in his attempt because of Krishna’s act (no elaboration of what this act is)”

(“Mahābhārata Variations in Malayalam,” May 22, 2005, http://mahabharata-

resources.org/variations/mvm_v2.pdf).

yahi antara kṛṣṇahu taba āī

bahuta prakāra harṣa taba mānā

pūjeu caraṇa harṣa bhagavāna || CM 1.55 ||

MBh 1.183.4, trans. van Buitenen in Mahābhārata 1:359.

Reimagining Draupadī’s Prayer to Krishna

The scene in which Duḥśāsana drags the menstruating Draupadī by her hair and then tries to

publicly disrobe her after Yudhiṣṭhira gambles and loses her in the first crooked game of dice is

one of most disturbing and popular scenes in the Mahābhārata tradition. In many Mahābhāratas,

Draupadī calls out to Krishna when Duḥśāsana begins to pull at her garment and the deity

answers her prayer by providing her with a never-ending stream of cloth.

For all its fame in people’s minds today, however, the sequence with Draupadī’s prayer

and Krishna’s divine intervention is noticeably absent from the critical edition of the

Mahābhārata. Multiple scholars have labeled Krishna’s presence in this episode in the Sanskrit

epic a late bhakti interpolation.

Wendy Doniger notes that the critical edition of the

Mahābhārata assumes that “the power of Draupadi’s own dharma, her unwavering devotion to

her husband(s), is what protects her when Duhshasana tries to strip her.”

Doniger adds that

“several manuscripts of this passage, as well as many texts composed after the tenth century,

remove Draupadi’s agency by saying that she called for help from Krishna, who arrived and

performed the miracle of the expanding sari. There is a real loss of feminist ground here.”

We cannot ignore, however, that Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna is an intrinsic part of the

dice game episode in the larger Mahābhārata narrative tradition in South Asia. Draupadī’s call to

Krishna is found in both the northern and southern recensions of the Sanskrit epic. In

Ramchandrashastri Kinjawadekar’s edition of the “vulgate” Mahābhārata of Nīlakaṇṭha

Caturdhara (which is generally identified with the northern recension), Draupadī alludes to the

stories of Krishna’s childhood amongst the cowherds of Vrindavan in her prayer:

When her clothes were being dragged off, Draupadī thought about Hari. “O Govinda! Resident of

Dvārakā! O Kṛṣṇa, beloved of the cowherdesses [gopījanapriya]. Don’t you know that I have

been abused by the Kauravas, Keśava? O Master! Master of Ramā [ramānātha]! Lord of Vraja

[vrajanātha]! One who removes suffering! Rescue me as I am sunk in the ocean of the Kauravas,

Janārdana! Kṛṣṇa, Kṛṣṇa! Great Yogī! Self of the world! Creator of the world! Protect [me] who

has taken refuge [in you], Govinda, suffering in the midst of the Kurus” ... Having heard

Yājñasenī’s words, Kṛṣṇa became absorbed. He left his throne [and] with compassion, the

merciful one arrived on foot.

This scene in the vulgate Mahābhārata in which Draupadī delivers her passionate eulogy to

Krishna distinctly presents the Pāṇḍavas’ joint wife as an “all along” bhakta and Krishna as a

See Alf Hiltebeitel, “Draupadī’s Garments,” Indo-Iranian Journal 22, no. 2 (1980): 99; Gurcharan Das,

“Draupadi’s Question: Lessons for Public and Corporate Governance,” in Textuality and Inter-Textuality in the

Mahabharata: Myth, Meaning and Metamorphosis, ed. Pradeep Trikha (Delhi: Sarup and Sons, 2006), 114; and

Pradip Bhattacharya, “Revising the Critical Edition of the Mahābhārata: An Approach through the Attempt to Strip

Draupadī,” Indologica Taurinensia 43–44 (2017–18): 17–18.

Doniger, The Hindus, 298.

Doniger, 298.

Mahābhārata (Mahābhāratam with the Bhāratabhāvadīpa) 2.68.41–47 and 2.68.50–51, trans. Vishal Sharma in

“The Problem of the Indifference to Suffering in the Mahābhārata Tradition,” International Journal of Hindu

Studies 24 (2020): 193–94. For the Sanskrit text, I am following Śrī Mahābhāratam with the Bhāratabhāvadīpa

Commentary of Nīlakaṇṭha, ed. Ramchandrashastri Kinjawadekar, 6 vols. (Poona: Chitrashala Press, 1929–36).

compassionate deity who cares deeply for his devotee. Krishna’s divine intervention in the dicing

game is also found in a plethora of other Mahābhārata retellings from premodern narrative texts

to modern poems, novels, plays, comic books, television shows, and feature films.

Several Vaiṣṇava bhakti poets including Tukārām in Marathi, Kanakadāsa in Kannada,

and Mīrābāī and Tulsīdās in Bhasha, also sing of how Krishna saves Draupadī in the assembly

hall.

In his Tamil Periyatirumoḻi (Grand Divine Speech), Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār suggests that

Krishna used the entire Kurukṣetra War to avenge Draupadī’s humiliation:

As the younger brother of the king of kings,

the son of the blind one,

went to the one with jeweled ornaments and said, “Be our slave!”

[Krishna] removed the wedding threads obtained by the own women of the one hundred,

giving them the sorrow of the one with hair the color of night who could not endure

and said: “Our lord [emperumāṉ]! Compassion!”

I saw him,

the one who stood at the front of the chariot of the son of Indra,

in Tiruvallikkeni.

These Mahābhāratas include (but are by no means limited to): the twelfth-century Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata (2.44

in Jaiminīya Mahābhārata: Āśvamedhika Parva; Part One, ed. Keshoram Aggarwal [Gorakhpur: Gita Press,

2007]); Kumāravyāsa’s fifteenth-century Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī (2.14.109–32); Ramcarit

Upādhyāy’s twentieth-century Hindi poem Devī Draupadī (see Pamela Lothspeich, Epic Nation: Reimagining the

Mahabharata in the Age of Empire (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2009), 202; Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s

English novel The Palace of Illusions (New York: Anchor Books, 2008), 192–94; Jean-Claude Carrière’s French

Play The Mahabharata: A Play; Based Upon the Indian Classic Epic, trans. Peter Brook (New York: Harper & Row

Publishers, 1985), 67–68; the 1974 Amar Chitra Katha comic book Draupadi: Queen of the Pandavas (see Kamala

Chandrakant and Pratap Mulick, Draupadi: Queen of the Pandavas [Bombay: Amar Chitra Katha, 1974], 18);

episode 145 of Doordarshan’s 1993–1996 Hindi Śrī Kṛṣṇa television serial (see Sagar World, “Shri Krishna

Draupadi Vastraharan,” YouTube video, 3:46:32, December 7, 2011,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrTPCWIQmyY); episode 147 of Sony Entertainment Television’s 2015–2016

television show Sūryaputra Karṇ (see SET India, “Suryaputra Karn– Episode 147,” YouTube video, 20:54, January

15, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2lygL3HnfM); N.T. Rama Rao’s 1977 Telugu film Dāna Vīra Śūra

Karṇa (see 1:20:53–1:25:08 of Shalimar Telugu & Hindi Movies, “Daana Veera Soora Karna Telugu Full Length

Movie,” YouTube video, 3:46:32, December 3, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JB1_n0LtUCY); and

Naganna’s 2019 Kannada film Kurukṣētra (see T-Series Kannada, “Yelliruve Hariye Full Video,” YouTube video,

3:07, October 4, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf6wTmf5rfk).

See R.D. Ranade, Tukaram (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), 64; Mattur Nandakumara,

“Kṛṣṇa in Kannada Literature with special reference to Purandaradāsa and Kanakadāsa” (PhD diss., University of

London: SOAS, 1983), 228); Mīrābāī, pada 3 in Rupert Snell, The Hindi Classical Tradition: A Braj Bhāṣā Reader

(London: The School of Oriental and African Studies, 199); Tulsīdās, Kavitāvalī 7.89 in Tulsīdās, Tulsīdās:

Kavitāvalī; Translated and with a Critical Introduction, trans. F.R. Allchin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1964);

Tulsīdās, Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī 60 and 61 in Tulsīdās, Tulsīgranthāvalī, vol. 2, ed. Rāmcandra Śukla (Banaras:

Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā, 1947); and Tulsīdās, Vinayapatrikā 213.3 in Tulsīdās, The Petition To Rām: Hindi

Devotional Hymns of the Seventeenth Century; A Translation of Vinaya-patrikā with Introduction, Notes and

Glossary, trans. F.R. Allchin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1966).

antakaṉ ciṟuvaṉ aracar tam aracaṟku iḷaiyavaṉ aṇi iḻaiyai ceṉṟu

emtamakku urimai cey eṉa tariyātu emperumāṉ aruḷ eṉṉa

cantam al kuḻalāḷ alakkaṇ nūṟṟuvar tam peṇṭirum eyti nūl iḻappa

intiraṉ ciṟuvaṉ tēr muṉ niṉṟāṉai tiruvallikkēṇi kaṇṭēṉ || Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, Periyatirumoḻi 2.3.6 ||

While especially known for his Bhasha padas about Krishna’s youth, Sūrdās dedicates an entire

poem to a meditation on how the adult Krishna protects Draupadī:

‘Nothing now remains.

Duḥśāsan has dragged me into the court

and he’s even grabbed my clothes.

Land, wealth, happiness, palace—all lost:

Every kind of sadness I’ve suffered.

Somewhere in my heart I wore the mantle of your mercy,

but now their stares have burned it away—

‘Govind!’ she shouted, ‘Govind!

Guard me at such a time!’

And then, says Sūr, the sea of compassion [karuṇā siṃdhu] surged:

its water, a current of cloth.

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār and Sūrdās preceded Villi and Cauhān. What happens to this scene when the

latter two poets incorporate it into their kṛṣṇacaritas? Not at all the same thing, as we are about

to see. While Villi uses this scene to illustrate the power of prapatti or “self-surrender,” Cauhān

uses Draupadī’s prayer as an opportunity to praise Krishna. Yet although these emphases are

somewhat divergent, both Mahābhāratas also present the entire dice game episode as a

devotional story that highlights Krishna’s omnipotence and compassion for his bhaktas.

In the “Gambling Match Chapter” (Cūtupōrccarukkam) in the Book of the Assembly Hall

(Capāparuvam) of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam, as Duḥśāsana prepares to strip Draupadī after

Yudhiṣṭhira loses her in the dice game, Draupadī joins her hands together and thinks of “our

lord,” emperumāṉ.

Notably, Draupadī uses this exact same epithet when she calls out to

Krishna in the verse of Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār’s Periyatirumoḻi that we just saw above. Villi then

presents Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna in a single quatrain verse:

Forming a river from her

two wide eyes with kohl,

hot tears of water fell.

Her hair fell.

Her hands tired from holding that cloth fell.

Her consciousness fell.

Then without saying a single other word,

she cried out “Govinda, Govinda,”

and nectar flowed on her cooled tongue

that had not flowed before,

the hair on her body stood on end,

and her whole heart completely melted.

Sūrdās, Sūrsagar 355, trans. Hawley in Sūrdās, Memory of Love, 159.

VP 2.2.246.

āṟu āki iru taṭa kaṇañcaṉam vem puṉal cōra aḷakam cōra

vēṟu āṉa tukil takainta kai cōra mey cōra vēṟu ōr collum

kūṟāmal kōvintā kōvintā eṉṟu araṟṟi kuḷirnta nāvil

ūṟāta amiḻtu ūṟa uṭal puḷakittu uḷḷam elām urukiṉāḷē || VP 2.2.247 ||

Particularly when we contrast what Villi gives us in this moment to the parallel passage

in Cauhān’s retelling, we are likely to be amazed at its brevity. Cauhān gives us a twenty-eight

line-long supplication to Kṛṣṇa at this point in the narrative, while Draupadī’s prayer as recorded

by Villi is a matter of just two words—in fact, a single word once repeated: Govinda. If we turn

to Śrīvaiṣṇava Manipravala texts from between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, however,

we find an explanation for the brevity of Draupadī’s supplication in the Pāratam.

The single

word Govinda serves to epitomize a theological perspective that has been long in the making.

For many prominent Śrīvaiṣṇava ācāryas (preceptors) and commentators, such as

Periyavāccāṉ Piḷḷai, Piḷḷai Lokācārya, and Maṇavāḷamāmun

i, Draupadī’s call to Krishna during

her attempted disrobing is a prime example of prapatti or śaraṇāgati, a paramount concept in the

Śrīvaiṣṇava religious tradition in South India.

Srilata Raman explains that:

The word prapatti is derived from pra+pad, meaning “to take refuge with/in” (van Buitenen

1974) and is used to refer to a soteriological path in Śrīvaiṣṇavism. A person does prapatti when

he/she surrenders oneself at the feet of God in order to obtain liberation from the cycle of

transmigration and attain mokṣa (defined as being part of Viṣṇu’s retinue in his paradise of

Vaikuṇṭha). Hence, prapatti is synonymous with self-surrender.

Katherine Young fills out the picture, saying “the incident of Draupadī is often used by the

[Śrīvaiṣṇava] ācāryas to suggest that prapatti may be performed at any time and in any place.”

In his Śrīvacana Bhūṣaṇam, Piḷḷai Lokācārya (traditional dates: 1264–1327 CE) states that

“Draupadī was not in the state of being purified [when] performing prapatti,” which is a

reference to Draupadī still being able to partake in prapatti in this scene even though she has her

period.

Piḷḷai Lokācārya also brings up Draupadī in the Mumukṣuppati in his discussion of the

Śrīvaiṣṇava tirumantra (divine mantra), om namo nārāyaṇāya “obeisance to Nārāyaṇa,” and

claims that “in Draupadī’s distress, it was the holy name that showered her with saris.”

In his

Suganya Anandakichenin explains that “Maṇipravāḷa [Manipravala], or ‘gems and coral,’ is, broadly speaking, a

technical term that can be used to describe a language or dialect that combines Sanskrit with a vernacular language.

More speciﬁcally, it is used as a designation for languages or dialects that are explicitly identiﬁed by its speakers or

in its literary corpus as falling under this general rubric in South India, e.g., Śrīvaiṣṇava Tamil Maṇipravāḷa,

(Malayalam) Maṇipravāḷa, Kannada-Maṇipravāḷa, and Telugu-Maṇipravāḷa” (“Maṇipravāḷa” in Hinduism and

Tribal Religions, ed. Pankaj Jain, Rita Sherma, and Madhu Khana, Springer Link, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-

94-024-1036-5_163-2).

See Archana Venkatesan, “Commentary and Notes to the Nācciyār Tirumoḻi,” in Āṇṭāḷ, Secret Garland, 213; and

Katherine K. Young, “On the Vedas, and the Status of Women with Special Reference to Śrīvaiṣṇavism,” in Jewels

of Authority: Women and Textual Tradition in Hindu India, ed. Laurie L. Patton (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2002), 105.

Raman, Self-Surrender, 11. The work by J.A.B. van Buitenen that Raman in referring to is Rāmānuja on the

Bhagavadgītā: A Condensed Rendering of his Gītābhāṣya with Copious Notes (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1974).

Young, “On the Vedas,” 120n148.

Piḷḷai Lokācārya, Śrīvacana Bhūṣaṇam 30, trans. Erin McCann in “Ācāryābhimāna: Agency, Ontology, and

Salvation in Piḷḷai Lokācārya’s Śrīvacana Bhūṣaṇam” (PhD diss., McGill University, 2015), 155.

Piḷḷai Lokācārya, Mumukṣuppati 16, trans. Patricia Y. Mumme in Piḷḷailokācārya, The Mumukuṣppaṭi of Piḷḷai

Lokācārya with Maṇavāḷamāmuni’s Commentary, trans. Patricia Y. Mumme (Bombay: Anantacharya Indological

Research Institute, 1987), 47.

commentary on the Mumukṣuppati, Maṇavāḷamāmun

i (traditional dates: 1370–1445) elaborates

on this claim with three quotes from the Mahābhārata. While none of the lines that

Maṇavāḷamāmun

i refers to are in the critical edition, they are all found in T.R. Krishnacharya

and T.R. Vyasacharya’s edition of the epic that is based on manuscripts from South India:

When Duśśāsana tried to disrobe her in the great assembly, Draupadī thought of what [the sage]

Śrī Vasiṣṭha had said earlier: “When great danger strikes, Lord Hari should be remembered.”

in her extreme distress, Draupadī sought refuge, saying “O Acyuta who lives in Dvārakā, bearing

the conch and discus in your hand, O Lotus-eyed Govinda, I seek refuge [śaraṇāgatām] in you.

Protect me!”

As [Kṛṣṇa himself] said, “When [Draupadī] called out ‘Govinda,’ I was far away

from her.”

Even though Kṛṣṇa, the one indicated [by the name “Govinda”] was far away, it was

that holy name of Govinda itself, referring to the avatāra, which provided her with multiple

garments.

As Young points out, in this passage Maṇavāḷamāmun

i clearly “associates taking the name of

God with surrendering to God.”

For Piḷḷai Lokācārya, Maṇavāḷamāmun

i, and Villi, the divine

name “Govinda” is the only word that Draupadī needs to partake in prapatti.

Draupadī’s bodily response in the Pāratam also makes it clear that she is engaging in

prapatti. Villi shows us that Draupadī’s entire being is literally surrendering to Kṛṣṇa: her tears,

hair, hands, and indeed her very consciousness all fall away. After Draupadī calls out to

Govinda, her body is instantly rewarded for her prapatti. Villi describes Draupadī entering a

state of rapture in ways that would be instantly recognised by audiences familiar with bhakti

literature across South Asia—the nectar on the tongue and the horripilation on the skin being

cases in point. But Villi’s particular language for what happens to Draupadi is somewhat more

specific. His description of melting—what happens to the devotee’s heart in the presence of the

divine—would have been deeply familiar to Śrīvaiṣṇava Tamil listeners. It is repeatedly utilized

in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam. In the Tiruvāymoḻi (Divine Utterance) alone, Nammāḻvār uses

the verb uruku, ‘to melt or soften,’ at least ten times.

We also see this trope in the compositions

of Tamil Śaiva bhakti poets including Kāraikkālammaiyār, Campantar, and Māṇikkavācakar.

Villi continues to describe Draupadī’s immersive devotional experience and Krishna’s

compassionate response to his devotee in the next verse of his Tamil bhakti narrative poem:

2.90.43 in Mahābhārata (Sriman Mahābhāratam: A New Edition Mainly Based on the South Indian Texts), ed.

T.R. Krishnacharya and T.R. Vyasacharya, 19 vols. (Bombay: Javaji Dadaji’s Nirnaya Sagar Press, 1906–10).

Mahābhārata (Sriman Mahābhāratam) 2.90.46.

Mahābhārata (Sriman Mahābhāratam) 5.47.39.

Maṇavāḷamāmuni’s commentary on Mumukṣuppati 16, trans. Mumme in Mumukuṣppaṭi of Piḷḷai Lokācārya, 47.

Young, “On the Vedas,” 105.

Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 1.5.2, 2.1.3, 2.4.6, 4.7.3, 5.4.9, 5.4.10, 5.8.1, 5.10.1, 5.10.4, and 5.10.10.

For the image of melting in the poetry of Kāraikkālammaiyār, Campantar, and Māṇikkavācakar, see Craddock,

Śiva’s Demon Devotee, 36; Peterson, Poems to Śiva, 32; and Cutler, Songs of Experience, 149.

At that time, her speech resounded and reached the divine ears

of the one with the red, beautiful, divine flower feet

who is abundantly praised by the gods

with the words of the one thousand names spoken in the rare, hidden Vedas.

The heart of the doe with fragrant flowers in her soft hair did not tremble

when the dark raincloud appeared and arrived in that very heart and

without anyone else knowing, showed her compassion.

In this verse, we see a reference to the Viṣṇusahasranāmastotra (Hymn of the Thousand Names

of Viṣṇu) which Bhīṣma tells Yudhiṣṭhira in the Book of Instructions (Anuśāsanaparvan) as

found in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

The Śrīvaiṣṇava ācārya Parāśara

Bhaṭṭar (traditional dates: 1123–1151) wrote an influential commentary on the

Viṣṇusahasranāmastotra,

and as Anand Venkatkrishnan notes, this hymn “became extremely

popular in many cultures of recitation across southern India.”

Villi also utilizes a common

image from Tamil bhakti poetry when he describes Krishna manifesting himself in Draupadī’s

heart. Norman Cutler explains that the idea that the “lord dwells within the devotee” is found in

the works of many Tamil Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva poets including Pēyāḻvār, Nammāḻvār,

Kāraikkālammaiyār, and Māṇikkavācakar.

Cutler further explains that:

The poet-saint often affirms that the lord dwells in his heart or in his mind, or that he and the lord

are inextricably intermingled. In many poems this motif appears as a kind of “personalization” of

the idea that the lord is omnipresent. The lord exists everywhere, but what matters most to the

devotee is that the lord is present in his own being. Śrīvaiṣṇava theologians expressed this idea in

their conception of the antaryāmin (one who goes within) or hārda (one who dwells in the heart)

form of Viṣṇu.

With just two quatrain verses, then, Villi presents a depiction of Draupadī’s prayer to Kṛṣṇa that

is anchored in the embodied experience of prapatti and that is full of familiar images and tropes

from Tamil bhakti poetry, especially that of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition.

When we turn to the Bhasha Mahābhārat, we find something quite different. Take the

first of the three extensive stanzas that Cauhān dedicates to Draupadī’s plea in the Book of the

Assembly Hall (Sabhāparv):

aru maṟai colliya nāmam āyiramum urai taḻaikka amarar pōṟṟum

tiru malar cem cīr aṭiyōṉ tiru ceviyil ivaḷ moḻi ceṉṟu icaitta kālai

maru malar meṉ kuḻal māṉiṉ maṉam naṭuṅkā vakai maṉattē vantu tōṉṟi

kariya mukil aṇaiyāṉum piṟar evarkkum teriyāmal karuṇai ceytāṉ || VP 2.2.248 ||

MBh 13.135.14–20.

Vasudha Narayanan, “Singing the Glory of the Divine Name: Parāśara Bhaṭṭar's Commentary on the Viṣṇu

Sahasranāma,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 2, no. 2 (1994): 85–98.

Anand Venkatkrishnan, “Mīmāṃsā, Vedānta, and the Bhakti Movement,” (PhD diss., Columbia University,

2015), 108.

Cutler, Songs of Experience, 198.

Cutler, 198.

Seeing the evil form of the lord of the Kauravas,

her mind went to where the lord of the Yadus was.

“Rādhā’s lover! Listen to my words,”

she bitterly cried and lamented.

“Just as you, the lord of the Raghus grasped the hands of Bharata

who was drowning in an ocean of separation,

just as you saved the king of monkeys Sugrīva,

protected Vibhīṣaṇa, and killed Rāvaṇa,

when Dhruva was scorned by his mother and father,

then, lord, you rescued him.

Besides you, lord, who will listen to me?”

she bitterly called out and lamented.

Lifting her arms towards the direction of Hari’s city,

“Protect me! Protect me!” she repeatedly screamed.

“Krishna! Krishna! Rādhā’s lover!”

she bitterly called out.

Here Draupadī begins her prayer with the word rādhāramaṇa, “Rādhā’s lover.” As with

gopījanapriya, “beloved of the cowherdesses,” the epithet for Krishna that Draupadī uses in this

scene in the vulgate version of the epic, the name Rādhāramaṇa does not bring to mind the

enigmatic advisor to the Pāṇḍavas, but the charming cowherd of Braj. While Rādhā is markedly

absent from the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, she is a major figure in bhakti poetry from the eastern and

northern regions of India as exemplified by the works of Vaiṣṇava poets such as Jayadeva in

Sanskrit, Vidyāpati in Maithili, Caṇḍīdās in Bengali, and Sūrdās, Nandadās, Hit Harivaṃś,

Harirāmvyās, and Haridās in Bhasha.

Rādhāramaṇa is the form of Krishna worshiped by the

Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sampradāya in the Rādhāramaṇa temple in Vrindavan.

Krishna is also

referred to as Rādhāramaṇa in the sixteenth-century Bhasha compositions of Gadādhar Bhaṭṭ,

kālarūpa lakhi kauravanāthā jāya raheu cita jahaṃ yadunāthā

rādhāramaṇa bacana sunu mere kīna bilāpa kalāpa karere

būḍata biraha sindhu raghunāthā jimi gahilīna bharata kara hāthā

jimi kapīśa sugrīva ubārā rākhi bibhīṣaṇa rāvaṇa mārā

dhruvahi nirādara kiya pitu mātā tākahaṃ nātha bhayo tuma trātā

tuma bina nāta sunai ko merī kari bilāpa dai hāṃka karerī

bhuja uṭhāya harinagara diśi pāhi pāhi puni ṭeri

kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa rādhāramaṇa dīnhī hāṃka kareri || CM 2.57 ||

See Tracy Coleman, “Rādhā: Lover and Beloved of Kṛṣṇa,” in The Oxford History of Hinduism: The Goddess, ed.

Mandakranta Bose (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 116–46; and Heidi Pauwels, “Rādhā” in Brill’s

Encyclopedia of Hinduism, ed. Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu, Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Brill

Online, 2018, http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2212-5019_BEH_COM_1030130.

See Kenneth Russell Valpey, Attending Kṛṣṇa’s Image: Caitanya Vaiṣṇava mūrti-sevā as Devotional Truth (New

York: Routledge, 2006), 43–78; and John Stratton Hawley, Krishna’s Playground: Vrindavan in the 21

Century

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2019), 4-7.

one of the six main disciples of the Gauḍīya sampradāya founder Caitanya, and Harirāmvyās, a

Krishna devotee who was not affiliated with a particular Vaiṣṇava sectarian community.

Yet despite calling out this popular name of Kṛṣṇa that is found in various North Indian

devotional contexts, Draupadī begins her prayer by remembering the deeds of Rāma, not Kṛṣṇa.

Draupadī commences her supplication with allusions to how Rāma comforts his brother Bharata

after Rāma is exiled, how he saves the monkey king Sugrīva from being killed by his brother

Vālī, how he protects Vibhīṣaṇa from the wrath of his elder brother Rāvaṇa, and finally how

Rāma slays Rāvaṇa. In Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas, all four of these characters are presented as

Rāma’s bhaktas.

100

Why does Draupadī start her prayer to Krishna by recounting these stories of

Rāma’s devotees? As I will show in greater detail in Chapter Four, Cauhān’s Mahābhārata is

imbued with references to Rāma and the Rāmāyaṇa tradition that anticipate an audience of Rāma

devotees and connoisseurs of the bhakti compositions of Tulsīdās in North India.

Krishna, however, is by no means neglected in the remaining twenty-four lines of

Draupadī’s prayer in the Bhasha Mahābhārat. After the reference to the story of Dhruva,

Draupadī brings up several well-known examples of Krishna’s compassion found in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa and other Vaiṣṇava bhakti works, such as his rescue of the people of Braj from

a forest fire, the wealth he bestows on Śrīdāmā, and his retrieval of the children of the Brahmin

sage from heaven.

101

In her plea, Draupadī addresses Krishna as Girivardhārī and Giridhārī,

102

two names that refer to Kṛṣṇa’s lifting of Mount Govardhana and that bring to mind the famous

signature line of the Bhasha bhakti poetess Mīrābāī: mīrāṅ ke prabhu giridhara nāgara, “Mīrā’s

lord is the clever Mountain-Lifter.”

103

We also find these epithets in the Bhasha poetry of the

Krishna devotees Nandadās and Kevalrām.

104

Cauhān also uses some common names and

references to stories of Viṣṇu that are not associated with a specific avatāra such as the epithets

“lord of Lakṣmī” (ramapāti/śrīpati) and “one who pities the poor” (dīnadayāla) and the tale of

Gajendra.

105

At the end of her prayer, Cauhān’s Draupadī uses the same title for Krishna that we

saw above at the conclusion of Sūrdās’s Bhasha pada: karuṇā siṃdhu, “sea of compassion.”

106

See Winand M. Callewaert and Swapna Sharma, Dictionary of Bhakti: North-Indian Bhakti Texts into Khari Boli,

Hindi, and English (Delhi: D.K. Printworld, 2009), 1798.

100

See Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 2.232, 4.5, 5.46, and 3.23.1–3.

In the Rāmcaritmānas, Rāvaṇa is depicted as a practitioner of dveṣa bhakti (hate-devotion). We see something very

similar in the Adhyatmarāmāyaṇa. On Rāvaṇa’s dveṣa bhakti in the Rāmcaritmānas and the Adhyatmarāmāyaṇa,

see S. Shankar Raju Naidu, A Comparative Study of Kamba Ramayanam and Tulasi Ramayan (Madras: University

of Madras, 1971), 424–27. I will discuss dveṣa bhakti in greater detail in Chapter Three.

101

CM 2.58.

For the story of the forest fire in Braj, see Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.17.

102

CM 2.57–58.

103

Mīrābāī, trans. Hawley in “Author and Authority,” 278.

104

Callewaert and Sharma, Dictionary of Bhakti, 520.

105

CM 2.57 and 2.58.

106

CM 2.58.

I should point out that the prapatti that underscores this scene in the Tamil Pāratam is

not absent from Cauhān’s Bhasha text since Draupadī does at one point state: “Lord of the three

worlds, I [take] refuge (śaraṇa) in you”

107

Also, like Villi, Cauhān tells us about how Draupadī

experiences bliss after her prayer to Krishna in the assembly hall of the Kauravas:

Seeing her garment expanding,

Draupadī was overcome with devotional [bhakti] love.

The line of hair above her navel stood on end

and with a choked voice, she made a humble request.

Her fears disappeared and there was joy in her heart,

as when the cakora bird

108

finds the moon in the night.

109

But then Draupadī immediately breaks into song and praises her lord all over again:

Kṛṣṇacandra, I make this offering to you:

Victory to Gopāla, the lifter of Govardhana.

Victory to the one who gives refuge, victory to the foe of demons.

Victory to the beguiler of the mind, the one who relaxes in the groves.

Victory to Mukunda, Mādhava, the one as dark as clouds,

the one with lotus eyes, the one who is as splendid as one hundred Kāmadevas,

the yellow-robed one, the guardian of the earth.

Victory to the son of Vasudeva and Devakī.

Victory to the king of the Yadus whose hands are lotuses,

those hands that showed me compassion.

Victory to the lotus feet that ran for my sake

and destroyed Duḥśāsana’s pride.

Victory to the lord, the lord of the Yadus, the one who killed Madhu.

Victory the lord of the three worlds, the controller from within.

Victory to the one who offers sacrifice, victory, victory to the unchanging one.

Victory, victory, victory to the foe of Keśī and Kaṃsa.

Victory to the one who protected my honour.

Victory to the darling of Yaśodā and Nanda.

Victory to the gracious one, the abode of compassion, victory to the joy of Kauśalyā.

Victory, victory to the one with the peacock feather, the flute player, the source of joy.

Victory to Hari, who is truth, consciousness, and bliss, Īśvara, the upholder of the world,

the one who protects the honour of his community.

Victory to my noble lord.

110

107

tribhuvana nātha śaraṇa maiṃ terī || CM 2.57 ||

108

Callewaert and Sharma explain that “the cakora is a type of red-legged partridge traditionally supposed to live on

moonbeams, or on glowing coals. The connection between the two is supplied by the glowing, almost red

appearance of the moon when it first rises in the sky. The cakora is often quoted as an example for its concentration

on the moon, and as a symbol for the yearning bhakta, or for a lover” (Dictionary of Bhakti, 587).

109

dekhi basana kai bāḍhi bhakti prema baśa draupadī

bhai romāvali ṭhāḍhi binaya karata gadagadagira

gayo śoca mana bhayo anandā janu cakora pāyo niśi candā || CM 2.58 ||

110

kṛṣṇacandra maiṃ taba balihārī jaya gopāla gobarddhana dhārī

jaya śāraṃgadhara jaya asurārī jaya manamohana kuñjābahārī

This extensive hymn to Krishna is reminiscent of the elaborate songs in praise of Krishna in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, Śiva in Periyapurāṇam, and Rāma in the Rāmcaritmānas. Draupadī begins by

addressing Krishna as Gopāla and “the lifter of Govardhana” (gobarddhana dhārī).

111

She goes

on to use several popular epithets of Krishna such as Mādhava, “beguiler of the mind”

(manamohana), the “darling of Yaśodā and Nanda” (yaśodā nandadulāre), and the “flute bearer”

(muralidhara). Within a sea of names for Krishna and some more general epithets of Viṣṇu like

“lotus-eyed” (kamalanayana) and the “one who knows from within” (antarayāmī), Cauhān also

makes sure to include a title of Rāma: kauśalānanda or the “joy of Kauśalyā.” Clearly, the

primary function of this scene is to revere and lovingly describe Draupadī’s lord.

After comparing the renderings of Draupadī’s prayer in these regional Mahābhāratas, we

are left with two rather different devotional scenes with Villi focusing on Draupadī’s physical act

of prapatti in the Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān concentrating on her overflowing words of praise

in the Bhasha Mahābhārat. If we look at the bigger picture, however, and examine Draupadī’s

prayer within the larger context of the dice game episode in each text, we see salient similarities.

Before the dice match even begins, both Villi and Cauhān make it clear that the

Kauravas have planned this event at a time when Krishna is away from the Pāṇḍavas. The

Cūtupōrccarukkam of the Pāratam opens with Duryodhana, Duḥśāsana, Śakuni, and Karṇa

talking about how to defeat the Pāṇḍavas. The conversation quickly turns to Krishna’s support of

Yudhiṣṭhira

112

and feats the deity performed during his youth such as the slayings of Pūtanā and

Kaṃsa.

113

Since Krishna is currently involved in a military campaign, Duryodhana suggests

tricking the Pāṇḍavas when the “thief with butter in his mouth”––an image that immediately

reminds us of the mischievous prankster who pervades the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa––cannot come to their rescue.

114

While Krishna’s role as the Pāṇḍavas’ ally is

jaya mukunda mādhava ghanaśyāmā kamala nayana śobhā śata kāmā

pītāmbaradhara dharaṇī pālaka jaya vasudeva devakī bālaka

jaya tava kara saroja yadurāyā kīnhyo jehi kara mopara dāyā

je pada sarasija mama hita dhāye duśśāsana kara darpa naśāye

jaya madhusūdana yadupati svāmī jaya trilokapati antaryāmī

jaya aghāri jaya jaya avikārī jaya jaya jaya keśī kaṃsārī

jaya mama lajjā rākhanahāre jayati yaśodā nandadulāre

jaya kṛpālu karuṇāyatana jayati kauśalānanda

mora pakṣa dhara muralidhara jaya jaya ānaṃdakanda

jayati sacciānanda hari īśvara jagadadhāra

rākhau lajjā jāti nija jaya mama nātha udāra || CM 2.58–59 ||

111

As John Stratton Hawley has shown, between 500 and 1500 CE, the Govardhana episode from Krishna’s

childhood was one of “the most popular motifs in the Krishna sculpture of the period” (“Krishna’s Cosmic

Victories,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 47, no. 2 [1979]: 201).

112

VP 2.2.14.

113

VP 2.2.19.

114

veṇṇey vāy kaḷvaṉ || VP 2.2.18 ||

Note that kaḷvaṉ can mean both “thief” and a “dark, black person.” See University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v.

“kaḷvaṉ,” accessed July 13, 2019, https://dsalsrv04.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=806.

mentioned in a similar scene in various recensions of the Mahābhārata,

115

the Kauravas do not

specifically schedule the dicing at a time when Krishna will not be present in the Sanskrit epic.

In the Bhasha poem, Śakuni, Vidura, Bhīṣma, Droṇa, and Vikarṇa, all warn Duryodhana

that it will be impossible to defeat the Pāṇḍavas with Krishna by their side.

116

Cauhān then

informs us that the Kauravas deliberately wait for the “beautiful month of Dāmodara to pass”

before inviting the Pāṇḍavas for the dice match.

117

In their modern commentaries on Cauhān’s

text, Rāmlagn Pāṇḍey and Rāmjī Śarmā

118

both understand this as a reference to Kārtik, a month

associated with the worship of Viṣṇu in North India.

119

Right before Yudhiṣṭhira is summoned to

play dice, we find a description of the Pāṇḍava king listening to Brahmins recite the

“incomparable, melodious tale of Hari” in Hastinapura.

120

Yudhiṣṭhira being pulled away from

the auspicious act of hearing Krishna’s story to partake in the gambling match in the Bhasha

Mahābhārat is highly significant. By foreshadowing Krishna’s absence during the crooked game

of dice, Villi and Cauhān illustrate the danger of being separated from Krishna.

In the northern and southern recensions of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Krishna’s

involvement in the dice game episode ends after he replenishes Draupadī’s garment. In both the

Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat, however, Krishna’s presence continues to be felt

long after he answers Draupadī’s plea. Take Cauhān’s composition. After Draupadī finishes

extolling Krishna, Vidura hurries to Gāndhārī’s home and tells his sister-in-law:

Today Krishna encompassed Draupadī’s body.

Extending her garment, he established his glory.

No harm will come to the son of Dharma

who has that great king, the son of Yadu.

The king of the Yadus is the destroyer

who always helps his servants and saves their lives.

Hari defeated the demon king

121

115

See MBh 2.44; Mahābhārata (Sriman Mahābhāratam) 2.75; and Mahābhārata (Mahābhāratam with

Bhāratabhāvadīpa) 2.48.

116

See CM 2.31, 2.32, and 2.34.

117

sundara māsa damodara āvā || CM 2.35 ||

118

2.76 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 2.77 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

119

See Tracy Pintchman, “Domesticating Krishna: Friendship, Marriage, and Women’s Experience in a Hindu

Women’s Ritual Tradition,” in Alternative Krishnas: Regional and Vernacular Variations on a Hindu Deity, ed.

Guy L. Beck (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 44.

120

harikī kathā rasāla anūpā || CM 2.37 ||

121

It is unclear which demon king Vidura is speaking of here since the words niśacāra rājū, “demon king,” could

refer to a number of different figures killed by an incarnation of Viṣṇu including Hiraṇyakaśipu, Rāvaṇa, and

Kaṃsa. Pāṇḍey and Śarmā both think that niśacāra rājū refers to Kaṃsa. See 2.143 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat

(Pāṇḍey); and 2.145 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā). Yet as Robert Goldman aptly pointed out to me, the term

niśacāra is a specific kenning for rākṣasas (the community Rāvaṇa belongs to) as opposed to asuras into which

category Hiraṇyakaśipu and Kaṃsa both fall (personal communication, June 7, 2020). Also, as I will show in

Chapter Four, Cauhān frequently refers to characters and episodes from the Rāmāyaṇa throughout his Mahābhārat.

in order to relieve the suffering of his own bhaktas.

122

Vidura goes on to remind Gāndhārī of how Narasiṃha saved “Hari’s unequaled bhakta”

Prahlāda.

123

He then warns her that Krishna’s discus Sudarśana may slice off the hands of

Duḥśāsana that pulled Draupadī’s garment.

124

Recall that Cauhān has earlier established Vidura’s

character as a devout “all along” bhakta of Krishna. Deeply distressed by Vidura’s words,

Gāndhārī rushes to the hall and berates Duḥśāsana.

125

Seeing this, Dhṛtarāṣṭra apologizes to

Draupadī and offers her boons which she uses to restore all Yudhiṣṭhira has lost.

126

Those

familiar with the Sanskrit epic will recognize this peace offering. In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

however, the ominous cries of a jackal, donkeys, and birds and the terrified reactions they elicit

in Vidura and Gāndhārī are what prompt Dhṛtarāṣṭra to seek Draupadī’s forgiveness.

127

Gāndhārī

is petrified in the Bhasha text, but it is her fear of what Krishna might do to Duḥśāsana in order

to avenge his devotees, not the shrieks of animals, that causes her husband to placate Draupadī.

Therefore, in Cauhān’s poem, Krishna is responsible for the return of the Pāṇḍavas’ freedom.

In the Bhasha Mahābhārat, as in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the Pāṇḍavas are called back

to Hastinapura and forced into exile after Yudhiṣṭhira loses a second game of dice. This takes

some time. In the Pāratam, however, the two dice matches are combined into a single chapter.

Immediately after the first game, Draupadī and her husbands are summoned back to the

assembly hall, where the Kauravas and Droṇa convince the Pāṇḍavas that they should follow the

example of other disgraced kings such as Rāma in the Rāmāyaṇa and live in the forest.

128

Droṇa

assures the Pāṇḍavas that they can rule their kingdom after twelve years in the forest followed by

one year of living incognito.

129

The Pāṇḍavas agree but Draupadī first insists that Yudhiṣṭhira

play one more game of dice to ensure that they will truly be free once the thirteen years are

over.

130

Before Yudhiṣṭhira rolls the dice, Draupadī gives her husband clear instructions:

122

kṛṣṇa āju draupadī tana byāpe basana baḍhāi birada asthāpe

nahiṃ hoihi suta dharma akājū jinke yadunandana maharajū

sadā dāsa kara karata sahāī praṇa tārata bhaṃjana yadurāī

je hari hanyo niśacāra rājū sahi dukha nija bhaktana ke kājū || CM 2.60 ||

123

hari bhakta ananya || CM 2.60 ||

124

CM 2.60.

125

CM 2.60–2.61.

126

CM 2.61.

127

MBh 2.63.22–24.

128

VP 2.2.275.

In their editions of the text, Vai. Mu. Kōpālakiruṣṇamācāriyār, Kē. Rājakōpālāccāriyār, and Va. Ta.

Irāmacuppiramaṇiyam all gloss muṉṉavaṉ katai (literally: “the story of the first one/God”) as the Rāmāyaṇa. See

2.2.275 of Villiputtūrār, Villi Pāratam, ed. Kē. Rājakōpālāccāriyār, 3 vols. (Chennai: Star Publications, 1970–84);

and 2.2.275 of Villiputtūrār, Villiputtūr Āḻvār Aruḷiya Makāpāratam, ed. Va. Ta. Irāmacuppiramaṇiyam, 4 vols.

(Chennai: Tirumakaḷ Nilaiyam, 2011).

129

VP 2.2.276.

130

VP 2.2.279.

To the man of truth, his own great goddess intelligently stated,

“Praise and worship the twelve names of Māyaṉ.”

Śakuni taking the beaten white dice, said: “What is your wager?” and

he (Yudhiṣṭhira) also intelligently said, “I stake all my religious merit [puṇṇiyam].”

131

In this verse, Draupadī tells Yudhiṣṭhira to praise the twelve names of Viṣṇu: Keśava, Nārāyaṇa,

Mādhava, Govinda, Viṣṇu, Madhusūdana, Trivikrama, Vāmana, Śrīdhara, Hṛṣīkeśa,

Padmanābha, and Dāmodara. First listed around 400 BCE in the Sanskrit

Baudhāyanadharmasūtra (Baudhāyana’s Sūtra on Dharma), the twelve names hold special

significance for Śrīvaiṣṇavas.

132

In Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi and Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi, these

Āḻvār poets both use an entire set of ten verses to lovingly dwell on each of these names.

133

These names also play an important role in Śrīvaiṣṇava samāśrayaṇa initiation rituals.

134

Villi

himself brings up this set of twelve names multiple times in his Tamil Mahābhārata retelling.

135

Then, in the next verse of the Pāratam, Villi informs us that thanks to the “compassion” (aruḷ) of

“the one with the discus” (nēmi uṭaiyavaṉ), Yudhiṣṭhira emerges as the victor of the second

game.

136

Thus, like Cauhān, Villi depicts Krishna restoring the Pāṇḍavas’ freedom.

As Emily Hudson notes, “the depiction of Draupadī’s abuse in the dicing episode [in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata] is one of the most disturbing scenes of human cruelty and affliction in

Indian literature.”

137

The retellings of Villi and Cauhān are if anything more explicit. The

beginnings of Draupadī’s disrobing in both regional Mahābhāratas are quite upsetting. In Villi’s

Tamil Pāratam, for instance, the terrified Draupadī first runs to Gāndhārī and begs the

blindfolded queen for help, but the Kauravas’ mother maliciously dismisses Draupadī’s pleas.

138

As for the Bhasha Mahābhārat, when Duḥśāsana drags Draupadī to the assembly hall, it is only

after he had pulled her through the streets of Hastinapura. Cauhān describes the women of the

city crying as they witness Draupadī being treated in such a horrific fashion.

139

Draupadī’s insistence on a second game of dice is also found in Cĕṟuśśeri’s Malayalam Bhāratagātha and a Telugu

folk retelling. In both these Mahābhāratas, Draupadī plays in the dice match herself. See Harindranath and

Purushothaman, “Mahābhārata Variations in Malayalam”; and Hiltebeitel, Draupadī 1, 238.

131

cattiya virataṉ tāṉum taṉ perum tēvi colla

puttiyāl vaṇaṅki māyaṉ paṉṉiru nāmam ētti

otta veḷ kavaṟu vāṅka cakuṉi yātu oṭṭam eṉṟāṉ

puttiyāl avaṉum yāṉ cey puṇṇiyam aṉattum eṉṟāṉ || VP 2.2.280 ||

132

Bryant, “Introduction,” 4.

133

Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 2.7.1–12; and Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 2.3.1–13.

134

See Srilata Raman, “Samāśrayaṇa in Śrīvaiṣṇavism,” in Words and Deeds: Hindu and Buddhist Rituals in South

Asia, eds. Jörg Gengnagel, Ute Hüsken, and Srilata Raman (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2005), 94.

135

For example, see VP 5.2.20, 6.9.1, and 8.1.6.

136

VP 2.2.281.

137

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 97.

138

VP 2.2.218.

139

CM 2.50.

These extended depictions of Draupadī’s distress in the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha

Mahābhārat, however, are ultimately in the service of displaying Krishna’s compassion. In their

kṛṣṇacaritas, Villi and Cauhān intensify the overall feeling of suffering that permeates the dice

match in the Sanskrit epic to enable their audiences to appreciate the full force of Krishna’s

benevolence when he answers his “all along” bhakta Draupadī’s prayer. As we saw in Chapter

One, the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Rāmcaritmānas are filled with stories of

the main deity saving his devotees. Not only does Krishna rescue Draupadī in the Pāratam and

the Mahābhārat, but he also comes to the aid of her husbands. While their depictions of

Draupadī’s prayer differ considerably, both Villi and Cauhān transform the narrative of the entire

dice game episode into a detailed illustration of how Krishna always protects his bhaktas.

Transforming the Book of Effort

As Villi and Cauhān go on telling their regional Mahābhāratas, these two poets continue to place

Krishna at the center of their respective narratives. Both the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha

Mahābhārat contain several episodes in which Krishna saves the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī that are

not found in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. Some of these deeds, such as

Krishna rescuing Draupadī from the wrath of the hungry sage Durvāsas in the forest and Krishna

using his discus to block the sun and trick Jayadratha so that Arjuna can kill him during the

Kurukṣetra War, are found in different recensions of the Sanskrit epic.

140

In Villi’s Pāratam, we see a scene in the Book of Drona that strongly resembles an

incident described in two Śrīvaiṣṇava works (Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi and Vedāntadeśika’s

Yādavābhyudaya) in which Arjuna realizes that Śiva is just a manifestation of Krishna when he

places flowers at Krishna’s feet and then sees them on Śiva’s head.

141

Another fascinating

episode in the Pāratam in which Krishna helps the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī reattach a piece of

fruit to a tree belonging to a sage is found in multiple premodern Mahābhāratas in regional

languages including those by Kumāravyāsa in Kannada, Sāraḷādāsa in Oriya, and Kāśīrāmdās in

Bengali.

142

Much of Cauhān’s Book of the Horse Sacrifice (Āśvamedhikparv) follows the events

of the Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata, which was also retold by premodern South Asian poets in

regional languages such as Assamese, Bengali, Kannada, Marathi, Oriya, Persian, and Telugu.

143

140

For the Durvāsas episode in Villi’s and Cauhān’s poems, see VP 3.6 and CM 3.3. M.A. Mehendale reports that

this episode is found in the vulgate edition, some Devanagari manuscripts, and one Grantha manuscript of the

Sanskrit epic (“Interpolations in the Mahābhārata,” Annals of the Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute 82, no. 1

[2001]: 199). For Krishna’s intervention in the slaying of Jayadratha in Villi’s and Cauhān’s texts, see VP 7.4.164

and CM 2.50. Mehendale notes that this scene is found in Telugu, Grantha, Devanagari, and Bengali manuscripts of

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (“Interpolations in the Mahābhārata,” 197).

141

VP 7.3.195; Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 2.8.6; and Vedāntadeśika, Yādavābhyudaya 23.8. All references to the

Yādavābhyudaya are to: Vedāntadeśika, Yādavābhyudayam of Vedāntadeśika: With the Commentary of

Appayyadīkṣita, trans. K.R. Padmanabhan, 3 vols. (Delhi: Abhishek Prakashan, 2015).

142

VP 3.7; Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 3.3.41; Mishra, “Mahabharata and Regional Variations,”

137–40; and Bhattacharya, “Variations on Vyasa,” 96. Devdutt Pattanaik notes that this story is also in the Marathi

folk play Jāṃbhūḻ Ākhyān (Jaya: An Illustrated Retelling of the Mahabharata [Delhi: Penguin Books, 2010], 184).

143

See Koskikallio and Vielle, “Epic and Puranic,” 71; W.L. Smith, “The Jaiminibhārata and its Eastern Vernacular

Versions,” Studia Orientalia 85 (1999): 389–406; and Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 109–10.

As we saw in the Introduction, the Jaiminibhārata is filled with expressions of bhakti to Krishna.

Numerous stories about Krishna coming to the aid of the Pāṇḍavas that are not in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata were undoubtedly circulating throughout premodern South Asia.

Both Villi and Cauhān, however, clearly take a cue from the Sanskrit epic when they

each dedicate a considerable amount of space to the Book of Effort (Udyogaparvan in Sanskrit,

Uttiyōkaparuvam in Tamil, and Udyogparv in Bhasha) in their respective regional Mahābhārata

retellings.

144

With roughly 340 stanzas, the Bhasha Book of Effort is the longest book of the

eighteen books of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat and comprises almost nineteen percent of the entire

text. With 264 verses, the “Krishna the Messenger Chapter” (Kiruṭṭiṇaṉ Tūtuccarukkam) in the

Tamil Book of Effort is the fourth longest chapter out of the fifty total chapters in Villi’s text and

roughly corresponds to the “Mission of Bhagavān” (Bhagavadyāna) sub-book of the Sanskrit

epic. Note that Krishna also plays a major role in the three longest chapters in the Pāratam: the

“Dicing Match Chapter” (Cūtupōrccarukkam, 284 verses) in which Krishna saves Draupadī from

being disrobed, the “Seventeenth Day of War Chapter” (Patiṉēḻāmpōrccarukkam, 269 verses) in

which Krishna orchestrates the death of Karṇa, and the “Thirteenth Day of War Chapter”

(Patiṉmūṉṟāmpōrccarukkam, 266 verses) in which Krishna helps Arjuna gain the tools he needs

to avenge Abhimanyu’s murder. The “Krishna the Messenger Chapter” is also the most popular

chapter of the Tamil poem in terms of manuscript circulation history.

145

For those familiar with the narrative of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the choice to focus on

the Book of Effort in these two regional, self-proclaimed kṛṣṇacaritas will come as no surprise.

As Alf Hiltebeitel observes, in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata “nowhere is Krishna more conspicuous

than in the Udyogaparvan.”

146

In the beginning of the Sanskrit Book of Effort, we find the pivotal

scene in which both Duryodhana and Arjuna ask Krishna for his support in the upcoming

Kurukṣetra War and Krishna promises his army to the Kauravas, but himself as a noncombatant

to the Pāṇḍavas.

147

Later in the Sanskrit Book of Effort, Krishna acts as an envoy for the

Pāṇḍavas and unsuccessfully tries to negotiate a peace treaty with the Kauravas.

148

During his

time in Hastinapura, Krishna also meets with Vidura, Kuntī, and Karṇa.

149

Yet while the divine Krishna certainly pervades the Book of Effort in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, recall that Patricia Greer points out that this book about the preparations for

Kurukṣetra is also filled with a “sense of confusion and foreboding [that] keeps increasing.”

150

144

In the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the Udyogaparvan is the sixth longest book of the eighteen

books at 6063 verses. The Udyogaparvan comprises 8.2% of the critical edition (not including the Harivaṃśa).

145

Out of the thirty-three different manuscripts of Villi’s poem that I enumerated during my fieldwork, fifteen were

manuscripts of the “Krishna the Messenger Chapter.” Also, more than half of the total thirty-three manuscripts were

manuscripts of some portion of Villi’s Book of Effort.

146

Alf Hiltebeitel, The Ritual of Battle: Krishna in the Mahābhārata (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1976), 114.

147

MBh 5.7.

148

MBh 5.70–129.

149

MBh 5.138–44.

150

Greer, “Ethical Discourse in Udyogaparvan,” 214.

Greer claims that “one theme dominates Udyogaparvan, and just one tone: terrifying unease.”

151

A careful examination of the Book of Effort in the Tamil and Bhasha texts, however, reveals that

these two regional retellings lack the overwhelming feeling of distressing uncertainty that

pervades their Sanskrit counterpart. As with the disrobing episode, Villi and Cauhān completely

transform the Book of Effort and this book is central to Villi and Cauhān’s shared project of

recasting the Mahābhārata as a devotional kṛṣṇacarita. The primary purpose of the extensive

renderings of the Book of Effort in the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat is to

showcase the intimate bond between Krishna and his beloved devotees, the Pāṇḍavas.

As we saw in Chapter One, Hiltebeitel describes Krishna as the “ringmaster” of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

152

In the Pāratam, Villi presents Krishna as not just a ringmaster, but a

puppet master pulling the strings of several different characters to safeguard the Pāṇḍavas.

Consider Villi’s rendering of the scene in which Duryodhana and Arjuna seek Krishna’s aid in

the war. In the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic, Arjuna independently makes the decision to

go see Krishna and ask him for help.

153

Yet in the Pāratam, Krishna specifically instructs the

Pāṇḍavas’ priest Ulūkaṉ to send Arjuna to him in Dwarka.

154

Duryodhana reaches Dwarka

before Arjuna in both the Mahābhārata and the Pāratam. The only reason why Duryodhana does

not receive Krishna’s full support in the impending war in the Sanskrit epic is because Krishna

happens to be asleep when Duryodhana arrives, and he only wakes up after Arjuna has also

reached Dwarka. Also, Arjuna respectfully places himself at Krishna’s feet, while the arrogant

Duryodhana is waiting at the head of the bed. Arjuna is thus in a prime position when Krishna

wakes up and first casts his glance, giving Arjuna the first choice.

155

In his composition,

however, Villi describes Krishna as being in a state of yōkattuyil (Sanskrit: yoganidrā) or

“wakeful sleep”

156

when Duryodhana enters.

157

Villi’s Krishna is only pretending to be asleep

when Duryodhana arrives in Dwarka. Thus, in the Pāratam, Krishna does everything in his

power to make sure that he is by his devotee Arjuna’s side in battle.

Nowhere is Krishna’s role as puppet master in the Tamil text more evident than in the

“Krishna the Messenger Chapter.” Throughout this chapter of the Book of Effort about Krishna’s

embassy to Hastinapura, the deity takes specific measures to guarantee that the Pāṇḍavas emerge

unscathed in the Battle at Kurukṣetra. For example, as in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, in the

Pāratam, Krishna decides to spend the night at Vidura’s home when he reaches Hastinapura

151

Greer, 214.

152

Hiltebeitel, “Krishna in the Mahabharata,” 23.

153

MBh 5.7.4.

154

VP 5.1.21.

The priest Ulūkaṉ in the Tamil Pāratam is a distinctly different character from Ulūka, the son of Śakuni, who acts a

messenger for the Kauravas in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (5.157–60).

155

MBh 5.7.5–9.

156

For a history of the term yoganidrā, see Jason Birch and Jacqueline Hargreaves “Yoganidrā: An Understanding

of the History and Context,” The Luminescent, January 6, 2015,

https://www.theluminescent.org/2015/01/yoganidra.html.

157

VP 5.2.8.

instead of in the accommodations the Kauravas have arranged for him.

158

Unlike in the Sanskrit

epic, however, in Villi’s poem Krishna deliberately stays with Vidura to make Duryodhana

jealous and lash out against his uncle. As in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and Cauhān in his Bhasha

Mahābhārat, Villi presents Vidura as a devout “all along” Krishna bhakta. The next day, after

Duryodhana maliciously compares Vidura’s loyalty to Krishna to the loyalty a whore has to the

man who gives her the most riches, Vidura furiously breaks his bow and refuses to partake in the

Battle at Kurukṣetra.

159

Thus in the Tamil Mahābhārata, Krishna protects the Pāṇḍavas by

ensuring that Vidura, who possesses the “bow of Acyuta (Viṣṇu)” (accutaṉ cantavil) will not

fight on the side of the Kauravas.

160

Similarly, in order to stop Aśvatthāman from becoming the

leader of the Kaurava forces at Kurukṣetra, Krishna stages a complex tableau involving himself

and an unsuspecting Aśvatthāman in front of Duryodhana that makes it seem like Aśvatthāman is

making a secret deal with Krishna.

161

With this scene in the Pāratam, which does not take place

anywhere in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Duryodhana’s trust in Aśvatthāman is broken and

Krishna prevents the son of Droṇa from leading the Kauravas into battle against the Pāṇḍavas.

Villi also describes Krishna going to great lengths to weaken Karṇa in this chapter.

Karṇa’s tragic demise in the Bhārata Battle is one of the most foreshadowed events in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata: two Brahmins (one of whom is his teacher Rāma Jāmadagnya or

Paraśurāma) curse him and Śalya promises Yudhiṣṭhira that he will obscure Karṇa’s tejas or

“divine energy” in battle.

162

There are two particularly poignant moments in the epic that alert

the audience to Karṇa’s impending death at the hands of Arjuna. The first is the episode in which

Arjuna’s father Indra in the disguise of a Brahmin tricks Karṇa

into giving up the earrings and

armor that make him invulnerable.

163

The second is the scene in which Kuntī tries to convince

Karṇa to fight alongside the Pāṇḍavas in the war and Karṇa promises his mother that either he

will slay Arjuna or Arjuna will slay him so that Kuntī will still have five sons by the end of the

Kurukṣetra War.

164

While Indra and Kuntī each decide to approach Karṇa on their own in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata, in Villi’s “Krishna the Messenger Chapter,” Krishna specifically

instructs Kuntī and Indra to go meet with Karṇa in order to protect Arjuna.

165

In the Pāratam,

Krishna also directs Kuntī to make Karṇa swear to use his nāgāstra or “serpent arrow” on Arjuna

only once in battle.

166

The nāgāstra is actually the snake Aśvasena who has sworn to kill Arjuna

because he killed Aśvasena’s parent when he and Krishna burned the Khāṇḍava forest.

167

This

158

MBh 5.89.34 and VP 5.4.75.

159

VP 5.4.128–33.

160

VP 5.4.132.

161

VP 5.4.224–29.

162

MBh 8.29, 12.3, and 5.8.25–35. See also Hiltebeitel, “Krishna in the Mahabharata,” 26–27.

163

MBh 3.284–94.

164

MBh 5.143–44.

165

VP 5.4.158 and 5.4.237.

166

VP 5.4.158.

167

See VP 1.8.61; and MBh 1.218.4–12.

promise, which is absent from the Sanskrit epic, further ensures Arjuna’s safety in the upcoming

war: in the Book of Karṇa of both the Sanskrit and Tamil texts, Krishna maneuvers Arjuna’s

chariot so that the serpent weapon only strikes off Arjuna’s crown.

168

Right before the final confrontation between Arjuna and Karṇa in the second and final

chapter of Villi’s Book of Karṇa (Kaṉṉaparuvam), Krishna takes one final step to ensure

Arjuna’s victory. The deity disguises himself as a Brahmin (as Indra does in the “Krishna the

Messenger Chapter”) and asks the ever-generous Karṇa for all of his puṇṇiyam or “religious

merit,” the same thing Yudhiṣṭhira stakes during the second dice game in Villi’s poem.

169

This

scene bears a striking resemblance to a sequence found in a Rajasthani folk Mahābhārata, the

Paṇḍvānī ballad performances of the Gond community in Chhattisgarh, the 1964 Tamil film

Karṇaṉ (Karṇa), and the 1977 Telugu film Dāna Vīra Śūra Karṇa (Charitable, Brave, Son of the

Sun, Karṇa) in which Karṇa gives Krishna his teeth.

170

Then, mere moments before Karṇa’s

death, Villi reminds his audience of the lengths Krishna went to protect Arjuna in the “Krishna

the Messenger Chapter” in the following two verses translated by David Shulman:

Now Kṛṣṇa [Kaṇṇaṉ] addressed him,

the god who had followed in the wake of the cattle

in the fertile meadowlands,

who had flung a calf at the demon in the viḷā tree,

and he said to Karṇa: “It was I

who sent the lord of the gods to take from you

your armor and your earrings

that day;

I was the one who used Kuntī to extort your promise

that you would shoot the serpent-weapon

only one, single time;

it was I who told you the truth about your birth,

and I who diverted that serpent-weapon, Takṣaka's child,

so that it failed to strike Dhanañjaya—

it was all my doing, for your sake,

out of true compassion—”

and with these words he turned back

and became again Vijaya’s charioteer—

that god [Māl] who is all the oceans, all the hills,

all the worlds, all gods and men,

and who stole from the dark-eyed young gopīs [kōviyar]

their fine clothes, their shyness,

168

MBh 8.66.11; and VP 8.2.228.

169

VP 8.2.239.

170

See John D. Smith, “Worlds Apart: Orality, Literacy, and the Rajasthani Folk-Mahābhārata,” Oral Tradition 5,

no. 1 (1990): 14–15; and Movies Central, “Ullathil Nalla Ullam HD Song | Karan,” YouTube video, 3:45, August 2,

2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ga8_Sx-nUlY).

In Sāraḷādāsa’s Oriya Mahābhārata, Krishna in the guise of a Brahmin visits Karṇa before the Battle of Kurukṣetra

and requests that Karṇa serve him the flesh of his son for dinner. See W.L. Smith, “The Canonization of Karṇa––

The Migration of a Hagiographical Motif,” Indologica Taurinensia 17/18 (1991–1992): 346–47.

their colorful bangles, and all the innocence

of their hearts.

171

In these two verses, Villi distinctly evokes the young Krishna of Vrindavan from the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa by describing him as the cowherd who

killed the calf demon Vatsāsura and who stole the clothes of the bathing gopīs.

172

He also

reminds his audience of Krishna’s dedication to Arjuna when the god reveals to Karṇa that he

was the one who sent both Indra and Kuntī to Karṇa in the “Krishna the Messenger Chapter.”

While the purpose of Krishna’s embassy to Hastinapura in the Sanskrit “Mission of Bhagavān”

sub-book is seemingly peace (yet as we saw in Chapter One, this is unclear), in Villi’s poem,

Krishna’s mission is undoubtedly the protection of the Pāṇḍavas in the upcoming war.

It is important to note that many of these preventative measures that Krishna takes in

Villi’s “Krishna the Messenger Chapter” are also described in other Mahābhārata retellings that

were composed in Tamil, Kannada, and Malayalam between the ninth and sixteenth centuries.

All of Krishna’s actions from the “Krishna the Messenger Chapter” that I have discussed above

are also found in the fifth book of Peruntēvaṉār’s Tamil Pārataveṇpā.

173

The stories of Vidura

breaking his bow and Krishna directing Kuntī to go see Karṇa are both found in two Kannada

retellings: the Vikramārjunavijayam and the Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī.

174

Finally, Krishna’s

meeting with Aśvatthāman is described in the Pārataveṇpā, the Vikramārjunavijayam, and three

Malayalam retellings: Śankaran’s fifteenth-century Bhāratamāla (Garland of the Bhārata),

Tuñcattŭ Ĕḻuttacchan’s sixteenth-century Bhāratam, and Ayyanappiḷḷa Āśān’s sixteenth-century

Bhāratam Pāṭṭu (Song of the Bhārata).

175

Therefore, this image of Krishna as a divine puppet

master doing everything in his power to make sure that the Pāṇḍavas are unharmed in battle with

the Kauravas was clearly pervasive across premodern South India.

When we turn to our North Indian Book of Effort in Cauhān’s Bhasha poem, we also find

a Krishna who is deeply committed to the safety of the Pāṇḍavas. Instead of focusing on the

varied ways that Krishna safeguards his devotees in the actual narrative of the Book of Effort,

however, Cauhān’s Book of Effort describes multiple past instances of Krishna rescuing the

Pāṇḍavas. As with the Sanskrit Book of Effort, the Bhasha Book of Effort is filled with examples

of characters telling each other stories. The Sanskrit Book of Effort contains many didactic sub-

stories. While most of the instructive sub-stories from the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, such as the

tales of Dambhodbhava, Mātali, Gālava, and Ambā, are not included in the Book of Effort in the

171

VP 8.2.250–51, trans. David Dean Shulman in The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 395.

172

For these stories about Krishna in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, see Narayanan, Way

and Goal, 159 and 161; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.11.41–59 and 10.22.

173

See Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 117–233. Also see Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 81–147. I

am following: Peruntēvaṉār, Peruntēvaṉār Pāratam, ed. Irā Iḷaṅkumaraṉ (Madras: The South India Saiva Siddhanta

Works Publishing Society, 1973).

174

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 315–16 and 318; Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī

5.8.64–68; and Subramanian, Mahabharata Story, 195 and 199.

175

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 317–18; Subramanian, Mahabharata Story, 202; and

Harindranath and Purushothaman, “Mahābhārata Variations in Malayalam.”

regional compositions of Cauhān or Villi,

176

Cauhān does retell two stories from the Sanskrit

Book of Effort in his Bhasha Book of Effort: Indra’s victory over Vṛtra and Viśvarūpa and

Vidurā’s instruction to her son.

177

Two sub-stories from the first book of the Sanskrit epic, the

tales of Śakuntalā and Tapatī, are also found in Cauhān’s Book of Effort.

178

But an important

difference between the presentations of the sub-stories of Indra’s victory over Vṛtra and

Viśvarūpa, Śakuntalā, and Tapatī in the Sanskrit text and Cauhān’s composition is that in the

Bhasha retelling, Krishna narrates all three of these sub-stories. In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

Janamejaya tells Vaiśampāyana the story of Śakuntalā, the gandharva Citraratha tells the story of

Tapatī to Arjuna, and Śalya tells Yudhiṣṭhira the story of Indra’s victory. Cauhān’s choice to

have Krishna be the narrator of these three sub-stories in his Book of Effort is significant.

Most of the stories in Cauhān’s Book of Effort, however, are not didactic sub-stories but

different characters’ retellings of the earlier events that have led to the impending battle between

the sons of Pāṇḍu and the sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra. For example, soon before Krishna leaves for

Hastinapura as the Pāṇḍavas’ ambassador, Bhīma recalls how he once ended up in the

underwater nāga city Bhogavati (Bhogavatī) during an assassination attempt by Duryodhana.

179

While Bhīma does not visit an underwater snake kingdom in the critical edition of the

Mahābhārata, he does in both the northern and southern recensions of the Sanskrit Book of the

Beginnings.

180

As in Sāraḷādāsa’s Mahābhārata, Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī,

Cĕṟuśśeri’s Bhāratagātha, and the Konkani Bhārata, Bhīma marries a snake princess in

Bhogavati and lives with her for a year in Cauhān’s poem.

181

Notably, the audience of the

Bhasha Mahābhārat has already encountered a version of this story in Cauhān’s Book of the

Beginnings.

182

In his Book of the Beginnings, Cauhān narrates an incident in which Bhīma dies

after drinking seven vessels of nectar in Bhogavati and Śiva has to bring the Pāṇḍava back to

176

MBh 94, 95–103, 104–121, and 170–93.

The story of Ambā/Śikhaṇḍin is found in the first book of the compositions of Villi (1.1.117–46) and Cauhān (1.9–

12). An important distinction, however, between the tale of Ambā/Śikhaṇḍin in the Sanskrit epic (and most

Mahābhārata retellings) and Cauhān’s poem is that in the Bhasha Mahābhārat it is Ambā’s youngest sister

Ambālikā who becomes Śikhaṇḍin, not Ambā.

177

MBh 5.9–18 and 5.131–34; and CM 5.42–44 and 5.98–99.

178

MBh 1.62–69 and 1.160–63; and CM 5.75–87 and 5.93–96

179

CM 5.68–70.

180

MBh lines 10–19 of Appendix 1, no.72 and lines 80–83 of Appendix 1, no.73.

181

Satyabrata Das and Lalit Kumar Lenka, “Folk Elements in Sarala Mahabharata,” Orissa Review 65, no. 9–10

(2009): 58; Subramanian, Mahabharata Story, 25; Harindranath and Purushothaman, “Mahābhārata Variations in

Malayalam”; and Rocky V. Miranda, “The Old Konkani Bharata,” in Reflections and Variations on The

Mahabharata, ed. T.R.S. Sharma (Delhi: Sahitya Akademi, 2009), 354–55.

Alf Hiltebeitel notes that this story is also found in Mahābhāratas from Bundelkhand and Garhwal in North India

(Rethinking India’s Oral and Classical Epics: Draupadī among Rajputs, Muslims, and Dalits [Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 1999], 420).

182

CM 1.25–26.

life.

183

In Bhīma’s own account of his time in Bhogavati in Cauhān’s Book of Effort, however,

there is no mention of Śiva reviving Bhīma. Instead, Bhīma speaks of how Krishna sent his

divine eagle mount Garuḍa to rescue Bhīma and the nāga princess while they were being

attacked by several serpents. Bhīma notes that Garuḍa frightened the snakes and warned the

nāga king that Krishna, the śrī brajrāja “illustrious king of Braj,” is Bhīma’s protector.

184

In the next chapter of Cauhān’s Bhasha Book of Effort, Arjuna recounts a story from the

Pāṇḍavas’ youth in which Krishna saved Yudhiṣṭhira. Arjuna notes that one day after failing to

kill Bhīma with poisoned sweets,

185

Duryodhana sent a Brahmin with the same deadly sweets to

Yudhiṣṭhira while he was in the forest hunting.

186

Yet Arjuna explains that thanks to the kṛpā or

“compassion” of the “lord of the Yadus” (yadunātha) Krishna, Yudhiṣṭhira’s life was spared.

187

As with Bhīma’s tale of Krishna sending Garuḍa to protect him in Bhogavati, Arjuna’s story of

Krishna preventing Yudhiṣṭhira from being poisoned by Duryodhana is not found in the accounts

of the Pāṇḍavas’ childhood in the Mahābhārata’s or Cauhān’s Book of the Beginnings.

With his rendering of the Book of Effort, Cauhān also shows his audience that Krishna

has been by the Pāṇḍavas’ side since the very beginning. While Cauhān describes the nativities

of the three sons of Kuntī in a single stanza in his Cauhān’s Book of the Beginnings,

188

Kuntī’s

own account of the miraculous births of her children is much more detailed. In the Bhasha Book

of Effort, Kuntī tells Krishna that when Yudhiṣṭhira was born a voice from the heavens

proclaimed that her son would be a bhāgavata

189

and “equal to Hari’s servant Prahlāda.”

190

Neither of these details about Yudhiṣṭhira’s destiny as a great “all along” bhakta of Krishna are

found in this scene in the Mahābhārata’s or Cauhān’s Book of the Beginnings.

191

In the descriptions of the birth of Arjuna in the Book of the Beginnings in both the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the Bhasha Mahābhārat, the middle Pāṇḍava is briefly compared to

Viṣṇu/Krishna. In the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic, the voice in the sky equates Arjuna

with Viṣṇu twice: “as Aditi’s joy was increased by Viṣṇu, so Arjuna, Viṣṇu’s equal will increase

your joy” and “[Arjuna is] the equal of Jamadagni’s son Rāma, O Kuntī, as valiant as Viṣṇu.”

192

183

CM 1.26.

According to Subramanian, a very similar story involving Bhīma and Śiva in Bhogavati is found in Kumāravyāsa’s

Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī (Mahabharata Story, 25). When I consulted D. Seshagiri Rao’s abridged

translation of the Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, however, I did not find this story.

184

CM 5.70.

185

The first book of the Sanskrit epic describes Duryodhana trying to poison Bhīma. See MBh 1.119.39–42.

186

CM 5.72–73.

187

CM 5.73.

188

CM 1.22.

189

CM 5.101.

190

hari sevaka prahlāda samānā || CM 5.102 ||

191

MBh 1.114.5–7; and CM 1.22.

192

MBh 1.114.30 and 1.114.34, trans. Smith in Mahābhārata: Abridged Translation, 48–49.

In Cauhān’s Book of the Beginnings, we are told that upon seeing the “dark form” (śyāmala

rūpa) of Arjuna, Pāṇḍu gave him the “beautiful name” (sunāma) Krishna.

193

When Kuntī speaks

of this event in the Cauhān’s Book of Effort, however, we see a stronger connection being drawn

between Arjuna and Krishna. Kuntī reveals that the heavenly voice stated that:

This boy will be a very [talented] archer

whose greatest dharma is the benevolent, illustrious Hari.

In Braj, Krishna has incarnated in order to be his protector.

194

A.K. Ramanujan asserts that “a certain kind of repetition” is “the central structuring principle” of

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

195

In Cauhān’s Book of Effort, the Pāṇḍavas’ repetition of stories

from the Book of the Beginnings with new details of how Krishna came to their aid showcases

his role as the Pāṇḍavas’ steadfast guardian and their role as his “all along” bhaktas. The

consistent emphasis on Krishna protecting the Pāṇḍavas in the Book of Effort in the Tamil and

Bhasha poems tempers the “terrifying unease” of the Sanskrit Book of Effort.

196

The troubled tone of the Sanskrit Book of Effort is also considerably softened by the

insertion of devotional tableaus involving Krishna and the Pāṇḍavas in the Mahābhāratas of both

Villi and Cauhān. Throughout the Tamil Book of Effort and the Bhasha Book of Effort, Villi and

Cauhān pause the main narrative to allow the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī to sing in praise of

Krishna. Before Krishna leaves for Hastinapura in the Tamil “Krishna the Messenger Chapter,”

for instance, Draupadī extols the deity in three verses. In the first verse, she tells Krishna:

Neṭumāl! When the gold-colored demon (Hiraṇyakaśipu)

became greatly angry with his own son (Prahlāda),

you came from within the stone pillar that he (Hiraṇyakaśipu) beat.

You stood like a dark mountain

for the great elephant (Gajendra) with the three-fold rut,

right when he called out your primordial name.

197

Draupadī begins her eulogy by recounting the stories of how Viṣṇu immediately came to the aid

of two of his most famous bhaktas: Prahlāda and Gajendra. As Draupadī continues her prayer to

Krishna in which she addresses him as Govinda and “our lord,” (emperumāṉ), just as she did

193

CM 1.22.

Note that in the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic, when Arjuna is describing his ten different names to Prince

Uttara, he says that his father named him Krishna. See MBh 4.39.

194

hoihi bālaka ati dhanudhārī parama dharma śrīhari hitakārī

braja mahaṃ hoi kṛṣṇa avatārā so yāko hoihai rakhavārā || CM 5.104 ||

195

A.K. Ramanujan, “Repetition in the Mahābhārata,” in Essays on the Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden:

Brill, 1991), 421.

196

Greer, “Ethical Discourse in Udyogaparvan,” 214.

197

cāla kaṉakaṉ taṉ taṉi maintaṉai muṉinta

kālattu avaṉ aṟainta kal tūṇ iṭai vantāy

mūlam pēr iṭṭu aḻaitta mummatam māl yāṉaikkum

nīlam kiri pōl muṉ niṉṟa neṭumālē || VP 5.4.43 ||

during the disrobing scene, it is clear that Villi is drawing a direct comparison between the

stories of Prahlāda and Gajendra and that of Draupadī and her husbands.

198

There is no doubt

that just as Viṣṇu saved Gajendra from the crocodile and Prahlāda from Hiraṇyakaśipu, Krishna

will save the Pāṇḍavas from the Kauravas. As Villi’s “Krishna the Messenger Chapter”

continues, we also see Vidura in his home and all those present when Krishna visits the court in

Hastinapura sing songs in praise of Krishna.

199

In Cauhān’s Book of Effort, Yudhiṣṭhira offers

two multi-stanzaic hymns to Krishna that we will examine in greater detail in Chapter Four.

200

Along with these multiple songs in praise of Krishna in the Book of Effort in both the

Tamil and Bhasha Mahābhāratas, Villi and Cauhān also present their audiences with tender

moments of bhakti between the deity and his devotees. After the famous scene in which Krishna

promises his army to Duryodhana, but himself as a noncombatant to Arjuna,

201

Cauhān describes

an intimate encounter between Arjuna, Krishna, and Devakī in Dwarka. Following a description

of a meal lovingly served to Arjuna and Krishna by Krishna’s eight wives,

202

Cauhān tell us:

Having learned [of Arjuna’s arrival], Devakī came.

Seeing the pair, she was filled with joy.

Hari and Arjuna rose and greeted her.

She blessed them to her heart’s desire.

Over and over, the mother embraced them.

Her eyes filled with tears as she said these words:

“Without you, my heart has remained replete with sorrow.

I am seeing you after thirteen years.

Krishna, listen to these instructions:

he is more precious to me than my life.

No one knows why you abandoned him.

Protect him, Bhagavān.”

Queen Devakī, having said such words,

grabbed Arjuna’s hands and handed them over.

203

Devakī’s extremely emotional reaction to seeing Arjuna and Krishna together is a clear vātsalya-

bhāva. Yet, unlike most examples of vātsalya-bhāva, such as those that pervade the devotional

poems of Periyāḻvār and Sūrdās who (as we saw in the Introduction) both frequently adopt the

198

VP 5.4.44–45.

199

VP 5.4.80–85 and 5.4.209–12.

200

CM 5.34–35 and 5.66–67.

201

For this scene in the Sanskrit epic, the Pāratam, and the Mahābhārat, see MBh 5.7; VP 5.2; and CM 5.27–29.

202

CM 5.30–31.

203

so sudhi pāi devakī aī dekhi yugalatana ananda chāī

hari arjuna uṭhi kīnha praṇāmā dīnha aśīśa hoi manakāmā

mātā puni puni kaṇaṭha lagāī bolī bacana nayana jala chāī

tuma bina raheu hiye ati śokā teraha barṣa bādi avalokā

sunahu kṛṣṇa jo mantra hamārā praṇahu te mohiṃ adhika piyārā

tumahiṃ tyāgi kahiṃ aura na jānā rakṣā tuma kījai bhagavānā

kahi asa bacana devakī rānī arjuna kahaṃ sauṃpyo gahi pānī || CM 5.31 ||

persona of Krishna’s adoptive mother Yaśodā, the primary recipient of this maternal bhakti is not

Krishna, but Arjuna. By emphasizing Devakī’s overflowing affection for Arjuna, Cauhān

highlights the immense closeness of Krishna and Arjuna’s relationship. Here Krishna’s mother

seems to love Arjuna as much (if not more so) than her own son.

A particularly moving devotional scene in Villi’s “Krishna the Messenger Chapter” is

one between Krishna and the Pāṇḍava prince Sahadeva. As John Smith notes, in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata Sahadeva and his twin brother Nakula “are only lightly sketched” and “there is

little to say about them.”

204

This is not the case, however, in the regional retellings of Villi and

Cauhān. In the Bhasha Mahābhārat, Sahadeva is the product of Pāṇḍu and Mādrī’s fatal moment

of passion, instead of being Nakula’s twin and the son of the Aśvins and Mādrī as he is in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

205

We see something similar in the Pāṇḍavlīlā or the “divine play of the

Pāṇḍavas” living performance tradition of the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand in which Nakula is

“the sole biological son of Pandu, the human son of a human father.”

206

Villi and Cauhān both

present Nakula and Sahadeva as devout “all along” Krishna bhaktas. For instance, in the Bhasha

Book of Effort, Cauhān presents a touching sequence in which Nakula begs Krishna and his

friend Sātyaki to let him accompany the two Yādava warriors to Hastinapura.

207

In the first

chapter of the Tamil Book of Virāṭa’s Court (Virāṭaparuvam), when the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī

are preparing to live incognito for a year in King Virāṭa’s kingdom, Villi explicitly compares

Sahadeva in his cowherd disguise to “the son of Nandagopa” (nantakōpaṉ maintaṉ), Krishna.

208

Yet the encounter between Krishna and Sahadeva in Villi’s “Krishna the Messenger

Chapter” is especially poignant. In this scene, Krishna takes on sixteen thousand forms in front

of Sahadeva and the youngest Pāṇḍava then binds the deity with just his mind.

209

Similar

renderings of this divine display are also found in the Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā, an episode of

Sun TV’s Tamil Makāpāratam serial (2013–2016), and the Terukkūttu plays of the Draupadī

goddess cult in northern Tamil Nadu.

210

As Hiltebeitel notes, “Sahadeva’s binding and

subsequent release of Kṛṣṇa are among the favorite scenes of the Terukkūttu.”

211

I should acknowledge that Krishna also displays his celestial form in the Sanskrit Book of

Effort in the court in Hastinapura during his peace embassy.

212

Unlike this “terrible form of noble

204

Smith, introduction to Mahābhārata: Abridged Translation, xxix.

205

CM 1.23.

206

William Sax, Dancing the Self: Personhood and Performance in the Pāṇḍav Līlā of Garhwal (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2002), 63.

207

CM 5.74–75.

208

VP 4.1.26.

209

VP 5.4.30–40.

210

See Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 129–35; Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 97–98; Ettapan Velu,

“Makāpāratam 124,” YouTube video, 40:10, March 11, 2020, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I2LlNNYGmr0;

and Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadī, 1:312–14.

211

Hiltebeitel, 313.

212

MBh 5.129.1–20. For similar scenes in the poems of Villi and Cauhān, see VP 5.4.191–217; and CM 5.90.

Keśava” in the Sanskrit epic which makes the Kauravas close “their eyes in their fear,”

213

however, the theophany in the Tamil Book of Effort reveals the mutal affection that Krishna and

Sahadeva have for each other. Villi begins by noting that Sahadeva’s words “melt the heart”

(maṉam uruka) of Mukunda, a reversal of the trope we saw earlier during Draupadī’s disrobing

in which the devotee’s heart melts in the presence of the deity.

214

Villi then tells us:

That man who is like God (Sahadeva) said:

“You are the one with the fresh tulsī wreath dripping with honey,

who that time sucked milk from the demoness,

passed in between the maruta trees,

killed the tall Śakaṭa such that he fell,

and grew up a family of herdsmen.

Māl! No one understands your māyā here.

But I know it as it is.

In fact, the views that are in your divine heart,

those are also mine.”

215

In this verse in which Sahadeva alludes to incidents from Krishna’s childhood in Vrindavan that

are described in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, such as his slaying of

Pūtanā, his splitting of two trees with a mortar, and his defeat of the cart demon Śakaṭa, the

Pāṇḍava prince describes an intimate bond between himself and Krishna.

216

The strength of

Sahadeva’s bhakti is further displayed later on in this scene when he binds the sixteen thousand

forms of Krishna simply with his “affection” (aṉpu) for the deity in his mind.

217

The consistent emphasis on Krishna protecting the Pāṇḍavas as well as the insertion of

tender moments of bhakti between the deity and his devotees in both the Tamil Book of Effort

and the Bhasha Book of Effort substantially reduces the “terrifying unease” of the Sanskrit Book

of Effort that Greer describes.

218

Instead, audiences of these regional Mahābhāratas are left with

extensive renderings of the Book of Effort with a distinctly devotional ethos.

213

MBh 129.12, trans. Smith in Mahābhārata: Abridged Translation, 337.

214

VP 5.4.30.

215

muruku aviḻkkum pacuntuḷapam muṭiyōṉē aṉṟu alakai mulai pāl uṇṭu

marutu iṭai ceṉṟu uyar cakaṭam viḻa utaittu potuvar maṉai vaḷarnta mālē

oruvarukkum teriyātu iṅku uṉ māyai yāṉ aṟivēṉ uṇmaiyāka

tiru uḷattu karuttu etuvō atu eṉakkum karuttu eṉṟāṉ teyvam aṉṉāṉ || VP 5.4.32 ||

216

For these stories about Krishna in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, see Narayanan, Way

and the Goal, 159–60; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.6, 10.10, and 10.7.

217

VP 5.4.39.

218

Greer, “Ethical Discourse in Udyogaparvan,” 214.

Concluding with Krishna

Just as the beginnings of the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat alert readers to Villi

and Cauhān’s shared project of reframing the Mahābhārata as a kṛṣṇacarita, the conclusions of

these poems make it very clear that Krishna is the most important figure in these narratives.

In the final verses of Villi’s Book of the Night Massacre (Cauptikaparuvam), Krishna

persuades the Pāṇḍavas not to seek further vengeance against Aśvatthāman after he mistakenly

beheads the five sons of Draupadī instead of the five Pāṇḍavas.

219

Villi then briefly describes

Krishna saving Bhīma’s life by placing an iron pillar before Dhṛtarāṣṭra who crushes it, thinking

he is hugging Bhīma.

220

The Tamil poem culminates with Krishna blessing the Pāṇḍavas and

returning to Dwarka.

221

As with multiple other Mahābhārata regional retellings, such as Pampa’s

Vikramārjunavijayam, Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, and Viṣṇudās’s

Pāṇḍavcarit, Villi’s Pāratam thus ends soon after the Battle at Kurukṣetra and does not deal with

the aftermath of the war that forms the contents of the eight final books of the eighteen total

books of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. We see something very similar with several Rāmāyaṇa

retellings, including the Rāmcaritmānas and the Adhyatmarāmāyaṇa, which do not cover many

of the events described in the seventh book of Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, the Book of

Epilogue (Uttarakāṇḍa). Robert Goldman and Sally Sutherland Goldman assert that the reason

for the absence of certain Book of Epilogue episodes from the conclusions of the Rāmcaritmānas

and the Adhyatmarāmāyaṇa is “because the kāṇḍa’s contents, most particularly its account of the

abandonment of Sītā and her being made to give a public oath of fidelity to Rāma, were felt to be

out of keeping with the emerging devotional representations of Rāma and Sītā.”

222

M.S.H. Thompson makes a similar argument about why the Pāratam ends right after the

war that is based on the verse in his author’s introduction in which Villi says he is retelling the

Mahābhārata because of his “desire for the carita of the eternal Mādhava.”

223

Thompson claims

219

VP 10.41–44.

Note that Krishna’s compassion towards Aśvatthāman in the Pāratam is a departure from the Sanskrit epic in which

Krishna curses Aśvatthāman after he kills Draupadī’s siblings, Dhṛṣṭadyumna and Śikhaṇḍin, her sons (known as the

Draupadeyas), and tries to abort the unborn Parikṣit (MBh 10.16). The reason why Villi has Krishna spare

Aśvatthāman may be related to the way this character was revered in premodern Tamil Nadu. David Shulman

explains that “Pallava genealogies identify the dynastic founder as the Mahābhārata Brahmin hero Aśvatthāman,

wandering the world forever because of a curse; his union with a Nāginī princess is the moment of origin, probably

hinted at in the great royal relief at Mahabalipuram known either as ‘Arjuna’s Penance’ or the ‘Descent of the

Ganges’” (Tamil, 142). It is also noteworthy that unlike in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata (10.9.48) in which

Aśvatthāman clearly tells Duryodhana he has killed the Draupadeyas, in the Tamil poem, Duryodhana is devastated

when Aśvatthāman brings him the heads of the Draupadeyas thinking that he has killed the Pāṇḍavas (VP 10.22).

220

VP 10.45.

We see a similar scene in the Book of the Women in the Sanskrit epic in which Krishna places an iron statue of

Bhīma in front of the blind king (MBh 11.11.15–30).

221

VP 10.46.

222

Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman, “Introduction” in Vālmīki, The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An

Epic of Ancient India, vol. 7, Uttarakāṇḍa, trans. Robert P. Goldman and Sally J. Sutherland Goldman (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2016), 70.

223

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 8.

that this verse “is taken to imply that it would have been a most painful experience to him to

describe the death of Śrī Kṛṣṇa, which he would have been obliged to do if he had gone on with

the story.”

224

Thompson’s theory that Villi ends his Mahābhārata with the conclusion of the

Battle at Kurukṣetra to avoid describing Krishna’s death is supported by the fact that the demise

of Krishna is not a popular story in Śrīvaiṣṇava literature. The Āḻvārs in the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and Vedāntadeśika in his Sanskrit mahākāvya on Krishna’s life, the

Yādavābhyudaya, refer to several of Krishna’s actions from the Mahābhārata tradition, such as

his slaying of Śiśupāla, his rescue of Draupadī during her disrobing, and his embassy to

Hastinapura.

225

None of the Āḻvārs nor Vedāntadeśika, however, speak of Krishna’s death. As

Steven Hopkins observes, the final chapter of the Yādavābhyudaya ends with an “auspicious

description of Krishna with his innumerable wives at home in Dvaraka, stopping short before his

legendary ignominious death at the hands of a hunter in the epic Mahabharata account.”

226

Villi’s Tamil Pāratam also ends with an auspicious account of Krishna blessing the

Pāṇḍavas in Hastinapura and then returning to his home in Dwarka in the text’s final verse:

Saying, “Henceforth, you will prosper for eons,”

the one with fresh tulsī

establishing the son of Dharma and his younger brothers,

saying, “I must return,”

surrounded by Sātyaki and Halāyudha,

and looking in the direction of the city of Dwarka,

he returned.

They too (the Pāṇḍavas) with great renown,

protecting the earth surrounded by the resounding sea,

lived in that city,

reflecting solely on the way of dharma.

227

I should point out that at least two Tamil poets were unsatisfied with this ending to the Pāratam.

In the eighteenth century, Nallāpiḷḷai and Araṅkanāta Kavirāyar both picked up where Villi

leaves off at the end of the Book of the Night Massacre and each wrote eight more books that

cover the events of the final books of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata to “finish” Villi’s poem.

228

Yet when we consider the trajectory of the narrative of Villi’s Pāratam, which begins

with the words “our Mādhava” and goes on to detail how Krishna protects the Pāṇḍavas from

their arrival in Hastinapura as children up until the end of the Kurukṣetra War, it is evident that

224

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 118.

225

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 162; and Vedāntadeśika, Yādavābhyudaya 23.7–9, 15.1–135, and 23.15–20.

226

Steven P. Hopkins, “Sanskrit from Tamil Nadu: At Play in the Forests of the Lord; The Gopalavimshati of

Vedantadeshika,” in Krishna: A Sourcebook, ed. Edwin F. Bryant (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 292–

93.290.

227

iṉi ūḻi vāḻkir eṉa iḷaiñar oru nālvarōṭu aṟattiṉmaintaṉ

taṉai irutti mīḷval eṉa cāttakiyum alāyutaṉum taṉṉai cūḻa

viṉai akaṟṟum pacuntuḷavōṉ tuvarai nakar ticai nōkki mīṇṭāṉ cīrtti

kaṉai kaṭal pār aḷittu avarum a nakariṉ aṟam neṟiyē karuti vāḻntā || VP 10.46 ||

228

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 122–23.

the above verse is a fitting conclusion to this kṛṣṇacarita. As Villi has made abundantly clear

throughout his composition, this Mahābhārata is not the story of how the Pāṇḍavas defeated the

Kauravas, but rather the story of how Krishna saved the Pāṇḍavas from the Kauravas.

Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat also presents the epic as the tale of how Krishna rescued

the Pāṇḍavas from their malevolent cousins. Yet, unlike Villi, Cauhān does not conclude his

Mahābhārata with the end of the war and does not avoid describing the death of Krishna. As in

the sixteenth book of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the eleventh book of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa,

Krishna is killed by a hunter after the Yādavas drunkenly slaughter each other in Cauhān’s Book

of the Clubs (Muśalparv).

229

As Cauhān’s Krishna ascends to heaven, he tells his charioteer

Dāruka to tell Arjuna to “keep the wisdom of the Bhagavadgītā in his heart.”

230

In a rather bizarre twist, however, in the subsequent and final book of the Bhasha

Mahābhārat, the Book of the Ascent to Heaven (Svargārohaṇparv), we see Krishna alive and

well in Dwarka. Cauhān’s Book of the Ascent to Heaven begins with Yudhiṣṭhira asking Vyāsa

how he can go to “Hari’s world” (hari loka).

231

After Vyāsa tells Yudhiṣṭhira to do penance in

the Himalayas, Sahadeva suggests that the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī go to Dwarka and ask

Krishna his opinion on the matter. Remarkably, none of the Pāṇḍavas or Draupadī seem to

remember that Krishna has died, and they happily prepare for the journey.

232

Upon arriving in

Dwarka and seeing Krishna, Yudhiṣṭhira sings a stotra in a mixture of Sanskrit and Bhasha:

I bow to the upholder of the mountain,

233

savior of the cowherds of Gokula,

the slayer of the arrogance of Indra. I bow to the lord, Janārdana.

I bow to the slayer of Kaṃsa, the destroyer of the pride of Cānūra,

the delighter of the life breath of the elephant, the destroyer of the pride of the crocodile,

the protector of the life breath of Prahlāda, Narasiṃha: the consumer of the wicked,

the hero of the daughter of the ocean, the giver of joy to Brahmins,

the savior of the burden of the earth, the slayer of the arrogance of the king of snakes.

Taking on the forms of the fish and the tortoise, he [protected] the evidence of the Vedas.

Assuming the body of Varāha, he killed the wicked Hiraṇyākṣa.

I bow to the form of Vāmana, whose feet covered the universe.

I bow to the one whose mount is Garuḍa, the refuge of the burning Kāmadeva.

I bow to the grasper of the discus, the remover of the sorrow of the gods and Earth.

Victory to the universal form of the lord, the compassionate one, the controller from within.

Victory to the remover of different worlds, who comes assuming the bodies of men,

Mukunda, the guardian of the world, Govinda, the destroyer of demons.

Victory, victory to the one who rests on water. Victory to the one who comes from all virtues.

I bow to the one I come to for refuge, the illustrious Krishna whose sight I obtain.

234

229

MBh 16.6; and Bhāgavatapurāṇa 11.30–31.

230

gītā jñānahiṃ rākhi hiya || CM 17.14 ||

231

CM 18.3.

232

CM 18.5.

233

Note that as with Draupadī’s eulogy in praise of Krishna after he saves her from being disrobes in the Bhasha text

(CM 2.58–59), Yudhiṣṭhira begins this prayer by alluding to the story of Krishna lifting Mount Govardhana.

234

namāmi śikhara dhāraṇaṃ gokulā gopa tāraṇaṃ

sureśa māna mardanaṃ namāmi prabhu janārdanaṃ

This whole beginning of the Bhasha Book of the Ascent to Heaven is rather perplexing. Has

Cauhān forgotten that he described the death of Krishna in the previous book of his text? This

major discrepancy could be used to support R.S. McGregor’s claim that Cauhān’s Mahābhārat

“was contributed to and brought to completion by others.”

235

It is also noteworthy that

Yudhiṣṭhira’s stotra is the first time in the Bhasha Mahābhārat where Sanskrit is used. As the

Book of the Ascent to Heaven continues, Yudhiṣṭhira recites two more stotras (to Śiva and to the

sage Nārada) in a similar mix of Sanskrit and Bhasha.

236

Could this new use of Sanskrit in the

Book of the Ascent to Heaven also support McGregor’s collective authorship theory?

While this is certainly a possibility, we should also recall that Sanskrit stotras are also

occasionally used in Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas, a major source of inspiration for Cauhān. The

Bhasha Book of the Ascent to Heaven also features two more hymns (to Śiva and to Krishna),

this time in the harigītikā chand meter, which (as we saw in Chapter One) is also utilized for

songs of praise in the Rāmcaritmānas.

237

In fact, as I will discuss in more detail in Chapter Four,

the entire metrical structure of Cauhān’s poem is undoubtedly inspired by the specific metrical

format of the Rāmcaritmānas.

238

The use of Sanskrit and the harigītikā chand meter in the Book

of the Ascent to Heaven could thus be another way Cauhān is emulating the Rāmcaritmānas.

Moreover, while Krishna dying in one book and then being alive in the next is certainly

strange, the overall devotional ethos of Cauhān’s Book of the Ascent to Heaven matches that of

the first seventeen books in this composition. As we have seen throughout the Bhasha

Mahābhārat, Krishna remains at the center of the Book of the Ascent to Heaven even when he is

not physically present in the narrative. After Yudhiṣṭhira offers his stotra to Krishna in which he

draws on several well-known stories of Krishna and other incarnations of Viṣṇu, the deity

confirms that the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī should travel to the Himalayas and perform penance.

239

Even though Krishna does not accompany the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī on their arduous journey

namāmi kaṃsa mardanaṃ cāṇūra garba gañjanaṃ

gayanda prāṇa rañjanaṃ graha garba bhañjanaṃ

prahalāda prāṇa rakṣakaṃ nṛsiṃha duṣṭa bhakṣakaṃ

sindhu sutā nāyakaṃ bipra sukha dāyakaṃ

mahī bhāra ṭāraṇaṃ phaṇīśa māna māraṇaṃ

maccha kaccha rūpa rākhī tāke saba beda sākhī

bārāha bapuṣa dhārī hiraṇyākṣa duṣṭa mārī

namāmi rūpa bāvanaṃ brahmāṇḍa kiyo pāvanaṃ

namāmi garuḍa bāhanaṃ tava śaraṇa kāma dāhaṃ

namāmi cakra dhāraṇaṃ sura dhenu duḥkha hāraṇaṃ

jaya biśvarūpa svāmī kṛpālu antarayāmī

jaya jakta haraṇa nyāre nara deha āya dhāre

mukunda jakta pālakaṃ gobinda danuja ghālakaṃ

jaya jaya jalaśāyanaṃ jaya sarva guṇa āyanaṃ

namāmi śaraṇa āyoṃ śrīkṛṣṇa daraśa pāyoṃ || CM 18.6 ||

235

McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

236

CM 18.11 and 18.17.

237

CM 18.10–11 and 18.15–16.

238

On the metrical structure of the Rāmcaritmānas, see Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 14–17.

239

CM 18.8.

into the mountains, his presence is continuously felt throughout their pilgrimage as his devotees

think of him and praise him.

240

While the four younger Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī slowly freeze to

death, Yudhiṣṭhira sustains himself by chanting different names of Krishna, including Vāsudeva,

Bhagavān, Hari, Gopāla, Govinda, and Janārdana.

241

We see something very similar in the final

book of Melputtūr Nārāyaṇa Bhaṭṭa’s seventeenth-century Sanskrit Bhārataprabandha, a

Mahābhārata retelling in which Naama Shalom asserts that “a strong influence of Vaiṣṇava

bhakti is felt throughout.”

242

Shalom points out that the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī “carry on with

their journey while they ‘perform dance in their minds in devotion to Viṣṇu’” and that they are

described as the “knowers of the sweetness emerging from the adoration of Hari’s feet.”

243

Cauhān’s Book of the Ascent to Heaven concludes, as the Sanskrit epic does, with the Pāṇḍavas

together again in heaven. Yet unlike in the Mahābhārata, the paradise where the Pāṇḍavas end

up in the Mahābhārat is not simply Svarga (heaven), but Vaikuntha, Viṣṇu’s abode.

244

As we have just seen, the endings of both Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat differ significantly from the conclusion of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. But there are

some other premodern regional compositions featuring characters from the Mahābhārata

tradition that have even more drastically different endings. Bhīm Kavi’s Bhasha poem

Ḍaṅgvaikathā (Story of Ḍaṅgvai, 1493 CE), Carigoṇḍa Dharmanna’s Telugu poem

Citrabhāratamu (Peculiar Bhārata, ca. 1500), Haḷēmakki Rāma’s Kannada Yakṣagāna play

Kṛṣṇārjuna Kāḷaga (Battle of Krishna and Arjuna, ca. 1618), and the Tamil ballad poems

Pañcapāṇṭavar Vaṉavācam (Residence of the Five Pāṇḍavas in the Forest, ca. 1600) and

Kurukṣēttira Mālai (Garland of Kurukṣēttiraṉ) all tell a remarkably similar story in which a local

king or gandharva (a celestial musician) accidentally insults Krishna and begs either Bhīma or

Arjuna to save him from Krishna’s wrath.

245

Encouraged by Subhadrā (Krishna’s sister and

Arjuna’s wife), the Pāṇḍavas decide to protect the king/gandharva and together with the

Kauravas they wage war against Krishna and his entire army. All the versions of this story end

with Krishna forgiving the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. Francesca Orsini notes that the

240

For example, see CM 18.15–16 and 18.17.

241

CM 18.19–20.

242

Shalom, Re-ending the Mahābhārata, 158.

243

Shalom, 159.

244

MBh 18.3; and CM 18.23.

245

See Francesca Orsini, “Texts and Tellings: Kathas in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” in Tellings and

Texts: Music, Literature and Performance in North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Katherine Butler Schofield

(Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2015), 337–46; E. Vasumati, Telugu Literature in the Qutub Shahi Period

(Hyderabad: Abul Kalam Azad Oriental Research Institute, n.d., ca. 1960), 19–53; K. Shivarama Karantha,

Yakṣagāna (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1997), 245–46; Martha Bush Ashton and Bruce Christie, Yakṣagāna: A

Dance Drama of India (Delhi: Abhinav Publications, 1977), 76–78; and M. Arunachalam, Ballad Poetry

(Thanjavur: Saraswati Mahal Library, 1976), 100–9.

Modern renditions of this same story include Chilakamarti Lakshmi Narasimham’s Telegu play Gayōpākhyānaṃ

(1890), K.V. Reddy’s Telugu film Śrīkṛṣṇārjuna Yuddhamu (1963), and Babubhai Mistri’s Hindi film Śrīkṛṣṇārjun

Yuddh (1971).

100

Ḍaṅgvaikathā concludes “when Duryodhana grasps one of his feet, Karna grasps the other, and

Arjun pleads with him, [and then] Krishna lifts them all up in an embrace.”

246

Can we call this fascinating and strange story that has characters from the Mahābhārata

tradition but that also avoids the central conflict of the Sanskrit epic––the devastating war

between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas––a “Mahābhārata”? Orsini observes that “while drawing

upon the familiar set of Mahābhārata characters,” Bhīm Kavi composed “a gripping tale that

turned the epic tale upside down.”

247

Notably, in his extensive study of Tamil ballad poetry M.

Arunachalam discusses the Pañcapāṇṭavar Vaṉavācam and the Kurukṣēttira Mālai in his section

entitled “The Romantic Ballads” instead of in his section called “Ballads from the Ithihasas” in

which he examines Tamil ballads based on the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa narrative

traditions.

248

The title of Carigoṇḍa Dharmanna’s Telegu poem, the Citrabhāratamu or “Peculiar

Bhārata,” is particularly telling: this Mahābhārata is immensely unusual.

249

The conclusions of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat are just

some of the numerous ways in which each of these texts differs considerably from the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. Yet both regional poems are still recognizable as “Mahābhāratas” in a way that

the Ḍaṅgvaikathā, the Citrabhāratamu, the Kṛṣṇārjuna Kāḷaga, the Pañcapāṇṭavar Vaṉavācam,

and the Kurukṣēttira Mālai are not. The Battle at Kurukṣetra between the “great Bhāratas”

remains a vital component of both the Tamil Pāratam and Bhasha Mahābhārat albeit with

Krishna playing an even more important role in the war than he does in the Sanskrit epic. Again,

instead of telling the story of how the Pāṇḍavas defeated the Kauravas, Villi and Cauhān are both

narrating the story of how Krishna saved the Pāṇḍavas from the Kauravas.

* * * * *

In this chapter, I have shown how both Villi and Cauhān reframe the Mahābhārata as a bhakti

narrative poem focused on the deeds of Krishna. Both the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha

Mahābhārat present the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī as “all along” devotees of Krishna who

frequently break out into song in praise of him. Both Mahābhāratas also depict Krishna as a deity

who cares deeply about his bhaktas. And even when Krishna is not physically present in the

narratives of the poems of Villi and Cauhān, he looms over the entireties of both texts.

I have also demonstrated in this chapter that Villi and Cauhān transform four of the same

sections of the Mahābhārata: Krishna’s introduction in the narrative, Draupadī’s prayer to

Krishna in the assembly hall, the Book of Effort, and the departure of Krishna at the end of the

story. Each of these four narrative transformations allow Villi and Cauhān to successfully recast

the tale of the war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas as a devotional kṛṣṇacarita. But I

have also revealed that while Villi and Cauhān often reimagine the same section from the

Mahābhārata tradition, their individual reimaginings are often quite different from each other.

For instance, while the renderings of the Book of Effort in both the Tamil Pāratam and the

Bhasha Mahābhārat present Krishna as the steadfast protector of the Pāṇḍavas, Villi

246

Orsini, “Texts and Tellings,” 345.

247

Orsini, 345–46.

248

Arunachalam, Ballad Poetry, 109–15.

249

I thank Mrunalini Chunduri for introducing me to the Citrabhāratamu and discussing the text’s title with me.

101

concentrates on the varied ways that Krishna safeguards his devotees in the actual narrative of

his Book of Effort, while Cauhān’s Book of Effort describes multiple past instances of Krishna

rescuing the Pāṇḍavas. Similarly, although both Villi and Cauhān recast the entire dicing episode

as a devotional story that emphasizes Krishna’s compassion for Draupadī and the Pāṇḍavas,

Villi’s rendering of Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna exemplifies the power of prapatti, while

Cauhān use Draupadī’s prayer as an opportunity to extol the deity in detail.

There is no doubt that Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat are both

devotional kṛṣṇacaritas. It is critical, however, to also recognize the different methods that Villi

and Cauhān each use to reframe the Mahābhārata as works of bhakti that speak to local

audiences. In the next two chapters, I will reveal how Villi and Cauhān each anchor their

retellings in specific regional Vaiṣṇava bhakti literary cultures: the South Indian Śrīvaiṣṇava

tradition for Villi and Tulsīdās’s Bhasha corpus of poems dedicated to Rāma for Cauhān.

102

CHAPTER THREE

Beginning with Bhakti:

The Use of Invocations in Villi’s Tamil Pāratam

How does one begin a work of literature? For many premodern South Asian literary cultures, the

answer to this question is: with an invocation. Bhāsa’s Sanskrit drama the Karṇabhāra (Karṇa’s

Burden, ca. 200 CE), for example, commences with the sūtradhāra (director) reciting the

following maṅgala (auspicious verse) in praise of Narasiṃha, the man-lion form of Viṣṇu:

Teeming with women and men,

with demons and gods,

this world and the netherworld reel

at the sight of his man-lion form;

the breast of the demon king

is cut by his axe-blade nails;

he destroys all foes of the gods––

may the glory of Viṣṇu,

Lord of Goddess Śrī, shine for you!

Or take the Sufi poet Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī who begins his Bhasha Padmāvat (Story of

Padmāvatī, 1540 CE) with a ḥamd, a verse in praise of Allah:

In the beginning I remember the Creator,

Who gave us life and made the universe.

He made the first light shine out.

For love of the Prophet, He made the heavens.

He made fire, air, water, and earth.

He made all the colors that are.

He made earth, heaven, and the nether world.

He made all the kinds of living beings.

He made the seven continents and the cosmos.

He made the fourteen divisions of creation.

He made the day and the sun, the night and the moon.

He made the constellations and their lines of stars.

He made the sunshine, the cold, and the shade.

He made the clouds and the lightning in them.

The One who made this entire creation, and whose sole glory it is:

Such a Name do I first invoke, and then I start my tale.

Bhāsa, Karṇabhāra 1, trans. Barbara Stoler Miller in “Karṇabhāra: The Trial of Karṇa” in Essays on the

Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 61.

Malik Muḥammad Jāyasī, Padmāvat 1, trans. Aditya Behl in Love’s Subtle Magic: An Indian Islamic Literary

Tradition, ed. Wendy Doniger (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 42.

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Yet while countless works of South Asian literature begin with some sort of invocation, the role

that these auspicious opening verses play within their larger texts has received little attention.

This chapter examines the different invocations to various forms of Krishna that

commence thirty-seven of the fifty chapters of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam.

I show how these

multiple invocations mark the Pāratam as a composition grounded in the literature and traditions

of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community in South India in four different ways: (1) they signal that

the Pāratam is a Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam (mahākāvya), (2) they place Villi’s poem in the

lineage of an earlier Śrīvaiṣṇava Tamil Mahābhārata: Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Pārataveṇpā,

(3) they anchor this text in a distinctly Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti milieu, and (4) they help reframe the

narrative of the epic as a Śrīvaiṣṇava devotional kṛṣṇacarita.

Marking the Pāratam as a Śrīvaiṣṇava Peruṅkāppiyam

In the taṟciṟappuppāyiram (author’s own introduction) to the fifteenth-century Tamil Pāratam,

Villi describes his poem as a peruṅkāppiyam (Sanskrit: mahākāvya), an ornate multi-chapter

narrative text replete with poetic figuration.

Notably, three of the most famous Sanskrit

mahākāvyas––Bhāravi’s sixth-century Kirātārjunīya (Arjuna and the Hunter), Māgha’s seventh-

century Śiśupālavadha (Slaying of Śiśupāla), and Śrīharṣa’s twelfth-century Naiṣadhīyacarita

(Deeds of the Naiṣadha King )––retell Mahābhārata episodes.

By the fifteenth century, the

peruṅkāppiyam was a well-established Tamil literary genre with examples including

Tiruttakkatēvar’s ninth-century Cīvakacintāmaṇi (Cīvakaṉ the Wish-Fulfilling Jewel),

Nātakuttaṉār’s tenth-century Kuṇṭalakēci, Tōlāmol

ittēvar’s tenth-century Cūḷāmaṇi (Crest

Jewel), the tenth-century Vaḷaiyāpati, the tenth-century Nīlakēci, Cēkkiḻār’s twelfth-century

Periyapurāṇam, and Kampaṉ’s twelfth-century Irāmāvatāram (Descent of Rāma).

As Anne Monius notes, the first definition of a peruṅkāppiyam is found in the twelfth-

century Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram (Poetic Figuration of Daṇḍin), a Tamil reimagining of Daṇḍin’s

seventh-century Sanskrit literary treatise, the Kāvyādarśa (Mirror of Kāvya).

The description of

the peruṅkāppiyam in the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram is clearly inspired by that of the mahākāvya in the

Kāvyādarśa. According to Daṇḍin, a mahākāvya is a sargabandha (a composition divided into

Exceptions include Christopher Minkowski, “Why Should We Read the Maṅgala Verses?” in Śāstrārambha:

Inquiries into the Preamble in Sanskrit, ed. Walter Slaje (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 2008), 1–24; Behl, Love’s

Subtle Magic, 30–58; and Herman Tieken, “On Beginnings: Introductions and Prefaces in Kāvya” in Innovations

and Turning Points: Towards a History of Kāvya Literature, ed. Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 86–108.

VP 1.2.1, 1.3.1, 1.4.1, 1.6.1, 2.1.1, 2.2.1, 3.3.1, 3.4.1, 3.8.1, 4.1.1, 4.4.1, 4.5.1, 5.1.1, 5.2.1, 5.3.1, 5.4.1, 5.5.1, 5.6.1,

5.7.1, 6.1.1, 6.2.1, 6.3.1, 6.4.1, 6.5.1, 6.6.1, 6.7.1, 6.8.1, 6.9.1, 6.10.1, 7.1.1, 7.2.1, 7.3.1, 7.4.1, 7.5.1, 8.1.1, 8.2.1,

and 9.1.1.

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 7.

Since around the fourteenth century, these three Sanskrit mahākāvyas along with Kālidāsa’s fourth or fifth-century

Raghuvaṃśa (Lineage of Raghu) and Kumārasambhava (Birth of Kumāra) have been referred to as the

pañcamahākāvya or the “five mahākāvyas.” See Deven M. Patel, Text to Tradition: The Naiṣadhīyacarita and

Literary Community in South Asia (New York, Columbia University Press, 2014), 59.

Anne E. Monius, “The Many Lives of Daṇḍin: The Kāvyādarśa in Sanskrit and Tamil,” International Journal of

Hindu Studies 4, no. 2 (2001): 15.

104

sargas or “chapters”) that is composed in multiple different sonorous meters, imbued with rasa,

based on itihāsa or “other good material,”

concerned with the four puruṣārthas,

and centered

around a hero who is “a great and generous person.”

Daṇḍin goes on to list a number of

different things that should be described in a mahākāvya, including cities, oceans, the seasons,

water play, drinking scenes, festivals, weddings, the separation of lovers, the birth of princes,

meetings with ministers, army processions, war, and the victory of the hero.

The part of the mahākāvya definition in the Kāvyādarśa that concerns us most here is the

account of how a mahākāvya should begin. Daṇḍin tells us that the first verse of a mahākāvya

should be a benediction (āśīs), a salutation (namaskriyā), or an indication of the poem’s subject

(vastunirdeśa).

Christopher Minkowski elaborates that an āśīs is a verse “in which a deity is

called upon to bless the reader and the author” and that a namaskriyā is a verse of “obeisance”

that “is made to a deity or a similarly exalted being.”

Similarly, in the Tamil Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram

we are informed of three suitable opening verses for a peruṅkāppiyam: a benediction (vāḻttu), a

salutation (vaṇakkam), or an indication of the poem’s subject (varuporuḷ).

The first verses of

several prominent peruṅkāppiyams––including the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Kuṇṭalakēci, the

Nīlakēci, the Vaḷaiyāpati, the Cūḷāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, the Irāmāvatāram, Ativīrarāmaṉ’s

sixteenth-century Naiṭatam (Naiṣadha King), Vaṇṇapparimaḷappulavar’s sixteenth-century

Āyiramacalā

(One Thousand Questions), Umaṟuppulavar’s seventeenth-century Cīṟāppurāṇam

(Legend of the Prophet), and Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi’s eighteenth-century Tēmpāvaṇi

(Unfading Jewel)––are indeed benedictions or salutations.

Rasa means “essence” or “flavor.” The eight primary rasas are śṛṅgāra (the erotic), hāsya (the comic), bībhatsa

(the disgusting), raudra (the violent), karuṇa (the compassionate), vīra (the heroic), bhayānaka (the fearsome), and

adbhuta (the amazing). Sometimes śānta (the peaceful) and bhakti are also considered rasas.

Itihāsa (which is often translated as “history”) is a genre that is frequently used to describe the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata.

The four puruṣārthas (aims of human life) are dharma (duty), artha (wealth or power), kāma (desire), and mokṣa

(liberation from the cycle of rebirth).

Daṇḍin, Kāvyādarśa 1.15, trans. V.V. Sastrulu in Kāvyādarśaḥ of Daṇḍin: Text with the Commentary Jibānand

Vidyāsāgar, trans. V.V. Sastrulu, ed. R.K. Panda (Delhi: Bharatiya Kala Prakashan, 2008), 8. See also

Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram 8. I am following: Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram Cuppiramaṇiyatēcikar Uraiyuṭaṉ, ed. K. Irāmaliṅkat

Tampirāṉ (Tirunelveli: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1963).

Daṇḍin, Kāvyādarśa 1.16–19. See also Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram 8.

Daṇḍin, Kāvyādarśa 1.14.

Minkowski, “Why Should We Read,” 5.

Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram 8.

See the opening verses of Tiruttakkatēvar, Cīvakacintāmaṇi (Cīvakacintāmaṇi: The Hero Cīvakaṉ; The Gem that

Fulfills All Wishes. Verses 1–1165), trans. James D. Ryan (Fremont, CA: Jain Publishing Company, 2005);

Tōlāmol

ittēvar, Cūḷāmaṇi, vol. 1, trans. P. Pandian (Chennai: Research Foundation for Jainology, 2002); Nīlakēci:

Camayativākaravāmaṉa Muṉivar Uraiyuṭaṉ, ed. A. Charkavarti (Kumbakonam: 1936); Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam;

Kampaṉ, Kamparāmāyaṇam, ed. Vai. Mu. Kōpālakiruṣṇamācāriyār, 6 vols. (Madras: 1926–71); Ativīrarāmaṉ,

Naiṭatam (Tirunelveli: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1962); Umar

uppulavar,

Cīr

āppurāṇam, ed. Em. Ceyyitu Muhammatu Hasan

(Chennai: Maraikkāyar Patippakam: 1987); and Costanzo

105

Let me make it clear, however, that I am not suggesting that Ativīrarāmaṉ, Beschi,

Cēkkiḻār, Kampaṉ, Nātakuttaṉār, Tiruttakkatēvar, Tōlāmol

ittēvar, Umaṟuppulavar, and

Vaṇṇapparimaḷappulavar all had palm leaf copies of the Sanskrit Kāvyādarśa or the Tamil

Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram in front of them while they were composing their various peruṅkāppiyams.

Admittedly, multiple Sanskrit scholars have suggested that literary theory in premodern South

Asia was proscriptive rather than descriptive. Daniel Ingalls, for instance, claims that the various

elements of Daṇḍin’s mahākāvya definition in the Kāvyādarśa are “not random suggestions but

specific requirements. Every complete mahākāvya that has come down to us from the time of

Kālidāsa contains the whole list.”

Sheldon Pollock similarly asserts that “in its earliest

embodiment the discourse on kāvya was intended not to explain it but to help produce it.”

Yet this view is not shared by all scholars. Tracing the development of the mahākāvya

genre over time, Deven Patel observes that each mahākāvya “represents a poetic practice that

consistently outpaces the theory” and he argues that “thus, in the seventh century Daṇḍin

formulated a preliminary description of the mahākāvya, very probably with Kālidāsa’s

Raghuvaṃśa or perhaps Bhāravi’s sixth-century Kirātārjunīya as his model poem.”

Indira

Peterson also advises against over-relying on literary theory to study mahākāvyas. Noting that

“mahākāvya poets cultivated generic strategies of their own,” she convincingly demonstrates that

“not the poeticians, but the poems themselves, are our best clues to these processes.”

Notably, the two earliest Tamil narrative poems, Iḷaṅkō Aṭikaḷ’s Cilappatikāram (Tale of

the Anklet, c. fourth or fifth century) and Cātaṉār’s Maṇimēkalai (c. sixth century), do not begin

with invocations.

Although these two texts along with the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Vaḷaiyāpati,

and the Kuṇṭalakēci are classified as the aimperuṅkāppiyam or “five peruṅkāppiyams” in

Kantappaiyar’s late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth-century Tiruttaṇikaiyulā (Ulā on

Tiruttaṇikai),

Jennifer Clare explains that both the Cilappatikāram and the Maṇimēkalai “lack

Giuseppe Beschi, Tēmpāvaṇi, ed. Na. Cēturakunātaṉ (Tirunelveli: The South India Saiva Siddhanta Works

Publishing Society, 1965).

On the invocations in the Kuṇṭalakēci, the Vaḷaiyāpati, and the Āyiramacalā, see Anne E. Monius, “Sanskrit is the

Mother of All Tamil Words: Further Thoughts on the Vīracōliyam and its Commentary,” in Buddhism among

Tamils in Tamiḷakam and Īḷam: Part Three; Extensions and Conclusions, ed. Peter Schalk and Astrid van Nahl

(Uppsala : Uppsala University Library, 2013), 119; Jennifer Steele Clare “Canons, Conventions and Creativity:

Defining Literary Tradition in Premodern Tamil South India,” (PhD diss., University of California: Berkeley, 2011),

112; and Ricci, Islam Translated, 100.

Daniel H.H. Ingalls, Sanskrit Poetry from Vidyākara’s Treasury (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard

University Press, 1968), 34.

Sheldon Pollock, “Sanskrit Literary Culture from the Inside Out,” in Literary Cultures in History: Reconstructions

from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 43.

Patel, Text to Tradition, 19.

Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 17.

Clare “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 114 n381.

While the term aimperuṅkāppiyam (which is likely derived from the Sanskrit pañcamahākāvya or “five

mahākāvyas”) is first found in Mayilainātar’s fourteenth-century commentary on the Tamil grammatical treatise, the

Naṉṉūl, the identification of the Cilappatikāram, the Maṇimēkalai, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Vaḷaiyāpati, and the

Kuṇṭalakēci as the aimperuṅkāppiyam only takes place in the late-eighteenth or early-nineteenth century in

106

key features associated with ‘kāvya’ and are only categorized as such by later theoreticians.”

The first two Tamil narrative poems to begin with invocations are Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā

and Tiruttakkatēvar’s Cīvakacintāmaṇi, which were both composed around the ninth century. As

Monius points out, “at the level of form, of poetic structure, and narrative frame, the

Cīvakacintāmaṇi establishes a set of conventions for long ‘epic’ narratives [peruṅkāppiyams]

that all subsequent medieval Tamil narrative works, from the Periyapurāṇam to Kampaṉ’s

Irāmāvatāram, follow.”

Just as Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa is a model for later Sanskrit

mahākāvyas, so is Tiruttakkatēvar’s Cīvakacintāmaṇi for Tamil peruṅkāppiyams. One of the

conventions the Cīvakacintāmaṇi establishes is beginning a peruṅkāppiyam with an invocation.

In several peruṅkāppiyams, the opening invocation alerts readers to the religious content

of the rest of the poem. Take the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, a peruṅkāppiyam that narrates the adventures

of Cīvakaṉ, a prince who eventually renounces the world and becomes a Jain ascetic. By using

the first three benediction verses of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi to pay tribute to the Jain siddhas or

“perfected beings” and Mahāvīra, the twenty-fourth tīrthaṅkara (Jain spiritual teacher),

Tiruttakkatēvar immediately alerts his audience that this peruṅkāppiyam is a work of Jain

literature.

Clare notes that the invocations of the Nīlakēci and the Cūḷāmaṇi similarly mark

these peruṅkāppiyams as Jain compositions.

Although Nātakuttaṉār’s Kuṇṭalakēci––a

peruṅkāppiyam about a woman who becomes a Buddhist nun after she kills her husband––is now

lost, we still have access to the text’s benediction through Peruntēvaṉār’s eleventh or twelfth-

century commentary on the eleventh-century Buddhist Tamil poetic treatise, the Vīracōliyam.

Monius observes that this verse “refers to Buddha’s constant efforts on behalf of others,”

therefore signaling to readers that the Kuṇṭalakēci is a Buddhist peruṅkāppiyam.

As we have seen in Chapter One, the Periyapurāṇam is a Śaiva bhakti narrative poem

about the lives of the sixty-three Nāyaṉmār saints. Accordingly, Cēkkiḻār begins his

peruṅkāppiyam with a salutation to Śiva in which he describes some of the deity’s most famous

attributes, such as his cosmic dancing and his matted tresses that hold the Gaṅgā:

Let us worship and adore the flower-ankleted feet

of the One who dances in the hall

of the One whose light is beyond measure

Kantappaiyar’s Tiruttaṇikaiyulā. See Anne E. Monius, Imagining a Place for Buddhism: Literary Culture and

Religious Community in Tamil-Speaking South India (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 15.

Clare “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 65.

Monius adds that Daṇḍin’s “standard features” for mahākāvyas “are not all found in the Maṇimēkalai, a text

concerned primarily with virtue (dharma) and the preparations necessary for undertaking the ascetic life that leads

ultimately to liberation” (Imagining a Place, 15).

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 139.

Tiruttakkatēvar, Cīvakacintāmaṇi 1–3.

Clare “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 106.

Note that this Peruntēvaṉār is a different individual than the author of the ninth-century Tamil Pārataveṇpā.

Monius, “Sanskrit is Mother,” 119.

107

of the One in whose matted locks rest

the abundant waters

of the One difficult to speak of, even if known

to all the world.

Ronit Ricci notes that Vaṇṇapparimaḷappulavar’s sixteenth-century Āyiramacalā “is widely

considered the earliest complete Muslim Tamil text extant.”

She adds that this peruṅkāppiyam

commences with an “invocatory kaṭavuḷ vāḻttu [benediction to god] in which praise is offered to

God, the Prophet, the four caliphs, the Prophet's companions, his grandsons Acaṉ and Ucaiṉ, the

prophets, the saints (avuliyā), the religious scholars, and the imams that founded the four schools

of law.”

The first chapter of Umaṟuppulavar’s Cīṟāppurāṇam, a peruṅkāppiyam about the life

of the Prophet Muḥammad, is actually titled the “Benediction to God Chapter” (Kaṭavuḷ Vāḻttu

Paṭalam) and, as with the Āyiramacalā, it begins with a verse in praise of Allah.

All six books of Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram––a retelling of the Rāmāyaṇa and one of the

most beloved examples of the peruṅkāppiyam genre––begin with an invocation.

In some of the

invocations, it is evident that Rāma is the deity being praised. In the salutation that opens the

Book of Beauty (Sundarakāṇḍam), for example, Kampaṉ extols the ilaṅkaiyil porutār or

“destroyer of Lanka,” which is an epithet that clearly refers to Rāma’s defeat of Rāvaṇa, the

demon king of Lanka (Laṅkā).

In other invocations, however, the identity of the deity being

lauded is not as obvious. Consider the first verse of the Book of the Forest (Āraṇiyakāṇṭam):

Under every different form he is the same. Though they branch out,

in him they are one. And only through him do men finally understand

words they have recited over and over. He is the primal lord whom no [Vedas,]

no Brahmins or gods have comprehended! O knowledge for our [knowing!]

Unlike the invocation in Kampaṉ’s Book of Beauty, this verse does not refer to any well-known

attributes of Rāma. The motif of the divine being unfathomable that permeates this verse is found

in both Vaiṣṇava and Śaiva Tamil bhakti traditions.

The epithet “primal lord” (mutalōr) that

Kampaṉ uses in this opening verse could easily refer to Viṣṇu or Śiva or another deity. Editors

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 1, trans. Monius in “Śiva Heroic Father,” 165.

Ricci, Islam Translated, 98.

Ricci, 100.

Umaṟuppulavar, Cīṟāppurāṇam 1. Also see Vasudha Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity: A

Study of the Tamil Cirappuranam (‘Life of the Prophet’)” in India’s Islamic Traditions, 711–1750, ed. Richard M.

Eaton (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2003), 398.

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram pāyiram 1, 2.1.1, 3.1.1, 4.1.1, 5.1.1, and 6.1.1.

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 5.1.1.

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 3.1.1, trans. George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz in The Forest Book of the Rāmāyaṇa of

Kampaṉ, trans. George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 37.

See Cutler, Songs of Experience, 199.

108

and translators have assumed that all the invocations in the Irāmāvatāram are in praise of Rāma

because this peruṅkāppiyam is a Rāmāyaṇa retelling.

It is important to pause here and take some time to discuss the religious orientation of

Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram. Multiple prominent scholars of Tamil literature have described the

Irāmāvatāram as a work of Vaiṣṇava bhakti.

One reason for this is the consistent presentation

of Rāma as an incarnation of Viṣṇu throughout the Irāmāvatāram. As A.K. Ramanujan notes:

In Vālmīki, Rāma’s character is that not of a god but of a god-man who has to live within the

limits of a human form with all its vicissitudes. Some argue that the references to Rāma’s divinity

and his incarnation for the purpose of destroying Rāvaṇa, and the first and last books of the epic,

in which Rāma is clearly described as a god with such a mission, are later additions. Be that as it

may, in Kampaṉ he is clearly a god.

Throughout the Irāmāvatāram, different characters acknowledge Rāma’s divinity. For example,

in the Book of the Forest, the demon Virādha praises Rāma in a lengthy prayer that is absent

from Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa.

Virādha begins his eulogy with the following verse:

You whose feet cover the world,

whose anklets resound like the Vedas,

how many forms are there for you

to have, you who are everywhere!

Between destruction and creation of a universe

you lie on the cool ocean of milk

and still you enter into all the disparate

elements! How can they possibly contain you?

In this verse, Virādha describes different attributes of Viṣṇu including his incarnation as

Vāmana, the dwarf who spans the earth, heavens, and netherworld in just three steps, and the

iconic image of the deity reclining on the celestial serpent Śeṣanāga in the middle of the

kṣīrasāgara (ocean of milk). Virādha’s prayer to Rāma––which bears a close resemblance to the

hymns that permeate bhakti narrative poems such as the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa, the Tamil

Periyapurāṇam, and the Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas––continues for another fourteen verses.

For example, see Hart and Heifetz, Forest Book, 301.

For example, see Jesudasan and Jesudasan, Tamil Literature, 162; Meenakshisundaran, Tamil Literature, 105;

Varadarajan, Tamiḻ Ilakkiya Varalāṟu, 164–66; Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1974), 147–48; George L. Hart, The

Relation Between Tamil and Classical Sanskrit Literature (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1976), 360; Ramanujan,

“Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas, 32; and David Shulman, “Fire and Flood: The Testing of Sītā in Kampaṉ’s

Irāmāvatāram” in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 90.

Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas,” 32.

See Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa 3.3. I am following: The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India, vol. 3,

Araṇyakāṇḍa, trans. Sheldon I. Pollock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 3.1.47, trans. Hart and Heifetz in Forest Book, 47.

Recall that in Chapter One, I argue that the frequency of devotees singing hymns in praise of the main deity is one

of the four central features of bhakti narrative poems.

109

Another reason why the Irāmāvatāram has been labeled a Vaiṣṇava text is that

Śrīvaiṣṇava hagiographical tradition identifies Kampaṉ as the student and devotee of

Nammāḻvār, the most famous of the twelve Āḻvār poets.

As David Shulman notes, in the

Vinōtaracamañcari (1876), Vīrācāmi Ceṭṭiyār describes a story in which Kampaṉ desires to have

the first public recitation (araṅkēṟṟam) of the Irāmāvatāram at the Raṅganātha temple in

Srirangam (Śrīraṅgam), which is one of the most sacred temples for Śrīvaiṣṇavas.

In the course

of this story, Kampaṉ composes a poem entitled the Caṭakōparantāti (Linked Verses about

Nammāḻvār).

While John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan point out that the Caṭakōparantāti

“is well known in the Śrīvaiṣṇava community and is sometimes published in editions of the

Sacred Collect [the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, the collected poems of the Āḻvārs],”

Norman

Cutler observes that “some scholars question his [Kampaṉ’s] authorship of this work.”

T.P. Meenakshisundaran and Mu. Varadarajan both argue that Kampaṉ was familiar with

the compositions of the Āḻvārs based on a comparison of verses in the Irāmāvatāram and

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār’s ninth-century Periyatirumoḻi (Grand Divine Speech) in which Rāma

describes Guha, the king of the Nishad tribal community, as his fifth brother.

Similarly, in her

work on Kulacēkarāḻvār’s eighth or ninth-century Perumāḷtirumoḻi (Divine Speech by the

Perumāḷ King), Suganya Anandakichenin identifies some salient similarities between Kampaṉ’s

and Kulacēkarāḻvār’s accounts of Daśaratha lamenting the exile of his son Rāma.

Yet while Kampaṉ may have been partly inspired by the poetry of the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, the Irāmāvatāram did not achieve the same status that the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam did within the Śrīvaiṣṇava community. Vasudha Narayanan explains

that “although Tamil Vaishnava poetry composed by the alvars became part of domestic and

Vishnu temple liturgies, and Shaiva poems were used in Shiva temples and Shaivite homes, the

Tamil Ramayana was never pressed into devotional use.”

This differentiates the Irāmāvatāram

from Tulsīdās’s sixteenth-century Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas, which has been called the “Bible of

Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas,” 32.

David Shulman, “From Author to Non-Author in Tamil Literary Legend” in The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in

Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 113–20.

Shulman, 117.

John Carman and Vasudha Narayanan, The Tamil Veda: Piḷḷaṉ’s Interpretation of the Tiruvāymoḻi (Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1989), 19.

Norman Cutler, “Three Moments in the Genealogy of Tamil Literary Culture,” in Literary Cultures in History:

Reconstructions from South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 304.

T.P. Meenakshisundaran, Collected Papers of Prof. T. P. Meenakshisundaran (Annamalainagar: Annamalai

University, 1961), 47; and Varadarajan, Tamiḻ Ilakkiya Varalāṟu, 165–66. Also see Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār

Periyatirumoḻi, 5.8.1; and Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 2.6.73–76.

Suganya Anandakichenin, “Kulacēkara Āḻvār’s ‘The Lament of Daśaratha,’” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 22, no.

2 (2014): 180–87.

Vasudha Narayanan, “The Ramayana and its Muslim Interpreters,” in Questioning Rāmāyaṇas: A South Asian

Tradition, ed. Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 280.

110

North India” due to its religious significance in the region,

and which in the nineteenth century

was directly adopted into the religious practices of two North Indian sectarian communities: the

Rāmānandīs and the Rāmnāmīs.

As Patricia Mumme, Vasudha Narayanan, and Ajay Rao have

all shown, the Rāmāyaṇa (especially Vālmīki’s Sanskrit epic) was an immensely important

narrative for the Śrīvaiṣṇava community in premodern South India.

Rao explains that:

Śrīvaiṣṇava engagement with the Rāma story occurred in three phases: (1) references in Tamil

Āḻvār poetry (sixth to ninth centuries) interspersing specifically Tamil folk traditions and

devotional veneration of Rāma with the basic outline of Vālmīki’s telling; (2) the inscription of

esoteric Maṇipravāla (mixed Tamil and Sanskrit) oral commentary on the Āḻvār poems and

independent esoteric (rahasya) works (eleventh through fourteenth centuries); and (3) the

composition of Sanskrit Rāma poems and full-length Sanskrit commentaries on the Vālmīki

Rāmāyaṇa (thirteenth through sixteenth centuries).

Thus, as Rao notes, “it is curious that the Irāmāvatāram is almost completely without

significance for Śrīvaiṣṇavas…the Irāmāvatāram spawned no Śrīvaiṣṇava commentarial

tradition; moreover, the Irāmāvatāram is rarely, if ever, cited in the rahasya literature.”

In a recent presentation, Anne Monius convincingly argued that “a close reading of

Kampaṉ’s text itself suggests a more complex project at work, that of a Śaiva poet (‘Kampaṉ’ is

also a name of Śiva) seeking to understand the workings of the divine on earth in avatāra or

incarnational form.”

Śiva is a key character in multiple Rāmāyaṇas including the fifteenth-

century Sanskrit Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa, Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas, and the seventeenth-century

Bhasha Ādirāmāyaṇ (Primordial Rāmāyaṇa) of Harjī, a leader of the Mīṇā sectarian Sikh

community.

But Śiva’s prominence in the Irāmāvatāram is unprecedented. Monius notes that

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 1.

See Paramasivan, “Text and Sect”; and Lamb, Rapt in the Name.

Patricia Y. Mumme, “Rāmāyaṇa Exegesis in Teṉkalai Śrīvaiṣṇavism,” in Many Rāmāyaṇas: The Diversity of a

Narrative Tradition in South Asia, ed. Paula Richman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 202–16;

Vasudha Narayan, “The Rāmāyaṇa in the Theology and Experience of the Śrīvaiṣṇava Community,” Journal of

Vaishnava Studies 2, no. 4 (1994): 55–90; and Ajay K. Rao, Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa as Theology: A History of

Reception in Premodern India (New York: Routledge, 2015).

Rao, Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa, 7.

Rao, 7.

Anne E. Monius, “Rāma and Sītā in a Śaiva Literary Key? Rethinking the Literary and Religious Orientation of

Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram” (paper presented at the Institute for South Asia Studies at the University of California,

Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, May 3, 2018).

As Yigal Bronner has shown, the sixteenth-century South Indian poet-scholar Appayyadīkṣita argues that Vālmīki’s

Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa is a Śaiva text. See “A Text with a Thesis: The Rāmāyaṇa from Appayya Dīkṣita’s Receptive

End,” in South Asian Texts in History: Critical Engagements with Sheldon Pollock, ed. Whitney Cox, Yigal

Bronner, and Lawrence McCrea, (Ann Arbor: Association for Asian Studies, 2011), 45–63.

On Śiva’s role in the Adhyātmarāmāyaṇa and the Rāmcaritmānas, see Chapter One. On Śiva in the Ādirāmāyaṇ,

see Hardip Singh Syan, Sikh Militancy in the Seventeenth-Century (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 163–64.

111

in Kampaṉ’s poem Śiva’s name appears more times than that of Rāma. This is in stark contrast

to the overtly Vaiṣṇava Rāmāyaṇa of Tulsīdās which stress the potency of Rāma’s name.

The reason why I have taken the time to discuss the religious orientation of the

Irāmāvatāram and questioned its categorization as a Śrīvaiṣṇava text is because in Chapter Five,

I will propose that Villi’s overall project with the Pāratam is to create the first Śrīvaiṣṇava

peruṅkāppiyam. I should point out that the Pāratam is not the first Śrīvaiṣṇava mahākāvya. The

Yādavābhyudaya is a Sanskrit mahākāvya about the life of Krishna by the Śrīvaiṣṇava poet-

philosopher Vedāntadeśika (traditional dates: 1268–1369 CE). Vedāntadeśika begins the

Yādavābhyudaya with an invocation that also happens to be the first verse of his Sanskrit stotra

to Krishna, the Gopālaviṃśati (Twenty Verses to Gopāla):

His shining body lights up the woods

of Vrindavan;

cherished lover of the simple

cowherd girls,

he was born on Jayanti

when Rohini touches,

on the eighth day,

the waning moon

in Avani:

this luminous power

that wears Vaijayanti

the long garland of victory,

I praise Him!

In this invocation, Vedāntadeśika is clearly paying tribute to Krishna with allusions to several

aspects of the deity’s youth such as his birth, his childhood home of Vrindavan, and his role as

the lover of the gopīs.

As with several peruṅkāppiyams, such as the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the

Periyapurāṇam, and the Āyiramacalā, the very first verse of Vedāntadeśika’s Yādavābhyudaya,

alerts readers to the religious content of this South Indian Śrīvaiṣṇava mahākāvya.

While Kampaṉ opens each of the six books of his peruṅkāppiyam with an invocation, not

all of these invocations are clear indicators of the sectarian identity of Irāmāvatāram. As we will

soon see, unlike the ambiguous salutation in the Book of the Forest of Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram

that may or may not be addressed to Rāma, the thirty-seven different invocations in the Pāratam

all make it abundantly clear that Villi’s poem is a Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam.

On the importance of Rāma’s name in the Rāmcaritmānas, see Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 39–43.

Vedāntadeśika, Yādavābhyudaya 1.1, trans. Steven P. Hopkins in “Sanskrit from Tamil Nadu,”292–93. This is

Hopkin’s translation of the first verse of the Gopālaviṃśati.

I should also point out that Vedāntadeśika begins each of the thirty-two chapters of his Manipravala

Rahasyatrayasāra (Essence of the Three Secret Teachings) with a Sanskrit invocation. See Manasicha

Akeyipapornchai, “Translation in a Multilingual Context: The Mixture of Sanskrit and Tamil Languages in

Medieval South Indian Śrīvaiṣṇava Religious Tradition,” Journal of South Asian Intellectual History 2 (2020): 157.

112

Paying Homage to the Śrīvaiṣṇava Pārataveṇpā

Along with marking his composition as a Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam, Villi’s use of invocations

is a clear nod to the multiple invocations scattered throughout an earlier Tamil Śrīvaiṣṇava

Mahābhārata: Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Pārataveṇpā (Bhārata in Veṇpā Meter).

As I noted in the Introduction, the Pārataveṇpā is the earliest extant Mahābhārata in a

regional South Asian language. The only surviving portions of the Pārataveṇpā are the Book of

Effort (Uttiyōkaparuvam), the Book of Bhīṣma (Vīṭṭumaparuvam), and part of the Book of Droṇa

(Turōṇaparuvam). Kamil Zvelebil notes that the existing version of the Tamil Pārataveṇpā only

has around “800 stanzas of an estimated 12,000.”

Peruntēvaṉār’s composition has been

described as a campū, a mixed prose-poem.

As Srilata Raman points out, in the Pārataveṇpā

“the poetry was in classical Tamil (= centamiḻ) while the prose sections were in maṇipravāḷa or a

heavily sanskritized Tamil.”

Raman also describes Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā as “the first

literary work with what might be called passages of Tamil maṇipravāḷa.”

Peruntēvaṉār’s use of

Manipravala in the Pārataveṇpā predates the extensive use of Manipravala in the Śrīvaiṣṇava

commentarial tradition between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries.

The patron of the Pārataveṇpā is usually understood to be the Pallava king Nandivarman

III (r. 846–869) because of the poem’s fourth verse, which describes Peruntēvaṉār’s patron as the

one who was triumphant at the river Teḷḷāṟu.

Emmanuel Francis notes that fifteen verses of a

ninth-century Tamil poem in praise of Nandivarman III, the Nantikkalampakam (Kalampakam to

Nandivarman), describe Nandivarman III “as a Pallava victorious in Teḷḷāṟu” and that

Nandivarman III “bore a specific epithet invoking this deed in local Tamil inscriptions.”

The

Mahābhārata narrative was at the center of the religious and courtly life of the Pallavas who

claimed Droṇa’s son Aśvatthāman as their “dynastic founder.”

The Nantikkalampakam also

describes Nandivarman III as a member of the Candravaṃśa or “lunar dynasty,” the clan of the

Kamil V. Zvelebil, Companion Studies to the History of Tamil Literature (New York: Brill, 1992), 66.

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 116; and Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 72

Raman, Self-Surrender, 63.

Raman, 63.

See Raman, 62–65; and Suganya Anandakichenin and Erin McCann, “Towards Understanding the Śrīvaiṣṇava

Commentary on the Nālāyira Tivviya Pirapantam: The Blending of Two Worlds and Two Languages,” in The

Commentary Idioms of the Tamil Learned Traditions, ed. Suganya Anandakichenin and Victor B. D’Avella

(Pondicherry: Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2020), 392–94.

Pārataveṇpā 4. Also see Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 116; Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and

Variations, 61; and Zvelebil, Companion Studies, 66–67.

Emmanuel Francis, “Praising the King in Tamil during the Pallava Period” in Bilingual Discourse and Cross-

cultural Fertilisation: Sanskrit and Tamil in Medieval India, ed. Whitney Cox and Vincenzo Vergiani (Pondicherry:

Institut Français de Pondichéry, 2013), 387–388. Also see Nantikkalampakam 32, 33, 37, 42, 53, 56, 57, 68, 75, 79,

82, 84, 85, 90, and 91. I am following: Nantikkalampakam, ed. Pu. Ci. Punnaivanata Mutaliyar (Tirunelveli: The

South India Saiva Siddhanta Works Publishing Society, 1961).

Shulman, Tamil, 142.

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Pāṇḍavas.

Temple and land endowments reveal that the Pallavas sponsored the recitation of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata in temples starting in the seventh century.

Finally, many of the rock

reliefs depicting scenes from the Mahābhārata in the town of Mahabalipuram (Māmallapuram) in

present-day Tamil Nadu were produced under the patronage of King Narasiṃhavarman I (r. 630–

688).

That Nandivarman III might have patronized a Tamil retelling of an epic so strongly

engrained in the courtly milieu of the Pallavas is thus not surprising.

As with Villi, we know very little about Peruntēvaṉār’s life. Since the Nantikkalampakam

and the Pārataveṇpā both claim Nandivarman III as their patron, Kambalur Venkatesa Acharya

has suggested that Peruntēvaṉār also composed the Nantikkalampakam.

Shulman and Clare

have both speculated that the author of the Pārataveṇpā may be Pāratam Pāṭiya Peruntēvaṉār or

“Peruntēvaṉār Who Sang the Bhārata,” the poet credited with writing the invocations found in

the beginning of five of the eight Caṅkam anthologies: the Akaṉāṉūṟu, the Aiṅkuṟuṉūṟu, the

Kuṟuntokai, the Naṟṟiṇai, and the Puṟanāṉūṟu.

There is a general consensus that the

invocations of the five Caṅkam anthologies are late additions to these ancient Tamil texts.

Not

all scholars, however, think that the composer of the Pārataveṇpā also wrote the invocations of

the Caṅkam anthologies. M.S.H. Thompson argues that Pāratam Pāṭiya Peruntēvaṉār was the

author of an “early Sangam Pāratam” that is cited in Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s fourteenth-century

commentary on the ancient Tamil grammar, the Tolkāppiyam.

Zvelebil also claims that the

verses in Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s commentary are by Pāratam Pāṭiya Peruntēvaṉār, but says that his

text “may probably be dated into the middle of the eighth century.”

Zvelebil, like Thompson,

discusses tenth-century copper plates from Cinnamanur that refer to “an early Pāṇḍya ruler who

established a Maturai caṅkam [academy]” that “Tamilised the Mahābhārata.”

But unlike

Thompson who thinks this is a reference to Pāratam Pāṭiya Peruntēvaṉār’s Caṅkam

Mahābhārata, Zvelebil says that the text referred to in the plates “is not available today, and the

Nantikkalampakam 43; and Kesevan Veluthat, The Political Structure of Early Medieval South India (Delhi:

Orient Blackswan, 2012), 77.

C. Minakshi, Administration and Social Life Under the Pallavas (Madras: University of Madras, 1931), 196 and

237; and Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadi 1, 14.

Hiltebeitel, 14.

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 62.

Clare, “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 107; and Shulman, Tamil, 146.

Eva Maria Wilden, for example, suggests that these invocations were composed in the late sixth or early seventh

century. Wilden’s main two pieces of evidence for this claim are that 1) in this time period the memory of the

structure of the old āciriyappā meter “is still intact” and 2) the way these opening verses each “directly approach” a

deity is a reflection of a time “when the institution of the temple is already in existence (as is shown by the early

Vaiṣṇava canonical poems of the 6th century), but not yet the exclusive matrix for personal devotion” (Manuscript,

Print and Memory: Relics of the Caṅkam in Tamilnadu [Boston: De Gruyter, 2014], 31–32).

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 115.

Kamil Zvelebil, The Smile of Murugan: On Tamil Literature of South India (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 30.

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 115; and Zvelebil, Companion Studies, 66.

114

name of its Tamil author remains unknown.”

To make matters even more confusing, Alf

Hiltebeitel states that there is “inscriptional and literary evidence” of a Mahābhārata “by a certain

Peruntēvaṉār in the Caṅkam period of the early Pandyas in Madurai” and that Shulman (via

personal communication) “suggests a date of about A.D. 300.”

What we can say with certainty about the author of the Pārataveṇpā is that he is deeply

familiar with the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious tradition. Hiltebeitel describes Peruntēvaṉār as “a

Vaiṣṇava poet steeped in the idioms of the Āḻvārs”

and as Venkatesa Acharya

demonstrates in

his detailed study of the Pārataveṇpā, Peruntēvaṉār presents his Mahābhārata as “a drama of the

ubiquity of Tirumāl [the Tamil form of Viṣṇu].”

One prominent example of Peruntēvaṉār’s

devotion to Viṣṇu/Krishna is the 150 lines in akaval meter that Peruntēvaṉār uses to describe

Krishna’s display of his celestial form to the Kaurava court in Hastinapura during his peace

embassy in the Book of Effort of the Pārataveṇpā.

Twenty-nine of these lines all end with the

word pōṟṟi which means “praise” or “hail.”

Here is a short excerpt from this section:

We praise the lord who sucked the breast of the goblin.

We praise the name of Māl who measured the worlds.

We praise the māyā of the one who crawled between the maruta trees.

We praise the great god who churned the great ocean.

We praise the lord who lifted the large mountain.

These lines bring to mind the first six lines of the twenty-fourth verse of the Tamil Tiruppāvai

(Divine Vow) of the Āḻvār poetess (and Peruntēvaṉār’s possible contemporary), Āṇṭāḷ:

That time long ago you measured these worlds

We praise your feet.

You went there and razed southern Laṅka

We praise your strength.

You kicked Śakaṭa and killed him

We praise your fame.

Thompson, 115; and Zvelebil, 66.

Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadi 1:13.

Alf Hiltebeitel, Non-Violence in the Mahābhārata: Śiva’s Summa on Ṛṣidharmā and the Gleaners of Kurukṣetra

(New York: Routledge, 2016), 148.

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 71.

Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 212.1–150.

Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 212.111–139. Also see Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 109–11.

pēy mulai uṇṭa pirāṉē pōṟṟi

pēr ulaka aḷanta mālē pōṟṟi

maruta iṭai tavaḻnta māyā pōṟṟi

mā kaṭal kaṭainta makēcā pōṟṟi

peru varai eṭutta pirāṉē pōṟṟi || Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 212.119–23 ||

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You threw that calf, broke him like a twig

We praise your anklets.

You lifted the mountain as an umbrella

We praise your virtue.

We praise the triumphant spear held in your hand

that ravages your enemies.

Steven Hopkins explains that in the Śrīvaiṣṇava literature of the Āḻvārs and the ācāryas

(preceptors) “Krishna comes, as it were, layered with other forms (avatāras or ‘incarnations’) of

Vishnu.”

We encounter a layered Krishna in both of these excerpts from the Pārataveṇpā and

the Tiruppāvai. In the lines from the Pārataveṇpā, Peruntēvaṉār describes three well-known

tales from Krishna’s childhood: Krishna nursing at the breasts of the demoness Pūtanā, Krishna

splitting two maruta/arjuna trees while being tied to a mortar, and Krishna lifting Mount

Govardhana. Yet Peruntēvaṉār also layers this Krishna with two other incarnations of Viṣṇu:

Vāmana, the dwarf who measured the three worlds, and Kūrma, the tortoise who supported

Mount Mandāra on his back during the churning of the ocean of milk. In the twenty-fourth verse

of the Tiruppāvai, Krishna is layered with Vāmana and Rāma. Also, as with the twenty-nine

lines in the Pārataveṇpā, the first six lines of the Tiruppāvai verse all end with the word pōṟṟi.

As I noted in Chapter Two, Villi inserts a number of episodes into his rendering of the

Book of Effort that are not found in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which Krishna takes specific

measures to ensure that the Pāṇḍavas emerge victorious in the battle with the Kauravas.

Each

of these episodes are also found in Peruntēvaṉār’s Book of Effort.

Some of these sequences,

such as Krishna directing Kuntī to go see Karṇa, are found in other premodern South Indian

Mahābhāratas like Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam and Kumāravyāsa’s

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī.

Others episodes, however, like Krishna pretending to be asleep

when Duryodhana comes seeking help in the war and Krishna sending Indra to Karṇa, are only

found in the Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam. Based on these and other shared scenes in the

Āṇṭāḷ, Tiruppāvai 24, trans. Venkatesan in Āṇṭāḷ, Secret Garland, 74.

Hopkins, “Sanskrit from Tamil Nadu,” 287.

The word pōṟṟi is also found at the end of 139 lines of the Pōṟṟi Tiruvakaval or “Divine Hymn of Praise” in the

Tiruvācakam of the ninth-century Śaiva bhakti poet, Māṇikkavācakar. See Māṇikkavācakar, Pōṟṟi Tiruvakaval 87–

225 of the Tiruvācakam. I am following: The Tiruvāçagam, Or, Sacred Utterances of the Tamil Poet, Saint, and

Sage Māṇikka-Vāçagar, trans. G.U. Pope (Oxford: Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1900), 35–43.

VP 5.4.1– 264.

Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 117–233.

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 318; Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 5.8.64–68;

and Subramanian, Mahabharata Story, 199

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Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam, multiple Tamil scholars have argued that Villi must have been

familiar with Peruntēvaṉār’s earlier Tamil Mahābhārata.

Another striking similarity between the Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam is the number of

invocations in both Tamil Mahābhāratas. Commenting on the Pārataveṇpā, Zvelebil explains

that “at the beginning of every new portion of his book, the poet has an introductory stanza

praising Tirumāl (Viṣṇu). If the entire text would have survived, we would have more than 100

such stanzas––in other words, a whole stotraprabandha [collection of stotras] on Viṣṇu.”

There are a total of seventeen invocations in the surviving version of the Pārataveṇpā.

Notably,

Villi frequently places an invocation in the same place in the narrative of the Pāratam that

Peruntēvaṉār does in the Pārataveṇpā. For example, both Peruntēvaṉār and Villi begin their

accounts of each day of the Battle of Kurukṣetra with an invocation.

Both Tamil poets also

commence their poems with a verse in praise of the elephant-headed deity, Gaṇeśa. Peruntēvaṉār

opens the Pārataveṇpā with the following benediction:

When I recite [and praise] the feet of the elephant

with the single tusk that inscribes the battle of the Bhārata

on top of the great mountain with the peak covered with cold snow,

sins vanish, rising praise overflows

and as desire is fulfilled,

everything will come into my hands.

Villi’s taṟciṟappuppāyiram begins with this invocation to Gaṇeśa:

Let us declare our love,

having worshiped the god

who wrote with his own tusk as his beautiful sharp stylus

and with Mount Meru of the North as his palm leaf

that day when the king of sages (Vyāsa)

with his everlasting penance and truthfulness

recited the Mahābhārata so that it may endure

as the fifth along with the four Vedas

in the world with the deep seas.

See Sankaran and Raja, “Sources of Villiputtūrār,” 231; Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 121; Venkatesa

Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 105; Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadī 1:15; and Manavalan, “Tamil Versions of

Mahābhārata,” 334–35.

Zvelebil, Companion Studies, 68

Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 1, 2, 3, 387, 484, 514, 532, 546, 559, 571, 583, 590, 618, 629, 678, 711, and 771.

Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 484, 514, 532, 546, 559, 571, 583, 590, 618, 629, 678, 711, and 771; and VP 6.1.1,

6.2.1, 6.3.1, 6.4.1, 6.5.1, 6.6.1, 6.7.1, 6.8.1, 6.9.1, 6.10.1, 7.1.1, 7.2.1, 7.3.1, 7.4.1, 7.5.1, 8.1.1, 8.2.1, and 9.1.1.

ōta viṉai akalum ōṅku pukaḻ perukum

kātal poruḷa aṉaittum kai kūṭum cīta

paṉi kōṭṭu māl varai mēl pāratam pōr tīṭṭum

taṉi kōṭṭu vāraṇattiṉ tāḷ || Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 1 ||

nīṭu āḻi ulakattu maṟai nāloṭu aintu eṉṟu nilai niṟkavē

vāṭāta tava vāymai muṉirācaṉ māpāratam coṉṉa nāḷ ēṭu

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While many works of South Asian literature begin by paying homage to Gaṇeśa because of his

role as the remover of obstacles, Gaṇeśa plays an especially important role in the Mahābhārata

tradition since he is frequently regarded as the original scribe of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Although the story of Vyāsa dictating the Mahābhārata to Gaṇeśa is absent from the critical

edition of the epic, James Fitzgerald notes that “the vision of a chubby boy with the elephant’s

head sitting amid stacks of palm leaves at Vyāsa’s feet in the latter’s remote forest retreat,

breathlessly running his pen over leaf after leaf, must have charmed Indian audiences through the

ages.”

By describing Gaṇeśa transcribing the Mahābhārata, Peruntēvaṉār and Villi place

themselves in the lineage of individuals who have transmitted this epic tradition.

Yet, although both Peruntēvaṉār and Villi begin their poems by invoking Gaṇeśa in his

role as the Sanskrit Mahābhārata’s first stenographer, the individual invocations to Krishna and

other forms of the deity throughout the rest of the Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam are quite

different from each other. Consider, for example, each of the invocations that Peruntēvaṉār and

Villi use to commence their accounts of the first day of the Battle at Kurukṣetra in their

respective renderings of the Book of Bhīṣma. First, Peruntēvaṉār’s salutation in the Pārataveṇpā:

Is there suffering for those who have spoken of

Tiruvēṅkaṭam with its sweet, rising groves,

the hill with groves reaching the sky,

Teṉṉaraṅkam,

and Tiruvattiyūr?

This verse is in praise of four locations that Archana Venkatesan describes as “the four important

pilgrimage sites” for Śrīvaiṣṇavas in South India:

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the Veṅkaṭeśvara temple in Tirupati

(Tiruvēṅkaṭam), the Kaḷḷaḻakar temple in Vanagiri (“the hill with groves reaching the sky”), the

Raṅganātha temple in Teṉṉaraṅkam (Srirangam), and the Varadarājasvāmī temple (Tiruvattiyūr)

in Kanchipuram (Kāñcipuram). As Narayanan points out, “the Lord enshrined in the temple is

the focus of many Āḻvār hymns…the Āḻvārs celebrate several holy places in their songs, and

later the number of these places were given as 108, a holy number in the Hindu and Buddhist

traditions.”

101

All four of the sites listed in Peruntēvaṉār’s verse are included in the 108

āka vaṭa mēru veṟpu āka am kūr eḻuttāṇi taṉ

kōṭu āka eḻutum pirāṉai paṇintu aṉpu kūrvām arō || VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 1 ||

Paul B. Courtright, Gaṇeśa: Lord of Obstacles, Lord of Beginnings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),

151–53.

James L. Fitzgerald, “India’s Fifth Veda: The Mahābhārata’s Presentation of Itself,” in Essays on the

Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 151.

tēṉ ōṅku cōlai tiruvēṅkaṭam eṉṟum

vāṉ ōṅku cōlai malai eṉṟum tāṉ ōṅku

teṉṉaraṅkam eṉṟum tiruvattiyūr eṉṟum

coṉṉavarkkum uṇṭō tuyar || Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 484 ||

100

Archana Venkatesan, “Annotations to Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi” in Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi (Endless Song:

Tiruvāymoḻi), trans. Archana Venkatesan (Gurgaon: Penguin Books, 2020), 355.

101

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 33.

118

Śrīvaiṣṇava divyadeśams or “divine places.” Note that Peruntēvaṉār never actually gives the

name of any of the local forms of Viṣṇu (Veṅkaṭeśvara, Aḻakar, Raṅganātha, and

Varadarājasvāmī) in these South Indian temples in this invocation in the Pārataveṇpā. Yet as

Narayanan explains in her analysis of a verse from Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi in praise of Aḻakar

in Vanagiri, “just saying the name Tirumāliruñcōlai [Vanagiri] (“The grove where the Lord

abides”) is enough for the Lord to fill the heart of the poet.”

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It is also important to recognize

that this verse is not in praise of Viṣṇu per se, but Viṣṇu’s devotees.

Let us now turn to the verse that Villi uses to begin his “First Day of War Chapter”

(Mutalpōrcarukkam) in the Book of Bhīṣma of the Pāratam:

Our king indeed is

the difficult to reach flood

of overflowing wisdom and joy,

the three starting with the creator,

the foremost among those three,

everyone and everything,

the many gods for worshipers to worship,

Māl with red, lovely eyes.

103

In this invocation, Villi draws on multiple Śrīvaiṣṇava tropes and images. One of these tropes is

the idea that Brahmā, Viṣṇu, and Śiva, the trinity of three great Hindu deities known as the

trimūrti, are all one. Cutler notes that in the Tiruvāymoḻi:

Nammāḻvār more often speaks of the three mūrtis as aspects of one supreme god. Sometimes he

does not name Viṣṇu in the poem, but merely states that “the lord” or “he” became Brahmā and

Śiva, or that he contains Brahmā and Śiva. In some of his poems Nammāḻvār implies that Viṣṇu

is prior to or superior to the other mūrtis, but in others the three great gods are grouped together

as three manifestations of one supreme being.

104

In this invocation in the Pāratam, Villi first tells us that Viṣṇu contains Brahmā and Śiva before

proclaiming that Viṣṇu is the “foremost” among the trimūrti. Villi also describes Viṣṇu as “our

king” (eṅkaḷ kō) in this verse. As Cutler observes, “the heroic, kingly nature of the lord comes

through plainly in the Tamil bhakti poems, and this aspect of the lord’s character is the central

theme of several poetic genres included in the bhakti corpus.”

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Finally, in this verse Villi

speaks of Māl, the distinctly Tamil form of Viṣṇu also known as Māyaṉ, Māyavaṉ, and Māyōṉ.

The multiple shared episodes and the similar placement of invocations in the

Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam strongly suggest that Villi had access to Peruntēvaṉār’s

composition. The vastly different themes of the salutations that Peruntēvaṉār and Villi each use

102

Narayanan, 38. The verse Narayanan is analyzing is Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 10.8.1.

103

mēvu aru ñāṉam āṉantam veḷḷam āy vitittōṉ āti

mūvarum āki anta mūvarkkuḷ mutalvaṉ āki

yāvarum yāvum āki iṟaiñcuvār iṟaiñca pal pal

tēvarum āki niṉṟa cemkaṇ māl eṅkaḷ kōvē || VP 6.1.1 ||

104

Cutler, Songs of Experience, 197.

105

Cutler, 202.

119

to begin their narratives of the first day of the Battle at Kurukṣetra, however, make it clear that

Villi is not simply copying or even putting his own spin on Peruntēvaṉār’s invocation. The same

is true for the rest of the invocations to Krishna in the Pārataveṇpā and the Pāratam. Villi is

certainly paying tribute to Peruntēvaṉār’s practice of using multiple invocations that speak to

Śrīvaiṣṇavas, but he is not attempting to replicate each one of Peruntēvaṉār’s invocatory verses.

Establishing a Śrīvaiṣṇava Bhakti Milieu

Let us now take a closer look at how the various invocations in Villi’s Pāratam firmly place this

Tamil Mahābhārata retelling in a distinctly Śrīvaiṣṇava devotional setting. The first of the thirty-

seven invocations to different forms of Krishna is in the second chapter of Villi’s Book of the

Beginnings, the “Origins Chapter” (Campavaccarukkam):

In utter darkness, becoming a respected woman,

transforming her own form into that of a mother,

overflowing with love, coming and picking him up,

embracing him, her heart rejoicing

and caressing him with affection,

the demoness with great breasts of milk melted.

The red lotus feet

of the youthful, beautiful body

of the dark Gopāla who sucked life from her

never leave my mind.

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This invocation tells the story of Pūtanā, the child-slaughtering demoness who is sent by

Krishna’s maternal uncle Kaṃsa to kill the infant Krishna. While Krishna’s encounter with

Pūtanā is briefly alluded to in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata,

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one of the

earliest detailed accounts of this story is found in the Sanskrit Harivaṃśa, the text about Krishna

and his family that the Mahābhārata labels a khila or “appendix”:

Later, at the appointed hour of midnight, Kamsa the Bhoja’s wet-nurse, the famous Pūtanā,

appeared in the form of a bird. Chirping again and again in a voice as deep as a tiger’s, she

perched on the cart’s axle and sprayed out a squirted stream. That night, while everyone was

asleep, she offered Krishna her breast. Krishna drained her breast, and with it her life, and he

roared. The bird fell to the ground immediately, her breast in tatters.

108

While Pūtanā takes the form of a bird in the Harivaṃśa, John Stratton Hawley points out that “in

other puranic versions of the Pūtanā story, however, she is merely said to be a female who preys

106

ariya kaṅkuliṉ aṉṉai taṉ vaṭivu koṇṭu alakai ākiya naṅkai

parivu poṅka vantu eṭuttu aṇaittu uvantu uḷam parintu uṭaṉ pārāṭṭa

urukum mā mulai pāluṭaṉ avaḷ uyir uṇṭu aḻum muruku ār mey

kariya kōvalaṉ ceyya tāḷ malarkaḷ eṉ karuttai viṭṭu akalāvē || VP 1.2.1 ||

107

MBh 2.38.4 and 5.128.45.

108

Harivaṃśa 50.20–22, trans. Brodbeck in Krishna’s Lineage, 162.

120

upon children.”

109

Perhaps the most famous version of the tale of Pūtanā is the one found in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa. In this text, Pūtanā adopts the form of a beautiful woman:

The gopīs, the cowherd women, saw a shapely, attractively dressed woman with flowers entwined

in her braid. Her waist was heavy with voluptuous hips and breasts, and her face and hair were

bright with shining ear-ornaments. The male residents of Vraj, their minds bewitched by her

sideways glances and beautiful smiles, thought that she was like Śrī, the goddess of fortune,

coming to her husband with a lotus flower in her hand.

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This account of Pūtanā transforming herself into an attractive woman in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa

brings to mind descriptions of other demonesses adopting the forms of enchanting maidens, such

as Hiḍimbā in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Śūrpaṇakhā in Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram and

Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas.

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Yet in Villi’s invocation in the “Origins Chapter,” Pūtanā does not

disguise herself as a bird or as a beautiful temptress, but as a mother (aṉṉai).

The image of Pūtanā taking on the form of a mother is a familiar one in the Śrīvaiṣṇava

tradition. In a verse in the Tiruvāymoḻi, for instance, Nammāḻvār tells his audience that:

She came disguised as a perfect mother

with a pure heart,

but you a small child with great wisdom

suckled at her poisoned breast

supreme Puruṣaṉ with shoulders vast as mountains,

asleep on a serpent

My beauty is useless

if it can’t enchant the great lord of mystery.

112

In the fourth chapter of the Sanskrit Yādavābhyudaya, Vedāntadeśika explicitly describes Pūtanā

disguising herself as Krishna’s adoptive mother Yaśodā when she arrives in Vrindavan.

113

Later

on in the Tamil Pāratam, Krishna’s cousin Śiśupāla brings up the story of Pūtanā when he is

insulting Krishna during Yudhiṣṭhira’s royal consecration ceremony. As in Villi’s invocation in

the “Origins Chapter,” Villi’s Śiśupāla describes Pūtanā taking on the form of a mother. But

unlike Vedāntadeśika who says that Pūtanā became Yaśodā, Villi (through Śiśupāla) states that

Pūtanā adopted the form of Krishna’s birth mother, Devakī:

Did he not drink Pūtanā’s life or was it her flowing breast milk

when she assuming the form of his birth mother

and holding him at her two breasts

with her heart melting

gave him the milk that was like nectar?

109

John Stratton Hawley, “Krishna and the Birds,” Ars Orientalis 17 (1987): 138.

110

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.6.5–6, trans. Bryant in Krishna: Beautiful Legend, 32.

111

MBh 1.139; Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 3.7; and Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 3.17.

112

Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 4.8.3, trans. Venkatesan in Nammāḻvār, Endless Song, 151.

113

Vedāntadeśika, Yādavābhyudaya 4.3.

121

He cried, having been tied to the mortar with the rope

because his excellent mother (Yaśodā)

had seen him eat with the help of the great mortar

the milk, fragrant ghee, and the curds

in pots hanging on ropes that could not be reached.

114

Regardless of whether Pūtanā takes on the appearance of Devakī, Yaśodā, or simply a generic

mother in the invocation in the “Origins Chapter,” what is clear is that Villi is utilizing vātsalya-

bhāva or the “emotional state of a parent.” Kulacēkarāḻvār, Periyāḻvār, and Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār all

use the idiom of the relationship between a mother and a child to express their love for Krishna

in an intimate and familiar way in their compositions.

115

As I pointed out in the Introduction,

Periyāḻvār, the first poet readers encounter in the Tamil Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, frequently

adopts the persona of Yaśodā. In one particularly lovely set of ten verses in Periyāḻvār’s

Tirumoḻi, Yaśodā is overcome with the urge to nurse Kṛṣṇa, and each verse ends with her

begging the baby to eat.

116

In the first verse in this set, Yaśodā tells her foster son:

Bull of the cowherds who sleeps on a serpent,

wake up now to suck my breast.

You went to sleep without eating last night

and now it’s nearly noon, is it not?

I don’t see you coming, your tummy must be grumbling.

Drops of milk trickle from my breast.

Come cling close to me, kicking up your feet

and drink, sucking with your blessed lips.

117

Villi is clearly playing with the emotion of parental love in this invocation. Although she has

been sent to murder Krishna by Kaṃsa, Pūtanā is completely enchanted by the irresistible infant,

and the immensely affectionate physical reaction she has to Kṛṣṇa mirrors that of Yaśodā in

Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi. In both the Tirumoḻi and the Pāratam, the love that Villi’s Pūtanā and

Periyāḻvār’s Yaśodā have for the adorable Krishna causes their breasts to overflow with milk.

Pūtanā thus almost seems to be a Krishna devotee herself in Villi’s invocation.

118

With this introductory invocation in the “Origins Chapter,” Villi reminds his South

Indian audience of the lovable Krishna of Vrindavan who exists primarily outside of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata and who pervades the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and other South Indian Vaiṣṇava

bhakti compositions, such as the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and Vedāntadeśika’s Gopālaviṃśati and

114

īṉṟa tāy vaṭivam koṇṭu uḷam uruki iṇai mulai taṭattu aṇaittu amutam

pōṉṟa pāl koṭuppa poḻi mulai pālō pūtaṉai uyir kolō nukarntāṉ

cāṉṟa pēr uralāl uṟi toṟum eṭṭā tayiruṭaṉ naṟu ney pāl arunti

āṉṟa tāy kaṇṭu vaṭattiṉil piṇippa aṇi uraluṭaṉ iruntu aḻutāṉ || VP 2.1.118 ||

115

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 31–33.

116

Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 2.2.1–10.

117

Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 2.2.1, trans. Ate in Periyāḻvār, Yaśodā’s Songs, 101.

118

I should point out that the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (10.6.35) depicts Pūtanā as a participant in dveṣa bhakti or “hate-

devotion,” a concept that I will discuss shortly.

122

Yādavābhyudaya. While some of Villi’s invocations are solely in praise of the adult Krishna of

the Mahābhārata tradition,

119

others exclusively retell episodes featuring the child Krishna,

including his splitting of the maruta trees with the mortar, his antics with the local gopīs, and his

victory over Kaṃsa.

120

By beginning different chapters of the Pāratam with these invocations,

Villi ensures that his readers do not forget the first half of Krishna’s carita.

It is important to recognize, however, that as in earlier Śrīvaiṣṇava compositions, such as

the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Pārataveṇpā, the Krishna of several of the invocations in

Villi’s Pāratam is a “layered” Krishna. The image of a layered Krishna can be traced back to the

Mutaltiruvantāti (First Divine Linked Verses) of Poykaiyāḻvār, one of the earliest Āḻvār poets. In

the following verse, Poykaiyāḻvār identifies Krishna with Vāmana:

My mouth praises no one but the lord,

my hands worship no one but the lord

who bounded over the world,

my ears hear no name, my eyes see no form

but the name and form of the lord

who made a meal of the poison he sucked

from the she-devil’s breast.

121

Villi continues the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition of presenting a layered Krishna with many of his

invocatory verses. While some of Villi’s invocations only describe two forms of Viṣṇu, such as

Krishna and Rāma, or Krishna and Vāmana,

122

others layer Krishna with several other forms of

Viṣṇu. In the invocation to the first chapter of the Book of Effort, for instance, Villi speaks of

Viṣṇu’s first seven incarnations: Matsya (the fish), Kūrma, Varāha (the boar), Narasiṃha,

Vāmana, Paraśurāma, and Rāma.

123

The final invocation in the Pāratam (which we will look at

in more detail shortly) is in praise of the daśāvatāra (ten primary incarnations) cycle of Viṣṇu.

One particularly striking invocation in which Villi layers Krishna is the one in the Book

of Bhīṣma’s fourth chapter, the “Third Day of War Chapter” (Mūṉṟāmpōrccarukkam):

The feet ended the curse placed on the searched for Ahalyā.

The extensive feet measured all of the expansive worlds.

The red feet kicked and killed the swift cart and danced on top of the snake.

The feet ruled me.

124

119

VP 2.1.1, 5.5.1, 6.2.1, and 7.4.1.

120

VP 6.7.1, 5.2.1, and 8.1.1.

121

Poykaiyāḻvār, Mutaltiruvantāti 11, trans. Cutler in Songs of Experience, 125.

122

VP 5.7.1. and 8.2.1.

123

VP 5.1.1.

124

tēṭiya akalikai cāpam tīrtta tāḷ

nīṭiya ulaku elām aḷantu nīṇṭa tāḷ

oṭiya cakaṭu iṟa utaittu pāmpiṉ mēl

āṭi um civanta tāḷ eṉṉai āṇṭa tāḷ || VP 6.4.1 ||

123

As with the very first invocation in the Pāratam about Pūtanā, the end of this verse in the “Third

Day of War Chapter” praises the child Krishna of Vrindavan with references to his defeat of the

cart-demon Śakaṭa and his dance on the head of the poisonous serpent Kāliya. With the opening

lines of this invocation, however, Villi is also layering Krishna with Rāma, the prince whose

touch releases the ascetic woman Ahalyā from a terrible curse, and with Vāmana.

Villi cleverly layers Krishna with Rāma and Vāmana in this invocation by describing

different stories that involve the feet of these three forms of Viṣṇu. In his work on Nammāḻvār,

A.K. Ramanujan explains that in the Tamil literary tradition, feet “receive a great deal of

attention in bhakti. Devotees are called aṭiyār, ‘men at the feet’; the Vaiṣṇava word for the first

person pronoun is ‘aṭiyēṉ’ meaning ‘I, at your feet.’”

125

The Āḻvārs constantly praise and

describe themselves surrendering to Viṣṇu’s feet. In the very first verse of the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam, which is the opening verse of Periyāḻvār’s Tiruppallāṇṭu (Divine

Many Years), Periyāḻvār addresses Viṣṇu and says, “may the beauty of your feet be

protected.”

126

Similarly, in the first verse of the Tiruvāymoḻi, Nammāḻvār addresses his mind and

tells it to “worship his [Viṣṇu’s] radiant feet that destroy all sorrow and rise.”

127

Villi’s invocation in the “Third Day of War Chapter” also strongly resembles the opening

invocation of the seventh-century collection of Tamil didactic poems, the Tirikaṭukam (Three

Spices), of Nallātaṉār, a poet who may also have been a member of the Śrīvaiṣṇava community:

Those which measured the expansive space of cosmos,

those which uprooted the kuruntha tree

of excellently attractive, cool, fragrant flowers,

those which kicked to pieces the charmed cart

that neared to kill,––

these three

are the feet of the Lord of kayambu complexion.

128

Of course, this focus on feet is not unique to the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition. As Daud Ali

observes, there was a “truly remarkable and perhaps unparalleled obsession with feet in the

religious and courtly culture of medieval India.”

129

If we look at bhakti poetry from the other end

of the Indian subcontinent, we find a remarkably similar Bhasha pad to Villi’s invocation that is

attributed to Sūrdās. Here are the poem’s final six lines:

125

A.K. Ramanujan, “Afterword” in Nammāḻvār, Hymns for the Drowning: Poems for Viṣṇu by Nammāḻvār, trans.

A.K. Ramanujan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 144.

126

Periyāḻvār, Tiruppallāṇṭu 1, trans. Ate in Periyāḻvār, Yaśodā’s Songs, 63.

127

Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 1.1.1, trans. Carman and Narayanan in The Tamil Veda.

128

Nallātaṉār, kaṭavuḷ vāḻttu of Tirikaṭukam, trans. S. Raman, T. N. Ramachandran, and R. Balakrishna Mudaliyar

in Tirikaṭukam: Text, Transliteration and Translations in English Verse and Prose, ed. T.N. Ramachandran, trans. S.

Raman, T.N. Ramachandran, and R. Balakrishna Mudaliyar (Chennai: Central Institute of Classical Tamil, 2013),

30.

129

Daud Ali, Courtly Culture and Political Life in Early Medieval India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2004), 125.

124

Those peerless feet––by merely touching a stone

they freed the sage’s wife whose body that stone had become;

Those peerless feet––in their compassion to Prahlād

they rescued him from the terror of having an enemy father;

Those peerless feet––they caused the women of Braj

to give up body and soul,

forgetting husbands, sons, and homes;

Those peerless feet––through Brindavan they wandered,

settling on the cobra’s head, killing countless foes.

Those peerless feet––they approached the Kauravas’ house

and made themselves messengers, saving the fate of us all.

These peerless feet––these joyful feet, says Sūr––

let them steal away our pain, our threefold suffering.

130

Indeed, if we disregard the signature line at the end of the pad, Villi’s Tamil invocation in the

“Third Day of War Chapter” and Sūrdās’s Bhasha poem seem like the could have been

composed by the same bhakti poet. Other invocations in the Pāratam, however, firmly mark this

Tamil Mahābhārata as a Śrīvaiṣṇava composition. Two clear examples of this are two

invocations that mention the poets Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār and Nammāḻvār. As Venkatesan points out,

Nammāḻvār and Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār are considered the “two most important of the āḻvār poets”

because Nammāḻvār is “the tradition’s first teacher” and Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār is “the one who

began the process of institutionalizing the Śrīvaiṣṇava traditions.”

131

In the final chapter of the Book of Bhīṣma, the “Tenth Day of War Chapter”

(Pattāmpōrccarukkam) Villi speaks of Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār in an invocation celebrating the power

of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tirumantra (divine mantra) om namo nārāyaṇāya “obeisance to Nārāyaṇa.”

The name that came to the son that time when his father strongly raged

The name that removes all afflictions

The name that shines with the twice-four (eight) syllables

The name that illuminates the meaning that is said in the Vedas

It is that name which Kaliyaṉ, our Maṅkai, and others understood.

132

Although the word “Nārāyaṇa” does not appear in this verse, we know that this is the “name”

(nāmam) that Villi keeps on referring to because he describes this name as having eight syllables.

While Villi begins this invocation with the story of how the uttering of this name saves Prahlāda

from his father Hiraṇyakaśipu, he ends with a reference to Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār. Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār

refers to himself in the twentieth verse of his Tirukkuṟuntāṇṭakam (Divine Short Verse in

130

Sūrdās, trans. John Stratton Hawley in Sūrdās: Poet, Singer, Saint, rev. ed (Seattle: University of Washington

Press, 1984; Delhi: Primus Books, 2018), 252–53.

131

Archana Venkatesan, “Speared through the Heart: The Sound of God in the Worlds of Tirumaṅkai,” Journal of

Hindu Studies 10, no. 3 (2017): 276.

132

valiyil aṉṟu tantai ceṟṟa maintaṉukku vanta pēr

nalivu elām akaṟṟum nāmam nāl iraṇṭu eḻuttuṭaṉ

poliyum nāmam maṟaikaḷ coṉṉa poruḷ viḷakkum nāmam

muṉ kaliyaṉ eṅkaḷ maṅkai āti kaṇṭu koṇṭa nāmamē || VP 6.10.1 ||

125

Tāṇṭakam Meter) by the name Kaliyaṉ.

133

The first ten verses of Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār’s massive

work, the Periyatirumoḻi, all end with the phrase nārāyaṇā eṉṉum nāmam, “the name of

Nārāyaṇa.”

134

In this opening set of verses Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār speaks of how Nārāyaṇa’s name

saved him from a hedonist lifestyle. In the first verse of the Periyatirumoḻi, he says:

I withered. My mind withered, I despaired

Born into this world of pain and suffering

Wedded to the seductions of young women

I pursued them. And then, even as I ran

That singular one turned my mind

to the singular goal

I sought, in seeking

found Nārāyaṇa’s name.

135

With the concluding line of the invocation in the “Tenth Day of War Chapter” (“it is that name

which Kaliyaṉ, our Maṅkai, and others understood”), Villi is clearly gesturing to the opening

decad of the Periyatirumoḻi in praise of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tirumantra. Villi reminds his Śrīvaiṣṇava

readers that just as Prahlāda was saved from Hiraṇyakaśipu by remembering Nārāyaṇa’s name,

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār was rescued from a life of depravity by turning to the name of Nārāyaṇa.

In the invocation in the final chapter of the Book of Droṇa, the “Fifteenth Day of War

Chapter” (Patiṉaintāmpōrccarukkam), we find an allusion to Nammāḻvār.

That priest of the four Vedas

that have seen the end of the three tattvas

which are spoken of as sentient, non-sentient, and the lord,

that king of liberation

placed in the heart such as that of the one in Kurukūr

with its many groves of overhanging flower gardens,

other than him

who is first among the gods?

136

This invocation is teaming with Śrīvaiṣṇava concepts. In the beginning of the verse, Villi speaks

of the three tattvas (realities) in Śrīvaiṣṇava theology: the sentient (cit), the non-sentient (acit),

and the lord (īśvara).

137

The image of the divine being “placed in the heart” of the devotee is a

reference to the Śrīvaiṣṇava “conception of the antaryāmin (one who goes within) or hārda (one

133

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, Tirukkuṟuntāṇṭakam 20.

134

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, Periyatirumoḻi 1.1.1–10.

135

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, Periyatirumoḻi 1.1.1, trans. Venkatesan in “Speared through the Heart,” 290.

136

cittu acittoṭu īcaṉ eṉṟu ceppukiṉṟa mūvakai

tattuvattiṉ muṭivu kaṇṭa catur maṟaipurōkitaṉ

kottu aviḻtta cōlai maṉṉu kurukai āti neñcilē

vaitta mutti nātaṉ aṉṟi vāṉanāṭar mutalvar yār || VP 7.5.1 ||

137

See Patricia Y. Mumme, The Śrīvaiṣṇava Theological Dispute: Maṇavāḷamāmun

i and Vedānta Deśika (Madras:

New Era, 1988), 29.

126

who dwells in the heart) form of Viṣṇu.”

138

Finally, Villi incorporates Nammāḻvār into the

invocation by referring to the Āḻvār’s hometown of Kurukūr (Kurukur or Alvar Tirunagari in

present-day Tamil Nadu). In several of the phalaśrutis found after each set of ten verses in the

Tiruvāymoḻi, Nammāḻvār identifies himself as “Caṭakōpaṉ” or “Māṟaṉ of Kurukūr.”

139

With the allusion to Nammāḻvār in the “Fifteenth Day of War Chapter,” Villi places

himself in the lineage of other Tamil Śrīvaiṣṇava poets who have sung Nammāḻvār’s praise such

as Maṇavāḷamāmun

i in his fourteenth-century Upatēcarattiṉamālai (Garland of the Jewels of

Instruction) and Tirukkurukaipperumāḷ Kavirāyar in his sixteenth-century Māṟaṉakapporuḷ

(Treatise on Akam Poetry of Māṟaṉ), which contains the Tiruppatikkōvai. Most importantly, Villi

places himself in the lineage of Maturakaviyāḻvār, the Āḻvār who composed the

Kaṇṇinuṉciṟuttāmpu (Knotted, Fine, Small Rope), a short poem of ten verses in honor of

Nammāḻvār. Maturakaviyāḻvār begins the Kaṇṇinuṉciṟuttāmpu by proclaiming:

Sweet it will be, my tongue will fill with nectar

in saying, “Nampi of South Kurukūr”

after nearing him through my Lord,

the Great Māyaṉ, who allowed himself to be tied

by the knotted, fine, small rope.

140

By emulating the poetry of the Tamil Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and directly paying tribute to

the Āḻvārs themselves, Villi’s invocations speak to a distinctly Śrīvaiṣṇava audience.

Reframing the Pāratam as a Śrīvaiṣṇava Kṛṣṇacarita

It is also important to recognize that the subject of each of Villi’s thirty-seven invocations is

informed by the narrative content of the chapter it commences and each invocation helps Villi

reframe the entire Mahābhārata epic as a Śrīvaiṣṇava devotional kṛṣṇacarita.

As we saw earlier, the first invocation to a form of Krishna in the Pāratam is the one to

the baby Krishna who killed Pūtanā in the “Origins Chapter.” The “Origins Chapter” narrates the

miraculous conceptions of the five Pāṇḍavas, Karṇa, and the one hundred Kauravas. Starting the

chapter that describe the births of these major characters from the Mahābhārata tradition with an

episode from Krishna’s own infancy is no accident. As I pointed out in Chapter One, Madhva

discusses the births of the Pāṇḍavas alongside the births of Krishna and Balarāma in the same

chapter of his Sanskrit treatise, the Mahābhāratatātparyanirṇaya. Although Villi does not

directly describe the birth of Krishna in the “Origins Chapter,” by beginning this chapter with the

story of Pūtanā, he incorporates the infant Krishna into his Mahābhārata retelling. Recall that the

“Origins Chapter” is also the chapter in which Krishna makes his first actual appearance in the

narrative of the Pāratam when he comes with his family to Hastinapura to meet Kuntī and the

138

Cutler, Songs of Experience, 198.

139

See Venkatesan, introduction to Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi (Endless Song), 6.

140

Maturakaviyāḻvār, Kaṇṇinuṉciṟuttāmpu 1, trans. Srilata Raman in “Reflections on the King of Ascetics

(Yatirāja): Rāmānuja in the Devotional Poetry of Vedānta Deśika,” in Śaivism and the Tantric Traditions: Essays in

Honour of Alexis G.J.S. Sanderson, ed. Dominic Goodall, Shaman Hatley, Harunaga Isaacson, and Srilata Raman

(Boston: Brill, 2020), 197.

127

Pāṇḍavas soon after the deaths of Pāṇḍu and Mādrī.

141

It is thus fitting that Villi starts this

chapter of his Tamil Mahābhārata with an invocation that focuses solely on Krishna.

The final invocation in the Pāratam, however, is in praise of a thoroughly “layered” form

of Krishna. Villi begins the “Eighteenth Day of War Chapter” (Patiṉeṭṭāmpōrccarukkam) in the

Book of Śalya (Calliyaparuvam) with an invocation to Viṣṇu’s ten forms in the daśāvatāra cycle:

The one who shows compassion

takes on different forms

as the fish, the tortoise, the boar, the great Narasiṃha, and

the short one who measured the earth with his trickery,

as those with the red hands bearing

the boundless raging axe (Paraśurāma),

the powerful bow (Rāma), and

the victorious sharp plow (Balarāma),

as someone who took on this form (Krishna)

in order to kill all of the kings of earth

while the gods came and worshiped him,

and as the man on the horse (Kalki).

Salutations to Nārāyaṇa!

142

As S. Ganeshram points out, in the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam Tirumaḻicaiyāḻvār, Nammāḻvār,

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, and Periyāḻvār all make references to Viṣṇu’s daśāvatāra cycle.

143

In his

Tirumoḻi, for instance, Periyāḻvār tells us his audience that:

The temple of him who was a divine fish and turtle,

a boar, a lion and a dwarf

Who became three Rāmas and Kaṇṇaṉ

and who will conclude with Kalki,

Is Śrīrangam of the river where a swan plays

Swinging on the red lotus blossoms,

Embracing her mate on a flower bed,

Besmearing their bodies with red pollen.

144

While the daśāvatāra cycle is a part of multiple different Vaiṣṇava traditions, both Periyāḻvār’s

verse in the Tirumoḻi and Villi’s invocation in the “Eighteenth Day of War Chapter” are

markedly Śrīvaiṣṇava. Although several of the prominent Sanskrit purāṇas (including the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa) list Krishna and the Buddha as the eighth and ninth incarnations of Viṣṇu in

141

VP 1.2.110–14.

142

mīṉ āmai kōlam neṭu naraciṅkam āki mā nilam virakāl aḷanta kuṟaḷāy

āṉātu cīṟum maḻu val villum vellum muṉai alam uṟṟa cem kaiyavar āy

vāṉ nāṭar vantu toḻa maṇ nāṭar yāvaraiyum maṭivikka vanta vaṭivāy

nāṉā vitam koḷ pari āḷ niṉṟu aruḷum nārāyaṇāya namavē || VP 9.1.1 ||

143

S. Ganeshram, “Daśāvatāras in Tamil Bhakti Literature and Programme of Sculptures in Vijayanagara-Nāyaka

Art,” Acta Orientalia 73 (2012): 3.

144

Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 4.9.9, trans. Ate in Periyāḻvār, Yaśodā’s Songs, 200.

128

the daśāvatāra cycle,

145

Śrīvaiṣṇavas consider Balarāma and Krishna to be Viṣṇu’s eighth and

ninth incarnations and this is reflected in the Tirumoḻi and the Pāratam.

146

Both Periyāḻvār and

Villi also connect the ten incarnations in the daśāvatāra cycle to a Śrīvaiṣṇava form of Viṣṇu. In

the Tirumoḻi, Periyāḻvār is praising Raṅganātha in Srirangam, one of the most important

Śrīvaiṣṇava pilgrimage sites. In the invocation in the “Eighteenth Day of War Chapter,” Villi

concludes the verse with the words nārāyaṇāya namavē “salutations to Nārāyaṇa!” which is a

phrase that immediately brings to mind the Śrīvaiṣṇava tirumantra: om namo nārāyaṇāya.

The “Eighteenth Day of War Chapter” narrates the final day of the Kurukṣetra War, and

this is the chapter in which the last general of the Kaurava forces (Śalya) and the last of the one

hundred Kaurava brothers (Duryodhana) are defeated by the Pāṇḍavas with the help of Krishna.

By having this daśāvatāra verse be the final invocation in the Pāratam, Villi reminds his

Śrīvaiṣṇava audience of the multiplicity and limitlessness of Krishna and his other nine major

forms. Villi’s first invocation in the “Origins Chapter” focuses on the adorable yet powerful baby

Krishna. Villi’s final invocation not only speaks of how the adult Krishna will eradicate the

Kauravas, but it also describes Krishna’s past/current incarnations (Matsya, Kūrma, Varāha,

Narasiṃha, Vāmana, Paraśurāma, Rāma, Balarāma) as well as his future incarnation (Kalki).

147

Several of Villi’s invocations foreshadow the narrative content of their chapters. Consider

the invocatory verse that opens the second chapter of the Book of the Assembly Hall

(Capāparuvam), the “Gambling Match Chapter” (Cūtupōrccarukkam):

As the supreme nectar that is wisdom,

as the māyā that is not debased,

as the sky and with it the wind,

as fire and water,

as the earth,

as the different moving and still things,

according to the rules of the great Vedas that are himself

as the one who lifted all of these things as the boar,

he protects me.

148

In this invocation, Villi equates Viṣṇu with multiple different aspects of the universe such as the

sky, fire, water, and the earth. The phrase navir aṟu mayakku “the māyā that is not debased”

refers to the description of prakṛti (gross mater) in the seventh chapter of the Bhagavadgītā.

149

145

See Bhāgavatapurāṇa 1.3.24; and Bradley S. Clough, “Buddha as Avatāra in Vaiṣṇava Theology: Historical and

Interpretive Issues,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 26, no 1 (2017): 163.

146

See John B. Carman, Majesty and Meekness: A Comparative Study of Contrast and Harmony in the Concept of

God (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 1994), 211.

147

I use the words “past/current” here because both Paraśurāma and Balarāma co-exist with Krishna.

148

ñāṉam ākiya param param amiḻtam āy navir aṟu mayakku āki

vāṉam āy uṭaṉ vāyu āy tēyu āy vaṉamum āy maṇ āki

tāṉam ām maṟai muṟaimaiyiṉ pal pal cara acaraṅkaḷum āki

ēṉam āy ivai aṉaittaiyum maruppiṉāl ēntiṉāṉ eṉai āṇṭōṉ || VP 2.2.1 ||

149

See Bhagavadgītā 7.4–5.

I thank Srilata Raman for directing me to this reference.

129

As Raman explains, in the Gītābhāṣya (Commentary on the Bhagavadgītā) of the foundational

Śrīvaiṣṇava philosopher Rāmānuja (traditional dates: 1011–1137 CE), “prakṛti is described as

that which obscures (tirodhānakarī) the essential nature of God and as a māyā consisting of the

guṇas (guṇamayīmāyā).”

150

At the end of this invocation, however, Villi brings up a specific

incarnation of Viṣṇu: Varāha, the boar who carries the earth goddess Bhūdevī on his tusks after

the demon Hiraṇyākṣa abducts her and carries her into the depths of the ocean. The “Gambling

Match Chapter” is the chapter in the Pāratam in which Duḥśāsana attempts to strip Draupadī in

the Kaurava court after Yudhiṣṭhira gambles and loses her in the dice game. The story of Varāha

saving Bhūdevī from being destroyed by Hiraṇyākṣa in this invocation foreshadows Krishna

shielding Draupadī from Duḥśāsana and the Kauravas later in this chapter. The final two words

of this verse, eṉai āṇṭōṉ “protects me,” also emphasize this theme of safeguarding.

The invocation that opens the first chapter of the Book of the Assembly Hall, the “Royal

Consecration Chapter” (Irāyacūyaccarukkam) not only foreshadows, but recaps as well:

Those who praise our great one––

who is adorned with compassion

and who in order to save them

incarnated and became the fruit of the penance of the Pāṇḍavas

and took on their enemies as his own,

and fiercely destroyed the heaped up ever-increasing sins in all the battles

and caused the belly of the fire to taste the Khāṇḍava Forest

as the blaze was extinguished so that it does not enter the skies––

they indeed change the seven births.

151

In its description of Krishna, this invocation clearly foreshadows his involvement in the Battle of

Kurukṣetra which Villi will narrate in the Book of Bhīṣma, the Book of Droṇa, the Book of

Karṇa, and the Book of Śalya. Yet towards the end of the verse, Villi describes an event that took

place in the previous chapter of his Mahābhārata, the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter”

(Kāṇṭavatakaṉaccarukkam). The “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter” is the final chapter of Villi’s

Book of the Beginnings and as the name of the chapter suggests, it focuses on how Krishna and

Arjuna set the Khāṇḍava Forest ablaze and kill the vast majority of the living creatures who

reside there in order to satisfy Agni, the Vedic god of fire. With this invocation in the “Royal

Consecration Chapter,” Villi therefore recaps what just transpired in the previous chapter of the

Pāratam. Villi also reminds his audience in this invocation that Krishna incarnated for the sake

of the Pāṇḍavas, a point which Villi makes very clear during Krishna’s first appearance in the

“Origins Chapter” when he arrives in Hastinapura and meets Kuntī and her children for the first

time in the Pāratam. As we saw in Chapter One, the depiction of the main deity as a god who

greatly cares about his devotees is a main feature of bhakti narrative poems.

Krishna is at the center of the “Royal Consecration Chapter” with Villi using more than

half of the chapter to describe the conflict between Krishna and his cousin Śiśupāla at

150

Raman, Self-Surrender, 50.

151

pāṇṭavarkaḷ purinta tavam payaṉ āki avatarittu, pakaittu mēl mēl

mūṇṭa viṉai muḻuvatuvum muṉaitōṟum muraṇ muṟukki mukil pukāmal

kāṇṭavamum kaṉal vayiṟu kaṉal taṇiya nukaruvittu kākkum āṟē

pūṇṭarul em perumāṉai pōṟṟuvār eḻu piṟappum māṟṟuvārē || VP 2.1.1 ||

130

Yudhiṣṭhira’s consecration ceremony. In the Mahābhārata tradition, Krishna makes a promise to

Śiśupāla’s mother that he will forgive one hundred insults by Śiśupāla. But after Śiśupāla offends

Krishna one hundred times during Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya ceremony, the deity beheads Śiśupāla,

an act the grants Śiśupāla

salvation.

152

Śiśupāla is depicted as a practitioner of dveṣa bhakti

(hate-devotion). The idea behind dveṣa bhakti is that any sort of interaction with a god, even an

action motivated by hate, can lead to salvation.

153

As in the southern recension of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata and Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, Villi takes his time to describe how Śiśupāla is an

incarnation of Hiraṇyakaśipu and Rāvaṇa, two demons who were defeated by Krishna’s past

incarnations of Narasiṃha and Rāma.

154

Villi’s lengthy account of the death of Śiśupāla is

unsurprising given the popularity of this story in the South Indian Vaiṣṇava tradition. Āṇṭāḷ,

Nammāḻvār, and Periyāḻvār all refer to Śiśupāla and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (a South Indian text

that draws heavily from the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam) and Vedāntadeśika’s Yādavābhyudaya

each dedicate an entire chapter to this episode.

155

Villi chooses to begin the chapter that narrates

the story of Krishna slaying Śiśupāla by praising Krishna’s past deeds as well as his future ones.

While several of the invocations in Villi’s Pāratam are addressed to Krishna or a layered

form of Krishna, some invocations only speak of Rāma, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa narrative

tradition. Take the first verse of the third chapter of the Book of the Forest (Āraṇiyaparuvam),

the “Journey for the Flower Chapter” (Puṭpayāttiraiccarukkam):

Valiant Rāma

with strong shoulders

like mountain summits made of pure strength

caused the death of the cruel demon with his clan

by stringing his bow and arrow

and ended the grief of the gods of flawless wisdom.

The ones who cut the attachments of seven births

are only those who praise with words,

rise up and leap,

and daily worship

those lotus feet

that gave back the own form of Ahalyā

who had taken the form of stone

so that she became beautiful again.

156

152

For different tellings of this episode, see MBh 2.42; VP 2.1.113–48; and CM 2.2–30. Note that like Villi, Cauhān

dedicates a considerable amount of space to the slaying of Śiśupāla in his Bhasha Mahābhārat.

153

See Clifford George Hospital, “The Enemy Transformed: Opponents of the Lord in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa,”

Journal of the American Academy of Religion 46, no.2 (1978): 199–215

154

See VP 2.1.141–48; and Yigal Bronner and Lawrence McCrea, “To Be or Not to Be Śiśupāla: Which Version of

the Key Speech in Māgha’s Great Poem Did He Really Write?” Journal of the American Oriental Society 132, no. 3

(2012): 429–30.

155

See Narayanan, Way and Goal, 162; Bhāgavatapurāṇa 10.74; and Yādavābhyudaya 15.1–135.

156

mal koṇṭu varuttatu aṉaiya cikaram tiṇ tōḷ vāḷ arakkaṉ kulattōṭum muṭiya muṉṉam

vil koṇṭu caram toṭuttu purai il kēḷvi viṇṇavartam tuyar tīrtta vīrāmaṉ

kal koṇṭa akaliyai taṉ uruvam mīḷa kaviṉ koḷḷa koṭutta tiru kamalam pātam

col koṇṭu tutittu eḻuntu tuḷḷi nāḷum toḻum avarē eḻu piṟavi tuvakku aṟṟārē || VP 3.3.1 ||

131

As with Villi’s first verse in the “Royal Consecration Chapter,” this invocation in the “Journey

for the Flower Chapter” is technically in praise of the deity’s devotees rather than the deity

himself. In both invocations in the “Royal Consecration Chapter” and the “Journey for the

Flower Chapter,” Villi mentions the “seven births.” Narayanan explains that:

In Tamil one frequently speaks of “seven births” or “seven generations” to indicate infinite

continuity; thus the merit of worship seems to pass on for the “seven generations.” The Āḻvārs

speak of themselves as hailing from seven generations of devotees, or declare that seven

generations of people before and after them are saved because of their association with the

Lord.

157

The invocation in the “Journey for the Flower Chapter,” which praises Rāma as the slayer of

Rāvaṇa and the savior of Ahalyā, opens the chapter of the Book of the Forest in which Draupadī

sends Bhīma on a hunt for the fragrant saugandhika flower. During his journey, Bhīma comes

across the divine monkey Hanumān. Along with being Bhīma’s elder half-brother through their

shared father Vāyu (the wind deity), Hanumān is also Rāma’s greatest devotee and a major

character in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. Given the prominent role Hanumān plays in this chapter of

the Pāratam, it is appropriate that Villi chooses to begin the “Journey for the Flower Chapter”

with an invocation that focuses on the actions of Rāma instead of those of Krishna.

The invocations that open chapters in which Krishna plays a major role often emphasize

the fact that the Krishna of the Pāratam is a Tamil deity. As we saw earlier, the invocation in the

first chapter of Villi’s Book of Bhīṣma, the “First Day of War Chapter” is not addressed to

Krishna, but to Māl, the distinctly Tamil form of Viṣṇu. This invocation comes right before

Villi’s rendering of the Bhagavadgītā. By inserting this verse in praise of the thoroughly Tamil

god Māl right before his version of what is easily the most famous episode involving Krishna in

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Villi firmly places the Krishna of the Pāratam in a markedly Tamil

Śrīvaiṣṇava religious milieu. The invocations that extol Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār in the “Tenth Day of

War Chapter” and Nammāḻvār in the “Fifteenth Day of War” commence the chapters of the

Pāratam in which Bhīṣma and Droṇa are defeated by the Pāṇḍavas and their allies. In Villi’s

poem (as in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata), Krishna orchestrates the deaths of both these powerful

generals.

158

By beginning these chapters that showcase Krishna’s involvement in the Battle at

Kurukṣetra with invocations to the two most important Āḻvārs, Villi once again positions his

version of Krishna in a distinctly Tamil-speaking, Śrīvaiṣṇava devotional world.

Villi also strategically places invocations at the beginning of chapters in which Krishna is

absent from the narrative. As we saw in Chapter Two, both Villi and Cauhān insert several

scenes highlighting Krishna’s divinity into their retellings that are not found in the critical edition

of the Mahābhārata. There are some episodes in the Mahābhāratas of Villi and Cauhān,

however, such as those in which Bhīma murders the demons Hiḍimba and Bakāsura in the Book

of the Beginnings in which Krishna does not make an appearance. Yet by starting his chapter on

the deaths of Hiḍimba and Bakāsura, the “Vetrakīya Chapter” (Vēttirakīyaccarukkam), with an

invocation, Villi provides his audience with an example of Viṣṇu’s compassion for his devotees.

157

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 53.

158

MBh 6.103 and 7.164; and VP 6.10.9–10 and 7.5.19–20.

132

Let us worship the feet of

the lord of Śrī

who resides in the divine place

which is the cool lotus of day,

the lord of the gods,

the lord of the Vedas,

the lord of living beings,

the lord of vows,

the lord of sages,

the primordial lord

who came before the king of elephants

who in the mouth of the crocodile,

his strength growing weak,

meditated and in front of everyone called out

“Primordial Cause!”

159

At the end of this invocation, Villi recounts the famous story in which Viṣṇu grants salvation to

the elephant king Gajendra. As I pointed out in Chapter Two, both the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and the Pāratam are full of allusions to Gajendra.

160

Hopkins

explains that “the elephant-king is a common trope in the Āḻvār and Śrīvaiṣṇava literature for the

devotee in dire trouble from sins who surrenders to the lord.”

161

As with the story of Draupadī

praying to Krishna to save her from being disrobed by Duḥśāsana, the tale of Gajendra calling

out to Viṣṇu to protect him from the crocodile is a prime example of prapatti (self-surrender), a

vital concept for Śrīvaiṣṇavas. Also note that Villi begins this invocation by praising Viṣṇu as

tiruviṉ nāyakaṉ or the “the lord of Śrī.” As Nancy Ann Nayar observes, “among Śrīvaiṣṇavas,

the salience of Viṣṇu’s iconic incarnations, both theologically and devotionally, is nearly

equalled by the preeminence of His Supreme Consort Śrī-Lakṣmī. The prominent position

accorded to the Goddess is one of the distinguishing features of Śrīvaiṣṇavas theology as

compared with other Vaiṣṇava traditions.”

162

Although Krishna does not make a physical

appearance in the “Vetrakīya Chapter,” by using the invocation above, Villi ensures that his

audience begins the chapter by thinking of an unequivocally Śrīvaiṣṇava form of Viṣṇu.

I should point out that there are thirteen chapters out of fifty total chapters of the Tamil

Pāratam that do not begin with an invocation. These invocation-less chapters clearly concerned

some copyists and scribes because certain manuscripts of Villi’s text contain additional

invocations beyond the thirty-seven invocations that are found in the majority of the manuscripts

of the Pāratam. Some manuscripts of the Book of the Beginnings, for example, have invocations

159

cītam nāḷ malar kōyil mēvu cem tiruviṉ nāyakaṉ tēva nāyakaṉ

vētam nāyakaṉ pūtam nāyakaṉ viratam nāyakaṉ viputa nāyakaṉ

pōtaka atipaṉ mutalai vāyiṭai poṟai taḷarntu muṉ potuvilē niṉaintu

aṭi mūlamē eṉṉa muṉ varum āti nāyakaṉ aṭi vaṇaṅkuvām || VP 1.4.1||

160

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 163; and VP 1.1.30, 3.5.109, 5.4.43, and 6.3.17.

161

Steven P. Hopkins, Singing the Body of God: The Hymns of Vedāntadeśika in their South Indian Tradition (New

York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 277n114.

162

Nancy Ann Nayar, Poetry as Theology: The Śrīvaiṣṇava Stotra in the Age of Rāmānuja (Wiesbaden: Otto

Harrassowitz, 1992), 221.

133

in the “Draupadī’s Bridegroom Choice Ceremony Chapter” (Tiraupatimālaiyiṭṭacarukkam) and

in the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” (Aruccuṉaṉṟīrttayāttiraiccarukkam).

163

As we saw in Chapter Two, Villi begins the very first chapter of his narrative, the

“Lineage of the Kurus Chapter” (Kurukulaccarukkam) with a verse in which Villi basically

informs his readers that he is retelling the Mahābhārata in Tamil. The author of the

Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram might have called this verse a varuporuḷ (Sanskrit: vastunirdeśa) or an

“indication of the subject” of the poem. But recall that this varuporuḷ verse begins with Villi

praising “our Mādhava from whose great lotus heart there appears the rising moon.”

164

It is thus

impossible for Villi’s readers to not think of Krishna when they begin the Tamil Pāratam.

When we turn to the remaining twelve chapters that do not commence with an

invocation, we find that Krishna plays a prominent role in most of these chapters. For instance,

as I noted in Chapter Two, Krishna permeates Villi’s “Draupadī’s Bridegroom Choice Ceremony

Chapter.” Krishna also is a major figure in the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” which is the

chapter in which Krishna helps Arjuna marry Krishna’s sister Subhadrā. While there is no

invocation in the beginning of the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter,” this chapter revolves around

Arjuna and Krishna setting the Khāṇḍava Forest on fire. Two chapters in the Book of the Forest

that narrate episodes in which Krishna saves the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī lack opening

invocations. In the “Sage Durvāsas Chapter” (Turuvācamuṉiccarukkam), Krishna quells the

hunger of the irascible sage Durvāsas when Draupadī runs out of food to serve him. Krishna

once again protects Draupadī and the Pāṇḍavas from the wrath of a sage by helping the brothers

and their wife reattach a fruit that they had mistakenly plucked from the sage’s garden in the

“Uniting of the Fruit Chapter” (Paḻamporuntucarukkam). Given that Krishna is already at the

heart of these chapters, Villi likely does not feel the need to commence them with invocations.

* * * * *

By inserting thirty-seven intricate invocations throughout the Tamil Pāratam, Villi guarantees

that his audience is constantly thinking of Krishna. The Krishna on display in Villi’s salutations

and benedictions is a Krishna who is frequently “layered” with other forms of Viṣṇu who would

be immensely familiar to members of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community in fifteenth-century

South India. As we will see in the next chapter, Sabalsingh Cauhān also uses invocations

throughout his Mahābhārata retelling. In the seventeenth-century Bhasha Mahābhārat, however,

it is not Krishna who Cauhān primarily praises in his invocations, but Rāma.

163

See pages 371 and 507 of Kōpālakiruṣṇamācāriyar’s edition of the Ātiparuvam of the VP.

164

eṅkaḷ mātavaṉ itayam mā malar varum utayam tiṅkaḷ || VP 1.1.1 ||

134

CHAPTER FOUR

Remembering Rāma:

The Role of the Rāmāyaṇa in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat

The tale of the warrior-prince Rāma and his journey to rescue his beloved wife Sītā from the

demon king Rāvaṇa has come to be known as the “Rāmāyaṇa” in reference to the name of the

ancient Sanskrit poem attributed to Vālmīki. The Rāmāyaṇa is integrated into several

Mahābhāratas. In the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the sage Mārkaṇḍeya tells the

story of Rāma to Yudhiṣṭhira during the Pāṇḍavas’ exile. This 728-verse-long rendition of the

Rāmāyaṇa in the Book of the Forest in the epic is known as the Rāmopākhyāna.

The Sanskrit

Book of the Forest also contains an episode in which Bhīma meets one of the main characters

from the Rāmāyaṇa, the divine monkey and Bhīma’s elder half-brother Hanumān.

Finally, there

are multiple references to the events of the Rāmāyaṇa throughout the critical edition of the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

For example, as Yigal Bronner points out, in the Book of Virāṭa’s Court

(Virāṭaparvan) “when Draupadī approaches Bhīma and demands that he kill Kīcaka, Bhīma first

counsels patience, citing, among other precedents, Sītā’s behavior in Rāvaṇa’s captivity.”

When we turn to premodern retellings in regional languages, we find that many of these

Mahābhāratas incorporate the Rāmāyaṇa into their narratives in ways similar to the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata. Sāraḷādāsa’s Oriya Mahābhārata, for instance, features an abridged version of the

Rāmopākhyāna.

Multiple regional Mahābhāratas, including Villi’s Tamil Pāratam, Viṣṇudās’s

Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit, and Kumāravyāsa’s Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, narrate the

encounter between Bhīma and Hanumān.

And both Peruntēvaṉār’s Tamil Pārataveṇpā and the

Pāratam make several references to the Rāmāyaṇa and its major figures.

In the third chapter of

Villi’s Book of the Beginnings alone, three comparisons are drawn between Mahābhārata and

Rāmāyaṇa characters: Bhīma is compared to Rāma’s younger brother Lakṣmaṇa, Arjuna is

described as having equal archery skills to Rāma, and Draupadī is likened to Sītā.

MBh 3.258–75.

On the relationship between the Rāmopākhyāna and Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, see Brockington, Sanskrit Epics,

473–78; and Robert P. Goldman, “On the Upatva of Upākhyānas: Is the Uttarakāṇḍa of the Rāmāyaṇa an

Upākhyāna of the Mahābhārata?” in Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata, ed. Vishwa Adluri and

Joydeep Bagchee (Boston: Brill, 2016), 69–82.

MBh 3.146–50.

See Brockington, Sanskrit Epics, 479–81.

Yigal Bronner, Extreme Poetry: The South Asian Movement of Simultaneous Narration (New York: Columbia

University Press, 2010), 152. See MBh 4.20.9–10.

William L. Smith, “Rāmāyaṇa Lore in the Mahābhārata of Saraḷā Dāsa,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 12, no.2

(2004): 137–39.

VP 3.3; Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 3.3; and Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 3.10.

For the references in the Pārataveṇpā, see Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 94.

VP 1.3.7, 1.3.49, and 1.3.91.

135

The way that Sabalsingh Cauhān weaves several different aspects of the Rāmāyaṇa

tradition into his Bhasha Mahābhārat, however, is unprecedented. In this chapter, I contend that

the allusions to the Rāmāyaṇa strongly suggest that Cauhān is a devotee of Rāma who is deeply

familiar with the Bhasha compositions dedicated to Rāma by the bhakti poet Tulsīdās. I

demonstrate this through close examinations of three different types of Rāmāyaṇa allusions that

Cauhān uses throughout his Mahābhārat: (1) invocations in the opening prologues of the

different books of the Bhasha poem, (2) episodes in the narrative in which Hanumān comes to

the aid of Arjuna, and (3) passages in which Krishna is equated with Rāma.

Invoking Rāma, the Rāmāyaṇa, and Tulsīdās

Eleven of the eighteen books of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat begin with prologues that include

invocatory (maṅgalācaraṇ) verses to different Hindu deities and sages.

In the first of these

prologues in the Book of the Assembly Hall, Cauhān claims that he began this book on a

paramount festival for devotees of Rāma in North India:

Meditating on Vyāsa, the feet of Gaṇapati (Gaṇeśa),

Girijā (Pārvatī), Hara (Śiva), and Bhagavān (Krishna),

Sabalsingh Cauhān tells the Book of the Assembly Hall in Bhasha.

In Vikram Saṃvat 1727 (1670 CE),

in the auspicious month of Caitra, the ninth day,

Thursday, in the light half of the lunar month, this story was illuminated.

The ninth day of the month of Caitra in the Hindu lunar calendar, known as Rāmnavamī, is

celebrated throughout North India as Rāma’s birthday. This date also aligns Cauhān’s

Mahābhārat with Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas. In the opening prologue to his poem, Tulsī states:

With respect, I bow my head to the lord Śiva and begin to sing of Rāma’s pure attributes.

In Vikram Saṃvat 1631 (1574 CE), I begin this story, placing my head at Hari’s feet.

On the ninth day, Tuesday, in the month of Caitra,

these deeds were illuminated in the city of Ayodhya (Ayodhyā).

On this day of Rāma’s birth, all sing the Vedas and leave and go there for pilgrimage.

CM 1.1–2, 2.1, 5.1, 6.1, 7.1, 8.1, 9.1, 15.1, 16.1, 17.1, and 18.1.

It should be noted that in both Pāṇḍey’s and Śarmā’s editions of the text, the fourteenth book, the Book of Peace

(Śāntiparv), begins with an invocatory couplet in which Cauhān invokes Krishna, Govinda, Vyāsa, and Bhagavān.

See 14.1 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 14.1 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

Pāṇḍey states that Bhagavān modifies Hara. See 2.1 in Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey). I think it is more likely,

however, that Bhagavān refers to Krishna given the way this title has been used in seminal Vaiṣṇava texts such as

the Bhagavadgītā and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa.

The Vikram Saṃvat calendar system, which was used extensively in premodern North India, has a zero point of

approximately 57 BCE.

sumiri vyāsa gaṇapati caraṇa girijā hara bhagavāna

sabhāparva bhāṣā bhanata sabalasiṃha cauhāna

satrah sau sattāisai saṃvata śubha madhu māsa

navamī aru guru pakṣa sita bhai yaha kathā prakāsa || CM 2.1 ||

sādara sivahi nāi aba māthā baranauṃ bisada rāma guna gāthā

136

Cauhān’s claim that he started the Book of the Assembly Hall on the same auspicious festival in

honor of Rāma that Tulsī says he began his Rāmāyaṇa retelling is not a coincidence. By stating

that he began the Book of the Assembly Hall on Rāmnavamī, Cauhān firmly places his

Mahābhārat in the same religious milieu as Tulsī’s beloved bhakti narrative poem.

Throughout his Mahābhārat, Cauhān makes it clear that he is emulating the

Rāmcaritmānas. One prominent example of this is the metrical structure of Cauhān’s bhakti text.

Several lengthy Bhasha narrative poems––including the Rāmcaritmānas and four of the most

well-known examples of the Sufi premkathā (love story) genre: Dāūd’s Cāndāyan (1379),

Quṭban’s Mirigāvatī (1503), Jāyasī’s Padmāvat (1540), and Mañjhan’s Madhumālatī (1545)––

are composed in the caupāī-dohā (quatrain-couplet) meter. Some scholars have used the fact that

the Rāmcaritmānas and these four premkathās are all composed in caupāī-dohā meter and in the

Avadhi dialect of Bhasha as evidence of an intertextual relationship between these Sufi romances

and Tulsī’s bhakti composition. Aditya Behl remarks that the Sufi poets “shape the poetical,

metrical, and narrative conventions that Tulasī uses so skillfully for his purpose, the glorification

of Rāma.”

Thomas de Bruijn adds that “Tulsidas did not choose for his work the language of

Braj with its distinct association with devotion to Vishnu, but the literary format of the Avadhi

epic, a genre that was until then exclusively developed by Indian Sufis.”

The close intertextual relationship that de Bruijn and Behl see between the Sufi

premkathās and the Rāmcaritmānas seems to be driven by an impulse to present premodern

Bhasha texts as participants in an inclusive and dialogic literary culture in which Hindu and

Muslim poets were inspired by one another. What Behl and de Bruijn fail to consider, however,

is that the Cāndāyan, the Mirigāvatī, the Padmāvat, and the Madhumālatī were by no means the

only Bhasha texts composed in caupāī-dohā meter. The caupāī-dohā stanza, which has distinct

analogues in Apabhramsha literature, is found in multiple non-Sufi Bhasha narrative poems that

proclaim to have been composed before or around the same time as the Rāmcaritmānas,

including Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit (1435) and Rāmāyaṇkathā (Story of the Rāmāyaṇa, 1442),

Bhīm Kavi’s Ḍaṅgvaikathā (1493), Nārāyaṇdās’s Chitāīcarit (Deeds of Chitāī, ca. 1520), and

Nandadās’s Dasamskandh (Tenth Book, ca. 1570). Moreover, some of these narrative poems are

also composed in Avadhi, such as Īśvardās’s Satyavatīkathā (Story of Satyavatī, 1501), Lālac’s

Haricarit (Deeds of Hari, 1530), and Sadhan’s Maināsat (Truthfulness of Mainā, ca. 1567). How

do we know that Tulsī modeled the Rāmcaritmānas on one of the four Sufi premkathās and not

on an Avadhi narrative in caupāī-dohā meter based on a “Hindu” story from the Sanskrit itihāsa-

purāṇa corpus like the Satyavatīkathā or the Haricarit?

saṃbata soraha sai ekatīsā karauṃ kathā hari pada dhari sīsā

naumī bhauma bāra madhu māsā avadhapurīṃ yaha carita prakāsā

jehi dina rāma janama śruti gāvahiṃ tīratha sakala tahāṃ cali āvahiṃ || Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.34.2–3 ||

Aditya Behl, “Presence and Absence in Bhakti: An Afterword,” International Journal of Hindu Studies 11, no. 3

(2007): 320.

Thomas de Bruijn, “Many Roads Lead to Lanka: The Intercultural Semantics of Rama’s Quest,” Contemporary

South Asia 14, no. 1 (2005): 45. De Bruijn also states that “there is no evidence of a similar use of the

Avadhi/Hindavi genre by ‘Hindu’ authors before Tulsidas composed his Rāmcaritmānas in this format” (“Dialogism

in a Medieval Genre: The Case of the Avadhi Epics,” in Before the Divide: Hindi and Urdu Literary Culture, ed.

Francesca Orsini [Delhi: Orient Blackswan, 2010], 126).

The other evidence Behl and de Bruijn give for Tulsī deliberately “choosing” to compose the Rāmcaritmānas in

the same genre as the premkathās is weak. Both Behl and de Bruijn note similarities between the descriptions of

137

The caupāī-dohā stanza units of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, however, which contain four to

five caupāīs followed by a dohā or its variant, the soraṭhā, occasionally interspersed with verses

in a meter called harigītikā-chand or “the meter of short songs to Hari,” are undoubtedly inspired

by the specific metrical format of the Bhasha Rāmcaritmānas.

Based on these shared stanza

units as well as the fact that Cauhān’s “language contains some eastern [i.e. Avadhi] features,”

R.S. McGregor describes the Mahābhārat as an “imitation” of the Rāmcaritmānas.

This view

is shared by other scholars. In the Miśrabandhuvinod (Delight of the Miśra Brothers, 1913)

Gaṇeśvihārī, Śyāmvihārī, and Śukadevvihārī Miśra make the following observations about

Cauhān: “his language style (praṇālī) is in the manner (ḍhaṃg) of that of Śrīgosvāmī Tulsīdāsjī

and he is also a follower (anuyāyī) of the poet.”

Lala Sita Ram writes that Cauhān “is evidently

a follower and imitator of Tulsidas.”

Even the title pages of recent editions of the Mahābhārat

describe this Bhasha poem as being written in “the style of the Rāmāyaṇa created by the

illustrious Gosvāmī Tulsīdās” (śrīgosvāmī tulsīdās kṛt rāmāyaṇ kī rīti).

As Vasudha Paramasivan notes, the Rāmcaritmānas is often described as “the most

widely known text in North India before the advent of print.”

While Philip Lutgendorf reports

that “a great surge in the royal and aristocratic patronage” of the Rāmcaritmānas only started in

the second half of the eighteenth century,

at least six manuscripts of the Rāmcaritmānas were

produced in the seventeenth century around the time when Cauhān claims to have composed his

Mahābhārat.

There are also seventeenth-century manuscripts of other compositions attributed

to Tulsī including the Rāmlalānahachū (Rāma’s Nail-Paring Ceremony) and the Kavitāvalī

sacred Mānasarovar lakes in the Padmāvat and the Rāmcaritmānas (Behl, “Presence and Absence,” 322–24; de

Bruijn, “Dialogism Medieval Genre,” 136–40). Yet accounts of a Mānasarovar lake are also found in multiple works

of South Asian literature, including the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the Mārkaṇḍeyapurāṇa (Diana L. Eck, India: A

Sacred Geography [New York: Three Rivers Press, 2012], 167). De Bruijn does convincingly show that the

Padmāvat draws extensively from the larger Rāmāyaṇa tradition (“Many Roads,” 46–50; and Ruby in the Dust:

Poetry and History in Padmāvat by the South Asian Sufi Poet Muḥammad Jāyasī [Leiden: Leiden University Press,

2012], 132–42). He does not, however, demonstrate that Tulsī is familiar with the specific allusions to the Rāmāyaṇa

narrative in the Padmāvat. Finally, de Bruijn’s argument that Tulsī is “aware of the Sufi paradigm” based solely on a

few instances of the terms “sāhab” (master) and “garībnewaj,” which is “the sobriquet of the founder of the Chishti

saint Muinuddin Chishti,” in his text, is unconvincing (“Dialogism Medieval Genre,” 135). Philip Lutgendorf also

has made very similar arguments to those of Behl and de Bruijn during a recent presentation (“The Clue in the Lake:

Tulsidas and the Sufis of Avadh” [paper presented at Court, Sampradāya and Beyond: A Workshop on Hindi

Literary Traditions from the 16th to 19th Centuries, Berkeley, CA, April 13, 2018]).

See Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 14–17; and McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

McGregor, 195.

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:273.

Sita Ram, Other Poets, 236.

See the title page of the 2015 Tej Kumār Book Depot edition.

Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 10.

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 135.

Imre Bangha, “History of a Text: The Early Manuscripts and the Modern Editions of the Rāmčaritmānas” (paper

presented at the International Conference on Early Modern Literatures in North India, Warsaw, Poland, July 18,

2018).

138

(Garland of Verses).

Further evidence of the circulation of Tulsī’s bhakti poems in the

seventeenth century is the inclusion of Tulsī in the influential seventeenth-century Bhasha

hagiography: the Bhaktamāl.

In his Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās, who is generally considered to have

been a member of the Rāmānandī Vaiṣṇava sampradāya and a contemporary of Tulsī,

writes

that “to help individuals surmount the ordeals of the Kali age, Valmiki took the form of Tulsi.”

This description of Tulsīdās as the incarnation of Vālmīki, the ādikavi and author of the Sanskrit

Rāmāyaṇa, suggests that Tulsī’s poetry to Rāma was popular in seventeenth-century North India.

While Cauhān does not directly pay tribute to Tulsīdās as Villi does to Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār

and Nammāḻvār in the Tamil Pāratam, there is a stanza in the Book of Peace (Śāntiparv) of the

Mahābhārat that may be a veiled homage to the author of the Rāmcaritmānas.

As part of his

counsel to Yudhiṣṭhira in the Bhasha Book of Peace, the dying Bhīṣma uses an entire stanza to

tell Yudhiṣṭhira about the virtues of tulsī, a sacred plant for Vaiṣṇavas and Tulsīdās’s namesake.

The word tulsī is repeated eleven times in the twelve lines of this stanza.

In some of these lines

when Cauhān refers to “garlands of tulsī” (tulasīmālā) or “leaves of tulsī” (tulasīdala), it is clear

that he is speaking about the properties of the tulsī plant.

Other lines, however, are more

ambiguous. Consider the concluding couplet of the stanza:

Listen Dharmarāja with your ears about the spoken greatness of tulsī.

The one who shows bhakti to tulsī is the one who is dear to Bhagavān.

While Cauhān could be referring to tulsī the plant here, he could also be referring to Tulsī the

poet. It is noteworthy that Tulsī creates puns using the word tulsī in his own poems. In the

beginning of the Rāmcaritmānas, for instance, Tulsī states that:

Danuta Stasik, “Text and Context: Two Versions of Tulsidas’s Rām-lalā-nahachū,” in Studies in Early Modern

Indo-Aryan Languages: Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan

languages (Seattle 1994), ed. Alan Entwistle, Carol Salomon, Heidi Pauwels, and Michael C. Shapiro (Manohar:

Delhi 1999), 382; and Imre Bangha, “Writing Devotion: Dynamics of Textual Transmission in the Kavitāvalī of

Tulsīdās,” in Forms of Knowledge in Early Modern South Asia, ed. Sheldon Pollock (Durham: Duke University

Press, 2011), 146.

It is important to remember that, as James Hare points out, “the author of the Bhaktamāl does not identify himself

as Nābhādās but rather as Nārāyandās, in the final verse. It is Priyādās, the influential first commentator on the

Bhaktamāl, who refers to Nābhādās as the sole author of the Bhaktamāl” (“Garland of Devotees: Nābhādās’

Bhaktamāl and Modern Hinduism” [PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011], 28).

Hare, 37–45.

Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl 129, trans. Paramasivan in “Text and Sect,” 10.

VP 6.10.1 and 7.5.1. For more on these verses, see Chapter Three.

CM 14.16–17

CM 14.16.

tulasī mahimā bhāṣyaū dharmarāja sunu kāna

tulasī bhaktī karata jo tāhi prīti bhagavāna || CM 14.17 ||

139

Ram’s name is a wish-granting tree

and an abode of blessing in this dark age.

Recalling it, Tulsidas was transformed from mere hemp

into tulsi, purest of herbs.

Similarly, in another of his compositions, the Vinayapatrikā (Letter of Petition), Tulsī plays with

the word tulsī when he addresses Śiva and asks for protection from the deity’s devotees:

Call them, then, quickly, and censure their harsh deeds,

For these wicked ones wish to smother this Tulsī plant

among thick thorn bushes.

Given the ways that Tulsī uses the multiple meanings of the word tulsī in his own poetic works,

it is possible that Cauhān is not simply talking about tulsī the plant in the Book of Peace.

Cauhān’s claim to have begun his Book of the Assembly Hall on Rāmnavamī is thus just one of

many different allusions to Tulsīdās and his compositions in the Bhasha Mahābhārat.

Cauhān goes on to describe himself composing multiple books of his Mahābhārat on

other Vaiṣṇava festivals. As we will see in Chapter Six, Cauhān claims that he wrote the Book of

Śalya (Śalyparv) and the Book of Clubs on festivals distinctly associated with Krishna. The dates

in the prologues of the Book of Droṇa (Droṇparv) and the Book of Karṇa (Karṇparv), however,

like the date in the Book of the Assembly Hall, are associated with Rāma. Cauhān states that he

started the Book of Droṇa in 1670 CE on the tenth day of the month of Āśvin, “that day Rāma

left Lanka.”

This is a clear reference to Vijayādaśamī, the day Rāma defeats Rāvaṇa.

Vijayādaśamī also marks the end of Navarātri, the nine-day festival during which Rāmlīlā

performances based on the Rāmcaritmānas are enacted throughout North India.

In the prologue

of the Book of Karṇa, Cauhān says that he began this book in 1667 CE on the fifth day of Āśvin,

which is the fifth day of Navarātri.

Yet, it is not Rāma but Krishna who plays a major role in

the actual narratives of Cauhān’s Book of the Assembly Hall, Book of Droṇa, and Book of Karṇa.

In the Book of the Assembly Hall, Krishna slays Śiśupāla and saves Draupadī from being

disrobed.

In the Book of Droṇa and the Book of Karṇa, Krishna tells the Pāṇḍavas exactly how

to defeat these two Kaurava generals.

The references to Rāmnavamī, Vijayādaśamī, and

Navarātri in these books thus explicitly incorporate the worship of Rāma into this Mahābhārata.

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.26 dohā, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:63.

Tulsīdās, Vinayapatrikā 8.4, trans. Allchin in Tulsīdās, Petition to Rām, 86.

jā dina laṅkā rāma payāne || CM 7.1 ||

Multiple legends identify Tulsīdās as the founder of the Rāmlīlā tradition. See Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 255–58.

I should point out, however, that there are some Rāmlīlā performances, such as the famous Rāmlīlā of Ramnagar in

Uttar Pradesh, that last for more than ten days.

CM 8.1.

CM 2.23 and 2.58.

CM 7.51 and 8.22.

140

As seen in the Book of the Assembly Hall, Cauhān often invokes multiple different Hindu

deities and sages in the opening verses of a single prologue. All eleven prologues refer to some

form of Viṣṇu. In contrast to the multiple episodes that focus on Krishna in the narrative of the

Mahābhārat, however, Cauhān’s invocations barely mention this deity. Although the epithet

Govinda, the “master of cows,” is found twice in the prologues,

unlike Villi’s invocations or

the Bhasha poems of Krishna devotees such as Sūrdās or Nandadās, Cauhān’s invocations make

no allusions to the stories of the cowherd of Vrindavan or praise the god in any detail.

Instead, the form of Viṣṇu that receives the most frequent and the most elaborate praise in

these invocations is Rāma. The first line of the Book of Hermitage (Āśramavāsikparv) is:

Victory, victory to the best of the Raghus, the illustrious Rāma

who fulfills all the desires of his bhaktas.

While other deities and sages are usually extolled in less than half a line, Cauhān frequently

dedicates entire quatrains to Rāma and other figures from the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. For example,

in the prologue to the Book of Bhīṣma (Bhīṣmparv), he writes:

I salute the feet of the lord of the Raghus

whose attributes are sung of in the four Vedas,

the beautiful protector of Ayodhya, the lord of Sītā,

the friend of the poor, the Indra of the Raghu clan.

Soon after this quatrain celebrating Rāma, Cauhān commends Vālmīki:

Vālmīki creates the Rāmāyaṇa:

the deeds of Rāma that destroy sin.

Although this verse speaks of Vālmīki and his Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, the reference to the carita or

“deeds” of Rāma in this line immediately reminds aficionados of Tulsīdās’s most famous Bhasha

Rāmāyaṇa retelling of its own title: the Rāmcaritmānas (Lake of the Deeds of Rāma).

Cauhān continues to praise Rāma in the prologue to the Book of Droṇa:

I worship the feet of Rāma, the delight of the Raghus,

the great hero, the destruction of the ten-necked one (Rāvaṇa),

CM 6.1 and 17.1.

In both Pāṇḍey’s and Śarmā’s editions of the text, however, in the opening prologue of the fourteenth book (which is

absent from the Tej Kumār Book Depot edition) Cauhān pays tribute to Krishna, Govinda, Vyāsa, and Bhagavān.

See 14.1 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 14.1 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

jayati jayati raghubara śrīrāmā bhakta janana ko pūraṇakāmā || CM 16.1 ||

kai praṇāma raghupati ke pāyana cāri veda jāke guṇa gāyana

avadhanātha sītāpati sundara dīnabandhu raghuvaṃśa puraṃdara || CM 6.1 ||

While Puraṃdara (fortress destroyer) is a common epithet of the Vedic god Indra, the title can also refer to Viṣṇu or

Kṛṣṇa. See Callewaert and Sharma, Dictionary of Bhakti, 1243.

bālmīki rāmāyaṇa karatā rāma caritra pāpa ko haratā || CM 6.1 ||

141

the one with long arms and lotus-petal eyes,

the liberation of the prostitute (Jīvantī), the hunter (Vālmīki), and Ahalyā.

In the second line of this quatrain, Cauhān mentions Jīvantī and Vālmīki, two individuals whose

lowly lives are redeemed after they chant rāmnām (the name of Rāma). David Lorenzen notes

that in North Indian bhakti traditions, Jīvantī is a prostitute who “bought a parrot to whom she

recited ‘Ram, Ram’ every morning. The day both she and the parrot died, Vishnu’s messenger

took them to heaven.”

Paula Richman explains that according to different Rāmāyaṇa narratives,

Vālmīki was “born into a robber family and, due to his low birth, he was judged unqualified to

chant Rama’s name directly. Instead, his religious preceptor taught him the mantra ‘mara mara.’

When Valmiki uttered the phrase repeatedly, the syllables blended into ‘(ma)rama rama(ra),’

thereby accruing the meritorious karmic fruits of chanting Rama’s name.”

The power of

rāmnām is a major component of Tulsī’s theology in the Rāmcaritmānas.

Tulsī dedicates ten

stanzas to the supremacy of Rāma’s name in the opening prologue of the first book of the

Rāmcaritmānas,

in which he uses the stories of Vālmīki and Jīvantī to illustrate the

omnipotence of rāmnām.

Julia Leslie points out that Tulsī also refers to the tales of Jīvantī and

Vālmīki being saved by the name of Rāma in at least two more of his Bhasha bhakti

compositions: the Kavitāvalī and the Vinayapatrikā.

By bringing up Jīvantī and Vālmīki in this

invocation praising Rāma, Cauhān alludes to the potency of rāmnām.

The prologues to the Book of Droṇa and the Book of Karṇa also both conclude with

couplets in which Cauhān describes himself “worshiping the feet of the lord of the Raghus.”

Recall that Cauhān claims that he began these two books during Vijayādaśamī and Navarātri. In

an earlier quatrain in the prologue to the Book of Karṇa, Cauhān venerates Rāma alongside the

prince of Ayodhya’s most dedicated and famous devotee: Hanumān.

I worship Rāmacandra, the ocean of attributes,

the lord of Sītā, the splendor of the Raghu clan.

No one understands his unfathomable magnificence.

[Only] his greatest bhakta Hanumān understands.

bandauṃ rāma caraṇa raghunandana mahābīra daśakandha nikandana

dīragha bāhu kamaladala locana gaṇikā byādha ahalyā mocana || CM 7.1 ||

David N. Lorenzen, Praises to a Formless God: Nirguṇī Texts from North India (Albany: State University of New

York Press, 1996), 268.

Paula Richman, “Introduction: Whose Ramayana Is It?” in Ramayana Stories in Modern South India: An

Anthology, ed. Paula Richman (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2008), 7.

For a detailed discussion of the use of rāmnām in this text, see Paramasivan, “Between Text and Sect,” 39–42.

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.19–28.

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.19.3 and 1.26.4.

Julia Leslie, Authority and Meaning in Indian Religions: Hinduism and the Case of Vālmīki (Burlington, VT:

Ashgate Publishing Company, 2003), 166.

raghupati caraṇa manāikai || CM 7.1 and 8.1 ||

bandauṃ rāmacandra guṇa sāgara sītāpati raghubaṃśa ujāgara

142

This is one of five invocations to Hanumān in the prologues of the Mahābhārat.

In the Book of

Hermitage, for example, Cauhān extols Hanumān as the one who is “well-versed in

knowledge”

and in the prologue in the Book of Clubs, he praises Hanumān as the one who is

“bound with bhakti.”

As we will soon see, Hanumān has a significant presence in this poem.

The eleven prologues in the Mahābhārat help ensure that Rāma’s story is part of

Cauhān’s narration of the deeds of Krishna. By announcing the composition dates of

Rāmnavamī, Vijayādaśamī, and Navarātri, and inserting numerous invocatory verses dedicated

to Rāma and other Rāmāyaṇa figures like Hanumān and Vālmīki, Cauhān creates prologues that

resonate with audiences of Rāma devotees and Tulsīdās connoisseurs in North India.

Honoring Hanumān

As I noted earlier, Rāma’s monkey companion Hanumān appears in an episode in the Book of the

Forest in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which he meets his younger half-brother Bhīma. In the

Bhasha Mahābhārat, however, Hanumān permeates the entire narrative of Cauhān’s poem. And

as we will soon see, Hanumān is a particularly important deity for Tulsīdās.

We first meet Hanumān in the final chapter of the first book of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat,

the Book of the Beginnings.

The chapter begins with the traveling sage and trickster Nārada

arriving in Dwarka and stirring up trouble between two of Krishna’s wives, Rukmiṇī and

Satyabhāmā, by giving Rukmiṇī a beautiful, divine flower.

In order to placate Satyabhāmā,

Krishna dispatches Arjuna to the Kadalī Forest to retrieve another flower. The Kadalī Forest,

which Lutgendorf describes as “a ‘plantain forest,’ often said to be situated in the Himalayas,

where immortal beings reside,” is the abode of Hanumān, and when he sees Arjuna plucking

flowers, the divine monkey becomes furious.

Hanumān informs Arjuna that “these flowers are

for worshiping the king of the Raghus.”

The Pāṇḍava prince and Hanumān proceed to have an

argument over whether Rāma or Arjuna is the superior archer. The boastful Arjuna insults the

bridge that Hanumān and his monkey companions built out of stones that allowed Rāma to cross

the ocean to Lanka. Arjuna goes on to brag to Hanumān that he can create a superior bridge just

out of arrows. But then Hanumān assumes a massive size and Arjuna becomes scared:

mahimā agama aura nahiṃ jānā parama bhakta jānata hanumānā || CM 8.1 ||

CM 6.1, 8.1, 16.1, 17.1, and 18.1.

hanūmāna ko jñāna biśārada || CM 16.1 ||

bandi bhakti hanumāna || CM 17.1 ||

CM 1.65–67.

This is very similar to the beginning of the Pārijātaharaṇa (theft of the Pārijāta tree) episode in an appendix of the

Harivaṃśa. See Christopher Austin, “The Fructification of the Tale of a Tree: The Pārijātaharaṇa in the Harivaṃśa

and Its Appendices,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 33, no. 2 (2013): 252.

Philip Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale: The Messages of a Divine Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press,

2006), 404.

yahī puhupa pūjata raghurāī || CM 1.66 ||

143

Pārtha (Arjuna) saw [Hanumān] and forgot his knowledge.

Then he thought of the feet of Bhagavān.

In his heart, the lord of Śrī knew about

the fight between Pārtha and Hanumān.

“Who in the world could bear the weight of Hanumān?

If he wants, he can flip over the three worlds.”

Thinking this, the hero of the Yadus

transformed his body into the form of a tortoise.

Pārtha made his arrows into a bridge.

Hari went to its center and placed it on his back.

He bore the weight of Hanumān on his back and

blood flowed and his body cracked.

Then, seeing the color of the blood, Hanumān thought:

“Who in the universe can come to the world and bear my weight?”

Meditating, he realized this was the illustrious Krishna.

Jumping up, Hanumān came to the shore.

Seeing his own blood, the forest one (Krishna)

thoroughly praised Pārtha and Hanumān.

The lord of Śrī said: “Pārtha and Hanumān,

you two heroes are alike!”

In this way, having displayed the extent of his love,

the lord of Śrī then disappeared.

Hanumān became the friend (sakhā) of Pārtha.

This is the way the sages describe it.

This story of Arjuna, Hanumān, Krishna, and the bridge of arrows can be traced back to the

fifteenth-century Sanskrit Ānandarāmāyaṇa (Joyful Rāmāyaṇa), although in the

Ānandarāmāyaṇa instead of taking the form of a tortoise, Krishna uses his discus to support the

weight of Hanumān on the bridge.

Philip Lutgendorf reports that this story is included in

pāratha dekhata bhūleu jñānā sumireu tabahiṃ caraṇa bhagavānā

apane mana meṃ śrīpati jānā bhayo bivāda pārtha hanumānā

hanū bhāra ko jagameṃ sahai tīni loka ko ulaṭana cahai

yahai bicāra karaiṃ yadubīrā kayaṭha rūpa taba dhareu śarīrā

śarako bodhi pārtha pula kīnhā tehi madhi jāi pīṭhi hari dīnhā

hanū bhāra pīṭhi para dhārā rakta bahāyo badana so phārā

rakta barṇa taba dekhyo kari bicāra hanumāna

mora bhāra saṃbhāra ko ko hai meṃ āna

dhareu dhyāna śrīkṛṣṇa ko pāye kūdi hanū taṭa ūpara āye

nija rudhirai dekheu banavārī pāratha hanu tau astuti sārī

śrīpati kaha dou eka samānā pāratha bīra aura hanumānā

yāhi prakāra prīti paramānā śrīpati taba bhe antarddhānā

pāratha sakhā bhaye hanumānā yahi prakāra te ṛṣihi bakhānā || CM 1.66–67 ||

As Lutgendorf notes, Krishna taking the form of a tortoise is a nod to “Vishnu’s kūrma avatara, which supported

the cosmic mountain during the churning of the milk-ocean” (Hanuman’s Tale, 231).

144

several twentieth-century Hindi texts focused on the life and deeds of Hanumān.

In the

Paṇḍvānī ballad performance tradition of the Gond community in Chhattisgarh, proponents of

the Kapālik style, such as Teejan Bai and Chetan Dewangan, as well as the Vedmatī style (which

is based on Cauhān’s Bhasha text), like Prabha Yadav, frequently and enthusiastically recount

the meeting of Arjuna and Hanumān.

We also find various versions of this encounter between

Hanumān and Arjuna in different Mahābhāratas composed in regional languages including those

by Sāraḷādāsa in Oriya and Kabi Sañjay and Kāśīrāmdās in Bengali and the Konkani Bhārata.

Unlike these other premodern regional Mahābhārata retellings, however, Cauhān narrates

this story with Arjuna and Hanumān on two separate occasions in the Bhasha Mahābhārat. In the

Book of Bhīṣma during the Kurukṣetra War, Yudhiṣṭhira reveals to Arjuna that he is feeling

worried about facing Bhīṣma in battle. Arjuna reassures his elder brother by reminding him that

they have Krishna on their side. Arjuna tells Yudhiṣṭhira that “the lord protects my life every

day” and then begins to describe his first meeting with Hanumān.

Notably, this episode is one

of the thirty-four scenes in an illustrated manuscript of the war books of Cauhān’s poem that was

transcribed in 1758.

In an illustration done in the Rajput style of painting, the artist of this

manuscript depicts Arjuna with his bow raised and Hanumān about to cross a body of water.

For the most part, Arjuna’s account of the story of Hanumān and the bridge of arrows

follows the one in the Book of the Beginnings. The version in the Book of Bhīṣma is two stanzas

longer than the one in the Book of the Beginnings and we hear a bit more of Hanumān’s voice. In

the Book of Bhīṣma after Arjuna first insults the bridge that Rāma built to Lanka, Hanumān

reprimands the Pāṇḍava prince and describes some of Rāma’s most impressive deeds:

Hanumān spoke in this manner:

“Wretched hunter, do you not know Rāma?

That archer who killed the ten-necked Rāvaṇa,

slew Kumbhakarṇa,

killed Vālī, and showed kindness to Sugrīva,

and made Vibhīṣaṇa the king of Lanka?

Lutgendorf, 230–31.

See Sundrani, “Hanuman Bhim Milap- Dr. Tijan Bai,” YouTube video, 30:21, December 3, 2017,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Ctv91WM6D8; Artist 440, “Pandvani | Artist440 Folkbox | Chetan Dewangan

| Chhattisgarh Folk Song | Indian Epic Mahabharata,” YouTube video, 6:31, September 21, 2017,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iigwx3sRTuU; and 1:37:00–1:53:28 of Sahapedia, “Pandavani: Adi Parv-

Prabha Yadav & Mandali,” YouTube video, 1:53:28, March 10, 2019,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XyRYsOkWYJY.

Smith, “Rāmāyaṇa Lore,” 143; Bhattacharya, “Variations on Vyasa,” 91 and 96; Miranda, “Old Konkani

Bharata,” 356.

saba dina prabhu mero praṇa rākhyo || CM 6.41 ||

Sabalsingh Cauhān, Mahābhārat, British Library, London: Or.13180.

While the paintings in this manuscript are not indicative of a specific school of Rajput painting, such as

Kishangarh or Mewar, they are clearly in the Rajput style. I thank Shivani Sud for examining this illustrated

manuscript in the British Library and sharing her observations with me.

hanūmāna yahi bhāṃti bakhānata adhama kirāta rāma nahiṃ jānata

jina mārau rāvaṇa daśakandhara kumbhakaraṇa jina badhyo dhanurdhdara

145

While Cauhān’s Mahābhārat does not have a version of the Rāmopākhyāna (the retelling of the

Rāmāyaṇa in the Book of the Forest in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata), with these three lines

Hanumān provides readers with a mini recap of some of the major events of the Rāmāyaṇa.

Arjuna’s own narration of his first meeting with Hanumān in the Book of Bhīṣma also

emphasizes Hanumān’s and Arjuna’s roles as bhaktas. In the Book of Bhīṣma when Krishna

realizes in his heart that Hanumān and Arjuna are quarrelling, he describes them as his “two

greatest bhaktas” (parama bhakta doū).

Several Vaiṣṇava traditions consider Hanumān and

Arjuna to be exemplary bhaktas. As we saw in Chapter One, the Sanskrit Bhāgavatapurāṇa

describes a ninefold (navadhā) bhakti.

In his Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās lists Hanumān and Arjuna

as two of the nine masters of ninefold bhakti: Hanumān is the master of the “servitor’s splendor”

(dāsa dīpati) and Arjuna is the master of “friendship” (sakhyatva).

By calling Arjuna and

Hanuman his “two greatest bhaktas,” Cauhān’s Krishna makes it clear that he values both the

bhakti of servitude as well as friendship.

The concluding couplet of this episode states:

Sabalsingh Cauhān says:

the one who worships Hari

in their heart, with their words, and through their actions,

and abandons other desires––

that bhakta will never be destroyed.

This couplet about the qualities of an ideal bhakta is a fitting conclusion to this episode in the

Book of Bhīṣma about the first meeting of two of the most celebrated Vaiṣṇava bhaktas. As I

pointed out in Chapter Two, Cauhān often retells stories from the Book of the Beginnings in

subsequent books of his Mahābhārat with new details about how Krishna helped the Pāṇḍavas.

In the Book of Bhīṣma’s retelling of the Arjuna and Hanumān encounter that was first told in the

Book of the Beginnings, we do not get any new details about how Krishna came to Arjuna’s aid,

but we do see a new emphasis on Arjuna’s and Hanumān’s roles as bhaktas.

After the first account of the story of Arjuna, Hanumān, and the bridge of arrows in the

Book of the Beginnings, the next place we see Hanumān in the Bhasha Mahābhārat is in the first

chapter of the Book of the Forest (Vanparv). Cauhān’s Book of the Forest begins with an account

of Bhīma slaying the demon Kirmīra, an episode we also find in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Yet unlike its Sanskrit counterpart, this scene in the Bhasha text ends with Hanumān arriving in

bāli māri sugrīva nevājā laṃkā kiyo bibhīṣaṇa rājā || CM 6.42 ||

CM 6.43.

Bhāgavatapurāṇa 7.5.23–24.

Nābhādās, Bhaktamāl 14, trans. Gilbert Pollet in “Studies in the Bhakta Māla of Nābhā Dāsa,” (PhD diss.,

University of London: SOAS, 1963), 60 and 154.

In the next verse of his text (15), Nābhādās also describes Hanumān and Arjuna as bhaktas “who are witnesses of

the flavor [rasa] and taste of the Lord’s [Hari’s] blessings” (trans. Pollet in “Bhakta Māla,” 61 and 155).

mana baca krama jo hari bhajai tajai aura kī āśa

sabalasiṃha cauhāna kaha nāhiṃna bhakta bināśa || CM 6.44 ||

MBh 3.12.

146

the forest right after Bhīma kills Kirmīra.

Cauhān states in his Mahābhārat that both Hanumān

and the Pāṇḍavas are filled with “delight” (harṣa) when they meet each other.

Hanumān makes a second appearance in the Book of the Forest in Cauhān’s retelling of

the famous meeting of Bhīma and Hanumān during Bhīma’s journey to retrieve the saugandhika

flower for Draupadī.

As noted earlier, this episode is found in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata as

well as in many regional Mahābhārata retellings. This encounter between Bhīma and Hanumān

has also been the subject of multiple independent works including Nīlakaṇṭha’s tenth-century

Sanskrit play Kalyāṇasaugandhikavyāyoga (which is now enacted as part of the Kūṭiyāṭṭam

tradition), the Kathakaḷi dance-drama Kalyāṇasaugandhikam by Kōṭṭayam Tampurān (ca. 1675–

1725), and the Amar Chitra Katha English comic book Bheema and Hanuman (1980).

In Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, this episode begins with Bhīma setting off to procure the

fragrant saugandhika flower for Draupadī. When Bhīma reaches the forest in which the flower is

located, he begins to uproot trees and roar. Hearing this commotion, Hanumān becomes furious,

assumes a gigantic form, and tells Bhīma: “Your death is in my hands.”

Hanumān then warns

Bhīma that this forest belongs to Kubera (the god of wealth) and that it is protected by a group of

demons. Bhīma, however, ignores Hanumān and begins to kill the demons. Hanumān reports this

to Kubera who surmises that Bhīma cannot be a normal human. Going back to Bhīma, Hanumān

describes himself as the one who went to Lanka for the “sake of Rāma” (rāma kāja), burned

Lanka, and defeated Mahirāvaṇa.

Hanumān then tells Bhīma that if he can lift up his tail,

Bhīma will be allowed to pluck the saugandhika flower. When Bhīma fails to do so, he realizes

in his heart that this monkey must be Hanumān. Bhīma goes to describe his family’s conflict

with the Kauravas and requests his half-brother to help the Pāṇḍavas in the same way that he

CM 3.3.

Cauhān refers to Hanumān as pavanakumārā (“son of the wind”). While this epithet could technically refer to

Bhīma since he is also the son of Vāyu, this is a very common epithet for Hanumān. In the Rāmcaritmānas, for

example, Tulsī uses this name (and the variants pavanasuta and pavanatanaya) for Hanumān over thirty times. See

Winand M. Callewaert and Philip Lutgendorf, Rāmcaritmānas Word Index (Delhi: Manohar, 1997), 176.

CM 3.3.

CM 3.26–29.

See Phillip B. Zarrilli, Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Come to Play (New York: Routledge,

2000), 103–17; Nīlakaṇṭha, Kalyāṇasaugandhikavyāyoga (Bhīma in Search of Celestial Flower: Nīlakaṇṭhakavi

Kalyāṇasaugandhikavyāyoga), trans. K.G. Paulose (Delhi: Bharatiya Book Corporation, 2000); and Lopamudra and

M.N. Nangare, Bheema and Hanuman (Bombay: Amar Chitra Katha, 1980).

more hāthahi maraṇa tuva || CM 3.27 ||

CM 3.28.

Lutgendorf explains that “Ahiravana (and/or Mahiravana) [is] a subterranean son, double, or brother (or pair of

brothers) of the king of Lanka, who comes to the latter’s aid during the final days of his battle with Rama and the

monkeys…Though absent from most recensions of Valmiki, this is a very popular and today virtually pan-Indian

tale … Already alluded to in the ca. eighth century Śatarudrasṃahitā of the Śivapurāṇa (3.20.34), it was greatly

elaborated on in Bengali, Oriya, and Assamese Ramayanas composed from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, as

well as in the ca. fourteenth-fifteenth-century Sanskrit Ānandarāmāyaṇa and the sixteenth–century Marathi

Bhāvārtharāmāyaṇa of Eknath” (Hanuman’s Tale, 53).

147

once helped Rāma. Hanumān promises Bhīma that he will be in Arjuna’s chariot and protect him

from weapons. Kubera is pleased and Bhīma happily returns to Draupadī with the flower.

There are several differences between Cauhān’s rendering of this episode and the one

found in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. In the Mahābhārata, for example, the

encounter between Bhīma and Hanumān takes place before Bhīma even reaches Kubera’s

abode.

While Hanumān teaches Bhīma about the four eons (yugas) and the proper conduct for

warriors (kṣatriya dharma) in the Sanskrit epic, these discourses are not found in the Bhasha

Mahābhārat.

The most significant difference, however, is the absence of Bhīma’s worship of

Hanumān after the divine monkey reveals his massive celestial form to Bhīma in Cauhān’s text.

In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, after Bhīma realizes he has been conversing with Hanumān, he

requests his half-brother to display “your unequal form when you leaped across the sea.”

Hanumān reluctantly agrees to do so and upon seeing his gigantic form, Bhīma kneels before

Hanumān with folded hands and begs the monkey to resume his normal size.

David Gitomer, James Laine, Arshia Sattar, John Brockington, Philip Lutgendorf,

Danielle Feller, and Bruce Sullivan have all noted the striking similarities between this moment

and Krishna’s theophany to Arjuna during the Bhagavadgītā.

Alf Hiltebeitel asserts that the

narrative of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata “builds up to and works around a series” of “‘bhakti

tableaux,’ scenes which present images that hold themselves before the hearer’s mind.”

adds that these bhakti tableaux “present ways of seeing the divine through the stories that are

akin to the contemporaneous development of temple iconography,” and that the “most obvious

such tableau” is Arjuna’s reaction to Krishna’s awe-inspiring display of his divine form in the

Bhagavadgītā.

Indira Viswanathan Peterson identifies Arjuna’s worship of Śiva after the deity

reveals himself at the conclusion of the kirāta episode in the Book of the Forest in the Sanskrit

MBh 3.146–50.

MBh 3.148–49.

MBh 3.148.3, trans. John L. Brockington in “Hanumān in the Mahābhārata,” Journal of Vaishnava Studies 12,

no. 2 (2004): 130.

MBh 3.149.12

David L. Gitomer, “The ‘Veṇīsaṃhāra’ of Bhaṭṭa Nārāyaṇa: The Great Epic as Drama,” (PhD diss., Columbia

University, 1988), 320–23; James W. Laine, Visions of God: Narratives of Theophany in the Mahābhārata (Vienna:

De Nobili Research Library, 1989), 40–42; Arshia Sattar, “Hanumān in the ‘Rāmāyaṇa’ of Vālmīki: A Study in

Ambiguity” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1990), 190–93; John Brockington, “Hanumān in Mahābhārata,”

130; Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 282; Danielle Feller, “Bhīma’s Quest for the Golden Lotuses (Mahābhārata

3.146–153 and 3.157– 59),” in Battle, Bards and Brāhmins. Papers of the 13th World Sanskrit Conference, Volume

II, ed. John L. Brockington (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 2012), 91; and Bruce M. Sullivan, “The Tale of an Old

Monkey and a Fragrant Flower: What the Mahābhārata’s Rāmāyaṇa May Tell Us about the Mahābhārata,” in

Argument and Design: The Unity of the Mahābhārata, ed. Vishwa Adluri and Joydeep Bagchee (Boston: Brill,

2016), 198–99. Also see Bhagavadgītā 11.1–51.

Alf Hiltebeitel, “The Two Kṛṣṇas on One Chariot: Upaniṣadic Imagery and Epic Mythology,” History of

Religions 24, no. 1 (1984): 2.

Hiltebeitel, 2.

148

epic as another bhakti tableau.

In her work on Bhāravi’s sixth-century Kirātārjunīya, Peterson

shows how Bhāravi’s “vision of bhakti” is in a “symbiotic relationship” with the heroic (vīra)

rasa that pervades this Sanskrit mahākāvya.

She also describes how the southern recension of

the Mahābhārata and later Kannada retellings from the Vīraśaiva community offer a different

presentation of this episode by adding a scene in which Arjuna builds and worships an altar to

Śiva in order “to make Arjuna’s deeds more compatible with the behavior of the ideal bhakta”

and with “the later accounts of divine revelation in the lives of bhakti saints.”

The image of Bhīma kneeling with his hands folded in front of the gigantic Hanumān in

the Mahābhārata clearly mirrors those of Arjuna bowing to Śiva and Krishna in the kirāta

episode and the Bhagavadgītā. It is thus surprising that Cauhān does not take advantage of this

bhakti tableau in his own devotional Mahābhārata retelling. While Hanumān does grow to a

massive size when he hears Bhīma destroying the forest in the Bhasha poem, the scene in which

Bhīma begs to see Hanumān’s huge form and then becomes terrified is absent from Cauhān’s

text. We do, however, see this scene in the oldest extant Bhasha Mahābhārata: Viṣṇudās’s

Pāṇḍavcarit. After Bhīma asks Hanumān to display his celestial form, Viṣṇudās tells us:

The pitiful, impotent one turned his back away from Bhīma.

His body became bigger and was the whole universe.

Bhīma trembled and his heart was frightened.

He moved restlessly like Sītā, the daughter of Janaka, when she was abducted.

Bhīma’s eyes were quite agitated.

[Hanumān] then assumed his previous form with his small body

and the red face of his adorable body.

In that way, Bhīma saw the hero Hanumān.

In this way, Hanumān and Bhīma became bound to each other by a promise.

The storehouse of compassion entered the heart of that descendent of Bharata.

Modern scholarship has categorized the Pāṇḍavcarit as a text that is outside the peripheries of

Bhasha bhakti poetry. Allison Busch remarks that Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit and Rāmāyaṇkathā

both “lack the type of religiosity that defines bhakti literature.”

As we saw in the Introduction,

Indira Viswanathan Peterson, “Arjuna’s Combat with the Kirāta: Rasa and Bhakti in Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya,” in

Essays on the Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 215–16.

Peterson, “Arjuna’s Combat,” 250.

Peterson, 245–46.

dīnīṃ pīṭhi bhīṃu balibaṃḍā bagḍhi sarīru gayau brahmaṃḍā

kāṃpyau bhīṃu manahu bhahabhītū kalamali gayau janaku hayau sītū

bhīṃu āṃkhi mihacīṃ akulāī bāhuri thorī deha dikhāī

mukha rātau pīyarau sarīrū aisau dekhyau hanivatu bīrū

hanimatu soṃ aru bhīma soṃ bhayau bacana baṃdhāna

bhārata mājha padhārabī jau hiya kṛpā nidhāna || Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 3.3.23–24 and dohrā 3.3.1 ||

Allison Busch, “Questioning the Tropes about ‘Bhakti’ and ‘Rīti’ in Hindi Literary Historiography,” in Bhakti in

Current Research, 2001–2003, ed. Monika Horstmann (Delhi: Manohar, 2006), 43.

149

Sheldon Pollock claims that “the oeuvre of Viṣṇudās evinces no particular concern with bhakti”

and that “if any echo of bhakti can be said to be present, it is remarkably muted.”

Commenting

on the ten line-long rendering of the Bhagavadgītā in the Pāṇḍavcarit, McGregor notes that “of

devotion (bhakti) or the philosophical implications of Kṛṣṇa’s teaching, there is nothing here.”

Yet as the passage above demonstrates, Viṣṇudās is clearly presenting this moment as a

bhakti tableau. Bhīma’s reaction to seeing Hanumān’s divine form in the Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit is

very similar to Arjuna’s response to witnessing Krishna’s theophany in the Bhagavadgītā in the

Sanskrit epic. Viṣṇudās also uses certain terms and images that permeate Vaiṣṇava literature. For

instance, Viṣṇudās refers to Hanumān as the “storehouse of compassion” (kṛpānidhāna), a term

that Tulsīdās uses for describing deities over twenty times in the Rāmcaritmānas.

The image of

Hanumān entering Bhīma’s heart is a reference to the Vaiṣṇava concept of antaryāmin or hārda

that we saw in the Śrīvaiṣṇava context in Chapters Two and Three. The idea of Hanumān

residing in Bhīma’s heart is also a fascinating inversion of a popular story in which Hanumān

rips open his chest to reveal Rāma, Rāma’s name, or Rāma and Sītā.

The special attention Viṣṇudās gives to this bhakti tableau, however, is likely not related

to the deity being worshiped, but to the man who is worshiping the deity. In the prologue of the

Pāṇḍavcarit, Viṣṇudās tells us that Dūṅgarsingh, the Tomar Rajput king of Gwalior (r. ca. 1429–

1459) and Viṣṇudās’s patron, is of “Pāṇḍu’s clan” (paṇḍuvaṃsa) and given his “arm-strength”

(bhujabala), he is Bhīma himself.

As several scholars have pointed out, Bhīma is the central

hero of the Pāṇḍavcarit.

Episodes that feature Bhīma prominently in Viṣṇudās’s retelling––

such as his marriage to Hiḍimbā and his slayings of Jarāsandha and Kīcaka––are given greater

importance than others involving Arjuna or Yudhiṣṭhira.

Unlike bhakti tableaux that feature

Arjuna, such as Krishna’s theophany in the Bhagavadgītā, Bhīma’s encounter with Hanumān is

one that Viṣṇudās cannot afford to ignore in his Bhīma-centric Bhasha Mahābhārata.

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 429.

McGregor, Hindi Literature, 36–37.

Callewaert and Lutgendorf, Rāmcaritmānas Word Index, 70.

Philip Lutgendorf notes that “this story occurs in the fifteenth-century Bengali Ramayana attributed to Krittibasa,

and it may have originated in Bengal” (“Ally, Devotee, and Friend” in The Rama Epic: Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe,

ed. Forrest McGill [San Francisco: Asian Art Museum, 2016], 159).

Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 1.1.36–37.

Vidya Prakash Tyagi points out the Tomar Rajputs claimed to be the descendants of Arjuna (Martial Races of

Undivided India [Delhi: Gyan Publishing House, 2009], 150).

See R.S. McGregor, “A Narrative Poet’s View of his Material: Viṣṇudās’s Introduction to his Brajbhāṣā Pāṇḍav-

carit (AD 1435),” in The Banyan Tree: Essays on Early Literature in New Indo-Aryan Languages, ed. Mariola

Offredi (Delhi: Manohar, 2000), 341; Pollock, Language of Gods, 395; Imre Bangha, “Early Hindi Epic Poetry in

Gwalior: Beginnings and Continuities in the Rāmāyan of Vishnudas,” in After Timur Left: Culture and Circulation

in Fifteenth-century North India, ed. Francesca Orsini and Samira Sheikh (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014),

372; and Heidi Pauwels, “The Power-Politics of Desire and Revenge: A Classical Hindi Kīcakavadha Performance

at the Tomar Court of Gwalior,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany:

State University of New York Press, 2021), 245.

Pauwels, “Power-Politics of Revenge,” 245n35.

150

While the Bhasha Mahābhārat contains a version of the story of Bhīma, Hanumān, and

the search for the saugandhika flower, Cauhān dedicates much more space to his two renderings

of the story of Arjuna, Hanumān, and the bridge of arrows. These two tales of Hanumān meeting

one of the Pāṇḍava brothers are actually quite similar. They both begin with a quest for a flower

to appease a queen, they both involve a Pāṇḍava angering Hanumān, and they both feature

Hanumān adopting a gigantic form. In both of Cauhān’s versions of the encounter between

Hanumān and Arjuna, Arjuna has a terrified reaction to Hanumān’s awe-inspiring vision that is

reminiscent of Bhīma’s reaction to the monkey’s theophany in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and

Viṣṇudās’s Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit. Although Bhīma is Hanumān’s half-brother, Cauhān is far more

concerned with the relationship between Arjuna and Hanumān. As the narrative of the

Mahābhārat progresses, Cauhān presents his audience with several more episodes that showcase

the bond between Arjuna and Hanumān and that emphasize their shared role as bhaktas.

In the next book of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, the Book of Virāṭa’s Court (Virāṭparv),

Hanumān plays an important role during the episode in which Arjuna and Virāṭa’s son Uttara

ride off into battle to protect Virāṭa’s cattle from a Kaurava raid. This takes place during the

Pāṇḍavas’ thirteenth year of exile when they are living in disguise in Virāṭa’s court and Arjuna

has taken on the identity of Bṛhannalā, the dance teacher of Virāṭa’s daughter Uttarā.

100

Arjuna-as-Bṛhannalā and Uttara prepare to face the Kauravas, Cauhān tells us that Hanumān is

sitting atop of the chariot’s flag.

101

In the search for the saugandhika flower episode in Cauhān’s

Mahābhārat (and in the Sanskrit epic and the Pāṇḍavcarit), Hanumān promises Bhīma that he

will reside in Arjuna’s flag in battle.

102

Yigal Bronner notes that during the cattle raid battle in

the Book of Virāṭa’s Court in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, “Arjuna closes his revelation to the

Kauravas by hoisting his flag with its simian ensign. The ape on the flag then takes an active role

in the fighting: it petrifies the enemy with its roars and is even hurt in the action.”

103

Bronner

also points out that while this monkey is never named in the critical edition of the Mahābhārata,

“later versions of the Mahābhārata leave no question about the identity of Hanumān as the

monkey on the banner.”

104

These later Mahābhāratas include Villi’s Pāratam, Kumāravyāsa’s

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit, and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat.

105

As in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, when Uttara realizes that

Bṛhannalā is Arjuna in Cauhān’s poem, the young prince asks to hear the middle Pāṇḍava’s ten

names. In the Sanskrit epic, the ten names Arjuna recites are: Arjuna, Phalguna, Jiṣṇu, Kirīṭin,

Śvetavāhana, Bībhatsu, Vijaya, Krishna (Kṛṣṇa), Savyasācin, and Dhanañjaya.

106

But in

100

Note that in the critical edition of the Sanskrit epic, Arjuna’s name is Bṛhannaḍā. For an analysis of Arjuna’s role

as Bṛhannaḍā in the Mahābhārata and as Bṛhannalā in the Sanskrit drama, the Pañcarātra, see Nell Shapiro

Hawley, “The Remembered Self: Arjuna as Bṛhannalā in the Pañcarātra,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro

Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 89–116.

101

CM 4.35.

102

CM 3.28; MBh 3.150.15; and Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 3.3.25.

103

Bronner, Extreme Poetry, 152.

104

Bronner, 152.

105

VP 4.4.61; Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 4.6.50; Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 4.5.26; and CM 4.35.

106

MBh 4.39.8.

151

Cauhān’s composition, we get a slightly different list of names: Arjuna, Pārtha, Bijayi (Vijaya),

Kirīṭa (Kirīṭin), Vibhatsa (Bībhatsu), Dhanañjaya,

107

Sabyasācī (Savyasācin), Śvetabāji

(Śvetavāhana), Kapidhvaja, and Śabdabheda (Sanskrit: Śabdavedhin).

108

While seven names are

found in both lists in the Sanskrit and Bhasha texts, Phalguna, Jiṣṇu, and Krishna are unique to

the Mahābhārata’s list and Pārtha, Kapidhvaja, and Śabdabheda are only part of Cauhān’s list.

Cauhān’s choice to give Kapidhvaja or “the monkey-bannered” as one of Arjuna’s ten names is

significant because it reinforces the importance of Arjuna and Hanumān’s friendship.

109

During the cattle raid battle in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Book of Virāṭa’s Court,

the unnamed monkey on Arjuna’s banner is described roaring and being wounded by one of

Bhīṣma’s arrows.

110

In the Bhasha poem, Hanumān is also injured but he is hurt by the Kaurava

prince Vikarṇa, not Bhīṣma.

111

Also, while the critical edition of the epic does not describe

Arjuna’s reaction to Bhīṣma shooting the monkey on his flag, Cauhān states that Arjuna is

furious when he sees Hanumān get struck by Vikarṇa’s arrow.

112

Another major difference

between these episodes in the Sanskrit and Bhasha texts is that while the Mahābhārata’s monkey

simply screeches at the Kauravas and frightens them, Cauhān’s Hanumān actually participates in

the battle by shooting arrows at the Kauravas.

113

The Bhasha Mahābhārat also describes

Hanumān protecting Arjuna during this episode. At one point while Arjuna is fighting his former

teacher Droṇa, the Pāṇḍava prince realizes that his death is eminent. Cauhān then tells us:

Pārtha knew that now he would die,

and remembered the feet of the god Krishna.

When Droṇa released the arrow,

Hanumān expanded his mouth and took it.

114

For Cauhān’s readers who are familiar with stories of Hanumān’s childhood, the image of this

divine monkey widening his mouth in order to consume Droṇa’s arrow and protect Arjuna might

remind them of the tale of the infant Hanumān mistaking the sun for a fruit and then trying to

107

While in the Sanskrit epic, Arjuna says “They call me Dhanaṃjaya because I stand in the midst of booty after

conquering all the countrysides and plundering their entire wealth” (MBh 4.39.11, trans. van Buitenen in

Mahābhārata 3:88), in Cauhān’s text, Arjuna tells Uttara that “Krishna calls me by the name Dhanañjaya” (nāma

dhanañjaya kṛṣṇa bakhānā, CM 4.36). This is thus another example of Cauhān highlighting Krishna in his poem.

108

CM 4.36.

109

I should point out that while Kapidhvaja is not one of the ten names of Arjuna in the Sanskrit epic, in other parts

of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Arjuna is referred to as Kapidhvaja. For example, see Bhagavadgītā 1.1.20.

110

See MBh 4.48.5, 4.48.21–22, and 4.59.7.

111

CM 4.39.

112

CM 4.39.

113

CM 4.51–52.

I will discuss the significance of depicting Hanumān as an archer shortly.

114

jānyo pārtha bhayo aba maraṇā sumire kṛṣṇadeva ke caraṇā

chūṭo jabahiṃ droṇa ko bānā mukha pasārī līnhoṃ hanumānā || CM 4.44 ||

152

swallow it.

115

This scene in the Bhasha Mahābhārat also has parallels with the episode in the

Sanskrit Book of Droṇa in which Bhagadatta, the ruler of the Pragjyotisha kingdom and an ally

of the Kauravas, launches the vaiṣṇavāstra or the “weapon of Viṣṇu” at Arjuna during the

Kurukṣetra War. Before the vaiṣṇavāstra can strike Arjuna, Krishna steps in front of the weapon

and the vaiṣṇavāstra transforms into a garland of flowers.

116

As we saw in Chapter Two, both

Villi’s Pāratam and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat are filled with instances of the Pāṇḍavas or Draupadī

thinking of Krishna during a moment of distress and the deity instantly coming to their side. In

the passage above, however, when Arjuna remembers Krishna it is not Krishna but Hanumān

who comes to his aid. By having Rāma’s greatest bhakta respond to Arjuna’s remembrance of

Krishna, Cauhān blurs the distinctions between Viṣṇu’s two most prominent incarnations.

As I pointed out in Chapter Two, much of the fifth book of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, the

Book of Effort, is dedicated to different characters’ retellings of the earlier events that have led to

the impending war between the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas. In these recaps of stories Cauhān

has already shared with his audience in the first four books of his Mahābhārata, several

characters bring up Hanumān and his bond with Arjuna. For example, in Kuntī’s account of the

deeds of her children to Krishna, the Pāṇḍavas’ mother tells the deity that Arjuna was able to tie

up the ocean with his bridge of arrows because of Hanumān.

117

Similarly, while describing the

lineage of the Pāṇḍavas from Bhīṣma to Sahadeva, Krishna briefly mentions the bridge of arrows

that resulted in Hanumān becoming Arjuna’s friend sakhā or “friend.”

118

Cauhān’s choice to

describe Hanumān as Arjuna’s sakhā in his poem is significant. Throughout the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, Arjuna and Krishna refer to each other as sakhā with one of the most prominent

examples of this being the two verses from the Bhagavadgītā that we saw in Chapter One in

which Arjuna apologizes to Krishna for not realizing his omnipotence and constantly calling him

his sakhā.

119

Also recall that in his account of the nine masters of ninefold bhakti in the

Bhaktamāl, Nābhādās describes Arjuna as the master of sakhyatva or “friendship” bhakti.

120

Cauhān is thus presenting Hanumān as the sakhā of the exemplar of sakhyatva bhakti.

Some of the Kauravas’ advisors in the Book of Effort also bring up Arjuna and

Hanumān’s friendship in their attempts to deter Duryodhana from going to war with his cousins.

When Aśvatthāman is recounting the lives of his father Droṇa and his students, he reminds the

Kauravas that Arjuna defeated Hanumān when they first met.

121

After failed peace negotiations

with the Pāṇḍavas, Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s charioteer Sañjaya warns the Kauravas that:

115

For this story and its many variants, see Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 186–89.

116

MBh 7.28.

117

CM 5.104.

118

CM 5.11.

119

Bhagavadgītā 11.41–42.

120

Pollet, “Bhakta Māla,” 60 and 154.

121

CM 5.17.

153

Hanumān became the sakhā of Arjuna.

The entire world knows about his victory in Lanka.

122

Vidura cautions his one hundred nephews against fighting with Arjuna by telling them:

That one who no one can defeat, the son of the wind

who is known in the universe, became his [Arjuna’s] sakhā.

123

Once the great Kurukṣetra War begins in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, it quickly becomes evident that

the Kauravas should have heeded these warnings about facing Arjuna and Hanumān in battle.

As noted earlier, although Hanumān promises Bhīma in the Book of the Forest in the

critical edition of the Sanskrit epic that “perching on the flagstaff of Vijaya, I shall utter fearful

roars that will rob your enemies of their lives,” the name of the monkey on Arjuna’s banner in

the Battle of Kurukṣetra is never mentioned in the war books of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

124

Yet in several retellings in regional languages, not only is the monkey identified as Hanumān,

but this monkey is a key player in the war. In Ranna’s eleventh-century Kannada

Sāhasabhīmavijayam, Duryodhana takes the time to insult “Raghava’s beloved aide” on Arjuna’s

flag and says that “it is in a monkey’s nature to fickle!”

125

Rocky Miranda points out that in the

Konkani Bhārata, Hanumān appears in all of the war books and that he is shown “destroying a

yajna performed by Duryodhana in order to win the war.”

126

William Smith observes that in

Sāraḷādāsa’s Oriya retelling, Hanumān advises Krishna and saves Arjuna’s life twice by adopting

his gigantic form and using “his great strength to press the chariot down into the underworld”

while weapons are being fired at the Pāṇḍava prince.

127

We find a similar scene in the Book of

Karṇa of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat when Indra appears and instructs Hanumān to protect Arjuna by

using his weight to sink the chariot into pātāla, the netherworld.

128

What sets Cauhān’s depiction of Hanumān in the Kurukṣetra War apart from other

retellings, however, is the Bhasha poet’s presentation of Hanumān as an archer fighting

alongside Arjuna. In Cauhān’s Book of Bhīṣma, while Arjuna is engaged in combat against

Bhagadatta and Bhagadatta’s particularly intimidating war elephant Supratīka, Krishna says:

“Along with Pārtha and the chariot,

you must protect us, Hanumān!”

122

arjuna kīna sakhā hanumānā laṅkā bijaya sakala jaga jānā || CM 5.58 ||

Note that later on in the Bhasha Book of Effort, Krishna praises Vidura by likening him to the “incomparable”

(ananya) bhakta Hanumān (CM 5.89).

123

sake jīti nahiṃ pavanakumārā kīnhe sakhā bidita saṃsārā || CM 5.63 ||

124

MBh 3.150.16, trans. van Buitenen in Mahābhārata 2:509.

125

Ranna, Sāhasabhīmavijayam 3.41, trans. Sundaram and Sharon in Ranna, Gadāyuddham, 83.

126

Miranda, “Old Konkani Bharata,” 356.

127

Smith, “Rāmāyaṇa Lore,” 146.

128

CM 8.13.

154

Saying this for the sake of his bhakta,

Bhagavān became enchanted.

129

Immediately after this receiving this command, Hanumān engages in combat with Supratīka. In

their visual representation of this episode, the artist of the 1758 illustrated manuscript of

Cauhān’s Mahābhārat depicts Hanumān in his giant celestial form charging Supratīka with a

mace or club,

130

which as Lutgendorf points out, is the “distinctive weapon” of Hanumān.

131

But then Cauhān goes on to describe Hanumān launching one hundred thousand arrows

(lakṣa bāṇa) at Bhagadatta.

132

This is a rather unusual and unique depiction of Hanumān as a

warrior. As noted above, like his half-brother Bhīma, Hanumān’s weapon of choice within the

Rāmāyaṇa tradition is usually the gadā, a mace or club. By having Hanumān fight with a bow

and arrow, Cauhān implicitly likens Hanumān to two of the greatest archers in the South Asian

epics: Rāma and Arjuna. Throughout his account of the Battle at Kurukṣetra, Cauhān describes

Hanumān firing arrows at Bhīṣma, Jayadratha, Droṇa, and Karṇa.

133

Cauhān also depicts

Bhīṣma, Karṇa, and Śalya trying to shoot Hanumān down with arrows.

134

Clearly, these powerful

Kaurava generals all see Hanumān as a formidable archer and a distinct threat.

After the conclusion of the Kurukṣetra War, the next time we see Hanumān in the Bhasha

Mahābhārat is in an episode in the Book of the Horse Sacrifice.

135

Cauhān begins this book with

Vyāsa encouraging Yudhiṣṭhira to perform the aśvamedha or “horse sacrifice”

136

on the basis

that “Rāmacandra, the son of Daśaratha, who destroyed the clan of Rāvaṇa” also completed this

ritual.

137

Krishna further advises Yudhiṣṭhira that a certain type of gold that is only available in

Lanka, which is currently ruled by Rāvaṇa’s younger brother Vibhīṣaṇa, is necessary for the

horse sacrifice. Arjuna volunteers to retrieve the gold from Vibhīṣaṇa and heads to Lanka.

138

While there are accounts of Sahadeva sending envoys to Lanka to meet with Vibhīṣaṇa as part of

129

hama pāratha aru ratha sahita tuma rakṣaka hanumānā

yaha kaha ke mohite bhaye bhakta hetu bhagavāna || CM 6.25 ||

130

Cauhān, Mahābhārat, Or.13180.

131

Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 257.

132

CM 6.25.

133

CM 6.52, 7.29, 7.46, 7.49, 8.17, and 8.20.

134

CM 6.30, 8.19, and 9.4.

135

CM 15.13–19.

136

John Smith explains that “in the horse sacrifice, a horse is released to wander at will for a year, and the

sacrificing king claims for himself all of the territory over which it travels. This necessarily involves doing battle

with the rulers of the lands in question” (Mahābhārata: Abridged Translation, 715n1).

137

rāmacandra daśaratha kumārā rāvaṇa baṃśa kiyo saṃhārā || CM 15.1 ||

Note that the fact that Rāma completed the aśvamedha ritual is not brought up in the corresponding passage of the

critical edition of the Sanskrit epic. See MBh 14.13.

138

CM 15.13–14.

155

Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya ceremony in the critical edition of the Mahābhārata, Villi’s Pāratam,

Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, and the Malayalam

retellings of Śankaran, Cĕṟuśśeri, Tuñcattŭ Ĕḻuttacchan, and Ayyanappiḷḷa Āśān, the story of

Arjuna traveling to Lanka seems to be unique to Cauhān’s Bhasha composition.

139

In the Bhasha Book of the Horse Sacrifice, when Arjuna approaches Lanka he attacks a

demon in the service of Vibhīṣaṇa. The demon retreats to Lanka where he meets Hanumān and

describes his attacker saying, “I thought that it was Rāma or that Lakṣmaṇa had arrived.”

140

The

delighted Hanumān goes to investigate but is disappointed to see that the intruder is neither

Rāma nor Lakṣmaṇa. Arjuna identifies himself but he does not seem to recognize his sakhā

Hanumān and he gives the divine monkey a lengthy recap of the events of the Rāmāyaṇa that

lasts for more than twenty lines.

141

After Arjuna tells Hanumān that he has come to retrieve the

gold from Lanka, Hanumān admonishes Arjuna and says that the Pāṇḍava has become arrogant

since Kurukṣetra. And then just as in the episode in the Book of the Beginnings, we see Arjuna

and Hanumān get into an argument about the bridge that Hanumān and his monkey companions

built to Lanka for Rāma. Once again, Arjuna begins to construct a bridge of arrows that he

claims can support the weight of Hanumān. But before Hanumān can step on the bridge, Krishna

provides the monkey with a divine vision and wherever Hanumān looks, all he sees is Krishna’s

body. Deeply ashamed, Hanumān runs to Arjuna and apologizes. Hanumān then crosses the

ocean to Lanka and obtains the gold that Arjuna needs for the horse sacrifice. When Hanumān

gives the gold to Arjuna, Cauhān concludes the episode by telling us:

Then Hanumān told Arjuna:

“Now I am your servant.

Whenever you think of me, I will come to your side.”

And Hanumān illuminated these words.

142

With this episode, we see a shift in Arjuna and Hanumān’s relationship with Hanumān treating

Arjuna with the same deferential respect that he has previously reserved for Rāma and Krishna in

Cauhān’s Bhasha poem. Instead of simply being Arjuna’s sakhā, Hanumān now seems to be

Arjuna’s bhakta as well. Hanumān’s description of himself as Arjuna’s “servant” (sevaka) also

brings to mind Nābhādās’s characterization of Hanumān as the master of the “servitor’s

splendor” (dāsa dīpati) in his account of the nine masters of ninefold bhakti in the Bhaktamāl.

143

139

See MBh 2.28.50–55; VP 2.1.61–65; Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī 2.21–50; CM 5.11; and

Harindranath and Purushothaman, “Mahābhārata Variations in Malayalam.”

In this episode in all of the Mahābhārata retellings that were composed in South Indian regional languages, the

messenger that Sahadeva sends to Vibhīṣaṇa is Bhīma’s half-demon son, Ghaṭotkaca.

140

maiṃ jānata hauṃ rāmahahiṃ kī tau lakṣmaṇa āhi || CM 15.14 ||

141

CM 15.15–16.

142

taba hanumata arjuna sana kaheū hama sevaka aba rāura aheū

jahaṃ sumirahu āveṃ tohiṃ pāsā aru hanumata yaha bacana prakāsā || CM 15.19 ||

143

Pollet, “Bhakta Māla,” 60 and 154.

156

When the aśvamedha ritual actually begins in Cauhān’s text and Arjuna starts to follow

the sacrificial horse across various lands, we see much more of Hanumān. Towards the

beginning of Arjuna’s journey, Krishna once again instructs Hanumān to protect Arjuna.

144

While passing through Bengal, Arjuna is attacked by a group of demons. Cauhān then tells us:

One demoness saw Hanumān

and she called out: “Run! Run!

Brothers, I know this monkey,

he burned the city of Lanka in an instant.”

145

In this scene, Hanumān’s mere presence in Arjuna’s chariot protects the Pāṇḍava prince.

As I pointed out in Chapter Two, the Book of the Horse Sacrifice in the Bhasha

Mahābhārat, like several other premodern Mahābhārata retellings, follows the events of the

twelfth-century Sanskrit Jaiminibhārata. In a scene in Cauhān’s poem that is clearly drawn from

the Jaiminibhārata, Arjuna engages in combat with a king named Vīravarma.

146

During the

battle, Hanumān pulls Vīravarma’s chariot into the sky in order to save Arjuna.

147

After

recovering, Vīravarma is delighted to meet Hanumān who then blesses the king.

148

Why does Hanumān play such a prominent role in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat? One possible

explanation is the increasing popularity of Hanumān throughout early-modern South Asia.

Lutgendorf notes that beginning in the fifteenth century, there was an “iconographic boom” of

depictions of Hanumān throughout the Indian subcontinent that “roughly coincides with the

elaboration of Hanuman’s deeds in later Puranas and regional Ramayanas.”

149

As we have seen,

the Bhasha Mahābhārat is not the only regional retelling of the epic to increase Hanumān’s

presence in the narrative. Smith points out that in his Oriya poem, Sāraḷādāsa “tells the story of

Hanumān’s birth and background, not once but three different times.”

150

Miranda describes an

episode in the Book of the Horse Sacrifice in the Konkani Bhārata in which Arjuna and

Hanumān have to rescue a kidnapped princess from the monkey army of Sugrīva.

151

The

consistent presence of Hanumān in Cauhān’s poem, however, is unique. Hanumān permeates the

Mahābhārat from the first rendering of the bridge of arrows story in the Book of the Beginnings

all the way up to the invocation of the text’s final book, the Book of the Ascent to Heaven:

144

CM 15.46.

145

daityani eka dīkha hanumānā bhāgu bhāgu so karai bakhānā

vaha bandar ke jānā bhāī pala mahaṃ laṅkāpurī jarāī || CM 15.51 ||

146

On the Jaiminibhārata scene, see Satyabrata Das and U.N. Sahu, “Aswamedha Episode and Jaimini Bharata in

the Tradition of Mahabharata: Bengali, Assamese and Oriya Version,” Orissa Review 66, no. 9 (2010): 76.

147

This scene is depicted in an illustrated manuscript of the Persian Razmnāmah (ca. 1582) that was copied around

1598. See Razmnāmah, British Library, London: Or.12076,

http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/Viewer.aspx?ref=or_12076_f080v.

148

CM 15.79.

149

Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 60.

150

Smith, “Rāmāyaṇa Lore,” 144.

151

Miranda, “Old Konkani Bharata,” 357.

157

In my heart, I think of and place my trust in that one:

Hanumān who removes innumerable obstacles.

152

Another possible explanation for Hanumān’s prominence in the Bhasha Mahābhārat is

that Cauhān might have been a member of the Rāmānandī Vaiṣṇava sampradāya in North India.

Patton Burchett has recently observed that Hanumān was an important figure in the Rāmānandī

tradition. He notes that the Rāmānandīs of Galta in present-day Rajasthan chose to “dedicate the

very first temple they constructed to Hanumān.”

153

Burchett adds that “potentially adding to the

evidence that Hanumān played a key role in the early Rāmānandī community, R.S. McGregor

notes that two early seventeenth-century Brajbhasha adaptations of the Sanskrit drama the

Hanumān-nāṭaka (a version of the Rām story centered on the deeds of Hanumān) indicate a

separate Hanumān-focused strand of early Rāmānandī literature.”

154

These two Bhasha retellings

were composed by Prāṇcand Cauhān in 1610 and Hṛdayrām in 1623.

155

Along with its poet

sharing the same family name as the author of the Bhasha Mahābhārat, the 1610 Bhasha

Hanumānnāṭaka also shares the same primary meter of Sabalsingh Cauhān’s Mahābhārata

retelling: the caupāī.

156

Monika Horstmann describes a third Bhasha retelling of the

Hanumānnāṭaka by another Rāmānandī poet: Govindānand’s Rāmcaritraratnāvalī (Garland of

Jewels of the Deeds of Rāma, 1793).

157

Notably, in the invocations in the beginning of his Book

of Bhīṣma, Cauhān speaks of “singing the attributes of the drama (nāṭaka) of Hanumān.”

158

Some scholars might see the intertextual relationship between Tulsīdās’s sixteenth-

century Rāmcaritmānas and Cauhān’s seventeenth-century Mahābhārat as further evidence that

Sabalsingh Cauhān is a Rāmānandī poet. As Vasudha Paramasivan points out, modern

scholarship has assumed that the Rāmcaritmānas is “the theological core of the Ramanandi

sampraday.”

159

Yet Paramasivan has also convincingly shown that the Rāmcaritmānas only

became an important scripture for the Rāmānandīs in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth

centuries, coinciding with the production of two of the earliest and most prominent

commentaries on the Rāmcaritmānas by members of the Rāmānandī Rasika ascetic community:

Mahant Rāmcaraṇdās’s Ānandlaharī (1808) and Śivlāl Pāthak’s Mānasmayaṅk (1818). While

acknowledging that Tulsīdās is present in the seventeenth-century Bhaktamāl of Nābhādās, who

is “generally considered a Ramanandi within the tradition,” Paramasivan also states that it is

telling that “Nabhadas does not include Tulsidas within any of the lineages of the Ramanandi

152

agaṇit bighana haraṇa hanumānā so bharosa maiṃ mana anumānā || CM 18.1 ||

153

Patton E. Burchett, A Genealogy of Devotion: Bhakti, Tantra, Yoga, and Sufism in North India (New York:

Columbia University Press, 2019), 165.

154

Burchett, 166.

155

McGregor, Hindi Literature, 109.

156

McGregor, 109.

157

Monika Horstmann, “Power and Status: Rāmānandī Warrior Ascetics in 18th-Century Jaipur” in Asceticism and

Power in South and South East Asia, ed. Peter Flügel and Gustaaf Houtmann (London: Routledge, forthcoming).

158

hanumāna gāvaiṃ guṇa nāṭaka || CM 6.1 ||

159

Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 108.

158

religious community” in the Bhaktamāl.

160

She further explains that “in the period between the

sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the rasiks produced several works of poetry and theology and

there is little evidence that the Rāmcaritmānas figured either in the literature or the religious

practices of the sampraday.”

161

If Cauhān was an active member of the Rāmānandī sampradāya,

it is unlikely that the Rāmcaritmānas was an important theological work for him.

I strongly suspect that Hanumān’s prominence in the Bhasha Mahābhārat is another

reflection of the influence of Tulsīdās’s poetry on Cauhān. While Lutgendorf describes

Hanumān’s role in Tulsī’s Rāmcaritmānas as “muted” and “subdued,”

162

he also notes that the

divine monkey is a key figure in Tulsī’s Vinayapatrikā and Kavitāvalī.

163

Imre Bangha adds that

“certain editions give the forty-four kabitts of the vulgate Hanumānbāhuk, the ailing Tulsī’s

prayers to Hanuman, as an appendix to the Kavitāvalī.”

164

Lutgendorf observes that in the songs

of the Hanumānbāhuk (Arms of Hanumān) “for the first time, the poet sometimes refers to

Hanuman, not Rama, as ‘Tulsi’s Lord.’”

165

In one verse in the Hanumānbāhuk, Tulsīdās

specifically celebrates Hanumān’s role during the Battle of Kurukṣetra:

In the Bhārata war, the king of the monkeys on the flag of the chariot of Pārtha roared

and hearing this, the army of the king of the Kurus scurried in confusion.

Droṇa and Bhīṣma said: “The son of the wind is the great hero.

His strength is the water of the ocean of the rasa of heroism.

That beautiful monkey in child’s play reached out to the sun from the earth.

He leaped in less than a leap to the surface of the sky.”

Bowing and bowing their heads and joining and joining their hands, the warriors looked.

Seeing Hanumān, all the lives in the world obtain fruit.

166

The descriptions of Hanumān on the “back of the tortoise” (kamaṭha kī pīṭhi) in the

Hanumānbāhuk

and as the “breaker of the pride of Bhima, Arjuna, and Garuda, protective banner

160

Paramasivan, 9 and 11.

161

Paramasivan, 108.

162

Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 94.

163

Lutgendorf, 95.

164

Bangha, “Writing Devotion,” 146.

165

Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 98.

The immensely popular praise poem, the Hanumāncālīsā (Forty Verses to Hanumān), is also attributed to Tulsī,

although as Lutgendorf notes, this text was likely only composed “sometime in the eighteenth century” (100).

166

bhārata meṃ pāratha ke rathaketu kapirāja gājyo suni kurūrāja dala halabala bho

kahyo drona bhīṣama samīrasuta mahābīra bīra rasa bārinidhi jāko bala jala bho

bānara subhāya bālakeli bhūmi bhānu lāgi phalaṃga phalāṃga hūṃ teṃ ghāṭi nabha tala bho

nāi nāi mātha jori jori hātha jodhā johaiṃ hanumāna dekhe jaga jīvana ko phala bho|| Tulsīdās, Hanumānbāhuk 5 ||

I am following: Tulsīdās, Hanumānbāhuk (Hanumānbāhuk Saṭīk), ed. Mahāvīrprasād Mālvīya Vaidya (Gorakhpur:

Gita Press, 1994).

159

of Dhananjaya’s chariot” in the Vinayapatrikā also suggest that Tulsī is familiar with the bridge

of arrows story that Cauhān keeps on returning to in his Bhasha Mahābhārat.

167

We also find hagiographical links between Tulsīdās and Hanumān in Bhasha literature as

early as 1712. In his Bhasha commentary on the Bhaktamāl, the Bhaktirasabodhinī (Awakening

of the Rasa of Bhakti), Priyādās, a member of the Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava sampradāya, describes a

series of meetings between Tulsī and Hanumān in which Hanumān teaches the poet how to

recognize Rāma.

168

In the modern context, Lutgendorf remarks that Tulsī “is hailed today as the

great preceptor of Hanuman worship in the densely populated Hindi-speaking regions of

northern and central India.”

169

Given how much Cauhān draws on other elements of Tulsīdās’s

poetry throughout his text, I contend that the increased presence of Hanumān in the Bhasha

Mahābhārat is another way in which Cauhān pay tributes to Tulsīdās.

Equating Krishna with Rāma

The final type of Rāmāyaṇa allusion that Cauhān uses throughout his Mahābhārat is passages in

which characters describe or identify Krishna with his earlier incarnation of Rāma. I suggest that

this equating of Krishna with Rāma is yet another way in which Cauhān emulates Tulsīdās.

As we saw in Chapter Two, while Draupadī begins her extensive prayer to Krishna

during her attempted disrobing in the Book of the Assembly Hall by addressing the deity as

“Rādhā’s lover” (rādhāramaṇa), in the very next line of her plea she calls him “lord of the

Raghus” (raghunāthā) and describes how he came to the aid of Bharata, Sugrīva, and Vibhīṣaṇa,

and then killed Rāvaṇa.

170

The fact that Cauhān starts his account of this paramount bhakti

tableau (to borrow Hiltebeitel’s term) with Draupadī calling Krishna by a distinct epithet for

Rāma and then recounting some of Rāma’s most famous deeds is highly significant. Cauhān is

making it abundantly clear to his audience that Krishna is Rāma and Rāma is Krishna.

As the narrative of the Bhasha Mahābhārat continues, Cauhān frequently equates

Krishna with Rāma. In the Book of Virāṭa’s Court, for instance, when Krishna comes to the

Matsya kingdom to attend the wedding of his nephew Abhimanyu and Virāṭa’s daughter Uttarā,

the Pāṇḍavas are delighted and Yudhiṣṭhira breaks into song and begins to lavishly praise

Krishna. While Yudhiṣṭhira uses several epithets that are distinct titles for Krishna, such as “son

of Yadu” (yadunandana), “shelter of Braj” (brajachāvan), and the “lord of Rādhā” (rādhāvara),

the Pāṇḍava also addresses the deity as the “ornament of the daughter of Janaka” (janakasutā

bhūṣaṇa), which is a reference to Rāma’s identity as Sītā’s husband.

171

Yudhiṣṭhira goes on to praise Krishna in detail on several other occasions in Cauhān’s

text and he always alludes in some way to Rāma and his deeds. As I pointed out in Chapter Two,

167

Tulsīdās, Hanumānbāhuk 7; and Tulsīdās, Vinayapatrikā 28.3, trans. Lutgendorf in Hanuman’s Tale, 96.

168

For detailed accounts of this story, see John Stratton Hawley, “Tulsidas” in Songs of the Saints, 149–50; and

Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 13.

169

Lutgendorf, Hanuman’s Tale, 92.

170

rādhāramaṇa bacana sunu mere kīna bilāpa kalāpa karere

būḍata biraha sindhu raghunāthā jimi gahilīna bharata kara hāthā

jimi kapīśa sugrīva ubārā rākhi bibhīṣaṇa rāvaṇa mārā || CM 2.57 ||

171

CM 4.59.

160

Yudhiṣṭhira offers two long multi-stanzaic hymns to Krishna in the Bhasha Book of Effort.

172

Yudhiṣṭhira begins the first of these prayers by stating:

The Vedas speak of you as nirguṇa,

but for the sake of your people, Bhagavān, you are saguṇa.

173

This reference to Krishna being both nirguṇa and saguṇa immediately brings to mind the

multiple accounts of the compatibility of Rāma’s iconic and aniconic forms in Tulsī’s

Rāmcaritmānas.

174

For example, in the first book of the Rāmcaritmānas, Śiva tells Pārvatī:

There is no difference in God, with [sagunahi] or without attributes [agunahi]––

so sages, purāṇas, scholars and Veda all declare.

That One, without attributes [aguna] and form, indivisible and unborn,

acquires qualities [saguna] by the power of devotees’[bhagata] love.

175

As the first prayer in the Book of Effort continues, Yudhiṣṭhira (like Cauhān’s Draupadī in her

plea to Krishna during her disrobing) repeatedly refers to the deeds of both Rāma, such as his

rule over Ayodhya and his slaying of Rāvaṇa and his brother Kumbhakarṇa, and Krishna, such

as his generosity towards Śrīdāmā and the vanquishing of Pūtanā, Tṛṇāvarta, and Śiśupāla.

176

Yudhiṣṭhira commences his second lengthy prayer to Krishna in the Book of Effort by

proclaiming “victory” (jaya) to “Rukmiṇī’s lover” (rukmiṇīramaṇa) and the one who lived in the

“forest grove of the illustrious Vrindavan” (śrībṛndābipina).

177

He then, however, proceeds to

describe several well-known Vaiṣṇava bhaktas who are not associated with Krishna including

Gajendra, Prahlāda, and Dhruva. Moreover, more than half of these bhaktas are devotees of

Rāma. Yudhiṣṭhira speaks of the “impure woman named Śabarī” (śabarī nāma apāvana nārī),

the Nishad king (niṣādarāja) Guha, the “lord of bears” (bhālukīśa) Jāmbavān, and “Rāvaṇa’s

brother named Vibhīṣaṇa” (rāvaṇabandhu bibhīṣaṇa nāmā).

178

The first stanza of this hymn

ends with the following couplet about Vālmīki and the name of Rāma:

Sabalsingh Cauhān says:

Even though Vālmīki chanted backwards,

172

CM 5.34–35 and 5.66–67.

173

yadyapi nirguṇa beda bakhānā janahita saguṇa hota bhagavān || CM 5.34 ||

174

See Paramasivan, “Between Text and Sect,” 36–39.

175

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.116.1–2, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:239.

For another example of this, see Jaṭāyū’s praise of Rāma in the Rāmcaritmānas which I discuss in Chapter One.

176

CM 5.35.

177

CM 5.66.

178

CM 5.66–67.

161

only saying half of the name,

he still was granted that immovable abode.

179

This is a clear reference to the story we saw earlier in which Vālmīki is still saved by the power

of rāmnām even though he is taught to chant “marā, marā” instead of “rāma, rāma.” Recall that

the supremacy of the name of Rāma is a major theological component of Tulsī’s Rāmcaritmānas.

As Yudhiṣṭhira continues to praise Krishna, he refers to the deity by names that remind us of

Krishna’s youth in Vrindavan, such as “lord of the gopīs” (gopīpati) and Girivardhārī.

180

The

references to Rāma’s bhaktas and the potency of rāmnām in this prayer, however, make it

apparent that Cauhān is muddling the distinctions between Krishna and Rāma.

Draupadī and Yudhiṣṭhira are not the only characters to equate Krishna with Rāma. At

another point in Cauhān’s Book of Effort, Gāndhārī tries to convince Duryodhana to not wage

war against the Pāṇḍavas because they have Krishna on their side.

181

As evidence of Krishna’s

prowess, Gāndhārī lists a number of demons and formidable men who Krishna has defeated or

killed. While Gāndhārī gives the names of many enemies Krishna overpowered as an adolescent,

including Keśī, Kaṃsa, Aghāsura, Bakāsura, Cāṇūra, Tṛṇāvarta, and Pūtanā, she begins her list

with Rāma’s most famous foe Rāvaṇa and his brother Kumbhakarṇa. She also lists several other

demons Rāma vanquished such as Subāhu, Tāṭakā, Mārīca, Khara, Dūṣaṇa, Trisirā, Kabandha,

and Virādha. Gāndhārī concludes her warning to her eldest son by asking:

Who can defeat the lord of the Raghus

who became the companion of the Pāṇḍavas?

182

In the Book of Bhīṣma in both the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Cauhān’s

Mahābhārat, there is a scene during the Battle of Kurukṣetra in which Krishna almost breaks his

promise to not partake in the war and charges at Bhīṣma with his discus.

183

In both texts, Bhīṣma

worships Krishna before Arjuna manages to restrain the deity.

184

Unlike his eulogy in the

Sanskrit epic, however, in the Bhasha poem Bhīṣma concludes his ode by praising Rāma:

You killed Rāvaṇa along with his clan

and gave Vibhīṣaṇa the kingdom of Lanka.

179

bālamīki ulaṭā jape kahyo ādhahī nāma

sabalasiṃha cauhāna kahi dīnhoṃ avicala ṭhāma || CM 5.67 ||

180

CM 5.67.

181

CM 5.50–51.

182

te pāṇḍava ke bhayo sahāyaka jīte ko sakai tāta raghunāyaka || CM 5.51 ||

183

MBh 6.102 and CM 6.52–53.

184

I should point out that Bhīṣma’s praise of Krishna in this episode receives significant attention in devotional

Mahābhārata retellings including the Bhāgavatapurāṇa (1.9.32–36), Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā (539–41),

Kumāravyāsa’s Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī (6.6.37–48), and Villi’s Pāratam (6.3.14–23). This scene is also the

subject of at least two Bhasha padas attributed to Sūrdās (Sūrsagar 356–57).

162

With the touch of your foot, you saved Ahalyā

the women of Gautama who was cursed to be stone.

185

Gāndhārī’s and Bhīṣma’s words reveal that the identification of Krishna with Rāma is not just

restricted to the Pāṇḍavas and Draupadī. We also see Cauhān use his own authorial voice to link

Krishna to Rāma. The Book of Bhīṣma, for instance, concludes with the following couplet:

Sabalsingh Cauhān says:

Speaking entirely of

Rāma, the lion,

186

Govinda, and Hari,

I have told the Book of Bhīṣma.

187

Bhīṣma once again stresses that Krishna is Rāma in the Book of Peace of Cauhān’s poem

when he teaches Yudhiṣṭhira about the one thousand names of Viṣṇu.

188

As I pointed out in

Chapter Two, the Viṣṇusahasranāmastotra (Hymn of the Thousand Names of Viṣṇu) is found in

the Book of Instructions of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

189

Although Cauhān’s Bhīṣma does not list

all one thousand names of Viṣṇu like his counterpart in the Sanskrit epic, he does describe the

benefits of chanting these names. He tells Yudhiṣṭhira that when the one thousand names are

recited “sin cannot survive” (pāpa na rāhai) and “glory arrives” (mahimā ānā).

190

Yet Bhīṣma

also explicitly states that the name of Rāma is equal to the one thousand names of Viṣṇu:

rāma ramahi rāme rama rāmā rāma sahastrana nāma samānā.

191

This line seems to be a Bhasha translation of the final verse of Budhakauśika’s Sanskrit

Rāmarakṣāstotra (Stotra to Rāma for his Protection):

rāma rāmeti rāmeti rame rāme manorame sahasranāma tattulyaṃ rāmanāma varānane.

192

185

rāvaṇa kula sameta badha kīnhyo laṅkā rājya bibhīṣaṇa dīnhyo

śāpa śilā gautama kī nārī parasata caraṇa ahalyā tārī || CM 6.53 ||

186

Note that in their editions of the text, both Pāṇḍey and Śarmā have rāma kṛṣṇa instead of rāma siṃha. See 6.134

of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 6.134 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

187

rāma siṃha gobinda hari kījai sadā bakhāna

bhāṣā bhīṣmaparba kaha sabalasiṃha cauhāna || CM 6.64 ||

188

CM 14.7–8.

189

MBh 13.135.14–20.

190

CM 14.7–8.

191

CM 14.7.

In their editions, both Pāṇḍey and Śarmā have sukhadhāmā (“storehouse of happiness”) instead of samānā (“equal

to”). See 14.16 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 14.16 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

192

Budhakauśika, Rāmarakṣāstotra 38. This is from what Gudrun Bühnemann describes as the “modern” version of

the stotra in Budha-Kauśika’s Rāmarakṣāstotra: A Contribution to the Study of Sanskrit Devotional Poetry (Vienna:

Indologisches Institut der Universität Wien, 1983), 29.

163

Beautiful faced-one, I delight in the handsome Rāma by uttering (the name) ‘Rāma, Rāma,

Rāma.’ Rāma’s name is equal to the one thousand names (of Viṣṇu).

193

Versions of the Rāmarakṣāstotra are found in the Sanskrit Padmapurāṇa (Legend of Padma) as

well as in the Ānandarāmāyaṇa.

194

Ramdas Lamb points out that the above verse is one of the

“most popular verses from the stotra, presented as a teaching by Shiva to Parvati” and that it is

“frequently recited by North Indian Ram bhaktas today. It expresses the supremacy of Ramnam

over all other names.”

195

Tulsī also alludes to this Rāmarakṣāstotra verse in his Rāmcaritmānas:

Valmiki, first poet, learned its [Rāma’s name’s] might,

for he became pure saying it backward.

Hearing Shiva declare it equal to a thousand names,

196

Bhavani repeats it with her beloved.

197

This line in Bhīṣma’s discourse on the one thousand names of Viṣṇu in the Bhasha Book of

Peace is therefore another example of Cauhān emphasizing the power of rāmnām. Bhīṣma

concludes his lesson on the one thousand names with the following three couplets:

Rāma, Krishna, the lord of the Raghus,

Hari, the descendant of Raghu, Rādhā’s lover,

the all-pervasive one, Gopāla, the bearer of the Śāraṅga bow,

and the bearer of Mount Govardhana that time.

198

The enemy of Rāvaṇa, the enemy of Kaṃsa, Hari,

the friend of bhaktas, and Bhagavān,

carefully hold and know [these names] in your heart

and this knowledge in your thoughts and words.

King! Listen and give your ears:

that lord of the world who is the essence of everything,

just say his names.

Worshiping these names destroys hell.

199

193

Budhakauśika, Rāmarakṣāstotra 38, trans. Bühnemann in Budha-Kauśika’s Rāmarakṣāstotra, 33.

194

Bühnemann, Budha-Kauśika’s Rāmarakṣāstotra, 14–15.

195

Lamb, Rapt in the Name, 187.

196

While Lutgendorf translates sahasa nāma sama as “equal to a thousand names,” I would translate these words as

“equal to the thousand names.” See also Paramasivan, “Between Text and Sect,” 42.

197

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.19.3, trans. Lutgendorf in Tulsīdās, Epic of Ram 1:51.

198

In their editions, both Pāṇḍey and Śarmā have giridhārī bhagavanta instead of gobarddhanadhara javana. See

14.16 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Pāṇḍey); and 14.16 of Cauhān, Mahābhārat (Śarmā).

199

rāma kṛṣṇa raghupati harī rāghava rādhāravana

bibhu gopāla śāraṃgadhara gobarddhanadhara javana

rāvaṇāri kaṃsāri hari bhakta bandhu bhagavāna

dhyāna karau mana jāni dhari manasā bācā jāna

164

While Bhīṣma gives Krishna’s name and four other distinct titles of this deity (“Rādhā’s lover,”

Gopāla, “the bearer of Mount Govardhana,” and “the enemy of Kaṃsa”), he begins this list with

the name of Rāma and then states three other epithets of Rāma: “the lord of the Raghus”

(raghupati), “the descendant of Raghu” (rāghava), and “the enemy of Rāvaṇa” (rāvaṇāri). The

translated line from the Rāmarakṣāstotra and these different names of Rāma in this passage all

make it impossible for Cauhān’s readers to disassociate Krishna from Rāma.

As we saw in Chapter Two, the final book of Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, the Book of

the Ascent to Heaven, concludes with Yudhiṣṭhira being reunited with his family in Vaikuntha,

the abode of Viṣṇu.

200

This is in contrast to the end of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata in which the

Pāṇḍavas and their family and friends are described as simply being in Svarga (heaven).

201

But in

an even greater departure from the Sanskrit epic, Cauhān describes Yudhiṣṭhira being greeted by

Rāma when he comes to Vaikuntha. Cauhān first tells us about Yudhiṣṭhira’s arrival:

In this way, Viṣṇu’s attendants brought the king

to the abode in an instant.

Those who abandon and lose deceit and only worship,

Rāma grants them the path.

202

The Bhasha poet then describes Yudhiṣṭhira greeting his lord in Vaikuntha:

“Victory to Saccidānanda, the one dark as clouds!”

Hearing this, the illustrious Rāma himself stood up.

203

Yudhiṣṭhira addresses the deity he sees in Vaikuntha by two different names. The first,

Saccidānanda, which literally means “existence, consciousness, and bliss,” is a term that is often

equated with Brahman, the ultimate reality of the universe, in several schools of Hindu

philosophy.

204

If we turn to Bhasha bhakti traditions, however, we find that Tulsī addresses

Rāma as Saccidānanda ten different times in the Rāmcaritmānas.

205

The second name, “the one

as dark as clouds” (ghanaśyāmā), is a title that can refer to either Krishna or Rāma.

206

But there

are no absolutely no doubts that the “the illustrious Rāma” (śrīrāmā) in the second part of the

sarva sāra je jagapatī itanā nāma bakhāna

nāma bhaje pātaka harata bhūpa sunau dai kāna || CM 14.8 ||

200

CM 18.23.

201

MBh 18.3.

202

yahi bidhi nṛpahiṃ biṣṇugaṇa kṣaṇa mahaṃ laige dhāma

je chala chāṃḍi bhajahiṃ hara tinahiṃ deta gati rāma || CM 18.23 ||

203

jaya saccidānanda ghanaśyāmā yaha suni āpu uṭhe śrīrāmā || CM 18.23 ||

204

John A. Grimes, A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 1996), 260.

205

Callewaert and Lutgendorf, Rāmcaritmānas Word Index, 290–91.

206

Callewaert and Sharma, Dictionary of Bhakti, 560.

165

above verse refers to the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. Cauhān’s choice to describe the deity

who welcomes Yudhiṣṭhira to Vaikuntha as Rāma is striking. As Paramasivan notes, “Although

Ram is considered an incarnation or avatar of Vishnu in the Rāmcaritmānas, he supersedes

Vishnu as the Supreme God or Brahman.”

207

By stating that the deity in Vaikuntha is Rāma

rather than Viṣṇu or Krishna, Cauhān also seems to be implying that Rāma is Brahman.

I should point out that the identification of Krishna with Rāma is something that happens

in bhakti poetry from all over South Asia. As we saw in Chapter Three, the Āḻvārs (and Villi)

frequently layer Krishna with other forms of Viṣṇu in their Tamil bhakti compositions. For

instance, consider the following verse from Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi:

Lord, great blazing flame,

who conquered seven bulls

and turned splendid Laṅkā to ashes,

don’t trust me!

When you take me to your feet of gold

don’t ever let me run off again.

208

In this Tiruvāymoḻi verse, Nammāḻvār is layering Krishna, the deity who killed seven bulls in

order to win the Tamil cowherdess Piṉṉai as his bride, with Rāma, the god who demolished

Rāvaṇa’s kingdom of Lanka. It is also worth noting that even in the compositions of Periyāḻvār

(who frequently speaks in the voice of Yaśodā) and Kulacēkarāḻvār (who uses the last ten verses

of his Perumāḷtirumoḻi to retell the Rāmāyaṇa) we find Krishna being identified as Rāma and

vice-versa. Vasudha Narayanan observes that the “alternation between Rāma and Kṛṣṇa is

sharply seen in one set of verses” in Periyāḻvār’s Tirumoḻi that “take the form of a folk song that

was sung while girls played a game resembling badminton.”

209

She explains that this set of

verses “alternately praises Rāma and then Kṛṣṇa, thus resembling the ball tossed from side to

side, with each team singing the glories of one manifestation.”

210

Narayanan also notes that “the

same Kulacēkara who talks in the guise of Kauśalyā and of Daśaratha (Perumāḷ Tirumoḻi 8.1–11

and 9.1–11) also sings as Devakī, the biological mother of Kṛṣṇa, who missed his childhood

entirely (Perumāḷ Tirumoḻi 7.1–10).”

211

She thus concludes that “it would be quite misleading,

then, to ask if the Āḻvārs were devotees of Kṛṣṇa or of Rāma.”

212

Narayanan is certainly justified in anticipating this question. In the world of Vaiṣṇava

bhakti literature, poets are frequently associated with a single incarnation or form of Viṣṇu. For

instance, the Sanskrit poet Jayadeva, the Gujarati poet Narsī Mehtā, and the Bhasha poetess

207

Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 47.

208

Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi 2.9.10, trans. Cutler in Songs of Experience, 145.

209

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 25. See Periyāḻvār, Tirumoḻi 3.9.1–11.

210

Narayanan, 25.

211

Narayanan, 33.

212

Narayanan, 33.

166

Mīrābāī are all considered to be Krishna bhaktas, while the Telugu poet Rāmadāsu and the

Marathi poet Rāmdās are thought of as devotees of Rāma. Yet even in the works of bhakti poets

who are labeled as “Krishna bhaktas” or “Rāma bhaktas,” we find instances where these two

different incarnations of Viṣṇu are identified with each other. In the Sanskrit Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta

(Nectar for Krishna’s Ears, c. 1300), for example, Bilvaman

gala presents us with a poem in

which after hearing a bedtime story from Yaśodā, Krishna remembers his past life as Rāma:

“Once there was a man named Rāma.” “Yes.” “His

wife was called Sītā.” “Yes.” “Rāvaṇa

abducted her from Rāma during his stay in the

Pañcavaṭī forest in obedience to his father’s command.”

Hari indicating with yeses that he was listening to

his mother’s bedtime story, said,

“My bow, my bow, where is my bow, Lakṣmaṇa?”

May these alarmed words protect us.

213

Although the title of Bilvaman

gala’s collection suggests that this work will solely be dedicated to

expressing devotion to Krishna, the poem above clearly equates Krishna with Rāma.

When we turn to the realm of Vaiṣṇava bhakti poetry in Bhasha, John Stratton Hawley

points out that Sūrdās and Mīrābāī “are primarily devotees of Krishna,” while Tulsī “is more

closely identified with Ram.”

214

Yet Hawley also notes that “Sur, the Krishna devotee, also

composed poetry to Ram; and Tulsi, the poet of Ram, dedicated an entire collection of poetry to

Krishna.”

215

Indeed, while the majority of Tulsī’s Bhasha compositions, including the

Rāmcaritmānas, the Vinayapatrikā, and the Kavitāvalī, are centered on Rāma, Tulsī is also the

attributed author of the Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī (Garland of Songs to the Illustrious Krishna).

The Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī is comprised of sixty-one padas in praise of Krishna. Except for the

final two poems in the collection which focus on how Krishna saved Draupadī during her

attempted disrobing, the majority of the padas narrate stories from the deity’s youth in

Vrindavan.

216

In his study of the Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī, R.S. McGregor observes that in the eighteenth

pada both Krishna and Rāma are called to come to lift Mount Govardhana. While McGregor

does admit that the Rāma of this verse might refer to Krishna’s elder brother Balarāma rather

than the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa, he also points out that in the Mount Govardhana episodes in the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa and the Bhasha padas of Sūrdās, Balarāma “appears strictly as an attendant of

213

Bilvaman

gala, Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta 72, trans. Frances Wilson in Bilvaman

gala, Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta (The Love of

Krishna: The Kṛṣṇakarṇāmṛta of Līlāśuka Bilvaman

gala), trans. Frances Wilson (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 166.

A very similar poem is attributed to Sūrdās. See Bryant, Poems to the Child-God, 53–57; and Hawley, Krishna, the

Butter Thief, 46.

214

John Stratton Hawley, introduction to Hawley and Juergensmeyer, Songs of the Saints, 5.

215

Hawley, 5.

For Sūrdās’s Rāmāyaṇa poems, see Sūrdās, Sūrsagar 364–77.

216

See Tulsīdās, Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī 60 and 61 in Tulsīdās, Tulsīgranthāvalī.

167

Kṛṣṇa and as dependent on Kṛṣṇa in the crisis, not as a participant in Kṛṣṇa’s action.”

217

He goes

on to postulate that Tulsī “is taking advantage here of the ambiguous designation and role of this

‘Rām’ to insinuate the idea of the function of his own Rām along with those of the Kṛṣṇa of his

subject matter.”

218

Thus Tulsī finds a way to incorporate Rāma into the Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī.

Krishna also finds a place in Tulsī’s Rāma-centric bhakti compositions. In his discourse

on the supremacy of rāmnām in the opening prologue of the Rāmcaritmānas, Tulsī tells his

audience that the two syllables in the word Rāma, rā and ma, are like:

Bees on the lotus of the hearts of the people and

Hari and Haladhara of the tongue’s Yaśodā.

219

While Tulsī often uses the name Hari as a synonym for Rāma, in this line of the Rāmcaritmānas

Hari clearly refers to younger brother of Balarāma (Haladhara) and Yaśodā’s foster-son Krishna.

In the Vinayapatrikā and the Kavitāvalī, Tulsī makes the identification of Rāma with

Krishna more explicit. In the two hundred and fourteenth verse of the Vinayapatrikā, Tulsī

describe Krishna’s dalliances with the gopīs, his slaying of Pūtanā and Śiśupāla, and his death at

the hands of the hunter who thought Krishna’s foot was a deer.

220

Yet in the very next verse,

Tulsī describes several interactions between Rāma and some of his most well-known bhaktas

including Guha, Jaṭāyū, Śabarī, and Vibhīṣaṇa.

221

This alternation between praising the deeds of

Krishna and the deeds of Rāma blurs the lines between these two incarnations. In the final book

of the Kavitāvalī, Tulsī turns to a discussion of the glories of rāmnām that is very similar to the

one found in the first book of the Rāmcaritmānas.

222

In the first line of a verse in this section of

the Kavitāvalī, Tulsī recounts the story of Vālmīki attainting salvation by chanting “marā marā”

instead of “rāma rāma.” But in the third line of this same verse, Tulsī tells us that “the splendor

of that Name” also protected Draupadī from being disrobed.

223

By juxtaposing the tale of

Vālmīki reciting “marā, marā” and Draupadī calling out to Krishna in the assembly hall, Tulsī

implies that it is Rāma’s name that saves Draupadī from Duḥśāsana.

It is also worth pointing out that Tulsī’s identification of Krishna with Rāma is also

reflected in Bhasha hagiographies. In his Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary on the Bhaktamāl,

Priyādās tells a story in which Tulsī visits the Madanagopāla shrine in Vrindavan, a Krishna

temple that was paramount to members of the Gauḍīya sampradāya. When Tulsī comes before

the image of Krishna as Madanagopāla he requests the deity to take the form of Rāma and

Tulsī’s wish is granted for a brief moment.

224

The Do Sau Bāvan Vaiṣṇavan kī Vārtā (Stories of

217

R.S. McGregor, “Tulsīdās’ Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 96, no. 4 (1976): 525.

218

McGregor, 526.

219

jana mana maṃju kaṃju madhukara se jīha jasomati hari haladhara se || Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.20.4 ||

220

Tulsīdās, Vinayapatrikā 214.3–5.

221

Tulsīdās, Vinayapatrikā 215.2–5.

222

Compare Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.19–28 and Tulsīdās, Kavitāvalī 7.56–109.

223

Tulsīdās, Kavitāvalī 7.89, trans. Allchin in Tulsīdās, Kavitāvalī, 166.

224

See Hawley, “Tulsidas” in Songs of the Saints, 151–51; and Paramasivan, “Text and Sect,” 13.

168

the Fifty-Two Vaiṣṇavas) is attributed to Gokulnāth (traditional dates: 1551–1640), a leader of

the Vallabha sampradāya, but as Shandip Saha explains, this work was likely “still in the process

of being redacted between the late seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth centuries.”

225

The Do Sau Bāvan Vaiṣṇavan kī Vārtā identifies Tulsīdās as the elder brother of Nandadās, a

sixteenth-century Krishna bhakti poet whose compositions were adopted into the literary

traditions of the Vallabha sampradāya. While it is quite unlikely that Tulsīdās and Nandadās

were actually brothers, it is still significant that this Bhasha hagiography is drawing such a strong

connection between a devotee of Rāma and a devotee of Krishna.

226

The examples from the Śrīkṛṣṇagītāvalī, the Rāmcaritmānas, the Vinayapatrikā, and the

Kavitāvalī all reveal how Tulsīdās brings together the worlds of Rāma and Krishna in his Bhasha

bhakti compositions. Although the multiple references to Rāma in Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat

far outnumber the allusions to Krishna in the Rāmcaritmānas, the Vinayapatrikā, or the

Kavitāvalī, it is certainly possible that Cauhān was inspired by the ways that Tulsī weaves

Krishna into his different Bhasha bhakti compositions dedicated to the deeds of Rāma.

* * * * *

As we saw in Chapter Three, Villi’s Tamil Pāratam is undoubtedly the work of a poet who is

intimately familiar with the literature of the Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community in South India.

While we cannot say with much confidence that Sabalsingh Cauhān was the member of a

specific Vaiṣṇava sampradāya in North India, such as the Rāmānandīs or the Gauḍīyas, the

evidence I have presented in this chapter clearly points to Cauhān being a devout Rāma bhakta,

specifically one who is well-versed in the Bhasha bhakti compositions of Tulsīdās.

It is also significant that in contemporary South Asia, the prevalence of Rāma in the

Bhasha Mahābhārat of Cauhān has led a sectarian community that views the Rāmcaritmānas as

their primary deity to adopt verses from this Mahābhārata into their daily religious practice.

227

While the Rāmcaritmānas is at the core of the Rāmnāmī sect in Central India, Ramdas Lamb

notes that Rāmnāmīs have adopted verses from other texts into their chanting practices as long as

these verses are in caupāī-dohā meter and “generally pertain to Ram, Ramnam, wisdom, or

devotion.”

228

Clearly, many verses of the Bhasha Mahābhārat meet these criteria since verses

from Cauhān’s Mahābhārata retelling are recited by Rāmnāmīs in modern India.

This chapter and the previous chapter have revealed how Villi and Cauhān each anchor

their Mahābhāratas in specific regional Vaiṣṇava bhakti contexts. In the next two chapters, I will

turn to the intersection and overlapping of devotional and courtly concerns in these two poems.

225

Shandip Saha, “Muslims as Devotees and Outsiders: Attitudes toward Muslims in the Vārtā Literature of the

Vallabha Sampradāya,” in Religious Interactions in Mughal India, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 324.

226

See R.S. McGregor, “Nanddās,” in Nandadās, The Round Dance of Krishna and Uddhav’s Message, trans. R.S.

McGregor (London: Luzac & Company Ltd., 1973), 33–34.

227

Lamb, Rapt in the Name, 119.

228

Lamb, 118.

169

CHAPTER FIVE

The Pāratam as a Peruṅkāppiyam:

Presenting Villi’s Poem as a Courtly Narrative

Despite the fact that mahākāvya and peruṅkāppiyam literally mean “long poem” or “great

poem,” today mahākāvya is frequently termed “court epic” or “court poem.”

As Deven Patel

points out, the mahākāvya “was the genre most closely tied to the culture of the royal court, both

in its emphasis on political and ethical themes and its absorption with crafting a sophisticated

language to correspond to the poet’s refined aesthetic intentions.”

Similarly, Lawrence McCrea

states that the mahākāvya genre “is generally presumed to have been connected with the arena of

royal power and self-presentation, and to have been produced and consumed mainly within royal

or court settings.”

Commenting on Māgha’s seventh-century Śiśupālavadha, Paul Dundas notes:

The conventional rendering of mahākāvya as “court poem” is hardly precise, since connections

between any of the early mahākāvyas and specific courtly locations can only be made in

approximate terms. Nonetheless, it can be conjectured with reasonable confidence that one of the

main functions of a mahākāvya such as Magha’s was to mirror the cultural ambiance and

concerns of a royal court and to depict the idealized actions of mythical protagonists in light of

the various emotional and social codes that governed the behavior of aristocrats and courtiers who

peopled such surroundings.

In Chapter Three, I discussed how the Tamil version of the mahākāvya, the peruṅkāppiyam, was

an extremely productive genre in premodern South India with some of the most famous

examples including Tiruttakkatēvar’s ninth-century Cīvakacintāmaṇi, Cēkkiḻār’s twelfth-century

Periyapurāṇam, and Kampaṉ’s twelfth-century Irāmāvatāram. As we will soon see, all three of

these peruṅkāppiyams contain royal patronage claims and/or feature detailed descriptions of

courtly life. In Chapter Three, I also pointed out that several peruṅkāppiyams are associated with

specific religious traditions. The Cīvakacintāmaṇi is about a prince who becomes a Jain ascetic,

the Periyapurāṇam narrates the deeds of the sixty-three Śaiva Nāyaṉmār, Umaṟuppulavar’s

seventeenth-century Cīr

āppurāṇam tells the story of the life of the Prophet Muḥammad, and

Costanzo Giuseppe Beschi’s Tēmpāvaṇi (1726) focuses on Joseph, the husband of Mary.

In this chapter, I show how Villi claims the Tamil peruṅkāppiyam genre for the

Śrīvaiṣṇava religious community and presents his bhakti narrative poem as a work of courtly

literature through close readings of (1) the patronage claims in the Pāratam, (2) the seventh

Again, as I noted in the Introduction, just take the titles of David Smith’s 1985 monograph, Ratnākara’s

Haravijaya: An Introduction to the Sanskrit Court Epic, and Indira Viswanathan Peterson’s 2003 monograph,

Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kirātārjunīya of Bhāravi.

Patel, Text to Tradition, 18.

Lawrence McCrea, “The Lord of Glory and the Lord of Men: Power and Partiality in Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha,” in

Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University of New York

Press, 2021), 117.

Paul Dundas, introduction to Māgha, Śiśupālavadha (The Killing of Shishupala), trans. Paul Dundas, Murty

Classical Library of India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), xiv–xv.

170

chapter of the Book of the Beginnings in which Arjuna embarks on a tīrthayātra pilgrimage

throughout South Asia, and (3) the arrival of Krishna for Yudhiṣṭhira’s royal consecration in the

Book of the Assembly Hall, which Villi presents in the Tamil genre known as the ulā.

Pronouncements of Patronage

In Chapter Three, I discussed how Villi’s opening invocations to various forms of Krishna in

thirty-seven of the poem’s chapters mark the Pāratam as a Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam. Yet

before the first of these invocations in the “Origins Chapter” of Villi’s Book of the Beginnings,

readers find another indication that this poem is a peruṅkāppiyam in the ciṟappuppāyiram or

“special introduction” to the Pāratam attributed to Villi’s son Varantaruvār. In this

ciṟappuppāyiram, Varantaruvār states that the Pāratam was commissioned by a royal patron.

Multiple Tamil peruṅkāppiyams make courtly patronage claims. Anne Monius explains

that “Cēkkiḻār names his royal patron, Anapāyaṉ, eleven times in the text of the

Periyapurāṇam,” and she adds that most Tamil scholars believe Anapāyaṉ to be the twelfth-

century Chola king Kulōttuṅka II (r. 1133–1150).

Roughly after every thousandth verse of the

Irāmāvatāram, Kampaṉ extols his patron, Caṭaiyappaṉ of Tiruvenneynallur (Tiruveṇṇeynallūr).

David Shulman notes that Caṭaiyappaṉ was “probably a wealthy local noble.”

While the earliest

extant Tamil peruṅkāppiyam, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, does not contain any patronage claims within

the actual narrative of the poem, Monius does point out that later traditions assert that the Jain

monk Tiruttakkatēvar composed this peruṅkāppiyam in a courtly context:

Tradition holds that that the text was composed on a dare of sorts. The poets of Maturai

challenged Tiruttakkatēvar, saying that while Jains were skilled in the poetics expressive of

renunciation, none knew how to praise the sentiments of love; convinced he could master the

poetic art of love, the young Jain monk composed the Cīvakacintāmaṇi and presented it in the

court of Maturai, much to the delight of the king.

As I noted in the Introduction, in the ciṟappuppāyiram of the Pāratam, Varantaruvār tells us that

his father’s patron was Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, the king of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, which is the land

surrounding the town of Tirukkovalur, and Villi himself praises Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ at four

different points in the actual narrative of the Pāratam. The reign of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ has been

used to date Villi to the late-fourteenth or early-fifteenth century by Tamil scholars.

In his seminal essay “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts” (1983),

Dominick LaCapra asserts that the “predominance of a documentary approach in historiography

is one crucial reason why complex texts––especially ‘literary’ texts––are either excluded from

the relevant historical record or read in an extremely reduced way.”

This approach to reading is

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 117.

Shulman, Tamil, 166.

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 128.

Thompson, “Mahābhārata in Tamil,” 118–19; and Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1975), 214–15.

Dominick LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts,” in Rethinking Intellectual History: Texts,

Context, Language (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 30.

171

solely concerned with what are perceived to be the “documentary” aspects of a text. LaCapra

explains that “the documentary situates the text in terms of factual or literal dimensions

involving reference to empirical reality and conveying information about it.”

While LaCapra is an intellectual historian of European history, his point about the

prevalence of a documentary approach to reading texts holds very true for the study of

premodern South Asian history. As Rama Mantena points out, “one of the enduring

consequences of the archival projects of the colonial state [in South Asia] … was the emphasis

on the recovery of history through the search for raw information or ‘facts.’”

Since the late

eighteenth century, countless historians of South Asia have treated certain types of medieval

texts, especially Indo-Persian chronicles, as “straightforward reports on an objective reality”

and mined more “literary” or “mythic” texts, such as the Sanskrit purāṇas, for historical facts.

In the same essay, LaCapra maintains that every text has “documentary” aspects and

“worklike” aspects and that the worklike “supplements empirical reality by adding to it and

subtracting from it.”

He adds: “With deceptive simplicity, one might say that while the

documentary marks a difference, the worklike makes a difference––one that engages the reader

in recreative dialogue with the text and the problems it raises.”

Many scholars of South Asian

literature and history have assumed that the praise of kings and emperors and the descriptions of

poets performing their compositions at royal courts in premodern literary works are documentary

aspects of texts that reflect historical patronage relationships. Yet few academics have

entertained the idea that many of these patronage claims may primarily be worklike. In what

follows, I will consider the consider the possibility that that the references to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ

in Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram and the four allusions to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the actual

narrative of Villi’s Pāratam are worklike aspects of this Tamil text. Based on comparisons of the

Periyapurāṇam, the Irāmāvatāram, and the Pāratam, I will suggest that Villi understands praise

of courtly patrons as a poetic topos of the peruṅkāppiyam genre.

As noted above, the first mention of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the Pāratam is found in

Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram. In her work on the Periyapurāṇam, Monius notes that there are

many similarities between Cēkkiḻār’s work and the Cīvakacintāmaṇi that we can see right from

the outset of each poem: “just as the Jain author begins his long story with elegant descriptions

of the bounty of the Tamil countryside, the grandeur of the royal city, and the virtue of the ruling

monarch, so, too, does Cēkkiḻār preface his long set of hagiographical narratives with the same

glorious praise of the Cōḻa country, the capital city, and his royal patron.”

Vasudha Narayanan

points out that two other peruṅkāppiyams, Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram and Umaṟuppulavar’s

Cīṟāppurāṇam, also both begin with descriptions of a luscious countryside and a prosperous city.

Narayanan explains that the Irāmāvatāram was a major source of inspiration for

Umaṟuppulavar’s poem about the life of Muḥammad: “Never having travelled to Arabia, Umaru

LaCapra, 30.

Rama Mantena, “The Question of History in Pre-Colonial India,” History and Theory 46, no.3 (2007): 403.

Talbot, Last Hindu Emperor, 31.

LaCapra, “Rethinking Intellectual History,” 30.

LaCapra, 30.

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 117.

172

gives a description of Tamilnadu transposed to Arabia. In this method, too, he has a predecessor.

Kampan, the author of the Tamil Rāmāyaṇa, transposes the Tamil landscape to Ayodhya in north

India, as when descriptions of the Kaveri river are transferred to the river Sarayu.”

Narayanan

adds that these descriptions of nature in the opening chapters of the Irāmāvatāram and the

Cīṟāppurāṇam are drawn from the five tiṇai or “landscape” systems found in the Caṅkam akam

poetic anthologies about love and domestic life: the “mountainous (kuriñci), seaside (neytal),

arid (pālai), pastoral (mullai), and agricultural (marutam) landscapes.”

As with Kampaṉ, Villi “transposes the Tamil landscape” to North India when he

describes Yudhiṣṭhira traveling from the Pāṇḍavas’ kingdom of Indraprastha to Hastinapura in

the second chapter of the Book of the Assembly Hall. Yudhiṣṭhira first makes his way across the

fields of marutam, before moving through the forests of mullai, then the mountains of kuriñci,

and finally the shores of neytal before reaching Hastinapura.

This markedly Tamil account of

the landscapes between Indraprastha and Hastinapura, however, is only found in the second book

of Villi’s poem. Unlike the opening chapters of the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, the

Irāmāvatāram, and the Cīṟāppurāṇam, the first chapter of the actual narrative of the Pāratam,

the “Lineage of the Kurus Chapter,” jumps right into a description of the Pāṇḍavas’ ancestors. In

this first chapter of the Book of the Beginnings, there is no account of the landscape of the

kingdom of the Bhāratas over which the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas will wage war.

Yet while the actual narrative of the Pāratam does not commence with landscape

descriptions, Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram certainly does. Varantaruvār’s prologue to his

father’s poem begins with a detailed account of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu. As with Cēkkiḻār with the

Kāvēri River in the Periyapurāṇam and Kampaṉ with the Sarayū River in the Irāmāvatāram,

Varantaruvār takes his time to describe the Peṇṇai River that flows through Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu.

Cēkkiḻār’s verses on the Kāvēri River are unsurprisingly filled with references to Śiva:

Flowing from the mountain peaks crowned with the crescent moon, with its waves clashing and

foaming like an old man’s hair, the ever-virgin Kāveri resembles the Ganges which descends

upon the head of our master. Or it can be likened to the grace that flowers in the heart of our

mistress, who forms part of the great Lord. For she too took her origin in the mountains, and is

the source of countless benefits. Or again the cool Kāveri is like the devotees of the Lord, for it

too worships the supreme Lord with offerings of fragrant flowers and water at countless Siva

temples built upon the golden sand along its banks.

Similarly, the first of Varantaruvār’s verses that describes the Peṇṇai River in the

ciṟappuppāyiram incorporates several images of Krishna/Viṣṇu. Varantaruvār tells us that:

The immaculate one

has butter smeared on his red coral mouth

and his body is darkened

like the dark eyes indeed of slim women.

Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity,” 398–99.

Narayanan, 401.

VP 2.2.90–111.

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 55–57, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 24.

173

Māl is the name of the great one,

that raincloud who drawing up the deep ocean,

swallowing the sky and the directions,

and surrounding the paddy fields

with the incomparable Peṇṇai alone,

ensures the prosperity and happiness

of the entire ancient land of Tirumuṉaippāṭi.

It is clear that the “immaculate one” (vimalaṉ) Varantaruvār is speaking of in the beginning of

this verse is the loveable, young Krishna who steals curds and butter from the women of

Vrindavan. This form of Krishna would instantly be recognized by Śrīvaiṣṇava audiences who

are familiar with compositions such as the Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and Vedāntadeśika’s

Gopālaviṃśati and Yādavābhyudaya. As the verse continues, Varantaruvār describes this same

deity using the name Māl, which, as we have seen earlier, is a distinctly Tamil name for Viṣṇu.

While Varantaruvār is describing the landscape of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu and the Peṇṇai River, a

markedly Śrīvaiṣṇava Krishna/Māl clearly permeates this entire verse.

In the next verse of the ciṟappuppāyiram, Varantaruvār goes on to compare the Peṇṇai

River to a beautiful, voluptuous woman, which is something that Tiruttakkatēvar also does with

the Carai River in the Cīvakacintāmaṇi as does Kampaṉ with the Sarayū River in the

Irāmāvatāram.

Just a few verses later, however, Varantaruvār makes another distinct reference

to the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition by paying homage to three of the Āḻvār poets:

In this good land, Mukunda was worshiped

and lifted by the lamp of the words of the three

who were squeezed together for a night and half a day,

those poets who greatly brought forth literature

through verses of precious Tamil.

This good land is the birthplace

of two of the unique three

who are respected by all people in the place

of the god with red, matted hair (Śiva)

who even the gods and Vedas cannot see.

In the first half of this verse, Varantaruvār is referring to a story about Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār,

and Pēyāḻvār that is found in multiple Śrīvaiṣṇava compositions including Garuḍavāhana’s

twelfth-century Sanskrit hagiography, the Divyasūricaritam (Deeds of the Divine Sages), and

veṇṇeyē kamaḻum pavaḷavāy vimalaṉ mey eṉa karuki melliyalār

kaṇṇaiyē aṉaiya neṭuṅkaṭal mukantu kakaṉamum ticaikaḷum viḻuṅki

paṇṇai cūḻntu ilakum tirumuṉaippāṭi paḻaiya nāṭu aṉaittaiyum orutaṉ

peṇṇaiyē koṇṭu pōkam uyttiṭu māl puyal eṉum peyaruṭai periyōṉ || VP ciṟappuppāyiram 6 ||

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 7; Tiruttakkatēvar, Cīvakacintāmaṇi 39; and Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 1.1.17.

pā arum tamiḻāl pēr peṟum paṉuval pāvalar pāti nāḷ iravil

mūvarum nerukki moḻi viḷakku ēṟṟi mukuntaṉai toḻuta naṉṉāṭu

tēvarum maṟaiyum iṉṉamum kāṇā ceñcaṭai kaṭavuḷai pāṭi

yāvarum matittōr mūvaril iruvar piṟanta nāṭu inta naṉṉāṭu || VP ciṟappuppāyiram 9 ||

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Vedāntadeśika’s Sanskrit stotra, the Dehalīśastuti (Praise of the Lord on the Porch). As Steven

Hopkins explains, this story describes the first meeting of these three Āḻvār poets:

According to a local legend (sthalapurāṇa), it was at Tirukkōvalūr that the first three Āḻvārs of

the southern Vaiṣṇava tradition received a revelation from Vishnu. While huddled on the temple

porch (iṭaikaḻi) in a rainstorm, the three poets suddenly felt another presence among them; each

felt an uncanny force that pressed them in, squeezing them together in the small space of the

porch. With their “lamp of knowledge” they perceived that it was Vishnu himself who had

entered the porch, and expanding his size, had begun to squeeze them tight. This experience

inspired in all three simultaneously an ecstatic outpouring of song. They are “squeezed” into

song, each singing the Tamil poems attributed to them in the Divyaprabandham.

The reference to the “lamp of the words” (moḻi viḷakku) and the three Āḻvārs being “squeezed”

(nerukki) together indicate that Varantaruvār is alluding to the same story of Poykaiyāḻvār,

Pūtattāḻvār, and Pēyāḻvār on the porch in Tirukkovalur that the Śrīvaiṣṇava preceptors

Garuḍavāhana and Vedāntadeśika are describing in their Sanskrit compositions.

The second half of this verse, however, mentions two Tamil Śaiva poets. As we saw in

Chapter One, the Nāyaṉmār poets Appar, Campantar, and Cuntarar, are known as the mūvar

mutalikaḷ or the “first three saints.” In the Periyapurāṇam, Cēkkiḻār tells us that both Cuntarar

and Appar were born in Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu.

Thus Varantaruvār uses references to both Āḻvār

and Nāyaṉmār poets to describe the glories of the land surrounding Tirukkovalur. Yet it is

important to recognize the different ways that Varantaruvār describes the Śrīvaiṣṇava and the

Śaiva poets. Varantaruvār does reverentially say that Cuntarar and Appar are “respected by all

people” in the above verse. But he also takes care to call Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār, and Pēyāḻvār

“those poets (pāvalar) who greatly brought forth literature (paṉuval) through verses of precious

(arum) Tamil.” Cuntarar and Appar are two of the most well-known Tamil Śaiva poets, yet

Varantaruvār makes no mention of their beloved bhakti compositions in the Tirumuṟai. There are

also noticeable differences in the ways that Varantaruvār describes the religiosity of these two

different sets of poets. Varantaruvār does not describe Cuntarar and Appar actually worshiping

Śiva. He just says that these two members of the mūvar mutalikaḷ are respected by other Śaiva

devotees. With the first three Āḻvārs, however, Varantaruvār points out that Viṣṇu “was

worshiped (toḻuta) and lifted (ēṟṟi) by the lamp of the words” of Poykaiyāḻvār, Pūtattāḻvār, and

Pēyāḻvār. Not only is Varantaruvār describing these Āḻvārs as exemplary poets in this verse of

the ciṟappuppāyiram, but he is also describing them as exemplary devotees.

After his accounts of the landscape, wealth, and women of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, which

once again resemble those in the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Irāmāvatāram,

Varantaruvār turns to his father, Villi. Varantaruvār describes Villi as a skilled poet who praised

“the supreme being with a crown of tulsī” (paintuḻāy muṭi paramaṉ) or Viṣṇu, who was well-

versed in muttamiḻ or “the three types of Tamil,”

and who was lifted up by the praise of the

kings from the three great Tamil empires: the Cheras, the Cholas, and the Pandyas.

These three

Hopkins, Singing the Body, 171.

Cēkkiḻār, Periyapurāṇam 147 and 1267.

The three types of Tamil are “iyal (verse and prose, meant for recitation); icai (musical composition, song); and

nāṭakam (drama)” (Peterson, Poems to Śiva, 40n72).

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 15–16.

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kings known as the mūvēntar are a fixture of Tamil literature. Norman Cutler explains that

“Caṅkam poems of the puṟam type sketch a political landscape in which rulers of these three

dynasties frequently waged war against one another, as well as against lesser chieftains whose

spheres of influence were confined to the more remote areas of the Tamil country.”

The

mūvēntar also play an important role in the lauded Tamil narrative poem, Iḷaṅko Aṭikaḷ’s

Cilappatikāram. Cutler notes that “the story of Cilappatikāram moves through the domains of all

three kings, and the text accordingly is divided into three sections (kāṇṭam), named after the

capital cities of the three kingdoms— Pukār (Cōḻa), Maturai (Pāṇṭiya), and Vañci (Cēra).”

Although Villi’s Mahābhārata retelling is primarily set in North India, the mūvēntar make

an extended appearance in the seventeenth day of the Kurukṣetra War in the Pāratam. Villi

describes the Chera, Chola, and Pandya kings all fighting against Aśvatthāman during the

battle.

As we will soon see, Villi presents the Pandya king as Arjuna’s father-in-law through

his marriage to the princess Citrāṅgadā in the Book of the Beginnings, so it is not surprising to

see the Pandya king being depicted as an ally of the Pāṇḍavas in the Pāratam. Two much older

works of Tamil literature, the Puṟanāṉūṟu (Four Hundred Puṟam Poems) and the

Cilappatikāram, both present the Chera king as an ally of both the Pāṇḍavas and the Kauravas.

In the second poem of the Puṟanāṉūṟu addressed to Cēramāṉ Peruñcōṟṟutiyañcēralātaṉ that is

attributed to Murañciyūr Muṭinākaṉār, the poet praises the Chera king as the one “who gave

heaps of food without stinting, of the finest rice, till the time came when the hundred who were

wearing their flower garlands of golden tumpai and had seized the land perished in the field,

fighting furiously against the five whose horses wore waving plumes.”

Similarly, in the book of

the Cilappatikāram set in the Chera capital, the women there praise “the Cēral king, Poṟaiyaṉ,

who offered an enormous amount of food in the war between the five Pāṇḍavas and the one

hundred Kauravas.”

Villi, however, depicts the Chera king as only being loyal to the Pāṇḍavas.

Moreover, the Pāratam presents the Chera, Chola, and Pandya kings (who are usually at war

with each other) uniting to support the Pāṇḍavas and their armies during the Kurukṣetra War.

Just as Villi depicts the Pāṇḍavas as being worthy of alliances with the mūvēntar, Varantaruvār

presents his father as being worthy of praise from the three great Tamil kings.

Varantaruvār then goes on to begin to tell the story of how Villi was commissioned to

compose the Pāratam by the king of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ:

At the time when this one (Villi)

was spreading his music everywhere

in this land I have spoken of

a generous benefactor,

Cutler, “Three Moments,” 297.

Cutler, 297.

VP 8.2.107–34.

Puṟanāṉūṟu 2, trans. George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz in Puṟanāṉūṟu (The Four Hundred Songs of War and

Wisdom: An Anthology of Poems from Classical Tamil), trans. George L. Hart and Hank Heifetz (New York:

Columbia University Press, 1999), 4.

Iḷaṅko Aṭikaḷ, Cilappatikāram 29.24, trans. R. Parthasarathy in Iḷaṅko Aṭikaḷ, The Cilappatikāram: The Tale of an

Anklet, trans. R. Parthasarathy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 265–66.

176

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ of the Koṅkar clan,

appeared.

He was a leader who did not drown in those cruel sounds

and did not sink in the great flood of Kannada

that is not to be mixed with

the knowledge of the cool Tamil of the three Caṅkams,

and instead he established a fourth Caṅkam.

In this verse, Varantaruvār introduces his father’s supposed patron, Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, as a king

who “established a fourth Caṅkam.” Varantaruvār also refers to the famous story of the “three

Caṅkams” (muccaṅka) or “three assemblies” of Tamil literature. Jennifer Clare explains that:

In this well-known story, the Tamil literary tradition originates in three great literary schools, or

Caṅkams, populated by a collection of divine and semi-divine scholars. After a seven-year famine

forced literary scholars into other kingdoms, the knowledge of the old tradition was lost, only to

be recovered through divine intervention. Beginning with Nakkīrar’s eighth-century commentary

on the poetic treatise Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ, a commentary which implicates the Caṅkam poems

and the poetic treatise Tolkāppiyam in the story of the divine origin of Tamil literature, the

Caṅkam tradition emerges as an identifiable and authoritative canon in Tamil scholarship.

By describing Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as the king responsible for creating a “fourth Caṅkam,”

Varantaruvār presents Villi’s patron as a great admirer and benefactor of Tamil literature.

Varantaruvār also tells us that Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ “did not sink in the great flood of Kannada.”

We find a very similar description of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in Kārmēka Kaviñar’s seventeenth-

century Tamil chronicle, the Koṅkumaṇṭala Catakam (One Hundred Stanzas on the Koṅku

Region), in which Kārmēka describes Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as a “powerful man” (valiyaṉ) who sponsored

the creation of a Tamil Mahābhārata that vanquished those who speak Kannada (kaṉṉaṭar).

As I pointed out earlier, Tamil scholars have dated Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ to the late-

fourteenth or early-fifteenth century. Notably, this was the time during which the presence and

power of the Vijayanagara Empire (1336–1646) was beginning to grow throughout South India.

The royal capital of Vijayanagara (or Hampi as it is more commonly known today) is located in

the present-day state of Karnataka, the home of the regional language of Kannada. By the middle

of the fifteenth century, a number of Kannada Mahābhāratas had been composed including the

Vikramārjunavijayam, the Sāhasabhīmavijayam, the Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, and the

Jaiminibhāratam. As we have seen in Chapter Two, there are several shared episodes in

Koṅkar refers to Koṅku Nāṭu, a region in the western part of present-day Tamil Nadu.

eṅkum ivaṉ icai parappi varum nāḷil yām uraitta inta nāṭṭil

koṅkar kula varapatiyaṭkoṇṭāṉ eṉṟu oru vaṇmai kuricil tōṉṟi

veṅkaliyiṉ mūḻkāmal karu naṭa pēr veḷḷattu viḻāmal nāṉkām

caṅkam eṉa muccaṅka taṇṭamiḻ nūl kalaṅkāmal talakaṇṭāṉē || VP ciṟappuppāyiram 18 ||

Clare, “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 8–9.

Kārmēka Kaviñar, Koṅkumaṇṭala Catakam 32. I am following: Kārmēka Kaviñar, Koṅkumaṇṭala Catakam

(Koṅkumaṇṭala Catakaṅkaḷ), ed. I. Cuntaramūrtti, Na. Irā. Ceṉṉiyappaṉ, and Ai. Irāmacāmi (Chennai:

Kiṭaikkumiṭam Aintiṇai Patippakam, 1986).

I thank Srilata Raman for directing me to this reference.

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Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā, Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam, Kumāravyāsa’s

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, and Villi’s Pāratam, which suggest that certain Mahābhārata

stories were circulating between Tamil and Kannada literary cultures. It is also possible,

however, that the Pāratam was composed in response to the influx of Kannada Mahābhāratas.

In the opening prologue to the Periyapurāṇam, Cēkkiḻār tells his readers that “the Cōḻa

king, Anapāyaṉ, won enduring fame by decorating with pure red gold the holy court of the red

Lord. Now, it is said, his royal court wishes to receive this book of mine.”

Cēkkiḻār’s story of

the commissioning of the Periyapurāṇam is much shorter and simpler than the account

Varantaruvār gives of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ approaching Villi in the ciṟappuppāyiram of the

Pāratam. Monius, however, points out that in Umāpati’s fourteenth-century Tamil

Cēkkiḻārpurāṇam (Legend of Cēkkiḻār), there is a much more detailed tale of how the

Periyapurāṇam came into being. She explains that in this text, “Umāpati maintains that Cēkkiḻār

composed the Periyapurāṇam in order to lure his royal patron, Anapāyaṉ, away from a profound

interest in the Tamil Jain narrative known as the Cīvakacintāmaṇi.”

Perhaps Varantaruvār is

positing Villi’s Pāratam as a Tamil response to Kannada Mahābhāratas (such as the

Vikramārjunavijayam, the Sāhasabhīmavijayam, the Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, and the

Jaiminibhāratam) in a way similar to how Umāpati describes Cēkkiḻār’s Śaiva Periyapurāṇam

as a response to Tiruttakkatēvar’s Jain Cīvakacintāmaṇi in the Cēkkiḻārpurāṇam.

In the next two verses of the ciṟappuppāyiram, Varantaruvār tells his readers that

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ defeated the Pandya king (vaḻutitteva) on behalf of Āṭkoṇṭāṉ’s Chola overlord

and that Āṭkoṇṭāṉ hoisted the tiger banner, which was the royal emblem of the Chola Empire.

For those familiar with South Indian history, Varantaruvār’s claim that Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ was in

the service of the Cholas may come as a surprise given that the reign of the last Chola emperor,

Rājendra III, was from 1246 to 1279 CE. If Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ ruled during the late-fourteenth or

early-fifteenth century, how could he have had a Chola overlord when the Chola Empire ended

in the late-thirteenth century? A likely explanation for this is that Varantaruvār is invoking the

memory of the Cholas as a source of political legitimacy. The Chola Dynasty was one of the

most powerful political empires in the history of South Asia, especially from the ninth century to

the thirteenth century. During this period, the might of the Cholas was not only felt in the

entirety of South India, but in Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and Southeast Asia as well. As Richard

Eaton and Philip Wagoner have shown in their study of the Deccan cities of Kalyana, Raichur,

and Warangal between 1300 to 1600, “the memory of earlier sovereign domains exerted such a

profound influence on the Deccan’s subsequent politics.”

To use the terminology of LaCapra,

Varantaruvār’s claim about Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ is not “documenting” a historical or factual

relationship between Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ and a Chola king. Instead, this is a “worklike” claim. By

describing Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as a supporter of the Cholas, Varantaruvār presents his father’s

supposed patron as an ally of one of the last great powerful Tamil empires. It is also worth noting

that David Shulman asserts that literary presentations of Chola kingship are very much present in

Villi’s poem. He explains that “the symbolic and conceptual orders that had crystallized under

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 8, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 20.

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 126.

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 19–20.

Richard M. Eaton and Phillip B. Wagoner, Power, Memory, Architecture: Contested Sites on India’s Deccan

Plateau, 1300–1600 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), xxii.

178

the Cholas survived to a large extent intact. They are, for example, still apparent in a major work

such as Villiputtūrār’s Pāratam (c. 1400, over a century after the Chola fall).”

As the ciṟappuppāyiram comes to a close, Varantaruvār states that Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ

ruled from a fort known as Vakkapākai and that he was the protector of the Tamil language.

the penultimate verse, Varantaruvār describes Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ instructing Villi to “tell the

great tale of the Bhārata in Tamil verse, ambrosia to the ears of the great, so that the land where

you and I were born will be celebrated forever.”

And in the last verse, Varantaruvār identifies

himself as the son of the author of the Tamil Pāratam.

By the end of this ciṟappuppāyiram,

Varantaruvār has firmly placed the story of the Pāratam’s composition in a courtly setting.

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ is presented as a great Tamil king who supports the Cholas and who protects

Tamil literature from the influx of Kannada literature that is likely connected to the rise of the

Vijayanagara Empire. But the Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti ethos that pervades the rest of his father’s poem

is certainly not absent from Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram. As we have seen, in his account of

the landscape of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, Varantaruvār draws on Śrīvaiṣṇava images and figures,

and he later goes on to describe his father as a devotee of Viṣṇu. Varantaruvār’s opening

ciṟappuppāyiram thus introduces Villi’s Pāratam as a courtly Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam.

Yet while more than twenty percent of Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram is dedicated to

describing Villi’s patron, Villi himself only pays tribute to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ four times in the

actual narrative of his poem consisting of roughly 4,300 verses. The first reference to Varapati

Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the Pāratam takes places in the eighth and final chapter of the Book of the

Beginnings, the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter.” Towards the end of this chapter in which

Arjuna and Krishna destroy the Khāṇḍava Forest, Villi alludes to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ:

Like those who do not seek refuge

with the golden feet of

the Koṅkar lord of the earth

who pours showers of gold

on top of poets who

pour showers of praise

with their praise poems

about the strength of his shoulders,

like them––

the dark, great rainclouds too

as the showers of arrows poured

down from the hands

of the conqueror of the gods (Arjuna)

their showers of hailstones were pulverized,

their bodies were whitened,

Shulman, King and Clown, 11.

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 21.

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 22, trans. David Shulman in “Poets and Patrons in Tamil Literature and Literary Legend,” in

The Wisdom of Poets: Studies in Tamil, Telugu, and Sanskrit (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001), 78.

VP ciṟappuppāyiram 23.

179

and they retreated.

This verse is a detailed simile (Tamil: uvamai, Sanskrit: upamā) comparing the enemies of

Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ to the rainclouds that retreat when Arjuna shoots them during the burning of

the Khāṇḍava Forest. As I noted in Chapter Three, the peruṅkāppiyam genre is first defined in

the Tamil Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, which in turn is a reimagining of Daṇḍin’s Sanskrit Kāvyādarśa. In

both the Kāvyādarśa and the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, alaṅkāra (poetic figuration) is key to the

mahākāvya/peruṅkāppiyam and simile is identified as one of the main types of alaṅkāra.

Praise is at the heart of the first half of this verse which describes Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ. Not

only does Villi praise Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as “the Koṅkar lord of the earth” with “golden feet,”

Villi also speaks of poets lavishing the king with “showers of praise” and Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ

rewarding these poets for their “praise poems” (tuti, Sanskrit: stuti). In fact, this verse in the

“Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter” is basically a mini-stuti itself. While the items being compared

(Tamil: poruḷ, Sanskrit: upameya) in this simile are the rainclouds and the standards of

comparison (Tamil: uvamum, Sanskrit: upāmana) are the enemies of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, a

comparison is also being drawn between Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ and Arjuna in this verse. Both the

Koṅkar king and the Pāṇḍava prince are being presented as formidable warriors.

Alliteration also permeates this verse with the word “showers” (maḻai) and different

forms of the verb “to pour” (poḻi) being repeated in all four lines of the verse. This verse features

what Tamil grammarians call etukai or “second-syllable rhyme.” In Sanskrit, this is known as

dvitīyākṣaraprāsa.

Indira Peterson defines etukai as a convention in Tamil poetry “in which the

second consonant, syllable, and sometimes a cluster of syllables of two or more lines are

identical.”

Clare adds that this “technique is also a standard feature of the long narrative poem

in Tamil, beginning with the early Buddhist poem Maṇimēkalai and becoming more prominent

in the epics (kāppiyam, Skrt. kāvya) Cīvakacintāmaṇi (900 CE) and the Kamparāmāyaṇam.”

The second allusion to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the narrative of the Pāratam takes place in

the fourth chapter of the Book of Virāṭa’s Court, the “Recovering the Cattle Seized by One’s

Enemy Chapter” (Niraimīṭciccarukkam), in which Arjuna and Uttara face off with the Kauravas:

Like the Koṅkar king,

that king of Vakkapākai with its bannered forts,

who with the feet of his horse

[kicked down]

the crown with great jewels

of the king from the Northern direction,

col maḻai poḻintu nāḷ toṟum taṉatu tōḷ vali tutikkum nāvalarkku

poṉ maḻai poḻiyum koṅkar pūpati taṉ poṉ patam poruntalar pōla

kal maḻai poḻiyum kāḷam mā mukilum kaṭavuḷar turantavaṉ karattil

viṉ maḻai poḻiya kaṟkaḷum tukaḷāy mēṉiyum veḷiṟi mīṇṭatuvē || VP 1.8.69 ||

Kāvyādarśa 2.14; and Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram 31.

Clare, “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 48.

Peterson, Poems to Śiva, 80.

Clare, “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 48.

180

Vijaya with his strength

went again and shattered

with one arrow

the crown of the king

with the rising serpent banner.

As with the verse in the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter,” this verse mentioning Varapati

Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the “Recovering the Cattle Seized by One’s Enemy Chapter” is another simile. Here

Arjuna defeating Duryodhana is being compared to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ defeating a king

“from the Northern direction” (vaṭa ticai). Who is this king in the North? While Varantaruvār

describes Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ subduing the Pandya king on behalf of Āṭkoṇṭāṉ’s Chola overlord

in the ciṟappuppāyiram of the Pāratam, the Pandya’s capital city of Madurai is south of

Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu and thus it is unlikely Villi is referring to the Pandya king here. Recall,

however, that Varantaruvār also speaks of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as a king who “did not sink in the

great flood of Kannada,” which might be a reference to the rise of the Vijayanagara Empire.

Perhaps Villi is speaking of a conflict between a ruler of Vijayanagara and Āṭkoṇṭāṉ.

In this verse, the crown of the king “from the Northern direction” is also being compared

to the crown of the “king with the rising serpent banner” (paṭam aravu uyartta kōvai). A.A.

Manavalan points out that in the ninth-century Tamil Pārataveṇpā, “Peruntēvaṉār calls

Duryodhana as ‘aravuyarttōn’ meaning ‘serpent-bannered.’ Vyāsa’s work clearly tells us that

Duryodhana had an elephant as the emblem of his banner (Droṇaparvan 125–26).’”

In the

Periyatirumoḻi of Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār (who may have been a contemporary of Peruntēvaṉār),

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār also refers to Duryodhana as the one with an “expansive serpent banner”

(aravu nīḷ koṭiyōṉ).

In fact, Kambalur Venkatesa Acharya observes that several premodern

South Indian poets writing in Kannada (Pampa, Ranna, and Kumāravyāsa), Telugu (Tikkana),

and Sanskrit (Anantabhaṭṭa, the author of the eleventh-century Bhāratacampū), have described

Duryodhana as the one with a snake banner.

Villi thus uses a markedly South Indian epithet for

Duryodhana in this verse in the “Recovering the Cattle Seized by One’s Enemy Chapter.”

With this verse in the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter,” Villi once again draws a

connection between his supposed patron, Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, and the greatest warrior among the

five Pāṇḍavas, Arjuna. The likening of a courtly patron to one of the Pāṇḍavas takes place in

multiple regional Mahābhāratas in South Asia. As I noted in the Introduction, Sheldon Pollock

places great importance on Arjuna being compared to Arikēsari II (r. ca. 930–955) of the

Chalukya Empire in Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam, Bhīma being compared to Satyāśraya (r. ca.

997–1008 CE) of the Chalukya Empire in Ranna’s Sāhasabhīmavijayam, and Bhīma being

koṭi mukil pākai vēntaṉ koṅkar kōṉ puravi kālāl

vaṭa ticai aracar taṅkaḷ māmaṇi mukuṭam pōla

aṭal uṭai vicayaṉ oṟṟai ampiṉāl mīṇṭum ceṉṟu

paṭam aravu uyartta kōvai paṇṇiṉāṉ makuṭa paṅkam || VP 4.4.104 ||

Manavalan, “Tamil Versions of Mahābhārata,” 333.

Note that nāga can mean both “elephant” and “snake” in Sanskrit.

Tirumaṅkaiyāḻvār, Periyatirumoḻi 9.1.8.

Venkatesa Acharya, Mahabharata and Variations, 176.

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compared to Dūṅgarsingh in Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit.

As we are about to see, however, Villi

does not continue to compare Arjuna to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as his poem progresses.

After the allusion to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the “Recovering the Cattle Seized by One’s

Enemy Chapter,” which is in the fourth book of the Pāratam, the Book of Virāṭa’s Court, readers

do not encounter another reference to this king until the eighth book of Villi’s poem, the Book of

Karṇa. In the “Sixteenth Day of War Chapter” (Patiṉāṟāmpōrccarukkam), Villi tells us:

Those in the army of Yudhiṣṭhira

who returned,

elated with joy in their hearts

were like those who obtained gifts

from the lovely, red hands of

the one with fame that is

unreached by tongues or hands,

the man from the land of the Peṇṇai River

that flows with abundance,

the one with the strong, expansive, victorious shoulders,

the Koṅkar king of Mākatam (Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu),

Āṭkoṇṭāṉ of Vakkapākai.

In this verse, Villi presents his readers with yet another simile. Yet unlike the previous

two verses, Arjuna is completely absent from this verse. Here Yudhiṣṭhira’s soldiers are being

compared to the people Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ rewards with gifts. As with the previous two verses,

the above verse depicts Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as a powerful and generous king who is worthy of

praise. This is also the penultimate verse of the “Sixteenth Day of War Chapter.” In Villi’s

rendering of the sixteenth day of the Battle of Kurukṣetra, the Kaurava forces struggle to keep up

with the Pāṇḍavas. In fact, at one point in this chapter while Arjuna is fighting Karṇa, Arjuna

notices that Karṇa seems exhausted and the Pāṇḍava tells the Kaurava general: “go today and

come back tomorrow.”

At the end of this day of the Kurukṣetra War in Villi’s poem, the

soldiers fighting for the Pāṇḍavas are beginning to feel hope and even joy.

The final verse that refers to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the Tamil Pāratam is found in the next

chapter of Villi’s Book of Karṇa, the “Seventeenth Day of War Chapter”:

The hands of the protector Karṇa,

who stood on his own in the hot battlefield

without discriminating between enemies or friends

and who poured forth showers of gold,

are like the red, lovely lotus hands

of the man from the land of Tirukkovalur

surrounded by the Peṇṇai,

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 360, 363, and 395.

nā kaiyā pukaḻāṉ peṇṇai nati vaḷam curakkum nāṭaṉ

vākaiyāl poli tiṇ tōḷaṉ mākatam koṅkar kōmāṉ

pākai āṭkoṇṭaṉ cem kai paricu peṟṟavar neñcu eṉṉa

ōkaiyāl cerukki mīṇṭār utiṭṭiraṉ cēṉai uḷḷār || VP 8.1.90 ||

iṉṟu pōy iṉi nāḷai vā || VP 8.1.38 ||

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the Koṅkar king of Vakkapākai,

the one who upholds the honor of poets.

With this final verse about Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ, Villi once again uses a simile comparing the

hands of Karṇa to the hands of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ. But in a marked departure from the verses in

the “Burning of Khāṇḍava Chapter” and the “Recovering the Cattle Seized by One’s Enemy

Chapter,” which both draw connections between Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ and Arjuna, this verse in the

“Seventeenth Day of War Chapter” directly compares Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ to Karṇa, the closest

friend of Duryodhana and the secret elder brother of the five Pāṇḍavas.

Villi’s decision to liken Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ to Karṇa is likely related to this Mahābhārata

character’s immense popularity in South India. As Shulman notes, “South Indian folk traditions

glorify Karṇa in various ways: he is said to have been reborn as Ciṟuttōṇṭar, the famous ‘Little

Devotee’ who served his own son as the main course of a meal for Śiva, at the latter’s request;

and one finds many hints of a clandestine love between Karṇa and Draupadī.”

Throughout the

Pāratam, Villi presents Karṇa in an immensely sympathetic manner. In fact, when the Pāṇḍavas

discover that Karṇa is their elder brother and learn about the role Krishna played in orchestrating

his death (which I discussed in Chapter Two), the five brothers lash out against Krishna.

Shulman points out that Sahadeva engages in the act of nindāstuti (praise by blame) and “angrily

lists Kṛṣṇa’s various acts of cruelty: he killed the demon Hiraṇyakaśipu by means of his, the

demon’s, son; he used Vibhīṣaṇa, Rāvaṇa’s brother, to destroy Rāvaṇa; now he has caused

Karṇa’s death in battle with his brother, Arjuna. ‘Who can fathom the gods’ cunning ways?’”

Arjuna is even more upset than Sahadeva and Villi tells us that “the young king himself

(Arjuna), Bhīma’s brother, hated Kṛṣṇa, who causes hate by his deceitful tricks.”

This is the

only moment in Villi’s devotional retelling of the Mahābhārata in which Krishna is treated with

such harsh animosity by his devotees. Clearly, Karṇa is an important character for Villi if his

death results in Krishna’s bhaktas expressing such extreme anger towards their chosen deity.

One of the reasons why Karṇa is such a beloved figure in South India is because of his

extreme generosity. Consider the Karṇabhāra, one of the six Mahābhārata Sanskrit dramas

attributed to Bhāsa that were discovered in Kerala in 1910. This play is entirely dedicated to the

story in which Karṇa gives his earrings and armor that make him invulnerable to Indra (who is

disguised as a Brahmin). As Barbara Stoler Miller explains, “Karṇa’s identity is defined by his

earrings and his armor, but his nature is determined by his great generosity, which sets up an

inevitable conflict between his immortality and ability for self-sacrifice.”

Note that in the above

verse, Villi describes Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as “the one who protects the honor of poets” and in

earlier verses he presents Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ as a charitable benefactor. By comparing the hands

kōval cūḻ peṇṇai nāṭaṉ koṅkar kōṉ pākai vēntaṉ

pāvalar māṉam kāttāṉ paṅkayam cem kai eṉṉa

mēvalar emar eṉ eṉṉāmal vem kaḷam taṉṉil niṉṟa

kāvalaṉ kaṉṉaṉ kaiyum poḻintatu kaṉakam māri || VP 8.2.33 ||

Shulman, King and Clown, 380.

Shulman, 398. See VP 8.2.268.

VP 9.12, trans. Shulman in King and Clown, 398.

Stoler Miller, introduction to Bhāsa, Karṇabhāra, 60.

183

of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ to the hands of Karṇa, Villi draws a potent connection between his

supposed patron and a Mahābhārata character who is famed for his generosity.

All four of the allusions to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the narrative of Villi’s Pāratam are in

the forms of similes. The majority of the eleven verses that speak of Anapāyaṉ in the

Periyapurāṇam are straightforward declarations of praise. Monius notes that Cēkkiḻār describes

Anapāyaṉ as “the Cōḻa king who covered in gold the roof of Śiva’s temple at Citamparam (vv. 8,

1218), as a fearless king of righteous scepter (v. 22), as a great protector of his Tamil realm (v.

85), and as the privileged inheritor of a glorious Cōḻa lineage (v.1218).”

There are, however, a

few verses in the Periyapurāṇam that use similes to extol Anapāyaṉ. Take, for example, the full

version of the twenty-second verse of Cēkkiḻār’s text that Monius mentions above:

The mountain is great beyond all telling, a place of light and purity and truth. It is the place where

the Lord holds court, with a deer and a battle axe in his hands, the Ganges and the crescent moon

in his matted hair, and a fragrant garland round his neck. It rises high like the spirit of the fearless

Cōḻa king, Anapāyaṉ, who bore the scepter of justice and the white parasol of victory.

In this verse, Cēkkiḻār is comparing Śiva’s abode of Mount Kailāsa to the “spirit of the fearless

Cōḻa king, Anapāyaṉ.” Later in the poem, when describing a hymn that Campantar composed,

Cēkkiḻār compares the cured hunchback of a Pandya king to the scepter of Anapāyaṉ:

The gist of the hymn inscribed on the leaf was that our Lord Siva is all in all. By his grace,

Campantar included in the hymn the prayer that the king might flourish. By virtue of that prayer,

the king of the South was cured of his hunchback and stood up as straight as the scepter of

Anapāyaṉ, the famous Cōḻa king.

Yet while just two of the eleven patron verses in the Periyapurāṇam are similes, the same is not

true for the Irāmāvatāram. Shulman notes that in this Tamil Rāmāyaṇa, Kampaṉ’s patron

Caṭaiyappaṉ of Tiruvenneynallur “is praised only obliquely, through the metaphors that the poet

brings to his main narration.”

Shulman also provides us with some examples:

Viśvāmitra gives Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa weapons unerring as ‘the word of Caṭaiyaṉ, lord of

Vēṇṇey, the healing medicine for the disease of poverty for all inhabitants of the world’ (1.4.12).

Or the moon rises, spreading its silvery rays ‘like the fame (pukaḻ) of Caṭaiyaṉ from Vēṇṇey with

its well-watered fields, that seemed to devour heaven and earth and all the quarters of space’

(1.6.28).

The patronage claims in the narrative of Villi’s poem thus more closely resemble those

found in Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram than those in Cēkkiḻār’s Periyapurāṇam. A major difference

between the patronage verses in the Pāratam and the patronage verses in both the Irāmāvatāram

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 117.

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 22, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 21–22.

Cēkkilār, Periyapurāṇam 2745, trans. McGlashan in Cēkkilār, History of Holy Servants, 239.

Shulman, “Poets and Patrons,” 78.

Shulman, 78.

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and the Periyapurāṇam, however, is the number of times the patron is referred to in the text

itself. Cēkkiḻār speaks of Anapāyaṉ eleven times in the Periyapurāṇam and Kampaṉ praises

Caṭaiyappaṉ ten times throughout the Irāmāvatāram. Yet Villi only extols Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ

four times in the entire narrative of the Pāratam. Recall that the detailed story of Varapati

Āṭkoṇṭāṉ commissioning Villi to compose a Tamil Mahābhārata in Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu is only

found in the ciṟappuppāyiram that is attributed to Villi’s son Varantaruvār. Given that the

Pāratam has less than half the number of patronage claims found in other prominent

peruṅkāppiyams, such as the Irāmāvatāram and the Periyapurāṇam, I suspect that Villi

understands the praise of courtly patrons as a poetic topos of the Tamil peruṅkāppiyam genre.

A close reading of the Pāratam strongly suggests that Villi was familiar with older

peruṅkāppiyams, especially Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram. There are multiple scenes in the Pāratam

that directly mirror scenes in the Irāmāvatāram. For instance, we just saw that in the “Sixteenth

Day of War Chapter” in the Book of Karṇa, Arjuna tells an exhausted Karṇa to “go today and

come back tomorrow” (iṉṟu pōy iṉi nāḷai vā). As M.V. Subramanian observes, Arjuna’s

command to Karṇa in the Pāratam is almost identical to a line from the final book of Kampaṉ’s

Irāmāvatāram in which Rāma tells a tired Rāvaṇa during the battle in Lanka to “go today and

come back tomorrow for battle” (iṉṟu pōy pōrkku nāḷai vā).

Both Karṇa and Rāvaṇa are treated

as tragic heroes in the peruṅkāppiyams of Villi and Kampaṉ and thus it makes sense for Arjuna

to deliver a line to Karṇa in the Pāratam that mirrors one that Rāma says to Rāvaṇa in the

Irāmāvatāram.

We also see parallels between scenes that depict encounters with demonesses in

the Irāmāvatāram and the Pāratam. After Rāvaṇa’s sister Śūrpaṇakhā unsuccessfully tries to

seduce Rāma in the Irāmāvatāram, Rāma tells her that “the wise always have said it is not fitting

for human men to marry a woman from the Rākṣasas [demons] who live at ease.”

When Bhīma

is sexually propositioned by the demoness Hiḍimbā in the Pāratam, Bhīma tells her what Rāma

said about marrying “demon women” (akakkar pavai), which is a clear reference to the meeting

of Rāma and Śūrpaṇakhā in the Irāmāvatāram.

Multiple Tamil scholars have also observed

several similarities between the Irāmāvatāram and the Pāratam, with Kamil Zvelebil noting that

“the influence of Kampaṉ [on Villi] is very strong,” and C. Jesudasan and Hephzibah Jesudasan

(rather harshly) declaring that the Pāratam is “almost a parody of Kampaṉ.”

As we have just seen above, another similarity between the Irāmāvatāram and the

Pāratam is that both poets indirectly praise patrons with similes embedded in the narratives of

their poems. Since the Pāratam has less than half the number of patronage verses of the

Irāmāvatāram, I believe that Villi’s four simile verses in praise of Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ may be a

tribute to Kampaṉ’s ten simile verses in praise of Caṭaiyappaṉ. I have noted above that Kampaṉ

is an important source of inspiration for Villi. While the allusions to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ might not

document an actual historical patronage relationship between the author of the Pāratam and the

Subramanian, Mahabharata Story, 262; and Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 6.14.255.

See Hart and Heifetz, introduction to Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram (Forest Book), 22–23; and Shulman, King and

Clown, 380–98.

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 3.5.51, trans. Hart and Heifetz in Kampaṉ, Forest Book, 95.

VP 1.4.21.

Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1974), 142; and Jesudasan and Jesudasan, History of Tamil Literature, 209.

185

Koṅkar king of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu, these verses perform critical work on Villi’s audience. The

four references to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ place the Pāratam is a courtly context and remind readers

who are familiar with the Irāmāvatāram of Kampaṉ’s praise of Caṭaiyappaṉ.

I also suspect that the story of Varatapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ instructing Villi to compose the

Pāratam in Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram is another worklike aspect of this Tamil

Mahābhārata. Recall that while the opening chapters of multiple peruṅkāppiyams, such as the

Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, the Irāmāvatāram, and the Cīṟāppurāṇam, all begin with

detailed landscape descriptions, this is not the case for the first chapter of the narrative of the

Pāratam, which starts with an account of the Bhārata lineage. Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram,

however, opens with a lengthy description of the land of Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu that mirrors the

landscape descriptions in the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, and the Irāmāvatāram. By

inserting these opening verses about Tirumuṉaippāṭināḍu into his ciṟappuppāyiram,

Varantaruvār ensures that his father’s poem begins in a similar way to other prominent

peruṅkāppiyams. Similarly, the tale of Varatapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ commissioning the Pāratam in the

ciṟappuppāyiram places this Mahābhārata in a courtly Tamil world that is also inhabited by other

well-known peruṅkāppiyams such as Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram and Cēkkiḻār’s Periyapurāṇam.

While it may be impossible to ever know whether the references to the Koṅkar king in

the Pāratam are documenting an actual historical patronage relationship between Villi and

Varatapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ or not, what is clear is that both Varantaruvār and Villi are positioning this

overtly devotional Śrīvaiṣṇava Mahābhārata retelling in a distinctly courtly milieu.

Reframing Arjuna’s Tīrthayātra

Throughout the Pāratam, Villi simultaneously presents his text as bhakti narrative poem and a

peruṅkāppiyam. One of the most prominent examples of this is the seventh chapter of the Book

of the Beginnings, the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” (Aruccuṉaṉṟīrttayāttiraiccarukkam).

This chapter of the Pāratam covers many of the same events described in the “Forest

Exile of Arjuna” (Arjunavanavasa) sub-book of the Book of the Beginnings in the critical edition

of the Sanskrit epic. In the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, after Arjuna is forced to violate a previously-

agreed-upon rule among the Pāṇḍavas that their shared wife Draupadī will only spend one year

at a time with each of the five brothers and the Pāṇḍavas should never interrupt each other’s

private meetings with Draupadī, the middle Pāṇḍava prince departs to live in exile as a celibate

renunciant for a year. Yet as Ruth Katz points out, “the striking point often raised regarding this

year of exile is that Arjuna is not, after all, celibate during it; rather he marries three times.”

Indeed, in the course of the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book, Arjuna weds three princesses

(Ulūpī, Citrāṅgadā, and Subhadrā) and has sons with each of them (Irāvān, Babhruvāhana, and

Abhimanyu) who all go on to play important roles in the Mahābhārata. Katz notes that Arjuna’s

three unions in the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book “may be viewed as being of central

importance to the epic structure, for they set up the alignment of forces for the Kurukshetra

War.”

She also observes that “in some sense, one may view Arjuna’s exilic journey as a

Ruth Cecily Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata: Where Krishna Is, There is Victory (Columbia, SC: University of

South Carolina Press, 1989), 61.

Katz, 61.

186

preliminary ‘conquest of the world,’ since he travels in all directions during it, and has an

adventure with some female, usually a conquest, at each cardinal point.”

But while the title of this section of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata describes Arjuna’s journey

as a vanavasa, a term which literally means “forest residence” but often refers to a period of

exile in the forest, the title of the corresponding section of the Tamil Pāratam uses the word

tīrthayātra. Knut Jacobsen explains that “the Sanskrit word tīrtha (Hind. tīrth) can be translated

as ‘sacred space,’ ‘pilgrimage place,’ and ‘salvific space.’ Tīrthayātrā means pilgrimage or

travel to a sacred place.”

Jacobsen goes on to point out that first descriptions of the

undertakings of tīrthayātrās in South Asian literature are found in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata:

The earliest text to contain tīrtha sections is the Mahābhārata. The Tīrthayātrāparvan constitutes

chapters 78–148 of the Vanaparvan of the Mahābhārata. In addition, Śalyaparvan contains 20

chapters on tīrthas (35–54), and Anuśāsanaparvan 2 chapters (15–16). These parts of the

Mahābhārata contain more than 3,900 verses. In the Vanaparvan, an extensive pilgrimage

around India is described, and numerous tīrthas are portrayed... these tīrtha sections are

goldmines of stories and rich sources of information about the religion of the time in a wide

geographical area.

While Jacobsen does not mention the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book in his account of tīrthas

in the epic, this section of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata does contain twelve verses describing

Arjuna visiting various tīrthas after he marries Ulūpī and right before he weds Citrāṅgadā:

The son of the Thunderbolt-Wielder [Arjuna] told it all to the brahmins, O Bhārata, and

thereupon went forth to the slope of the Himālaya. Kuntī’s son reached the Banyan Tree of

Agastya and the Mountain of Vasiṣṭha and he made his ablutions on the Peak of Bhṛgu. The chief

of the Kurus made donations of thousands of cows at the fords [tīrthas] and sanctuaries, and gave

dwellings to the brahmins. The eminent man bathed at the Ford [tīrtha] of the Drop of Gold and

beheld the great mountain and holy sanctuaries. Then the best of men descended with the

brahmins, and the bull of the Bharatas went on, for he wished to reach the region of the East.

Many a ford [tīrtha] did he see in succession. and the lovely river Utpalinī by the Naimiṣa Forest,

the rivers Nandā and Upanandā, and the glorious Kauśikī, the great river Gayā as well as the

Ganges. Thus seeing all the fords [tīrthas] and hermitages, and hallowing himself with the sight,

he gave wealth to the brahmins. In the lands of Anga, Vanga [Bengal], and Kalinga [Odisha] he

visited all the fords [tīrthas] and sanctuaries found there, and having visited them in the proper

fashion he gave away largess. At the gates of the kingdom of Kalinga the brahmins who had

followed him took their leave from the Pāṇḍava and returned. With their consent, however,

Dhanaṃjaya Kaunteya the champion went on with very few companions as far as the ocean.

Katz, 61.

Knut A. Jacobsen, “Tīrtha and Tīrthayātra: Salvific Space and Pilgrimage,” in Brill’s Encyclopedia of Hinduism,

ed. Knut A. Jacobsen, Helene Basu, Angelika Malinar, and Vasudha Narayanan. Brill Online, 2018,

http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/2212-5019_BEH_COM_1020010.

Jacobsen, “Tīrtha and Tīrthayātra.”

MBh 1.208.1–12, trans. van Buitenen in Mahābhārata 1:359.

187

In this portion of the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, we see

Arjuna traveling to several tīrthas across the Indian sub-continent and performing religious

rituals and distributing wealth to Brahmins. These twelve verses, however, are just a small

section of the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book. As Katz observes, “Arjuna’s journey is, in fact,

a traditional pilgrimage to pilgrimage places in the various directions, but this fact is not stressed

by the epic.”

As we are about to see, Villi presents his “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” as both

a journey in which key political alliances are forged as well as a devotional pilgrimage.

In the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book in the Mahābhārata, Arjuna is forced to

interrupt a personal meeting between Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī because he needs to retrieve the

stolen cows of a Brahmin, and Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī are in the room where the Pāṇḍavas

store their weapons.

Villi sets up this scene a bit differently in his Tamil retelling. In the

“Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” of the Pāratam, Arjuna encounters Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī

sporting in a “pleasure garden” (poḻil) on his way to get his weapons to help the Brahmin.

the Kāvyādarśa, one of the several different things that Daṇḍin says should be described in a

mahākāvya is “sporting in gardens or water” (udyānasalilakrīḍā

As I pointed out in Chapter

Three, I contend that both the Kāvyādarśa and its Tamil retelling, the Taṇṭiyalaṅkāram, are

descriptive rather than proscriptive accounts of the mahākāvya/peruṅkāppiyam genre.

Descriptions of romantic “sporting” (krīḍā) in nature abound in Sanskrit mahākāvyas, including

the Raghuvaṃśa and the Kumārasambhava of Kālidāsa and Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya, as well as

in some Tamil peruṅkāppiyams, such as Tiruttakkatēvar’s Cīvakacintāmaṇi.

In his study of

gardens in courtly life in premodern South Asia, Daud Ali points out that the garden is a

“constant and ubiquitous theme of courtly poetry, and the presumed content of much of the floral

and botanical imagery which pervaded the literature of the court.”

He also notes that “garden

scenes in the literary corpus are typically full of uncertainty and secrecy, a theme constantly

enacted in Sanskrit dramas.”

By having Arjuna interrupt Yudhiṣṭhira and Draupadī while they

are privately playing together in a pleasure garden rather than in the weapons storeroom as in the

Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Villi marks his retelling as a mahākāvya/peruṅkāppiyam.

As in the Mahābhārata, the first woman who Arjuna marries during his year of exile in

the Pāratam is the snake princess Ulūpī. David Gitomer describes the meeting of Arjuna and

Ulūpī in the Sanskrit epic noting that “while Arjuna bathes in the Gaṅgā, she [Ulūpī] pulls him

underwater and asserts that while dharma may require that Arjuna remain in exile for a year from

Draupadī, this particular dharma has nothing to do with her. In fact, she explains, dharma

Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata, 68n25.

MBh 1.205.1–20.

VP 1.7.4.

Daṇḍin, Kāvyādarśa 1.16.

See Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 90 and 249n9; and Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 129–30.

Daud Ali, “Gardens in Early Indian Court Life,” Studies in History 19, no. 2 (2003): 239.

Ali, 238

188

demands that Arjuna satisfy her lust. So, of course, he does.”

Although the Sanskrit epic does

not offer any details into how exactly Arjuna satisfies Ulūpī’s lust other than that he “did as she

desired,” this is not the case in the Tamil poem.

Villi presents his readers with a vivid

description of Arjuna and Ulūpī making love for several days on a bed of flowers.

As we will

soon see, the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” is filled with detailed verses about Arjuna’s sexual

trysts with the three princesses he marries. These accounts of Arjuna having sexual intercourse

with his three wives are reminiscent of those of the prince Cīvakaṉ and his seven wives in the

oldest extant Tamil peruṅkāppiyam, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi. Monius explains that in this poem,

which is also known as the Maṇanūl (Book of Marriages), “love-making is vigorously and

pointedly described with gusto, the poetry full of sly humor and hidden meaning.”

The next verse of the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” which is about the birth of Irāvān,

is filled with word play and Villi repeatedly uses the phrase nākam atipaṉ.

Atipaṉ or “lord” is

derived from the Sanskrit word adhipa.

The Tamil word nākam, however, can correspond to

the Sanskrit term nāka, which can mean “heaven” or Indra’s paradise,” as well as to the Sanskrit

words nāga, which has multiple meanings including, “serpent” and “elephant,” and naga, which

means “mountain.”

Thus in a single verse, Villi uses the phrase nākam atipaṉ four times to

refer to Ulūpī’s father (“the lord of serpents”), Arjuna’s father Indra (“the lord of Indra’s

paradise” and “the lord of the elephant,” which is an allusion to Indra’s elephant Airāvata), and

Himavat (“the lord of the mountains”). The different uses of nākam is an example of the

alaṅkāra known as yamaka “or ‘twinning,’ where phonetically identical duplicates are repeated,

each time with a different meaning.”

Several well-known Sanskrit mahākāvyas, including the

Raghuvaṃśa, the Kirātārjunīya, the Śiśupālavadha, and Bhaṭṭi’s seventh-century Rāvaṇavadha

(Slaying of Rāvaṇa), are filled with examples of yamaka.

It is thus no surprise that Daṇḍin

dedicates seventy-seven verses of the third book of the Sanskrit Kāvyādarśa to a discussion of

yamakas.

Gary Tubb adds that in another Sanskrit literary treatise, the ninth-century

David Gitomer, “The Invention of Irāvān,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah

Pillai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 57.

MBh 1.206.33, trans. van Buitenen in Mahābhārata 1:401.

VP 1.7.9.

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 129.

VP 1.7.10.

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v. “atipaṉ,” accessed June 3, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-

bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=75.

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, “nākam,” accessed June 3, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-bin/app/tamil-

lex_query.py?page=2197.

Bronner, Extreme Poetry, 21.

Gary Tubb, “Kāvya with Bells On: Yamaka in the Śiśupālavadha: Or, ‘What’s a flashy verse like you doing in a

great poem like this?’” in Innovations and Turning Points: Toward a History of Kāvya Literature, ed. Yigal

Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 159–92.

Daṇḍin, Kāvyādarśa 3.1–77.

189

Kāvyālaṅkāra (Ornaments of Poetry), “Rudraṭa says, in his closing verse on yamakas, that

yamaka verses should be used thoughtfully, in ways that are accessible to the reader, and that the

proper setting for them is primarily the sargabandha, that is, the mahākāvya genre.”

This yamaka-filled verse describes the birth of Arjuna’s son, Irāvān (who is also known

in Tamil Nadu as Aravāṉ). While Irāvān only appears in a single chapter of the Book of Bhīṣma

in the critical edition of the Mahābhārata, he is much more visible in Tamil Mahābhārata

traditions. Drawing on work by Alf Hiltebeitel and David Shulman, Gitomer explains that:

In several Tamil Mahābhārata traditions, Aravāṉ is the son of Arjuna who willingly offers

himself to the Pāṇḍavas for a human sacrifice to the goddess Kālī before the battle at Kurukṣetra.

In certain tellings of this story, Aravāṉ is married to Mohinī (Kṛṣṇa in female form) before he is

sacrificed. Because of his marriage to Mohinī, Aravāṉ has become an important figure for the

transgender community in Tamil Nadu.

In the Book of Effort of the Pāratam, Villi uses a chapter of eight verses called the “Battlefield

Sacrifice to the Goddess Chapter” (Kaḷappaliyūṭṭucarukkam) to tell the story of Irāvān

volunteering to sacrifice himself in order to ensure his father’s victory in battle.

Given Irāvān’s

extended role in the Pāratam and his popularity in Tamil-speaking South India, it is fitting for

Villi to use an intricate verse replete with yamaka to describe the birth of this son of Arjuna.

After marrying Ulūpī in the Pāratam, Arjuna begins his tīrthayātra in earnest and

proceeds to visit multiple different sacred spaces. Villi tells his readers:

He who is the measure of bhakti,

Pārtha, after bathing in many tīrthas

that one can exclaim about in each and every direction,

approaching the land of the South

which is a seed for success,

reached the hills in the form of the serpent

with its flowing rivers which one can leap over.

Note that Villi describes Arjuna here as the one “who is the measure of bhakti” (pattikku

varampu ākiya), thus emphasizing Arjuna’s role as Krishna’s devout bhakta. While the first part

of this verse is rather vague with no clear indicators of which tīrthas Arjuna visits, the second

half tells us that Arjuna turns south and goes to “the hills in the form of the serpent” (aravakkiri).

This is a clear reference to the Seshachalam (Śeṣācalam) Hills in the Eastern Ghats in the

Tubb, “Kāvya with Bells On,” 157.

Gitomer, “Invention of Irāvān,” 55n5. See also David Shulman, “The Serpent and the Sacrifice: An Anthill Myth

from Tiruvārūr,” History of Religions 18, no. 2 (1978): 107–37; and Alf Hiltebeitel, “Dying Before the

Mahābhārata War: Martial and Transsexual Body-building for Aravāṉ,” Journal of Asian Studies 54, no. 2 (1995):

447–73.

VP 5.7.1–8.

pattikku varampu ākiya pārttaṉ pala tīrttam

a tikkiṉum e tikkiṉum ām eṉṟavai āṭi

cittikku oru vitai ākiya teṉ nāṭṭiṉai aṇuki

tatti cori aru taṭa aravakkiri cārntāṉ || VP 1.7.12 ||

190

modern-day state of Andhra Pradesh. In Śrīvaiṣṇava mythology, the seven peaks of the

Seshachalam Hills represent the seven hoods of the celestial serpent Śeṣanāga upon whom Viṣṇu

reclines.

The Seshachalam Hills are also the home of the Veṅkaṭeśvara temple in Tirupati,

which as we saw in Chapter Three is one of the four most important sacred sites for Śrīvaiṣṇavas.

Ajay Rao notes that in Vedāntadeśika’s Sanskrit Haṃsasandeśa (Message of the Swan), in

which Rāma sends a message to the captive Sītā via a swan, the swan’s “route proper begins at

Tirupati.”

Vedāntadeśika also alludes to the mythology of the Seshachalam Hills:

Just ahead the Añjanādri Mountain (Tirupati)

will please your eyes.

People rightly consider it to be serpent Śeṣa himself.

It is where Viṣṇu resides,

it bears the earth,

it has jewels inlaid in its peaks/hoods,

and it is joined with large clouds

appearing like skin just cast off.

100

Just as his fellow Śrīvaiṣṇava poet Vedāntadeśika has the swan in the Haṃsasandeśa begin his

journey through South India by flying over Tirupati, Villi has Arjuna begin his tīrthayātra in

South India with a trip to Tirupati. That both Vedāntadeśika and Villi commence their mappings

of sacred spaces in South India with the paramount Śrīvaiṣṇava shrine of Tirupati is significant.

Villi goes on to describe Arjuna visiting multiple different temples throughout South

India. While some of these temples are dedicated to a form of Viṣṇu such as the Varadarājasvāmī

temple in Kanchipuram and the Dehalīśa shrine in Tirukkovalur,

101

others are Śiva temples, like

the Aṇṇāmalaiyār temple in Tiruvannamali and the famous Tillai Naṭarāja temple in

Chidambaram (Citamparam).

102

As with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the Tamil Pāratam is by no

means devoid of allusions to Śiva. Some Tamil scholars, however, have interpreted the various

references to Śiva within the Pāratam through the lens of a hagiographical story involving the

fifteenth-century Tamil poet and devotee of Śiva’s son Murukaṉ, Aruṇakirinātar.

There are multiple different variants of this story, but according to one version that has

been immortalized in T.R. Ramanna’s devotional Tamil film Aruṇakirinātar (1964), Villi is a

skilled but arrogant Śrīvaiṣṇava poet who roams around South India cutting off the ears of

inferior poets after defeating them in poetry competitions.

103

This barbaric practice ends when

Villi is unable to decipher the meaning of a verse of Aruṇakirinātar’s Kantarantāti (Linked

Verses about Skanda) and Aruṇakirinātar kindly refrains from chopping off Villi’s ears. In

Eck, India: Sacred Geography, 317–22.

Rao, Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa, 37.

100

Vedāntadeśika, Haṃsasandeśa 1.21, trans. Rao in Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa, 37.

101

VP 1.7.14 and 1.7.16.

102

VP 1.7.15 and 1.7.18.

103

See 1:44:49–1:50:58 of Tamil Cinema, “Arunagirinathar Full Movie” YouTube video, 2:24:52, May 16, 2016,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRse_eI09TY.

191

another version of this story described by Kamil Zvelebil, Aruṇakirinātar blinds Villi after the

Śrīvaiṣṇava poet loses the competition and tells his “followers to avoid even the sight of a Śiva

temple.”

104

After Villi begs for a lesser punishment, Aruṇakirinātar orders him “to compose a

poem in praise of Śiva” and “Villi chose a compromise solution and undertook the composition

of the Pāratam which is intermingled with the legends of Śiva.”

105

Zvelebil then suggests an

alternative reading of the line from Villi’s own introduction (taṟciṟappuppāyiram) to the

Pāratam that we saw in Chapters One and Two in which the poet states that he is retelling the

Mahābhārata out of his “desire for the carita of the eternal Mādhava.”

106

Zvelebil asserts that the

words maṉṉum mātavaṉ, “eternal Mādhava,” is an example of the alaṅkāra known as śleṣa.

Śleṣa, also known as “simultaneous narration” or “double entendre” is an alaṅkāra “in which a

single phonemic sequence yields numerous meanings.”

107

Zvelebil argues that maṉṉum mātavaṉ

could be read as maṉ umā tavaṉ, thus referring to Śiva as “the ascetic (with) the eternal Umā”

and he says that this “would be quite in accordance with Villi’s learned, sophisticated manner to

use a pun like this.”

108

Agreeing with Zvelebil’s śleṣa reading of this verse, Shulman notes that

the phrase maṉṉum mātavaṉ “is ambiguous: it could refer either to Viṣṇu or to Śiva. The

deliberate pun is wholly characteristic of Villiputtūrār’s ornate, complex style.”

109

Villi certainly is a master of different alaṅkāras, including śleṣa, but the sectarian

hagiographical story about Aruṇakirinātar forcing Villi to compose a poem in honor of Śiva is

clearly impacting Zvelebil’s reading of this verse from the taṟciṟappuppāyiram. While Śiva does

pop up several times in the narrative of this Tamil Mahābhārata and Villi does allude to different

Śiva temples and poets in his text, the Pāratam is undoubedtly a Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti narrative

poem. The Śrīvaiṣṇava ethos of Villi’s composition is reaffirmed with the sacred site Arjuna

visits right before he arrives in Madurai, the home of his future Tamil wife Citrāṅgadā:

He worshiped at the site of Araṅkam in the South,

that is a bestowed adornment

to the lady Earth

as the beautiful Kāvēri flowed on both sides

and where on two occasions

the one who earlier destroyed the capital city of Lanka

worshiped the golden feet

of the one who is conscious of the universe while asleep

on the bed made by the shining, dancing serpent.

110

104

Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1975), 214n65.

105

Zvelebil, 215n65.

106

VP taṟciṟappuppāyiram 8.

107

Rao, Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa, 72.

108

Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1975), 215n65.

109

Shulman, “From Author to Non-Author,” 113n28.

110

ilaṅkāpuri muṉ ceṟṟavaṉ iru pōtum vaṇaṅka

tulaṅku āṭu aravu aṇai mēl aṟituyil koṇṭavar poṉ tāḷ

polam kāviri irupālum vara pūtalam maṅkaikku

alaṅkāram aḷikkum teṉ araṅkattiṭai toḻutāṉ || VP 1.7.19 ||

192

In the above verse, Villi describes Arjuna visiting Srirangam (Araṅkam). As we saw in Chapter

Three, there are 108 Śrīvaiṣṇava divyadeśams or “divine places.” Vasudha Narayanan observes

that “the most popular of the 108 sacred places is Śrī-raṅgam, near the modern city of

Tiruchirapalli. All the Āḻvārs (except Maturakavi) sang in praise of the Lord in this temple. The

most verses on any subject are addressed to this deity. Indeed, 247 verses are written in praise of

Śrī-raṅgam and the Lord there.”

111

In Srirangam, Śrīvaiṣṇavas worship Viṣṇu in his form of

Raṅganātha sleeping on top of Śeṣanāga. This verse not only speaks of Raṅganātha, “the one

who is conscious of the universe while asleep” (aṟituyil koṇṭavar), but also of the destroyer of

Lanka, Rāma. Therefore Villi praises two different forms of Viṣṇu in this verse. As Rao points

out, “the mythic origin of the Raṅganātha icon at Śrīraṅgam is for Śrīvaiṣṇavas the strongest and

oldest material link with the epic narrative [of the Rāmāyaṇa]. From the early Āḻvār poetry, the

Raṅganātha icon was identified with the family heirloom (kuladhana) Rāma gave to Vibhīṣaṇa

as recompense for his assistance in ousting Rāvaṇa.”

112

By having Arjuna begin his tīrthayātra

in Tirupati and come to Srirangam right before he marries the Tamil princess Citrāṅgadā in

Madurai, Villi clearly maps out a sacred Śrīvaiṣṇava geography.

While the most famous temple in Madurai is without question the Mīnākṣī Sundareśvara

temple dedicated to the Pandya princess/goddess Mīnākṣī along with her consort Sundareśvara (a

form of Śiva), Madurai is also a sacred destination for followers of the Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition.

Viṣṇu in the form of Aḻakar, “the beautiful one,” is considered to be the brother of Mīnākṣī and

both the Kūṭalaḻakar temple within the city and the Kaḷḷaḻakar temple in Vanagiri, which is about

eight miles north-west of Madurai, are among the 108 Śrīvaiṣṇava divyadeśams. Archana

Venkatesan adds that the Kaḷḷaḻakar temple “is praised by six of the twelve Āḻvār poets, for a

total of 128 verses, placing it third on the list, after Srirangam and Tiruvenkatam [Tirupati].”

113

While Villi’s verse on Madurai refers to a story in Cēkkiḻār’s Periyapurāṇam about Campantar

in Madurai in which “8,000 Jain monks impale themselves on metal stakes to atone for their sins

against the young Śaiva devotee,”

114

Villi also describes Arjuna bathing in tanks of tulsī

(tuḷavam), a plant distinctly associated with the worship of Viṣṇu.

115

This suggests that Arjuna is

visiting the Kūṭalaḻakar temple during his trip to the city of Madurai.

Madurai is also the capital of the Pandya kingdom; this is where Arjuna falls in love with

Citrāṅgadā, the only child of the Pandya king. In the Book of the Beginnings in the critical

edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Arjuna meets Citrāṅgadā in a kingdom called Maṇalūra.

116

Yet in the critical edition of the Book of the Horse Sacrifice, when Arjuna meets Babhruvāhana

111

Narayanan, Way and Goal, 34.

112

Rao, Re-figuring the Rāmāyaṇa, 39–40.

113

Venkatesan, “Annotations to Nammāḻvār’s Tiruvāymoḻi,” in Nammāḻvār, Tiruvāymoḻi (Endless Song), 355.

114

Anne E. Monius, “From Foolish Ascetics to Enemies of Śiva: The Fate of Jains as Religious Others in Tamil

Śaiva Literature,” in Regional Communities of Devotion in South Asia: Insiders, Outsiders, and Interlopers, ed. Gil

Ben-Herut, Jon Keune, and Anne E. Monius (New York: Routledge, 2019), 12. Also see Cēkkiḻār, Periyapurāṇam

2693–2750.

115

VP 1.7.20.

116

MBh 1.207.14.

193

(his son with Citrāṅgadā) after the great war, Citrāṅgadā’s kingdom is referred to as Maṇipūra.

117

One of the most famous retellings of the story of the romance of Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā,

Rabindranath Tagore’s English play Chitra (1914), identifies Maṇipūra as Manipur, a state in

present-day northeastern India.

118

Pradeep Bhattacharya, however, points out that “Southern

manuscripts [of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata] locate Maṇalūra near Madurai and make Citrāñgadā

a Pānḍyan princess.”

119

C.R. Sankaran and K. Rama Varma Raja add that “this happy alliance

between the Pāṇḍavas and the Pāṇḍyas” is also described in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa,

Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar’s fourteenth-century commentary on the Tolkāppiyam, and Agastya Paṇḍita’s

Sanskrit Bālabhārata.

120

There also several Tamil ballad traditions that center around the

powerful Pandya warrior-queen of Madurai named Alli who is seduced by Arjuna. Vijaya

Ramaswamy notes that the tale of Citrāṅgadā “has amazing parallels with the Alli legend.”

121

Villi describes Citrāṅgadā’s father as a great Pandya king who has defeated the other two

members of the mūvēntar: the Chera king and the Chola king. Arjuna meets the Pandya king in

the guise of a Brahmin sage, and he tells Citrāṅgadā’s father kaṉṉiyai kaṇṭu āṭa vantaṉam.

122

This phrase is an example of śleṣa that plays with different meanings of the noun kaṉṉi and the

verb āṭu. One of the most common meanings of kaṉṉi is “virgin,” but Kaṉṉi is also another name

of the Kumari River.

123

The verb āṭu can mean “to sport” or “to play,” but it can also mean “to

bathe.”

124

Therefore the phrase kaṉṉiyai kaṇṭu āṭa vantaṉam can be translated as “I have come to

see and bathe in the Kaṉṉi River” or “I have come to see and sport with the virgin.” This line

from the Pāratam bears a striking resemblance to a line from the Cīvakacintāmaṇi. Monius

elaborates: “in describing the love games of the hero with his wife Curamañcari, for example,

Tiruttakkatēvar plays on the phrase kumari āṭa, which can mean both ‘to bathe in the Kumari

River’ and ‘to lie down [sexually] with a virgin’ (v.2020).”

125

For Villi’s readers who are

familiar with Tiruttakkatēvar’s peruṅkāppiyam, this line from the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna

Chapter” will immediately remind them of Cīvakaṉ’s rendezvous with Curamañcari.

117

MBh 14.77.46.

118

Rabindranath Tagore, Chitra: A Play in One Act (London: Macmillan Company, 1914), xi.

119

Bhattacharya, “Revising the Critical Edition,” 15.

120

Sankaran and Raja, “On the Sources of Villiputtūrār,” 262–63.

121

Vijaya Ramaswamy, The Taming of Alli: Mythic Images and Tamil Women,” Journal of the Inter-University

Centre for Humanities and Social Sciences 5, no .2 (1998): 80.

It should be noted, however, that in the Draupadī goddess cult in Tamil Nadu (which draws much inspiration from

Villi’s poem), Alli and Citrāṅgadā are two different wives of Arjuna. See Hiltebeitel, Cult of Draupadī 1:216–17.

122

VP 1.7.22.

123

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v. “kaṉṉi,” accessed June 6, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-

bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=832.

124

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v. “āṭu-tal,” accessed June 6, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-

bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=219.

125

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 129.

194

While the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata narrates the story of the courtship

of Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā with just ten śloka couplets, the Tamil Pāratam dedicates twenty-two

quatrains in viruttam meter to the romance of the Pāṇḍava prince and the Pandya princess.

126

Villi takes his time to describe the first meeting of Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā which ends with the

couple partaking in a secret gandharva marriage (a ceremony with no rituals or witnesses) and

then making love. As soon as she is separated from Arjuna, Citrāṅgadā begins to suffer from

what is known in Sanskrit as viraha or “longing in separation.” Different characters that familiar

from Caṅkam corpus of Tamil literature, such as Citrāṅgadā’s female friends (tōḻis) and foster

mother (cevilittāy), try to console the princess but nothing works. The Pandya king is told of his

daughter’s love for Arjuna (who is also burning with viraha) and Citrāṅgadā’s father happily

arranges a grand formal wedding for the two lovers which is attended by various deities as well

as the Chera and the Chola kings. Villi goes on to vividly describe the honeymoon of Arjuna and

Citrāṅgadā, which results in the birth of the future Pandya king, Babhruvāhana. The love story of

Citrāṅgadā and Arjuna in the Pāratam features many of the typical events of the

mahākāvya/peruṅkāppiyam genre, including a wedding, lovemaking, and the birth of a prince.

Throughout this sequence, however, Villi does not let his audience forget that his composition is

a Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam. When Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā first see each other, Villi compares

them to Tirumāl and Śrī.

127

And among the celestial guests invited to the wedding of the Pandya

king’s daughter are “our lord” (empirāṉ) and the “lovely Śrī.”

128

As soon as Arjuna leaves the city of Madurai, Villi describes him visiting the “divine

mountain” (tirumalai), which is a reference to the Kaḷḷaḻakar temple in the Vanagiri hills outside

of the city.

129

Arjuna then heads to the same place in the Kiṣkindhā Forest in South India (now

believed to near present-day Hampi) where in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, Rāma shot seven trees

with a single arrow to convince Sugrīva of his archery skills. While this story is found in

Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa, it also referred to twenty-two times by the Āḻvārs in the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam.

130

Notably, none of the South Indian shrines and cities that Arjuna

visits in the Pāratam, such as Tirupati, Kanchipuram, Tirukkovalur, Srirangam, Madurai, and

Vanagiri, are mentioned in the “Forest Exile of Arjuna” sub-book of the critical edition of the

Sanskrit epic. With the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” Villi thus brings his own regional,

devotional space into the much larger geographical world of the Mahābhārata tradition.

The final stop on Arjuna’s tīrthayātra in the Tamil Pāratam is Krishna’s kingdom of

Dwarka where Arjuna marries Krishna’s sister Subhadrā. As in multiple Mahābhāratas from

South India (including the southern recension of the Sanskrit epic, Kulaśekhara’s twelfth-century

Sanskrit drama Subhadrādhanañjaya, and Agastya Paṇḍita’s Bālabhārata), Arjuna disguises

126

MBh 1.207.13–23; and VP 1.7.21–43.

127

VP 1.7.29.

128

VP 1.7.41.

129

VP 1.7.44.

130

See Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa 4.12.1–5 (I am following Vālmīki, The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki: An Epic of Ancient India,

vol. 4, Kiṣkindhākāṇḍa, trans. Rosalind Lefeber [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994]); and Narayanan, Way

and Goal, 157.

195

himself as a wandering ascetic when he arrives in Dwarka in Villi’s poem.

131

In all of these

South Indian renderings of the love story of Subhadrā and Arjuna, Krishna is well-aware that the

ascetic is actually Arjuna and the deity plays a much more active role in bringing the two lovers

together than he does in the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

132

When Arjuna arrives in Dwarka, the rainy season is beginning. As Rosalind Lefeber

explains, “it is a convention observed in Indian poetry, music, and art that the rains are the

season for love, a time for separated lovers to be reunited, and for all couples to profit from the

necessary restriction of outdoor activities.”

133

Friedhelm Hardy notes that the association of the

experience of viraha with the rainy season is seen in works belonging to the Caṅkam corpus as

well as works from Sanskrit and Prakrit literary traditions: “the monsoon made it necessary for

travelers, monks, or warriors to return home at the beginning of the rainy season. Thus, it is not

surprising that this season is connected with the waiting wife, as we find also in Prakrit and

Sanskrit lyrics. This season, promising the imminent return of the husband, was particularly

loaded with emotions for the lonely wife.”

134

In his rendering of the tale of Arjuna and

Subhadrā’s romance, Villi utilizes the setting of the rainy season to describe Arjuna burning

uncontrollably with viraha after meeting Krishna’s sister for the first time and being unable to

cool himself despite the refreshing rains of the monsoon.

135

Villi’s first description of the rainy

season in the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” however, is not focused on the concept of viraha

but on the arrival of Krishna to Arjuna’s camp on the outskirts of Dwarka:

The king of the Yādavas

reflected on the marriage of Indra’s divine child

who had reached that prosperous place.

The clouds of the rainy season

tying up the sky in a blue canopy

as the drums of thunder of heaven roared and roared,

approaching and placing ornamental hangings

representing makara fishes of five colors

that were made up of twinned colorful rainbows,

and lighting rising lamps of dazzling lightning,

they split an entire cascade of pearls of rain.

136

131

See Mahābhārata (Sriman Mahābhāratam) 1.217–20; Sudha Gopalakrishnan, “What Are the Goals of Life? The

Vidūṣaka’s Interpretation of the Puruṣārthas in Kulaśekhara’s Subhadrādhanañjaya,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed.

Nell Shapiro Hawley and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 137; and

Sankaran and Raja, “On the Sources of Villiputtūrār,” 263–64.

132

For this episode in the critical edition, see MBh 1.211–13.

133

Lefeber, “Notes” to Vālmīki, Rāmāyaṇa:4, 269n13.

134

Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti, 161.

135

VP 1.7.60–62.

136

intiraṟku tiru matalai maṉṟal eṇṇi yātavar kōṉ vaḷam patiyil eytiṉāṉ eṉṟu

antarattai nīlattāl vitāṉam ākki aṇṭam uṟa iṭi muracam ārppa ārppa

vantu iraṭṭai vari cilaiyāl pañca vaṇṇam makaratōraṇam nāṭṭi vayaṅkum miṉṉāl

muntuṟa tīpam eṭuttu tārai muttāl muḻu pori cintiṉ kāla mukilkaḷ ammā || VP 1.7.51 ||

196

In this verse full of poetic imagery, the arrival of Krishna at Arjuna’s camp is clearly being

compared to the arrival of the monsoon in Dwarka. In Villi’s description of this scene, it is

almost as if the rainy season is coming out to welcome Krishna. While there have been multiple

allusions to various forms of Viṣṇu up to this point in the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” this

verse is Krishna’s first physical appearance in the narrative of this chapter in the Pāratam. It is

thus fitting that Villi uses a verse celebrating the arrival of the monsoon to introduce Krishna in

this chapter. Also note that Krishna approaches Arjuna while contemplating the marriage of the

Pāṇḍava prince to Krishna’s sister. As I pointed out in Chapter Two, Villi depicts Krishna as the

puppet master of the Pāratam who pulls the strings of several different characters. With this

verse, Krishna is setting everything in motion in order for Arjuna and Subhadrā to fall in love,

wed, and produce the great warrior Abhimanyu, who will play a pivotal role in the great war.

After warmly greeting Arjuna, Krishna tells him that he will come back the next day.

137

When Krishna returns in the morning, he brings along an entourage which includes his older

brother Balarāma.

138

Arjuna greets his guests by blessing them like an ascetic and he proceeds to

give them a lecture on the daśāvatāra or “ten incarnations” cycle of Viṣṇu.

139

As we saw in

Chapter Three, unlike many other Vaiṣṇava communities who regard Krishna and the Buddha as

Viṣṇu’s eighth and ninth incarnations, Śrīvaiṣṇavas consider Balarāma and Krishna to be Viṣṇu’s

eighth and ninth incarnations in the daśāvatāra cycle. Therefore, Śrīvaiṣṇava audiences will see

the humor in this scene of Arjuna pretending to be an ascetic and lecturing two of Viṣṇu’s

incarnations on the different forms of Viṣṇu in the daśāvatāra cycle.

Following this comical moment, Villi describes Arjuna seeing Krishna and Balarama’s

beautiful sister Subhadrā for the first time as she approaches the disguised Pāṇḍava prince:

The two (Arjuna and Krishna) were close to each other

and together at that time, they saw

Subhadrā on that path of the mountain

on one side of the hill:

like lightning in a fresh cloud

or a line of beauty.

The one who appeared

caused the hairs of the body to rise in joy all over.

Without blinking,

Arjuna beheld with his eyes

the virgin who was like

the blossoming of the young, unique kaṭampu flower.

Witnessing this first sight (kāṭci) of the

esteemed one of great penance (Arjuna),

Mādhava gave a gentle smile,

abundantly rejoicing in the

relationship of his cousin/brother-in-law.

140

137

VP 1.7.53.

138

VP 1.7.54.

139

VP 1.7.55.

140

tuṉṉi iruvarum oruppaṭṭu irunta kālai cupattirai a taṭam kuṉṟiṉ cūḻal ōr cār

miṉṉiya paim puyaliṉ eḻil irēkai pōla veḷippaṭalum mey puḷakam mēl mēl ēṟi

197

In his commentary on the second verse of the Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ (Study of Stolen Love), a

treatise on the poetics of the akam tradition of Tamil poetry, Nakkīrar describes a series of

different scenes (tuṟai) that take place when two people fall in love. The first of these scenes is

kāṭci or “first sight,” which Nakkīrar defines as “when the eyes of those two people meet.”

141

Premodern Tamil literature is full of examples of kāṭci. Just take the following verse about Rāma

and Sītā from the first book of Kampaṉ’s Rāmāyaṇa peruṅkāppiyam, the Irāmāvatāram:

Far beyond thought she stood: their eyes

Met and gorged each other; their souls

No longer theirs became as one ––

The hero gazed, and so did she!

142

Rāma and Sītā and the powerful love they feel when they see each other for the first time is at the

heart of this verse from the Irāmāvatāram. In the kāṭci verse about Arjuna and Subhadrā in the

Pāratam, however, Krishna is as prominent a character as the two lovers (if not more so). The

verse begins with both Arjuna and Krishna seeing Subhadrā make her way down the mountain.

Villi goes on to describe Subhadrā using rather conventional similes comparing her to lightning

and the blossoming of a flower and he makes it clear that Arjuna is enamored with her by

describing the prince’s horripilation and unblinking eyes. Yet the final part of the verse is all

about Krishna and his reaction to witnessing the kāṭci of Arjuna and Subhadrā.

Villi tells us that “Mādhava gave a gentle smile, abundantly rejoicing in the relationship

of his cousin/brother-in-law.” The term maittuṉamai means “the relationship with one’s

maittuṉaṉ.”

143

While maittuṉaṉ can mean the “son of one’s maternal uncle or paternal aunt,” it

can also mean “sister’s husband.”

144

Kuntī is the sister of Krishna’s father Vasudeva, thus

making Arjuna the son of Krishna’s paternal aunt and Krishna’s maittuṉaṉ. But since Krishna

knows that Arjuna will soon wed Subhadrā, he is also viewing Arjuna as his maittuṉaṉ in the

sense of a brother-in-law. Arjuna is Krishna’s paternal cousin and brother-in-law in the Sanskrit

epic as well, but the prevalence of cross-cousin marriage in Tamil culture gives Villi the

opportunity for some fun wordplay that is not possible in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

145

The

double meaning of maittuṉamai in this verse also illustrates Krishna’s playful nature.

kaṉṉi iḷam taṉi kaṭampu malarnta eṉṉa kaṇṭa viḻi imaiyāta kāṭci kāṇā

maṉṉiya mātavattōṉai mantam mūral mātavaṉ maittuṉamaiyiṉāl makiḻcci kūrntē || VP 1.7.56 ||

141

Nakkīrar’s commentary on Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ 2, trans. David C. Buck and K. Paramasivam in The Study of

Stolen Love: A Translation of Kaḷaviyal eṉṟa Iṟaiyaṉār Akapporuḷ with Commentary by Nakkīraṉār, trans. David C.

Buck and K. Paramasivam (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997). 35.

142

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 1.10.35, trans. P.S. Sundaram in Kampaṉ, Kamba Ramayanam, vol 1, Balakandam,

trans. P.S. Sundaram (Tanjavur: Tamil University Press and Department of Tamil Development-Culture,

Government of Tamil Nadu, 1989), 99.

143

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v. “maittuṉamai,” accessed April 10, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-

bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=3368.

144

University of Madras Tamil Lexicon, s.v. “maittuṉaṉ,” accessed April 10, 2021, https://dsal.uchicago.edu/cgi-

bin/app/tamil-lex_query.py?page=3368.

145

Isabelle Clark-Decès explains that in Tamil culture “cross-cousin marriage permits three prescriptive or

preferential modalities: (1) marriage (from a man’s point of view) to the patrilateral female cousin, the father’s

198

As he does with the account of Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā’s romance, Villi takes his time to

describe the courtship of Arjuna and Subhadrā.

146

After the kāṭci verse, Krishna mischievously

instructs Subhadrā to take good care of their ascetic guest. Subhadrā dutifully obeys her brother’s

command and finds Arjuna a bed for the night. Villi then goes on to describe how the intense

heat of Arjuna’s viraha for Subhadrā prevents him from sleeping (despite the coolness of the

monsoon) and how Subhadrā begins to suspect that this mendicant is Arjuna. Once Arjuna

reveals himself to Subhadrā, the marriage of these two lovers is finally arranged. Villi describes

Krishna bringing several deities and celestial beings to bless his sister’s marriage, including the

famous Vedic sage Vasiṣṭha and his wife Arundhatī:

Through the compassion of the especially skilled one (Krishna)

who had stolen and eaten the milk, special curds, and the best ghee in town,

the excellent Arundhatī along with her husband who brought forth superiority

and many fine sages came at the suitable time and uttered blessings.

147

Although Krishna is escorting a divine sage and his wife to Subhadrā’s wedding in Dwarka, Villi

uses this verse to remind his audiences of the young Krishna of Vrindavan. The description of

the god as the one “who had stolen and eaten the milk, special curds, and the best ghee in town”

draws on stories of Krishna’s childhood in Braj found in the Tamil verses of the

Nālāyirativiyappirapantam and other South Indian Vaiṣṇava bhakti texts, including the

Bhāgavatapurāṇa, and Vedāntadeśika’s Gopālaviṃśati and Yādavābhyudaya. As we have seen,

throughout the Pāratam Villi ensures that his readers do not forget that the Pāṇḍavas’ advisor

was once the loveable prankster and cowherd who pervades the Vaiṣṇava bhakti corpus.

After the wedding is complete and Arjuna and Subhadrā begin the journey back to

Indraprastha, Villi gives an account of the furious Balarāma (who disapproved of the marriage

and did not know it had taken place) along with his entire army chasing after his sister and her

new husband and then engaging in battle with Arjuna. Upon being defeated by Arjuna and

placated by Krishna, however, Balarāma allows Subhadrā to travel to her new home.

148

In the

final verse of the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter,” Villi describes Arjuna and Krishna as Nara

and Nārāyaṇa.

149

As Katz notes, the Sanskrit Mahābhārata identifies Nara and Nārāyaṇa as “two

seers, whose godlike power derived from a tremendously long course of austerities.”

150

sister’s daughter; (2) marriage (again from a man’s point of view) to the matrilateral female cousin, the mother’s

brother’s daughter; and (3) bilateral marriage to either the patrilateral or matrilateral cousin” (The Right Spouse:

Preferential Marriages in Tamil Nadu [Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014], 6). Arjuna’s marriage to

Subhadrā is an example of the second preferential modality.

146

VP 1.7.57–75.

147

pāl aruntati naṟuney āy pāṭiyil kaḷḷattāl

aruntu ati virakaṉatu aruḷiṉāl viraivil

cāl aruntati talaivaṉum talai peṟum pala nuṇ

nūlarum tati uṟa pukuntu ācikaḷ nuvaṉṟār || VP 1.7.76 ||

148

VP 1.7.79–89.

149

VP 1.7.90.

150

Katz, Arjuna in the Mahabharata, 215.

199

Throughout the Sanskrit epic, Arjuna and Krishna are said to be incarnations of these two

sages.

151

Katz adds that “it is clear that the source of the Nara-Narayana pair’s omnipotence is

actually Narayana, for it is he who is identified with Vishnu, that is, the supreme Godhead; this

identity is reiterated throughout the extant Mahabharata, which regards ‘Narayana’ as a name of

Vishnu, and Krishna as an incarnation of Vishnu/Narayana.”

152

As evidenced by its title and its contents, the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” of the

Pāratam centers on Arjuna and his adventures during his year of exile. Many distinctive features

of the peruṅkāppiyam/mahākāvya genre are on display in this chapter of Villi’s poem, such as

different types of poetic figuration and descriptions of scenes associated with courtly life,

including sporting in gardens, lovemaking, weddings, and the birth of princes. Yet as we have

seen, the “Tīrthayātra of Arjuna Chapter” also clearly maps out a sacred Śrīvaiṣṇava geography

of South India and features Krishna in a prominent role. This chapter may seem to be all about

Arjuna, but Krishna and other forms of Viṣṇu are always in the background, which (as we saw in

Chapter One) is a primary feature of bhakti narrative poems. Villi’s choice to end this Arjuna-

centric chapter of his peruṅkāppiyam with a reflection on Arjuna and Krishna’s relationship and

their past lives as the divine pair Nara and Nārāyaṇa is no accident.

The Ulā of Krishna

Another excerpt from the Pāratam that shows a distinct overlapping of religious and courtly

concerns is the description of Krishna’s entrance into Indraprastha for Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya

(royal consecration) ceremony in the Book of the Assembly Hall. Using twelve verses, Villi

describes the women of Indraprastha watching Krishna and his entourage enter the city.

While this sequence in the Pāratam is absent from the critical edition of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, it does have a mahākāvya precedent in Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha. Lawrence

McCrea points out that when Krishna enters Indraprastha in the Śiśupālavadha, he is viewed by

the citizens of “Yudhiṣṭhira’s country as he arrives and enters the city, with love, with wonder,

and (in the case of the female observers) with sexual desire.”

153

Māgha dedicates nineteen verses

of the thirteenth chapter of his mahākāvya to the reactions that the women of Indraprastha have

upon seeing Krishna process through the city’s streets.

154

Here is a small excerpt:

Women on every roof pelted their adored Krishna with

parched rice grain and flowers from hands like lotus

buds, as if with powdered pearls released from oyster

shells pried open.

151

Katz, 213–21.

152

Katz, 215.

153

Lawrence McCrea, “The Conquest of Cool: Theology and Aesthetics in Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha,” in Innovations

and Turning Points: Towards a History of Kāvya Literature, ed. Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb

(Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), 131.

154

Māgha, Śiśupālavadha 13.30–48.

200

Krishna was a constant source of delight to the women,

like the spring season, beautified by the moon freed

from winter, with lotuses blossoming everywhere,

charming the birds and stimulating love, the time

when wine is at its best.

155

It is impossible to say with any confidence whether Villi’s account of Krishna entering

Indraprastha in the Tamil Pāratam is directly inspired by the one in Māgha’s Sanskrit

Śiśupālavadha. It is worth noting, however, that David Shulman and Blake Wentworth have

documented processions in which women observe a deity or a king and are then filled with desire

in multiple other famous Sanskrit mahākāvyas including Aśvaghoṣa’s second-century

Buddhacarita (Deeds of the Buddha) and Kālidāsa’s Raghuvaṃśa and Kumārasambhava.

156

Also, by the time of the composition of the Pāratam, a genre focused on women

watching the procession of a deity or king was well-established in Tamil literature. This type of

poem is known as an ulā. The first definitions of ulās are found in Tamil literary treatises known

as pāṭṭiyals, with the earliest two pāṭṭiyals being the eleventh- or twelfth-century Paṉṉirupāṭṭiyal

and the twelfth- or thirteenth-century Veṇpāppāṭṭiyal. Jennifer Clare explains that “pāṭṭiyals

claim praise of a royal patron as a central condition of what constitutes the literary.”

157

Kamil

Zvelebil provides a definition of the ulā that is clearly based on those in the pāṭṭiyal treatises:

Ulā ‘Procession.’ A very interesting and productive genre: A poem in kaliveṇpā which describes

the patron (or god) going in procession around the streets of a city, while women of varying ages

(makaḷirparuvam) fall in love with him; their love is not returned. The women belong to the

classes of pētai (5–7 years of age), petumpai (8–11 years), maṅkai (12–13 years), maṭantai (14–

19 years), arivai (19–25 years), terivai (26–31 years), and pēriḷampeṇ (31–40 years).

158

The earliest example of the ulā genre is the eighth-century Tirukkayilāyañāṉavulā (Ulā of the

Wisdom of Divine Kailāsa) of Cēramāṉ Perumāḷ, one of the Nāyaṉmār poets. As with the

mahākāvya genre, the ulā is frequently associated with courtly contexts. Shulman notes that “the

genre as a whole reflects the symbolic quality of South Indian kingship: the king is there in order

to be perceived, and to perceive himself, in highly formalized and emotionally powerful

ways.”

159

Anne Monius points out that “Oṭṭakkūttar, author of the Takkayākapparaṇi and court-

poet to three successive Cōḻa kings (Vikkiramaṉ, Kulōttuṅka II [Cēkkiḻār’s patron], Rājarāja II),

155

Māgha, Śiśupālavadha 13.37–38, trans. Dundas in Māgha, Killing of Shishupala, 429.

156

Shulman, King and Clown, 313; and Blake Tucker Wentworth, “Yearning for a Dreamed Real: The Procession of

the Lord in Tamil Ulās,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2011), 74–88.

See also Sam Levin, “UC Berkeley professor fired nearly two years after sexual harassment claims substantiated,”

The Guardian, May 24, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/may/24/sexual-harassment-university-

california-berkeley-blake-wentworth.

157

Clare, “Canons, Conventions, Creativity,” 59.

158

Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1974), 197.

159

Shulman, King and Clown, 312.

201

composed the most famous of these processional studies in the psychology of female love, the

Mūvarulā or ‘Ulā of the Three,’ referring to each of his royal patrons.”

160

In his study of Tamil ulā poems, Wentworth asserts that “the ulā genre was almost totally

a Śaiva phenomenon.”

161

He goes on to support this claim with the following evidence:

Of the ninety or so ulās known to scholarship, three were written on Viṣṇu: the Tiruvēṅkata

Nātar Ulā, the Ciṟupuliyū Ulā, and the Tirukkuṟuṅkutị Ala

kiya Nampi Ulā. None are to my

knowledge extant, and nothing is known of their dates and authors, all fairly clear suggestions

that these poems did not gain any lasting currency. We know of a Jain ulā, and modern ulās have

been written on a variety of figures, as I noted in my mention of the twentieth-century political

instances of the genre. But these are outliers which have never defined the genre’s trajectory.

Ulās are texts written over centuries about the god Śiva and about Śaiva kings.

162

Yet while the three Vaiṣṇava ulās that Wentworth describes above may no longer be extant,

there are certainly other ulās to Viṣṇu in premodern Tami literature. In fact, Wentworth analyzes

and provides a complete translation of one of these ulās: the “Chapter on the Ulā”

(Ulāviyalpaṭalam) in the first book of Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram, which describes Rāma

processing through the streets of Mithila (Mithilā) on his way to his wedding to Sītā.

163

Building

on the work of Anne Monius, I have suggested in Chapter Three that the Irāmāvatāram is not a

Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti narrative poem. But while the central project of the Irāmāvatāram is not

expressing devotion to Rāma, this incarnation of Viṣṇu is undoubedtly at the center of the

“Chapter on the Ulā” in Kampaṉ’s peruṅkāppiyam.

164

Consider this verse from the chapter:

Those who flocked to see the foot

Which released Ahalya’s rose-red body,

And the shoulders which shot up like hills

To break the bow for the dark-haired girl

Were on the streets like a swarm of bees

Humming around a pot of honey.

165

This verse of the “Chapter on the Ulā” celebrates Rāma’s role as the savior of Ahalyā and the

winner of the competition for Sītā’s hand in marriage during which Rāma successfully breaks the

bow of Śiva. As I have pointed out earlier in this chapter, the Irāmāvatāram is a major source of

inspiration for the Pāratam. Just as Kampaṉ embeds an ulā about Rāma into his Rāmāyaṇa

peruṅkāppiyam, Villi embeds an ulā about Krishna into his Mahābhārata peruṅkāppiyam.

160

Monius, “Love, Violence, Disgust,” 138.

161

Wentworth, “Yearning for Dreamed Real,” 10.

162

Wentworth, 10.

163

Wentworth, 172–76, and 409–22.

164

Note that Shulman identifies another second “greatly telescoped ulā by Kampaṉ: the passage describing Rāma’s

ride through the streets of Ayodhyā on his way to his father’s palace” in the second book of the Irāmāvatāram (King

and Clown, 315). See Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 2.1.55–59.

165

Kampaṉ, Irāmāvatāram 1.19.5, trans. Sundaram in Kampaṉ, Kamba Ramayanam 1:207–8.

202

And Villi is not the only peruṅkāppiyam poet who may have been inspired by Kampaṉ’s

ulā in the Irāmāvatāram. Vasudha Narayanan points out that in Umaṟuppulavar’s Cīṟāppurāṇam

“the long chapter on the wedding of ‘Ali to the Prophet Muhammad’s daughter, Fatima (Pāttimā

tirumaṇap paṭalam), contains a beautiful description of ‘Ali’s procession through the city of

Medina, paralleling Kampan’s description of Rama’s procession through Mithila in his

Rāmāyaṇam.”

166

Narayanan adds that “the young women of Medina, wearing bejeweled anklets

and waist-belts like Tamil women, overflow from balconies trying to catch a glimpse of ‘Ali, the

handsome bridegroom. And when they see him, they are filled with longing and wonder.”

167

In her study of the thirteenth-century Tirucciṉṉamālai (Garland of the Brass Bugle),

Srilata Raman convincingly demonstrates that this Tamil poem by the Śrīvaiṣṇava poet-

philosopher Vedāntadeśika “might have been generally considered a ulā-like composition.”

168

Raman notes that the Tirucciṉṉamālai “speaks with the voice of a bugle, calling the devotee to

praise, wonder at, and pray to the deity, Varadarājasvāmī (a form of Viṣṇu displaying the

varada-mudrā, as seen in a number of Tamil temples), in the context of his procession from his

temple through the streets of the temple city of Kāñcipuram.”

169

She goes on to show how “both

in terms of the constant oscillation between the remoteness and proximity of God, and in terms

of how his divine location is the central and entire focus of The Brass Bugle, we can understand

the latter as a form of a truncated ulā, consisting of the essence of its formal features.”

170

The eighth and ninth verses of the Tirucciṉṉamālai are in praise of some of Krishna’s

most well-known deeds from both the stories of his childhood as well as from the Mahābhārata:

He who-

went as messenger at Dharma’s behest,

averted the unbearable burden of the Earth,

spread around all the meaning of the rare Vedas,

said, “You who are afraid, come to me,”

stood, having become all of Dharma,

himself will avert all sins,

said, “The burden is mine. Why do you grieve?”

He has come.

He himself, who drove the chariot of Pārtha, has come.

He who –

killed the deceitful Pūtanā,

fought the wrestlers and the maddened elephant,

ended, with fiery anger, the war with Kaṃsa,

reduced the shoulders of Bāṇa, before the blink of an eye,

was pleased to give salvation to those of harsh words,

166

Narayanan, “Religious Vocabulary and Regional Identity,” 403.

167

Narayanan, 403.

168

Srilata Raman, “The Garland of The Brass Bugle of Mantras: Vedānta Deśika’s Tirucciṉṉamālai,” Journal of

Vaishnava Studies 24, no 2 (2016): 168.

169

Raman, 164.

170

Raman, 168.

203

hastened, to put us on our unhindered path,

guarded the five in myriad ways,

He has come.

He himself, who bound up the tresses of Pāñcālī, has come.

171

In these two verses of the Tirucciṉṉamālai, Vedāntadeśika alludes to the Krishna of Vrindavan

with references to the deity slaying Pūtanā, the wrestlers Cāṇūra and Muṣṭika, the elephant

Kuvalayāpīḍa, Krishna’s maternal uncle Kaṃsa, and the demon Bāṇa. Yet Vedāntadeśika also

clearly praises the Krishna of the Mahābhārata tradition by mentioning his role as Yudhiṣṭhira’s

messenger, Arjuna’s charioteer, the guardian of the five Pāṇḍavas, and the protector of Draupadī.

Thus, with these two verses of the eleven-verse Tirucciṉṉamālai, Vedāntadeśika layers

Varadarājasvāmī with Krishna, which as we saw in Chapter Three, is something that takes place

in many works of Śrīvaiṣṇava literature, including Villi’s Tamil Pāratam.

The “Chapter on the Ulā” in Kampaṉ’s Irāmāvatāram and Vedāntadeśika’s

Tirucciṉṉamālai are two Tamil compositions about the procession of a form of Viṣṇu that are

very reminiscent of other Tamil poems that bear the name ulā in their titles. I should note that the

ulā-like compositions of Kampaṉ and Vedāntadeśika do lack some of the defining features of the

ulā genre as described in the pāṭṭiyal treatises. For example, Kampaṉ’s “Chapter on the Ulā” is

not in kaliveṇpā meter and Vedāntadeśika’s Tirucciṉṉamālai does not specifically describe the

reactions of women to the procession. Yet it is important to remember that these pāṭṭiyal

definitions of the ulā genre are likely descriptive (rather than proscriptive) reflections of well-

known ulās such as Cēramāṉ Perumāḷ’s Tirukkayilāyañāṉavulā and Oṭṭakkūttar’s Mūvarulā.

Villi uses twelve verses to describe the women of Indraprastha watching Krishna process

through the streets of Indraprastha on his way to the consecration ceremony. The first six verses

of Villi’s ulā are quatrains in viruttam meter. Indira Peterson notes that “from the tenth century

on, the term viruttam has been specifically applied to a particular type of meter that became the

standard vehicle for narrative poetry, especially epics and Purāṇas, in Tamil.”

172

Indeed, nearly

all peruṅkāppiyams––including the Paratam, the Cīvakacintāmaṇi, the Nīlakēci, the Vaḷaiyāpati,

the Cūḷāmaṇi, the Periyapurāṇam, the Irāmāvatāram, the Naiṭatam, the Āyiramacalā, the

Cīṟāppurāṇam, and the Tēmpāvaṇi––are primarily composed in different forms of viruttam.

The remaining six verses of Villi’s ulā, however, are in koccakakkalippā meter. Kamil

Zvelebil points out that koccakakkalippā and kaliveṇpā, which is the meter of most ulās, are two

of the seven different types of kalippā meter.

173

We will turn to these six koccakakkalippā verses

shortly, but I first want to point out that in the verse right before these final six verses, Villi

mentions “the seven types of women” (eḻu vakai paruva mātar), which is a clear reference to

how ulās usually feature women from the seven different stages of life (makaḷirparuvam). Let us

now examine the final six koccakakkalippā verses of Krishna’s procession in the Tamil Pāratam:

171

Vedāntadeśika, Tirucciṉṉamālai 8–9, trans. Raman in “Garland of Brass Bugle,” 172.

172

Peterson, Poems to Śiva, 65.

173

Zvelebil, Tamil Literature (1974), 100.

204

In the streets with jewels and festoons of flowers close together,

their wide kohl-lined eyes pressed together and unsettled

thinking about that extravagant one who is like a rain cloud from head to toe,

some women worshiped him.

174

So that their breasts like flower buds

would dissolve against the jeweled chest

of the one with the golden anklets given by Gaṅgā

and in order to embrace his body without fear,

with their red, lovely hands like flowers

more agitated than they themselves,

some women went.

175

As if seeing the one with bees, flowers, and sugarcane as his colorful weapons (Kāmadeva),

as if drinking the unique nectar from the red coral [lips] of

that one who bears the bouquet of flowers

and is the color of the kāyā flower who fills the eyes,

some women rejoiced in their hearts.

176

Seeing the one who with his feet kicked and killed the strong Kaṃsa

and slew the demon Śakaṭa who practiced cruelty with his sword,

with their bodies pierced by the five arrows from the one without a body (Kāmadeva),

with their five senses exhausted and their hearts unsettled,

some women stood.

177

174

māṭam payilum maṇi tōraṇam vīti

nīṭu añcaṉam kaṇ neruṅki taṭumāṟa

āṭamparam koṇṭal aṉṉāṉai āpāta

cūṭam karuti toḻutār cila mātar || VP 2.1.78 ||

175

kaṅkai taru poṉ kaḻalāṉ maṇi mārpil

koṅkai mukuḷam kuḻaiyumpaṭi āka

caṅkai aṟa mey taḻuvutaṟku tammiṉum tam

ceṅkai malar pataṟa ceṉṟār cila mātar || VP 2.1.79 ||

176

vaṇṭu malar karumpu ām vaṇṇam paṭaiyāṉai

kaṇṭu aṉaiya kaṇ niṟainta kāyāmalar vaṇṇaṉ

ceṇṭu tarittōṉ tiru pavaḷattu ār amutam

uṇṭu maṉattiṉāl uyntār cila mātar || VP 2.1.80 ||

177

vañcam payil cakaṭa vāḷ acuraṉ māḷa viṟal

kañcaṉ paṭa utaitta kālāṉai kaṇṭu uruki

añcu ampu mey uruva aimpulaṉum cōkam uṟa

neñcam taṭumāṟa niṉṟār cila mātar || VP 2.1.81 ||

205

In the courtyard of their houses,

beholding the body of the one who came

before the cruel elephant with three types of flowing rut,

with water shining in their eyes,

with their beautiful arched eyebrows raised,

and with perspiration dripping from their moon-like foreheads

some women ran and stood.

178

Becoming dark rows of bees

with eyes like swords,

for the scent of the garland of fragrant tulsī on the jewel bedecked chest

of the divine form of the lord who is like the dark cloud and the kāyā flower,

some women stood.

179

All six of these koccakakkalippā verses end with the words “some women” (cila mātar). The

repetition of this phrase at the conclusion of each of these verses is reminiscent of the way

Vedāntadeśika finishes most of the verses of his Tirucciṉṉamālai. Raman points out that “almost

every line of each verse ends with the word “vantār” meaning “He has come/He came.”

180

Shulman points out that “commentators from Nacciṉārkkiṉiyar on (fourteenth century)

have claimed that the women described in the ulā belong to the category of ‘common women’

(pōtu makaḷir) or prostitutes. There is an obvious reluctance to imagine chaste, married women

in the passionate poses depicted here.”

181

The women watching Krishna in these six

koccakakkalippā of Villi’s ulā are certainly filled with passion for the deity. The second

koccakakkalippā verse describes some women fantasizing about pressing their “breasts like

flower buds” up against Krishna while embracing him. Both the third and fourth

koccakakkalippā verses allude to Kāmadeva, the god of love, in their descriptions of women

yearning for union with Krishna. Half of these koccakakkalippā verses make it clear that the

powerful love of these women for Krishna is making them physically uncomfortable with Villi

telling us that they are “unsettled” (taṭumāṟa), “agitated” (pataṟa), and “exhausted” (cōkam uṟa).

Shulman asserts that “the mode of the ulā” is “viraha celebrated in a display of passion directed

toward a largely inaccessible object.”

182

Some of the women of Indraprastha in Villi’s poem are

clearly suffering as they behold the unattainable Krishna make his way through their city.

178

taṅkaḷ kulam muṉṟil talai āya mummatattu

veṅkaṇ matamā micai varuvōṉ mey nōkki

am kaṇ miḷira arum puruvam vil muriya

tiṅkaḷ nutal vērvu ōṭa niṉṟār cila mātar || VP 2.1.82 ||

179

kālam mukilum malar kāyāvum aṉṉa tiru

kōlam uṭaiyāṉ kulavu maṇi pūṇ mārpiṉ

mālai naṟuntuḷapa maṉṟalukku vāḷ nayaṉam

nīlam vari vaṇṭu āki niṉṟār cila mātar || VP 2.1.83 ||

180

Raman, “Garland of Brass Bugle,” 175n19.

181

Shulman, King and Clown, 312–13.

182

Shulman, 322.

206

As Friedhelm Hardy has shown, the trope of the devotee pining with viraha for Viṣṇu or

Krishna pervades Vaiṣṇava bhakti compositions from all over the Indian subcontinent.

183

Villi is

thus not only following in the footsteps of the authors of ulās, but also in the footsteps of the

Āḻvārs, Vedāntadeśika, and countless other Vaiṣṇava poets. Each of the six koccakakkalippā

verses mention a familiar from of Krishna or Viṣṇu. For example, the first and the last of the

koccakakkalippā verses refer to the kaustubha jewel on Viṣṇu’s chest. The fourth

koccakakkalippā verse alludes to two different stories from Krishna’s youth in Vrindavan: the

slaying of Kaṃsa and the slaying of the cart-demon Śakaṭa. Villi brings up Kuvalayāpīḍa, a mad

elephant that Krishna kills in Mathura, in the fifth koccakakkalippā verse. Several of these

koccakakkalippā verses celebrate Krishna’s dark complexion with familiar similes and

metaphors that compare the deity to a raincloud or the kāyā flower.

With this account of the women of Indraprastha gazing upon Krishna as he makes his

way through the streets of city, Villi presents his readers with a passage that not only resembles

similar sections of other mahākāvyas and peruṅkāppiyams, including the Buddhacarita, the

Raghuvaṃśa, the Kumārasambhava, the Śiśupālavadha, the Irāmāvatāram, and the

Cīṟāppurāṇam, but that is also inspired by the Tamil genre of the ulā, which, like the

mahākāvya/peruṅkāppiyam genre, is often associated with courtly life. Yet Krishna is also

clearly at the center of Villi’s ulā and this passage is steeped with Vaiṣṇava imagery.

* * * * *

Before turning to the intersection of religious and courtly concerns in Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat in Chapter Six, I want to clarify that not all mahākāvyas and peruṅkāppiyams place

themselves in courtly contexts. As Deven Patel points out, the mahākāvya genre’s “range of

themes and linguistic forms often exceeds what is usually thought of as ‘courtly.’”

184

While

some peruṅkāppiyams, such as the Periyapurāṇam and the Irāmāvatāram, make courtly

patronage claims, others, such as the Nīlakēci and the Tēmpāvaṇi, do not.

Villi’s Mahābhārata peruṅkāppiyam, however, is clearly presented as a courtly narrative.

In the first section of this chapter, I suggested that the allusions to Varatapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ may not

be documenting an actual historical patronage relationship between Villi and this Koṅkar king.

Nonetheless, the references to Varatapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in Varantaruvār’s ciṟappuppāyiram and the

narrative of the Pāratam still place this composition in a courtly world. The Pāratam is also

filled with descriptions of courtly life, such as the courting of princesses (and the political

alliances that are forged in the process), vibrant lovemaking, the birth of princes, and royal

processions. But while constantly marking his composition as a courtly peruṅkāppiyam, Villi

never lets his audience forget that his Mahābhārata is also a Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti narrative poem

focused on the deeds of Krishna. As I have shown in this chapter, the categories of “devotional”

and “courtly” in Villi’s Tamil Pāratam are deeply intertwined and by no means incompatible.

183

Hardy, Viraha-Bhakti, 555–69.

184

Patel, Text to Tradition, 18.

207

CHAPTER SIX

A Mahābhārata for the Mughals:

Praising Aurangzeb in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat

Between the late sixteenth century and the early eighteenth century, several South Asian poets

composed Persian retellings of the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa narratives that were either

commissioned by or dedicated to one of the rulers of the Mughal Empire.

As I noted in the Introduction, the first of these retellings was the Razmnāmah (ca. 1582),

the Persian “translation” of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata commissioned by the third Mughal

emperor Akbar.

The Razmnāmah was reworked in the late 1580s by Akbar’s poet laureate Fayz

and abridged in 1602 in the universal history Rawz

at al-Ṭāhirīn by Ṭāhir Muḥammad Sabzvārī, a

historian in Akbar’s court.

In 1594, Fayz

ī also composed a Persian mas

navī (a lengthy narrative

poem in rhymed couplets) based on the story of Nala and Damayantī from the Mahābhārata

tradition entitled Naldaman.

Along with the Razmnāmah, Akbar commissioned a Persian

translation of Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa.

One of the manuscripts of the Akbarī Rāmāyan

was owned by both Akbar’s mother, Ḥamīda Banū Begum (d. 1604), and Akbar’s son and the

fourth Mughal emperor, Jahāngīr (r. 1605–1627).

Gauḍa Abhinanda’s tenth-century Sanskrit

Laghuyogavāsiṣṭha is a Rāmāyaṇa retelling that was repeatedly translated into Persian under the

patronage of multiple members of the Mughal royal family including Akbar, Jahāngīr, and

Jahāngīr’s grandson Dārā Shikūh (1615–1659).

Supriya Gandhi observes that Dārā Shikūh is

also credited with being the patron of a Persian translation of the Bhagavadgītā.

There are two different early seventeenth-century Persian Rāmāyaṇa retellings that are

dedicated to Jahāngīr: Masīḥ Pānīpatī’s Mas

navī-yi Rām va Sītā (Tale of Rāma and Sītā) and

For more on the Razmnāmah, see Najaf Haider, “Translating Texts and Straddling Worlds: Intercultural

Communication in Mughal India,” in The Varied Facets of History: Essays in Honour of Aniruddha Ray, ed. Ishrat

Alam and Syed Ejaz Hussain (Delhi: Primus Books, 2011), 118–23; Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 101–33; and

Audrey Truschke, “A Padshah Like Manu: Political Advice for Akbar in the Persian Mahābhārata,” Philological

Encounters 5, no. 2 (2020): 112–33.

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 133–41.

For more on this text, see Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Writing the Mughal World: Studies on

Cultures and Politics (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 97–114.

Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “An Indo-Persian Retelling of Nala and Damayanti,” in Damayanti

and Nala: The Many Lives of a Story, ed. Susan S. Wadley (Delhi: Chronicle Books, 2011), 38–81.

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 204–14.

Audrey Truschke, “The Persian Text of the Doha Ramayana,” in The Ramayana of Hamida Banu Begum: Queen

Mother of Mughal India, ed. Marika Sardar, John Seyller, and Audrey Truschke (Cinisello Balsamo: Silvana

Editoriale, 2020), 28.

Shankar Nair, Translating Wisdom: Hindu-Muslim Intellectual Interactions in Early Modern South Asia (Oakland:

University of California Press, 2020), 30–55; and Supriya Gandhi, The Emperor Who Never Was: Dara Shukoh in

Mughal India (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 194–97.

Gandhi, 199.

208

Giridhardās’s Rāmnāmah (Book of Rāma).

While Truschke describes the Rāmnāmah of

Giridhardās (who was a member of the Hindu Kāyasth scribe community) as a Rāmāyaṇa

retelling that “follows Vālmīki’s version quite closely,” Prashant Keshavmurthy points out that

in the Mas

navī-yi Rām va Sītā, Masīḥ identifies “himself as a Sufi master or pīr” and that he

invokes “the conventions of the ‘ishqiyyah trope, the trope of amorous love between

symmetrically paired lovers canonical in Persian and Indic narrative traditions.”

And finally,

there are two more Persian retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa that are dedicated to Dārā Shikūh’s

younger brother and the sixth Mughal emperor, Aurangzeb: Candraman Bedil’s Nargisistān

(Narcissus Garden, 1692) and Amar Singh’s Amar Prakāsh (Illumination of Amar, 1705).

Yet in this ocean of Rāmāyaṇas and Mahābhāratas that were commissioned by or

dedicated to one of the Mughals, only one is composed in Bhasha: Sabalsingh Cauhān’s

Mahābhārat. As we saw in Chapter Four, eleven of the eighteen books of this poem begin with

prologues. These prologues have caught the interest of multiple Hindi scholars. Eight of the

prologues contain dates ranging between 1661 and 1724 CE.

Four of these dated prologues

praise the Mughal emperor Aurangzeb, one praises a king by the name of Mitrasen, and another

praises both Aurangzeb and Mitrasen. Given that seven out of the eight dates in the prologues are

within the dates accepted as Aurangzeb’s reign (1658–1707), many prominent Hindi literary

historians have asserted that the prologues document Aurangzeb and Mitrasen’s patronage of

Cauhān and have thus firmly categorized the Bhasha Mahābhārat as a “courtly” text.

A closer look at each of the eight dated prologues, however, seriously complicates this

designation. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the prologues of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat present a

distinct overlapping of devotional and political spheres. Through close readings of these eight

different prologues, I show how Cauhān uses the opening verses of the different books in the

Mahābhārat to present his poem as an unequivocally Vaiṣṇava text that is sanctioned by two

powerful rulers from different religious and cultural backgrounds. One of these two rulers is the

Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. As Truschke notes, today Aurangzeb is remembered by many

Indians as a “zealous bigot who ruled by sword and left behind a trail of Hindu tears.”

In recent

Robert Lowell Phillips, “Garden of Endless Blossoms: Urdu Rāmāyans of the 19th and Early 20th Century,” (PhD

diss., University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2010), 76–84; Supriya Gandhi, “Retelling the Rāma Story in Persian Verse:

Masīḥ Pānīpatī’s Masṉavī-yi Rām va Sitā,” in No Tapping Around Philology: A Festschrift in Honor of Wheeler

McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70

Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz

Verlag, 2014), 309–24; Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 214–17; and Prashant Keshavmurthy, “Translating Rāma

as a Proto-Muḥammadan Prophet: Masīḥ’s Mas

navī-i Rām va Sītā,” Numen 65 (2018): 1–27.

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 140; and Keshavmurthy, “Translating Rāma,” 10 and 4–5.

Audrey Truschke, Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth (Gurgaon: Penguin Random House, 2017), 60; and Phillips,

“Garden of Endless Blossoms,” 76.

Yet while most printed editions of Cauhān’s text state that the eighteenth book was composed in 1724, one

manuscript gives the composition year as 1677. See Rai Bahadur Hiralal, The Twelfth Report on the Search of Hindi

Manuscripts for the Years 1923, 1924 and 1925 (Banaras: Nāgarīpracāriṇī Sabhā, 1944), 1276.

See Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272–73; Sita Ram, Other Poets, 236; Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā

Itihās, 326; Nagendra, Rītikāl, 371; and McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

Truschke, Aurangzeb, 3.

209

years, however, scholarship has begun to complicate this picture of Aurangzeb.

My analysis of

the praise of Aurangzeb in Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat in this chapter contributes to this body

of scholarship that challenges monolithic representations of this Mughal ruler.

Earlier Scholarship on Cauhān’s Dated Prologues

Before carefully examining each of the eight dated prologues in the Bhasha Mahābhārat,

however, it is first necessary to examine earlier scholarship on these prologues.

While Cauhān is mentioned in two of the most influential studies of Bhasha literature

from the late-nineteenth century, Śivsingh Sengar’s Śivsinghsāroj (Lotus of Śivsingh, 1878) and

George Abraham Grierson’s The Modern Vernacular Literature of Hindustan (1889), neither

Sengar nor Grierson seem to have actually read any of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat. Sengar tells us:

Sabalsingh Cauhān, born in the Vikram Saṃvat year of 1727 [1670 CE]. Twenty-four thousand

ślokas of the Mahābhārata have been translated (ulathā) with a lot of summary in dohā-caupāī

meter. Some say this poet was the king (rājā) of Chandagarh, others say of Sabalgarh. Members

of his lineage (vaṃśvāle) till date are in the Hardoi district. But I do not accept this. I say, no, this

poet was a landowner (zamīndār) in some village in the Etawah district [of present-day Uttar

Pradesh], and he translated ten books himself.

Apart from speculating that Cauhān may have also been the author of two other texts listed in the

Śivsinghsāroj, Grierson’s account is essentially the same as Sengar’s.

Since Sengar only

describes ten books of the Bhasha Mahābhārat and both Sengar and Grierson say that Cauhān

was born in 1670 CE, I suspect that neither of these scholars had access to manuscripts of this

text.

As we will soon see, Cauhān informs us that he composed eight books of his Mahābhārata

between 1661 and 1724. If Sengar or Grierson had seen these dates in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, it

is unlikely they would have still given Cauhān’s birth year as 1670.

See Katherine Butler Brown, “Did Aurangzeb ban music? Questions for the historiography of his reign,” Modern

Asian Studies 41, no. 1 (2007): 77–120; Munis D. Faruqui, “Awrangzīb,” in The Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. Kate

Fleet, Gudrun Kramer, Denis Matringe, John Nawas, and Everett Rowson, Brill Online, 2011;

https://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/encyclopaedia-of-islam-3/awrangzib-COM_23859; Truschke,

Aurangzeb; Anne Murphy and Heidi Pauwels, eds. “From Outside the Persianate Centre: Vernacular Views on

Ālamgīr,” special issue, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (2018); and Richard M. Eaton, India in the

Persianate Age 1000–1765 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019), 327–39. Munis Faruqui is also currently

working on a monograph on Aurangzeb.

Sengar, Śivsinghsāroj, 500.

Grierson, Vernacular Literature of Hindustan, 78.

Grierson states that he is “indebted” to “the very useful” Śivsinghsāroj on the first page of his introduction.

Cauhān’s Mahābhārat was first published in 1881 by the Naval Kishore Press in Lucknow (Ulrike Stark, An

Empire of Books: The Naval Kishore Press and the Diffusion of the Printed Word in Colonial India [Delhi:

Permanent Black, 2007], 321). It is thus possible that Grierson could have read this edition of the text. I suspect,

however, that Grierson’s account of Cauhān’s poem comes directly from the Śivsinghsāroj.

The Miśra Brothers, Sita Ram, and Nagendra all comment on this. See Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra,

Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272; Sita Ram, Other Poets, 236; and Nagendra, Rītikāl, 371.

210

Sengar notes that “some say this poet was the king (rājā) of Chandagarh, others say of

Sabalgarh,” but Sengar himself asserts that Cauhān “was a landowner (zamīndār).” These

assumptions that Cauhān was either a king or a zamīndār are likely based on the surname of this

poet. The last name of the author of the Bhasha Mahābhārat suggests that this poet was a

member of the Cauhān Rajput clan. Allison Busch notes that that during the period of Mughal

rule in South Asia, the term “Rajput” can “mean the rulers from today’s Rajasthan but also the

subimperial kings, from across northern and eastern India as well as the Deccan, who served as

Mughal manṣabdārs [high-ranking Mughal officials] and contributed to the forging of new styles

of kingly self-presentation in this period.”

The most famous ruler to bear the surname Cauhān

was the twelfth-century Rajput king Pṛthvīrāj Cauhān, who the colonial scholar James Tod

famously labeled “the last Hindu emperor” in his Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829–

1832).

Pṛthvīrāj Cauhān is immortalized in Cand Baradāī’s sixteenth-century Bhasha narrative

poem, the Pṛthvīrājrāso.

Several premodern North Indian literary texts, including Jayanka’s

twelfth century Sanskrit Pṛthvīrājavijaya (Victory of Pṛthvīrāj Cauhān), Nayacandra Sūri’s

fifteenth-century Sanskrit Hammīramahākāvya (Mahākāvya on Hammira Cauhān),

Candraśekhara’s seventeenth-century Surjanacarita (Deeds of Surjan), and Cand Baradāī’s

Bhasha Pṛthvīrājrāso, present kings of the Cauhān clan as heroic Rajput warriors.

A much more detailed account of Sabalsingh Cauhān and his text is found in the

formative Bhasha anthology, the Miśrabandhuvinod (1913) of Gaṇeśvihārī, Śyāmvihārī, and

Śukadevvihārī Miśra. The Miśra Brothers begin by pointing out that the “majority” (adhikāṃś)

of the books contain a date in the Vikram Saṃvat calendar.

They have a doubt about the

reliability of the date in the final book because the names of Aurangzeb and Mitrasen are found

frequently in the poem but Aurangzeb was not alive in 1724 and “maybe” Mitrasen was not

either.

These remarks make it clear that the Miśra Brothers are reading the dates and references

to Aurangzeb and Mitrasen as “documenting” facts to once again use the language of LaCapra.

The Miśra Brothers then list the eight dated books according to the chronological order in

which the text claims they were composed: the Book of Bhīṣma (1661), the Book of Karṇa

(1667), the Book of Śalya (1667), the Book of the Assembly Hall (1670), the Book of Droṇa

(1670), the Book of Clubs (1673), the Book of Hermitage (1694), and the Book of the Ascent to

Heaven (1724). Based on this dated list, the Miśra Brothers claim that Sabalsingh Cauhān could

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 167.

See Talbot, Last Hindu Emperor, 3.

Talbot, 223–36.

See Talbot, 37–43 and 107–45; Sander Hens, “Beyond Power and Praise: Nayacandra Sūri’s Tragic-historical

Epic Hammīra-mahākāvya as a Subversive Response to Hero Glorification in Early Tomar Gwalior,” South Asian

History and Culture 11, no. 1 (2020): 40–59; and Audrey Truschke, The Language of History: Sanskrit Narratives

of Indo-Muslim Rule (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021), 44–65, 89–96, and 168–72.

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272.

Note that in reality, only eight of the eighteen books are dated.

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, 1:272.

211

not have begun this poem with the intention of telling the “entire” Sanskrit Mahābhārata and

that writing poetry must have not been his “occupation” (peśā) but only a “hobby” (śauq).

The Miśra Brothers also place great importance on the following verses from the

prologue to the Book of Hermitage of Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat:

King Aurangzeb, lord of Delhi, rules

and there Mitrasen, lord of the earth, is delighted.

Before these kings of men, Sabalsingh Cauhān sang and counted.

The authors of the Miśrabandhuvinod then declare:

From this, the inference is that our respected poet had a brotherly relationship (bhāīcārā) with

Mitrasen, and he was in the service of Emperor Aurangzeb, otherwise what business did he have

“being delighted” in Delhi? It seems that for this reason the respected poet has often written

Aurangzeb’s name at fixed intervals along with words of praise.

The Miśra Brothers also entertain the possibility that Cauhān himself was in the service of

Aurangzeb along with Mitrasen and that perhaps they were allies in “battle” (yuddha) and this is

why Cauhān decided to begin his Bhasha Mahābhārat with the Book of Bhīṣma, which is the

first of the four books describing the Kurukṣetra War in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

The influence of the Miśra Brothers’ documentary reading of the dates and allusions to

Aurangzeb and Mitrasen in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat is evident in the subsequent scholarship of

Lala Sita Ram, Rāmcandra Śukla, and Nagendra. Sita Ram states that Mitrasen was Cauhān’s

“relative,” Śukla claims that Cauhān lived at the court of Aurangzeb with “some King Mitrasen,”

and Nagendra calls Mitrasen a “courtly” (darbārī) king.

The Miśra Brothers’ influence is also

seen in the much more recent Hindi Literature from its Beginnings to the Nineteenth Century

(1984) by R.S. McGregor. McGregor mentions Cauhān’s “connection with a member of

Aurangzeb’s court” and argues that based on the late date of 1724 in the eighteenth and final

book, the Book of the Ascent to Heaven, “it is thus likely (quite apart from the extent of the

work) that this was contributed to and brought to completion by others.”

Multiple Hindi scholars also classify Cauhān as a poet belonging to the rītikāl or “rīti

period” of Bhasha literature. As we saw in the Introduction, Rāmcandra Śukla puts forth a kāl

vibhāg (periodization) scheme in Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās.

Much like Grierson, Śukla conflates

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, 1:272–73.

auraṃgaśāha dilīpati rājata mitraseni bhūpati tahaṃ gājata

ye nṛpa ke puruṣana mahaṃ gāe sabalasiṃha cauhāna ganāe || Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272 ||

The Tej Kumār edition of the text has a slightly different version of these verses. See CM 16.1.

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272.

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, 1:272.

Sitaram, Other Poets, 236; Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 326; and Nagendra, Rītikāl, 371.

McGregor, Hindi Literature, 195.

Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 2.

212

periodization with categorization. According to Śukla, the “beginning period” (ādikāl) from 993

to 1318 CE was the “heroic songs period” (vīrgāthākāl), the “early medieval period”

(purvmadhyakāl) from 1318 to 1643 was the “bhakti period” (bhaktikāl), the “late medieval

period” (uttarmadhyakāl) from 1643 to 1843 was the “rīti period” (rītikāl), and the “modern

period” (ādhunik-kāl) from 1843 to 1927 was the “prose period” (gadyakāl). The bhaktikāl is

then split into saguṇa (iconic) and nirguṇa (aniconic) “streams” (dhārā). The saguṇa stream is

divided even further into “Rāma bhakti” and “Krishna bhakti.” Sufi romance narratives, which

Śukla calls “premkathās,” such as the Mirigāvatī, the Madhumālatī, and the Padmāvat are

described as belonging to a branch of the nirguṇa stream.

In his literary history, Śukla displays

a distinct preference for the literature of the bhaktikāl, especially that of the Rāma bhakti

tradition as exemplified by Tulsīdās’s distinctly “Indian” (bhāratiya) Rāmcaritmānas.

Śukla

appreciates that the Rāmcaritmānas is not steeped in the expressions of śṛṅgāra (erotic love)

seen in the poetry of Krishna bhaktas like Sūrdās and Mīrābāī.

He also values the way the

Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas is untouched by the influence of the “Muslims,” unlike the nirguṇa

poems of the sants (saints) Kabīr and Guru Nānak.

Śukla’s bitter disappointment in rītikāl

poetry, which he sees as imitative and convoluted, is evident right from his introduction in which

he admits that he spent very little time working on this section of his literary history.

As Dalpat Rajpurohit explains, “scholars have rightly questioned the rigidity of this

timeframe and the assumptions of nationalist historians in evaluating the literature of this era on

the grounds that such a schematic classification hampers our understanding of the Hindi past.”

Busch, for example, attributes Śukla’s negative depiction of rīti poetry and his overt preference

for bhakti poetry for the way rīti texts have been neglected by modern academics.

Aditya Behl

strongly objects to Śukla’s classification of the Sufi premkathās as a branch of the “Hindu”

nirguṇa tradition.

Tyler Williams has challenged Śukla’s assumption that all nirguṇa poets

were illiterate.

Yet, as Vasudha Dalmia and Munis Faruqui have pointed out, Śukla’s “ideas

continue to resonate in academic as much as popular discourses.”

Cauhān’s classification as a rītikāl poet is another reason why he is frequently described

as a courtly poet. Both Śukla and the well-known rīti scholar Nagendra place Cauhān in the

Śukla, 94.

Śukla, 124–46.

Śukla, 166 and 184.

Śukla, 78 and 84.

Śukla, 6.

Dalpat S. Rajpurohit, “Bhakti versus Rīti? The Sants’ Perspective,” Bulletin of SOAS 84, no.1 (2021): 96.

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 226–37.

Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic, 11–12.

Williams, “Sacred Sounds and Sacred Books,” 36–40.

Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui, “Introduction,” in Religious Interactions in Mughal India, ed. Vasudha

Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014), xii.

213

rītikāl in their respective literary histories.

In the preface of his comparatively recent literary

history of Bhasha literature, McGregor makes a point of stating that his periodization model is

different from that of Śukla.

Yet, when we actually examine McGregor’s three periods––“The

Rise of New Traditions in Literature and Religion: 1200–c.1450,” “The Years of Maturity: the

and 16

Centuries,” and “The Waning of An Era: from the 17

to the 19

Centuries”—we

find that McGregor’s model closely mirrors the one in Śukla’s Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās. In his

literary history, McGregor discusses Cauhān in a subsection called “Poets dealing chiefly with

other subject matter” in the “Other court poets” section of the “Waning of An Era” period.

If we were to accept that the dates and lines praising Aurangzeb and Mitrasen are in fact

documenting historical facts (as suggested by the Miśra Brothers, Sita Ram, Śukla, Nagendra,

and McGregor), the next step would be to search for other texts that establish connections

between Cauhān, Aurangzeb, and Mitrasen. According to Muḥammad Kāẓim’s seventeenth-

century Persian chronicle, the ‘Ālamgīrnāmah (Book of Aurangzeb), there was a Bundela Rajput

prince by the name of Mitrasen in the service of Aurangzeb who was sent to battle the Maratha

king Śivājī (r. 1674–1680) and then later sent to the Deccan.

Raṇchoḍ Bhaṭṭ’s Rājapraśasti

(Praise of Rājsingh), a Sanskrit mahākāvya dedicated to the seventeenth-century Sisodiya Rajput

king Rājsingh of Mewar (r. 1629–1680), mentions a “King Sabalsingh Cauhān” who was a

“general” (senapati), and his brother “King Kesarīsingh” fighting alongside Rājsingh’s son,

Jaisingh, against Aurangzeb in is now known as the “Rajput Rebellion” of 1679–81. The poem

then describes the eventual peace treaty reached between Jaisingh and Aurangzeb in 1680.

In what follows, however, I will once again draw on LaCapra’s theorization of

documentary aspects and worklike aspects of texts and suggest that the allusions to Mitrasen and

Aurangzeb in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat are primarily worklike aspects of this Bhasha text.

The Eight Dated Prologues

As noted earlier, eight out of the eighteen books of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat contain dated

prologues. Cauhān is not the first Bhasha poet to include a date in the body of his poem.

For instance, in the Cāndāyan, a Sufi premkathā considered to be one of the oldest works

of Bhasha literature, Maulānā Dāūd states: “It was the [Hijri] year seven hundred and eighty-one

Śukla, Hindī Sāhitya kā Itihās, 326; and Nagendra, Rītikāl, 371.

McGregor, Hindi Literature, vii.

McGregor, 195.

See Ahmad Amir, “Bundela Nobility and Chieftaincy Under the Mughals,” (PhD diss., Aligarh Muslim

University, 2000), 101; and Velcheru Narayana Rao, David Shulman, and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, Textures of Time:

Writing History in South India 1600–1800 (Delhi: Permanent Black, 2001), 142.

Raṇchoḍ Bhaṭṭ, Rājapraśasti 22.30–35 and 23.34–62. I am following: Raṇchoḍ Bhaṭṭ, Rājapraśasti (Mahākavi

Raṇchoḍa Bhaṭṭa Praṇitam Rājapraśastiḥ Mahākāvyam), ed. Motilal Menariya (Udaipur: Sahitya Sansthan,

Rajasthan Vidyapeeth, 1973).

On the “Rajput Rebellion,” see Robert C. Hallissey, The Rajput Rebellion Against Aurangzeb: A Study of the

Mughal Empire in Seventeenth-Century India (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1977).

LaCapra, “Reading Intellectual History,” 30.

214

[1379 CE] when I proclaimed this poem endowed with rasa.”

In the prologue of the

Pāṇḍavcarit, Viṣṇudās tells his audience he began his Mahābhārata retelling in the Hindu lunar

month of Kārtik in the Vikram Saṃvat year of 1492 (1435 CE).

Similar statements are also

found in many other Bhasha narrative poems including Quṭban’s Mirigāvatī, Jāyasī’s Padmāvat,

Mañjhan’s Madhumālatī, Lālac’s Haricarit, and Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas.

Yet while the dates mentioned in the Cāndāyan, the Pāṇḍavcarit, the Mirigāvatī, the

Padmāvat, the Madhumālatī, the Haricarit, and the Rāmcaritmānas are all found in the opening

prologues of these Bhasha texts, the first date encountered in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat is not in the

prologue to the first book of his poem, but to the second. As we saw in Chapter Four, Cauhān

begins his second book, the Book of the Assembly Hall, with the following invocation:

Meditating on Vyāsa, the feet of Gaṇapati, Girijā, Hara, and Bhagavān,

Sabalsingh Cauhān tells the Book of the Assembly Hall in Bhasha.

In Vikram Saṃvat 1727 (1670 CE), in the auspicious month of Caitra, the ninth day,

Thursday, in the light half of the lunar month, this story was illuminated.

As I revealed in Chapter Four, the ninth day of Caitra in 1670 CE is not simply a random

composition date but Rāmnavamī, the birthday of Rāma. This is also a clear nod to the opening

prologue of Tulsī’s Rāmcaritmānas in which he states that he began his Rāmāyaṇa retelling on

the ninth day of Caitra in 1574 CE.

This first dated prologue in the Book of the Assembly Hall

places the Bhasha Mahābhārat in a distinctly North Indian Rāma bhakti milieu.

The next dated book of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat is the sixth book: the Book of Bhīṣma.

After a series of invocations to Cauhān’s teacher, Krishna, Rāma, Śiva, Sanaka, Śuka, Nārada,

Hanumān, Vālmīki, Vyāsa, Gaṇeśa, Sarasvatī, and Śeṣanāga (a group of deities and sages of

which the majority are primarily associated with Viṣṇu or his incarnations), Cauhān states:

In Vikram Saṃvat 1718 (1661 CE), on the full moon date, Tuesday,

that occasion, in the month of Māgha, this story was described and

Shah Aurang was the great lord of Delhi.

Dāūd, Cāndāyan 17, trans. Behl in Love’s Subtle Magic, 53.

Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 1.1.34–35.

See Behl, Love’s Subtle Magic, 30–58; Francesca Orsini, “Inflected Kathas: Sufis and Krishna Bhaktas in

Awadh,” in Religious Interactions in Mughal India, ed. Vasudha Dalmia and Munis D. Faruqui (Delhi: Oxford

University Press, 2014), 206; and Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.34.2–3.

sumiri vyāsa gaṇapati caraṇa girijā hara bhagavāna

sabhāparva bhāṣā bhanata sabalasiṃha cauhāna

satrah sau sattāisai saṃvata śubha madhu māsa

navamī aru guru pakṣa sita bhai yaha kathā prakāsa || CM 2.1 ||

Tulsīdās, Rāmcaritmānas 1.34.2–3.

saṃbata satraha sai aṭṭhārahi punivā tithi maṃgala ke bārahi

māgha māsa meṃ kathā bicārī auraṃgaśāha dilīpati bhārī || CM 6.1 ||

215

Māgha Pūrṇimā (the full moon of Māgha), the date Cauhān claims to have begun his Book of

Bhīṣma, is an auspicious day for many Hindus, but unlike Rāmnavamī, Māgha Pūrṇimā does not

hold any particular significance for Vaiṣṇavas. Nonetheless, the date Cauhān provides his readers

with here still performs important work. If Cauhān’s audience, like the Miśra Brothers, create a

list of all the dated books in the text, they will quickly realize that the year in the date of the Book

of Bhīṣma is the earliest year Cauhān presents his readers. Here Cauhān clearly wants his

audience to think that he composed the Book of Bhīṣma before the seven other dated books in his

retelling. Since the ten remaining books in his Mahābhārat are undated, Cauhān may even be

implying that he began his entire poem with the Book of Bhīṣma.

As I have already noted, the authors of many other Bhasha narrative poems give the

composition dates of their texts in the opening prologues of their poems, thus suggesting that

they began at the “beginning.” Why then does Cauhān claim to have commenced his

Mahābhārata by first telling the sixth book of this epic? As shown earlier, the Miśra Brothers

suggest that Cauhān begins his retelling with the Book of Bhīṣma because this is the first war

book of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Cauhān may have been an ally of Aurangzeb and

Mitrasen and fought in battle with them.

But while the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is undoubtedly,

as Emily Hudson puts it, “a story about a war, a brutal, fratricidal, apocalyptic war,” Cauhān

clearly envisions his own Bhasha Mahābhārata as the carita of Krishna not the Pāṇḍavas.

Given the importance Cauhān places on Krishna, Viṣṇu, and Rāma throughout his

retelling, I suspect that Cauhān wants his audience to think he started with the Book of Bhīṣma,

not because it is the first book of the Bhārata War, but because this book contains one of

Krishna’s most famous episodes in the epic tradition: the Bhagavadgītā. As with a number of

other premodern Mahābhārata retellings––including Peruntēvaṉār’s Tamil Pārataveṇpā,

Pampa’s Kannada Vikramārjunavijayam, Villi’s Tamil Pāratam, Viṣṇudās’s Bhasha

Pāṇḍavcarit, Sāraḷādāsa’s Oriya Mahābhārata, the Persian Razmnāmah, and Śubhacandra’s

sixteenth-century Sanskrit Pāṇḍavapurāṇa––Cauhān’s six stanza-long iteration of the legendry

dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna is rather short when compared to the seven hundred verse-

long Bhagavadgītā in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Just because Cauhān presents an abbreviated

Bhagavadgītā, however, does not mean that he is unaware of the episode’s religious

significance.

The implication of Cauhān beginning to compose his Mahābhārat with the book

Miśra, Miśra, and Miśra, Miśrabandhuvinod 1:272.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 10.

See Peruntēvaṉār, Pārataveṇpā 146; B.N. Sumitra Bai and Robert Z. Zydenbos, “The Jaina Mahābhārata” in

Essays on the Mahābhārata, ed. Arvind Sharma (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 264; VP 6.1.2–7; Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit

6.31–35; Patnaik, “Sarala's Oriya Mahābhārata,” 174; Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 116; and Padmanabh S.

Jaini, “‘Mahābhārata’ Motifs in the Jaina ‘Pāṇḍava-Purāṇa,’” Bulletin of SOAS 47, no. 1 (1984): 109–10.

McGregor and Truschke assert that the Bhagavadgītā is shortened in the Pāṇḍavcarit and the Razmnāmah

because of its “Hindu” content. McGregor argues that the truncated Bhagavadgītā in Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit

“suggests a dependence on Jain Apabhraṃśa treatments of Mahābhārata materials, in which the subject matter of the

Bhagavadgītā (nothing if not a Hindu topic) would likely to have been passed over” (Hindi Literature, 37). Indeed,

multiple Jain Mahābhāratas, including Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam and Śubhacandra’s Pāṇḍavapurāṇa, either

condense or completely do away with the Bhagavadgītā. On the Bhagavadgītā in the Persian Razmnāmah, Truschke

claims that “while for the most part Islamic and Hindu traditions comfortably coexist in the Razmnāmah, the

Mughals indicate discomfort with the perceived Hindu message of the Bhagavadgītā by drastically shortening and

altering this section” (Culture of Encounters, 116). Yet as we have seen, Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpā, Villi’s

Pāratam, and Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, are all markedly Hindu Vaiṣṇava Mahābhārata retellings that also have

216

in which Krishna reveals that he is the Supreme Being of the universe and lectures on the

primacy of the path of bhakti is not lost on a Vaiṣṇava audience.

When the contents of Cauhān’s Book of Bhīṣma are carefully examined, one finds a

number of other episodes that focus on Krishna or Rāma. Along with the death of Bhīṣma (an

event orchestrated by Krishna), the Book of Bhīṣma of this Mahābhārata features an episode in

which Krishna saves Arjuna from the “weapon of Viṣṇu” (vaiṣṇavāstra) being used by

Bhagadatta, another in which Krishna prevents the entire Pāṇḍava army from being slaughtered

by the “weapon of Nārāyaṇa (Viṣṇu)” (nārāyaṇāstra) deployed by Aśvatthāman, and the bridge

of arrows episode involving Arjuna and Hanumān that we saw in Chapter Four. In the critical

edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, both the vaiṣṇavāstra and nārāyaṇāstra episodes are found

in the seventh book, the Book of Droṇa, rather than in the Book of Bhīṣma.

The fight between

Arjuna and Hanumān is nowhere to be found in the Sanskrit epic. By inserting these episodes

into the narrative of his Book of Bhīṣma, Cauhān is informing his audience that he began his

Bhasha Mahābhārat with a book in which Krishna/Rāma is paramount.

After the long list of mostly Vaiṣṇava deities and sages in the sixth book’s prologue,

Cauhān also states that when he told this story in 1661, Aurangzeb was “the great lord of Delhi.”

As Thomas de Bruijn has shown, Jāyasī praises the ruler of Delhi in three premkathās: the first

Mughal emperor Bābur (r. 1526–1530) in the Ākhiri Kalām (Discourse on the Last Day, 1530),

Bābur’s son Humāyūn (r. 1530–1540 and 1555–1556) in the Kanhāvat, and Sher Shāh Sūrī (r.

1540–1545) of the Sur Dynasty in the Padmāvat.

The date Jāyasī gives in the prologues of each

of these premkathās corresponds to the reign of the emperor praised in the poem. De Bruijn

asserts that since there is no external evidence that Jāyasī was patronized by any of these

emperors, “praise to the ruler in Delhi should therefore be seen as a poetical topos.”

Is the

mention of Aurangzeb in Cauhān’s Book of Bhīṣma also an example of a “poetical topos”? Is

Cauhān merely documenting that Aurangzeb was ruling in Delhi when he began his poem?

These questions concerning this reference to Aurangzeb can only be addressed once this line

praising Aurangzeb is put in dialogue with the other allusions to the Mughal emperor in the text.

The next book of Cauhān’s poem, the Book of Droṇa, begins with invocations to

Cauhān’s unnamed teacher, Rāma, and Vyāsa. As we saw in Chapter Four, in the lines addressed

to Rāma, Cauhān describes how the deity destroyed the demon king Rāvaṇa and freed the cursed

woman Ahalyā. Cauhān’s decision to praise these celebrated actions of Rāma in the opening of

this book becomes clear once he tells his audience the date he began his Book of Droṇa:

Calculated and known to be Vikram Saṃvat 1727 (1670 CE),

in this way this story was told.

Known to be Wednesday, on the auspicious occasion

of that day Rāma left Lanka,

in the light half of the lunar month of Āśvin,

truncated Bhagavadgītās. I suspect that Cauhān’s Bhagavadgītā is emblematic of a much larger trend throughout

premodern South Asia in which poets shortened the Bhagavadgītā in their Mahābhārata retellings to avoid the

largely philosophical content of this dialogue between Arjuna and Krishna.

MBh 7.28 and 7.171–172.

De Bruijn, Ruby in the Dust, 45.

De Bruijn, 45.

217

on the tenth day, this book was made and illuminated.

In the best city that was protected and made beautiful,

there Mitrasen, lord of the earth, was king.

Worshipping the feet of the lord of the Raghu lineage and meditating on the lord Vyāsa,

Sabalsingh Cauhān created the Book of Drona in Bhasha.

As I explained in Chapter Four, the tenth day of the lunar month of Āśvin is another auspicious

date associated with Rāma: Vijayādaśamī, the day Rāma killed Rāvaṇa. As with Rāmnavamī in

the Book of the Assembly Hall, Vijayādaśamī performs critical work on Cauhān’s audience

members who are immersed in Rāma devotional traditions in North India. Once again, Cauhān is

using a specific date to anchor his Mahābhārata retelling in a distinctly Rāma bhakti context.

1670 CE, the year Cauhān claims he started the Book of Droṇa, is also significant.

Returning to the prologue of the Book of the Assembly Hall, we see that Cauhān states that he

“illuminated” his Book of the Assembly Hall and Book of Droṇa in the same year on two of the

most important dates in the Hindu lunar calendar involving Rāma. The year 1670 also works on

Cauhān’s readers by causing them to connect the composition of the Book of the Assembly Hall

and the Book of Droṇa with the king mentioned in the above verses from the Book of Droṇa.

The line praising Mitrasen in the Book of Droṇa is the first of two references to this king

in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat. In the previous book, there is a mention of Aurangzeb, a Mughal

emperor remembered today as a remarkably pious Muslim. In this book, however, Cauhān

describes a king with a distinctly Sanskritic and Hindu-sounding name ruling “in the best city

that was protected and made beautiful.” Moreover, Mitrasen’s name in the prologue above is

sandwiched between two references to Rāma, a Hindu deity considered by many to be the ideal

king. Sheldon Pollock argues that the narrative of Vālmīki’s Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa allowed Hindu

kings in premodern South Asia to “demonize” and “Otherize” Muslim rulers who threatened

their sovereignty.

One of the examples he provides is the seventeenth-century poet Rāmdās

composing a Marathi Rāmāyaṇa retelling for Śivājī that presents Aurangzeb as Rāvaṇa.

As Cauhān’s audience makes their way through the rest of his Mahābhārata retelling, it

quickly becomes clear that the poet is in no way trying to demonize Aurangzeb. The link

between Mitrasen and Rāma, however, is significant. Allison Busch has shown that a number of

Bhasha poets, such as Keśavdās, Cintamaṇī Tripāṭhī, and Vṛnd, align themselves with multiple

rulers in their compositions.

Busch also points out that Keśavdās compares different kings and

emperors to Rāma. For example, in his Ratnabāvanī (Fifty-Two Verse on Ratnasen), Keśavdās

satraha śata sattāisa jāne gani sambata yahi bhāṃti bakhāne

puni budhabāra gharī śubha jāne jā dina laṅkā rāma payāne

śukla pakṣa āśvina ko māsā daśamī tithi kari grantha prakāsā

uttama nagara suracanā chājā bhūpati mitrasena tahaṃ rājā

raghupati caraṇa manāikai byāsadeva dhari dhyāna

droṇaparba bhāṣā raceu sabalasiṃha cauhāna || CM 7.1 ||

Sheldon Pollock, “Ramayana and Political Imagination in India,” Journal of Asian Studies 52, no.2 (1993): 264.

Pollock, 287.

Busch, Poetry of Kings, passim.

218

has the hero of the text, the Rajput Bundela prince Ratnasen, declare: “Lord Rama, the deity

revered by my lineage, killed Ravana. Now his glories are sung in the world. I am Ratnasena,

junior prince of the [Orchha] clan––why should I do what others do and flee the battlefield?”

Similarly, in his Jahāngīrjascandrikā (Moonlight of the Fame of Jahāngīr, 1612), Keśavdās

praises Aurangzeb’s grandfather Jahāngīr saying: “Seeing the moonlight of his deeds, the

generals of other emperors lose their courage. The dread of Akbar’s invincible son Emperor

Jahangir terrifies even Ravana.”

Truschke notes that Aurangzeb’s great-grandfather Akbar is

compared to Rāma in the Persian Akbarī Rāmāyan. She explains that “Akbar idealized Rama, an

avatar of Vishnu’s and the hero of the epic, as a model Indian monarch. Imperially illustrated

manuscripts of the [Akbarī Rāmāyan] translation overtly parallel the two men and suggest what

other Sanskrit texts state explicitly: Akbar was another incarnation of Vishnu.”

In contemporary North India among followers of the Gauḍīya sampradāya in Vrindavan,

Aurangzeb is actually remembered as the patron of a Rāma temple. Summarizing a discourse by

the Gauḍīya ācārya Shrivatsa Goswami, John Stratton Hawley notes:

Shrivatsa goes on to remind his hearers that later, when Aurangzeb faced the last and most

difficult battle of his rule, far to the south in the Deccan, he suspended that crucial confrontation

with the Marathas and took nine months off to go to Chitrakut, where another threatened ruler,

Ram, had bivouacked in the course of his own exile. There Aurangzeb constructed a temple for

Ram, providing both the land and the funds. What kind of rabid Muslim fanatic would do that? If

he was not personally a worshiper of Ram, he was at least his patron and someone who venerated

Ram’s role as righteous warrior in a long battle that took him far to the south. As Shrivatsa spins

out this revisionist history, he rehabilitates the most hated of Mughal emperors …and he shows

how Aurangzeb had a special respect for Ram.

Is it possible that Cauhān in the seventeenth century was aware of this story that Shrivatsa

Goswami told his Gauḍīya followers in Vrindavan in the twenty-first century?

Regardless of whether there is any historical veracity to Shrivatsa Goswami’s story about

Aurangzeb patronizing a Rāma temple, the references to Aurangzeb in the previous book, the

Book of Bhīṣma, and now Mitrasen in the Book of Droṇa perform vital work on Cauhān’s readers

who are familiar with Bhasha poets such as Jāyasī, Keśavdās, Cintamaṇī, and Vṛnd who all

praise multiple different kings in their various texts. While I am not suggesting these allusions to

these two rulers in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat document actual historical relationships of patronage,

it is clear that Cauhān wants his readers to start to draw connections between his poem and a

Hindu king and a Mughal emperor. By linking the composition of the Book of Droṇa on

Vijayādaśamī and the Book of the Assembly Hall on Rāmnavamī to Mitrasen and then

worshiping Rāma right after he describes Mitrasen ruling in the “best city,” Cauhān begins to

make his audience associate this king with the poet’s markedly Vaiṣṇava project.

The next book of Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, the Book of Karṇa (which is the eighth

book of the composition), begins with the following invocatory verses:

Keśavdās, Ratnabāvanī 17, trans. Busch in Poetry of Kings, 31.

Keśavdās, Jahāngīrjascandrikā 32, trans. Busch in Poetry of Kings, 59.

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 204–5.

Hawley, Krishna’s Playground, 240.

219

First, I salute the feet of my teacher, who does all perfected actions.

I worship Rāmacandra, who is an ocean of attributes,

the husband of Sītā, and the splendor of the Raghu clan.

No one understands his unfathomable greatness,

only his best devotee Hanumān understands.

In the light half of the lunar month of Āśvin, on the fifth day,

this story was illuminated in Vikram Saṃvat 1724 (1667 CE)

and Shah Aurang, the lord of Delhi, was ruler.

Worshipping the feet of the lord of the Raghu lineage and meditating on the lord Vyāsa,

Sabalsingh Cauhān creates the Book of Karṇa in Bhasha.

As in the prologue to the previous book, these verses that open the Book of Karṇa are replete

with images of Rāma. After paying homage to his nameless preceptor, readers witness Cauhān

showering praise on Rāma and his beloved bhakta Hanumān. As I pointed out in Chapter Four,

the date in this prologue is the fifth of day of Āśvin, which is the fifth day of Navarātri and just a

few days before Vijayādaśamī. Again, it is worth recalling the prevalence of Rāmlīlā

performances during the first ten days of Āśvin throughout contemporary North India.

The reference to the fifth of day of Āśvin is followed by the second mention of

Aurangzeb in the text. In the last book, the Book of Droṇa, Mitrasen’s name is placed between

two references to Rāma. This is also found here in the Book of Karṇa, except now it is the name

of a Muslim emperor instead of a Hindu king. Positioning Aurangzeb’s name between allusions

to Rāma performs the same work on Cauhān’s audience that the placement of Mitrasen’s name

in the previous book does. Cauhān is not only associating Mitrasen and Aurangzeb with Rāma,

the model of perfect Hindu kingship, but he is also connecting these rulers from two different

cultural and religious backgrounds to his explicitly bhakti Mahābhārata retelling.

As in the prologue to the Book of Droṇa, Cauhān calls Aurangzeb “Shah Aurang” in this

prologue to the Book of Karṇa. In another seventeenth-century Bhasha poem, the Śivrājbhūṣaṇ

(Ornament to King Śivājī, 1673) of Bhūṣaṇ Tripāṭhī, we also see Aurangzeb being referred to as

“Aurang.” Busch notes that Bhūṣaṇ’s composition in praise of the Maratha king Śivājī is filled

with multilingual puns and that it “trenchantly articulates Shivaji’s disillusionment with the

Mughal political establishment under Emperor Aurangzeb.”

Busch elaborates that:

Another powerful instance of Bhushan’s derisive multilingual wordplay is his thematically

brilliant but etymologically corrupt handling of Emperor Aurangzeb’s name. In Persian, the word

aurangzīb is a flattering title, meaning “adorning the throne.” In Bhushan’s hands, the first part of

the compound “aurang” (throne), is transformed into “avaraṅga.” According to Braj phonetics,

this is a plausible enough pronunciation of the emperor’s name, but it is also invokes the

prathamahiṃ kari guru caraṇa praṇāmā jāte hohiṃ siddha saba kāmā

bandauṃ rāmacandra guṇa sāgara sītāpati raghubaṃśa ujāgara

mahimā agama aura nahiṃ jānā parama bhakta jānata hanumānā

śukla pakṣa āśvina ko māsā tithipañcami yaha kathā prakāsā/

sambata satraha śata caubīśā nauraṃgaśāha dilīpati īśā

raghupati caraṇa manāikai byāsadeva dhari dhyāna

karṇaparva bhāṣā racata sabalasiṃha cauhāna || CM 8.1 ||

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 96.

220

combination of the Sanskrit lexemes ava and raṅga, which together mean something like “sickly

pale”––a point that would have been immediately apparent to a Sanskrit-trained Brahman like

Bhushan or to members of the Maratha court. This deliberate Sanskritization of the emperor’s

Persian name suggests Aurangzeb’s overwhelming trepidation in the face of Shivaji, transforming

his exalted title into a source of derision.

Notably, in this same poem Bhūṣaṇ compares Aurangzeb to the eldest Kaurava brother

Duryodhana and Śivājī to the five Pāṇḍava princes fleeing the house of lac when he describes

how Śivājī escaped house arrest in Aurangzeb’s court in Agra in May of 1666.

Bhushan says, Aurangzeb, who is twice as cruel as Duryodhana, has deceived the world.

Ghazi Shivaji has exhibited prowess even greater than that of the Pandavas.

He mobilized the moral courage of Yudhishthira, the strength of Bhima, the fortitude of Arjuna,

the intelligence of Nakula, and the power of Sahadeva.

The five of them snuck out from a wax house in the dark of night—

Shivaji on his own escaped from 100,000 watchmen in broad daylight.

Yet while Bhūṣaṇ cleverly satirizes Aurangzeb by calling him avaraṅga and likens him to the

villain of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, Cauhān praises Aurangzeb and associates him with Rāma.

The next prologue in the Book of Śalya, the eighth book of the Bhasha Mahābhārat

begins with the praise of Cauhān’s teacher, Rāma, Sarasvatī, and Vālmīki. Cauhān then states:

When it was known in the world as Vikram Saṃvat 1724 (1667 CE), this was told.

In the light half of the lunar month of Kārtik on the tenth day, this story was uttered.

Shah Aurang was the sultan of Delhi. The whole world knew of his mighty prowess.

Cauhān claims to have begun his Book of Śalya on the tenth day of Kārtik. Tracy Pintchman

points out that the month of Kārtik “is principally concerned with the worship of Vishnu and

therefore is most meaningful to Vaishnavas.”

She adds that in some parts of North India,

including Mathura (the birthplace of Krishna according to Vaiṣṇava traditions), the tenth day of

Kārtik is celebrated as the day Krishna killed his maternal uncle Kaṃsa.

Up until this point, most of the dates that the readers of this Bhasha Mahabharata have

encountered have been associated with Rāma. Unlike Rāmnavamī or Vijayādaśamī, however, the

Busch, 96–97.

See Truschke, Aurangzeb, 79–79.

Bhūṣaṇ, Śivrājbhūṣaṇ 144, trans. Allison Busch in “Introduction to the Śivrājbhūṣaṇ by Bhushan Tripathi (fl.

1673),” Annual Hindi‐Urdu Workshop at Columbia University, April 12, 2008,

http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00urduhindilinks/workshop2008/WorkshopBhushanTranslation.pdf.

sambata satraha sai jaga jānā tyahi ūpara caubīsa bakhānā

kārtika māsa pakṣa ujiyārā daśamī tithi ko kathā ucārā

nauraṃgaśāha dilī sultānā prabala pratāpa jagata saba jānā || CM 9.1 ||

Tracy Pintchman, Guests at God's Wedding: Celebrating Kartik among the Women of Benares (Albany: State

University of New York Press, 2005), 16.

Pintchman, 76.

221

tenth day of Kārtik places the Book of Śalya in a specifically Krishna-centric context. Why does

Cauhān want his audience to think that he began the Book of Śalya on the anniversary of

Krishna’s victory over Kaṃsa? While certainly alluded to at different points in the critical

edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the slaying of Kaṃsa plays a much more prominent role in

narratives of Krishna’s early life, such as the Bhāgavatapurāṇa and other Vaiṣṇava bhakti

compositions.

Why does Cauhān associate this particular book of his Bhasha epic retelling with

one of the most important deeds from Krishna’s adolescence?

Unlike the previous two books, Krishna is basically absent from Cauhān’s Book of Śalya.

While Krishna plays a crucial part in the deaths of Jayadratha and Droṇa in the Book of Droṇa

and Karṇa in the Book of Karṇa of Cauhān’s text, Krishna does not do much in the Book of Śalya

of this Bhasha Mahābhārata retelling. Although Krishna helps orchestrate the murder

Duryodhana in the Sanskrit Book of Śalya, in Cauhān’s Mahābhārat Duryodhana is killed in a

different book dedicated solely to his demise: the Book of Maces (Gadāparv).

The overall absence of Krishna in Cauhān’s Book of Śalya, however, may be the reason

why Cauhān tells his readers that he began this book on this key day in Krishna’s life. In

Cauhān’s Book of Śalya, the Pāṇḍavas slay two of their maternal uncles: Śakuni, the brother of

their aunt Gāndhārī, and Śalya, the brother of their mother Mādrī. By stating that he started his

Book of Śalya on the tenth day of Kārtik, Cauhān is reminding his Vaiṣṇava readers of the day

Krishna killed his own maternal uncle: Kaṃsa. Even though Krishna is not a major player in the

events of this Book of Śalya, Cauhān invokes this deity in his preface with this specific date.

The line praising Aurangzeb in the Book of Śalya also signals the readers of Cauhān’s

Bhasha Mahābhārat to the importance the poet places on the Mughal emperor. This is not just

the third time Cauhān has praised Aurangzeb in his text, it is also the most powerful and positive

description of Aurangzeb that Cauhān’s audience has encountered so far. While Cauhān states in

earlier prologues that Aurangzeb, the “lord of Delhi” (dilīpati), was “great” (bhārī) and “ruler”

(īśā), here he proclaims that “the whole world knew of his mighty prowess.”

As illustrated by the examples we saw earlier from Bhūṣaṇ Tripāṭhī’s Śivrājbhūṣaṇ,

Aurangzeb is not a universally adored figure in the world of premodern Bhasha literature.

Several of Cauhān’s contemporaries present Aurangzeb as the enemy of Hindus in their Bhasha

compositions. For instance, Busch points out that in the Chatraprakāś (Light of Chatrasāl, c.

1710), a poem in praise of the Bundela Rajput king Chatrasāl (r. 1675–1731), Lāl Kavi writes

that “when Aurangzeb came to power he began to wipe out Hindu dharma.”

Cynthia Talbot

has shown that in the Rājvilās (Adventures of Rājsingh, c. 1680), Mān Kavi explicitly compares

Aurangzeb to Rāma’s nemesis Rāvaṇa and Rājsingh of Mewar to Viṣṇu.

But there are also other seventeenth-century Bhasha texts that dismantle the image of

Aurangzeb as the tormentor of Hindus. Busch has revealed that in Maheśdās’s Binhairāso (Tale

of the Two, c. 1660), which narrates the war of succession that broke out amongst the sons of the

See MBh 2.13, 5.126, and 14.68.

MBh 9.57.

Allison Busch, “Unhitching the Oxcart of Delhi: A Mughal-Period Hindi Account of Political Insurgency,”

Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (2018): 434.

Cynthia Talbot, “A Poetic Record of the Rajput Rebellion, c. 1680.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3

(2018): 462 and 469.

222

fifth Mughal emperor Shāh Jahān (r. 1628–1658), “Aurangzeb emerges as a consummate leader

and orders that the Hindus are to be burned, the Muslims buried,” thus honoring the religious

sentiments of those who had died in the war.

As Heidi Pauwels and Emilia Bachrach have

shown, in the Śrināthjī ki Prākaṭya Vārtā (Story of the Appearance of Śrināthjī) attributed to

Harirāy (traditional dates: 1590–1715), Aurangzeb is even presented as a “secret ardent devotee”

of Śrināthjī, a form of Krishna who is paramount to the Vallabha sampradāya.

The diversity of representations of Aurangzeb in Bhasha texts composed during his reign

reaffirms recent scholarship on this Mughal emperor’s complicated relationships with different

religious communities. As Munis Faruqui points out, while Aurangzeb “made his commitment

and ability to uphold Islam’s centrality in the life of the Mughal Empire a keystone of his own

political legitimacy,” his overall actions as emperor “suggest an awareness that he ruled a

religiously diverse empire.”

Faruqui goes on to challenge the image of Aurangzeb as the

demolisher of Hindu idols and temples by noting that while Aurangzeb “occasionally ordered the

destruction of Hindu temples,” he also patronized “certain temples with cash and land grants.”

Busch notes that “the stereotype that he [Aurangzeb] was antagonistic towards Hindus,

which in the nationalist imagination also means he was antagonistic toward Hindi, is a

misconception.”

While Busch states that “the extent of Emperor Aurangzeb’s own patronage of

Braj poets is not easy to establish,” she also observes that Aurangzeb “was known to cite Hindi

verse and, as reported in the Ma’āsir-i ālamgīrī, he took an interest in Hindi orthography,

consulting Khan Mir Hadi, the diwan of his son Azam Shah, about the matter. Some scholars

have also attributed original Braj compositions to Aurangzeb.”

Busch draws attention to the

famed Bhasha poet Vṛnd describing this Mughal emperor using the adjectives “powerful,

compassionate, praiseworthy (mahābalī, mehrbān, ṣubiḥān)” in the beginning of his Śṛṅgārśikṣā

(Instruction in Passion, 1691).

She also discusses the Bhasha praise poems of Mirzā Raushan

Ẓamīr ‘Nehī’ on “Śāha Ālamgīra ko dāna barnana and pratāpa barnana (Descriptions of

Emperor Alamgir’s generosity and valour, respectively)” and asserts that the introduction to

these poems “strongly suggests some kind of patronage from Aurangzeb.”

Unlike Busch, I do not believe that praise of Aurangzeb in the beginning of a poem

automatically documents actual conditions of patronage. I do, however, think that the admiration

that Vṛnd, Nehī, and Cauhān all express for Aurangzeb is performing meaningful work on the

Allison Busch, “The Poetry of History in Early Modern India,” Proceedings of the British Academy 207 (2017):

178.

Heidi Pauwels and Emilia Bachrach, “Aurangzeb as Iconoclast? Vaishnava Accounts of the Krishna Images’

Exodus from Braj,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 28, no. 3 (2018): 494.

Faruqui, “Awrangzīb.”

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 156.

Busch, 156 and 157.

Vṛnd, Śṛṅgārśikṣā 4, trans. Busch in Poetry of Kings, 160.

Allison Busch, “Hidden in Plain View: Brajbhasha Poets at the Mughal Court,” Modern Asian Studies 44, no. 2

(2010): 296.

223

readers of these Bhasha compositions. Aurangzeb was one of the most powerful men in

seventeenth-century South Asia. By continuously praising Aurangzeb throughout his epic

retelling in the sections of the poem in which he pays homage to predominantly Vaiṣṇava deities

and sages and declares the auspicious dates on which he related his Bhasha narrative, Cauhān

creates a potent connection between his bhakti Mahābhārata and Aurangzeb.

After the prologue to the Book of Śalya, Cauhān’s readers do not encounter another dated

preface until the sixteenth book of the Bhasha poem: the Book of Hermitage. The lines in which

Cauhān describes the date and conditions of the composition of this book are placed between a

set of salutations to Rāma, Cauhān’s teacher, Krishna, Cauhān’s parents, Indra, Śiva, Lakṣmī,

Durgā, Sarasvatī, Vyāsa, Nārada, and Hanumān, and two couplets in which Cauhān praises

Viṣṇu and Lakṣmī. The verses in the middle of these invocations are as follows:

Sabalsingh told this Bhārata in Bhasha

about when the lord of Śrī descended and gave protection.

Shah Aurang, lord of Delhi, rules and there Mitrasen, lord of the earth, is delighted.

Before these kings of men, Sabalsingh Cauhān sang and composed

In Vikram Saṃvat 1751 (1694 CE) on the day of Wednesday,

on the tenth day in the light half of the lunar month of Śrāvaṇ,

then I began this story and meditated on lord Vyāsa.

I noted earlier how the Miśra Brothers read the references to Aurangzeb and Mitrasen in the

Book of Hermitage as documenting patronage relationships amongst Cauhān, Mitrasen, and

Aurangzeb. In this preface to the Bhasha Book of Hermitage, Cauhān explicitly states that

Mitrasen is “delighted” by Aurangzeb’s rule and that both kings are in Delhi. For readers

familiar with Mughal politics, this might suggest that Mitrasen is a Rajput king who is a

manṣabdār in Aurangzeb’s service. Cauhān also says that he “sang and composed” his Bhasha

Mahabharata before Aurangzeb and Mitrasen, who are “kings of men.”

Countless South Asian poets describe themselves presenting their poems at the courts of

patrons. For example, in his Pāṇḍavcarit, Viṣṇudās describes Dūṅgarsingh, the Tomar Rajput

king of Gwalior, placing a betel leaf (a sign of a challenge) in the poet’s hand and asking him

how just five Pāṇḍava brothers were able to defeat one hundred Kauravas.

Truschke notes in

the sixteenth-century Jain poet Śānticandra’s Sanskrit poem about the life of Akbar, the

Kṛpārasakośa (Nectar of Compassion), that “Śānticandra identifies Akbar as the chief recipient

of his Kṛpārasakośa and identifies several times that the Mughal king heard and understood the

Sanskrit text.”

As with many scholars of South Asian literature and history, Truschke discusses

a documentary reading of her text and states it is possible that Śānticandra performed his

composition at the court of Akbar. Yet she also points out that since Śānticandra also addresses a

Jain audience in his poem, “it is tempting, then, to postulate that it was more important for

sabalasiṃha yaha bhārata bhākhā śrīprabhu jaba arake dai rākhā

auraṃgaśāha dilīpati rājata mitraseni bhūpati tahaṃ gājata

ye nṛpa ke puruṣana mahaṃ gāye sabalasiṃha cauhāna banāye

sambata satraha sai ikyāvana śukla pakṣa daśāmī budha sāvana

taba maiṃ kathā arambhana kīnhā byāsadeva ko sumiraṇa kīnhā || CM 16.1 ||

Viṣṇudās, Pāṇḍavcarit 1.1.38–39.

Truschke, Culture of Encounters, 79.

224

Śānticandra to represent himself to his own community as writing a text for Akbar than to

actually speak to the Mughal emperor in Sanskrit.”

I contend that Cauhān is doing something

similar to this with Vaiṣṇava communities in his Mahābhārata retelling.

Cauhān’s statement that he performed his Bhasha Mahābhārat at Aurangzeb’s court

brings to mind several hagiographical narratives, such as Gokulnāth’s Caurāsī Vaiṣṇavan kī

Vārtā (Stories of the Eighty-Four Vaiṣṇavas), Priyādās’s Bhaktirasabodhinī commentary on

Nābhādās’s Bhaktamāl, and Mahīpati’s Marathi Bhaktavijay (Victory of the Bhaktas, 1762), in

which famous North Indian Vaiṣṇava bhakti poets, including Mīrābāī, Sūrdās, and Tulsīdās,

meet with Akbar.

In Hindu bhakti traditions throughout South Asia, the legends of the lives of

the devotional poets are often just as important and famous as their poetry. In these

hagiographies, either Akbar invites the bhakti poet to his court or Akbar himself seeks out the

poet in their own home. While some of these stories were only committed to writing in

eighteenth-century hagiographies, such as the Bhaktirasabodhinī and the Bhaktavijay, it is

possible that the tales of these bhaktas and Akbar were circulating in the seventeenth century

when Cauhān says he performed his Mahābhārat. By claiming Aurangzeb as his courtly patron,

Cauhān is placing himself in the lineage of earlier bhakti poets such as Mīrābāī, Sūrdās, and

Tulsīdās, who are said to have performed their devotional compositions before a Mughal

emperor. It is worth noting, however, that all of the hagiographical stories mentioned above are

about Akbar, who is celebrated in India today for respecting different religious traditions, and not

his great-grandson Aurangzeb, who is remembered as an orthodox Muslim ruler.

Another possible explanation for the multiple allusions to Aurangzeb and Mitrasen in the

Bhasha Mahābhārat is that Cauhān is using them to create a frame story. Both the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata and Tulsīdās’s Rāmcaritmānas (which, as we have seen, are two very important

texts for Cauhān) each contain four frame stories. As Brian Black points out, in the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata “significantly, a king features as the primary listener in three of these frames, all of

which connect the content of what the king hears to his role as king, thus making the stories and

teachings part of his ability to rule and part of his claim to regal power.”

The three frame

stories with kings as listeners are (1) the sage Vaiśampāyana reciting the Mahābhārata to

Arjuna’s great-grandson King Janamejaya, (2) Dhṛtarāṣṭra’s charioteer Sañjaya describing the

Kurukṣetra War to the blind king, and (3) Bhīṣma counseling Yudhiṣṭhira and sharing many

stories about kingship on his deathbed. Black elaborates on these three frames:

In the three conversational frames that feature kings, the dialogues are addressed to the specific

situations that face their auditors as kings. For Janamejaya, he learns about his ancestors; for

Dhṛtarāṣṭra, he hears accounts of his army on the battlefield; and for Yudhiṣṭhira, his role as a

listener is in preparation for his duties as a dharma king. In these cases, neither Janamejaya,

Dhṛtarāṣṭra nor Yudhiṣṭhira are listening to stories or receiving instructions merely for their

Truschke, 80.

See Kumkum Sangari, “Tracing Akbar: Hagiographies, Popular Narrative Traditions and the Subject of

Conversion,” in Mapping Histories: Essays Presented to Ravinder Kumar, ed. Neera Chandhoke (Delhi: Tulika,

2000), 62–69; and John Stratton Hawley, “Last Seen with Akbar,” in Three Bhakti Voices: Mirabai, Surdas, and

Kabir in Their Times and Ours (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005), 181–93.

Brian Black, “Eavesdropping on the Epic: Female Listeners in the Mahābhārata,” in Gender and Narrative in the

Mahābhārata, ed. Simon Brodbeck and Brian Black (New York: Routledge 2007), 58.

225

amusement. All of them have something very personal at stake in their role as listeners, and for

all of them what they hear is indelibly connected to their position as king.

The frame of Vaiśampāyana narrating the Mahābhārata to Janamejaya, is also present in

Cauhān’s poem. As in the Sanskrit epic, we occasionally see the phrase “Vaiśampāyana said”

(vaiśampāyana uvāca) in the beginning of different sections of the Bhasha retelling.

But

Cauhān begins other sections of the poem by simply saying “listen, king” (rājā sunau).

While

some might assume that the king being addressed in these instances is Janamejaya, the multiple

references to Aurangzeb and Mitrasen in the poem suggest that one of these two rulers might be

the king to whom Cauhān is speaking. Philip Lutgendorf notes that one of the four frames of the

Rāmcaritmānas is Tulsīdās himself “relating the story and commenting on it to his listeners.”

With the frequent allusions to Aurangzeb and Mitrasen throughout his poem, Cauhān forms a

frame story of himself narrating the Mahābhārata to two different kings

What about the date that Cauhān gives in the prologue to the sixteenth book? As

evidenced in many works of South Asian literature, the month of Śrāvaṇ (roughly around July

and August in the Gregorian calendar) is a time when soldiers and kings are expected to stay at

home as since one cannot wage war during the monsoon. The reference to composing the

sixteenth book in the month of Śrāvaṇ seems to support Cauhān’s statement that he performed

this book during a month in which Aurangzeb and Mitrasen would likely have been at court. The

work that the year presented in the Book of Hermitage performs, however, is a bit more complex.

In the five earlier books, Cauhān often jumps around between different dates. He first

gives 1670 in the Book of the Assembly Hall, then jumps backwards to 1661 in the Book of

Bhīṣma, then returns to 1670 in the Book of Droṇa, and then backwards to 1667 with the Book of

Karṇa and the Book of Śalya. With the Book of Hermitage, however, Cauhān leaps forward

twenty-seven years to 1694. Cauhān will go back in time to 1673 in the next book, the Book of

Clubs, and in the final book, the Book of the Ascent to Heaven, Cauhān will take another massive

leap forward to 1724. Why does Cauhān give his readers the impression he is constantly

traveling backwards and forwards in time with these different dates in these eight prologues?

I suggest that the way Cauhān manipulates time with these different years in his

prologues is a tribute to the Sanskrit Mahābhārata. As Hudson points out, the Sanskrit epic

constantly moves “backward[s] and forward[s] in time; stories merge into other stories with

deliberate disregard for temporal boundaries.”

Cauhān creates this same effect with the

different years in the prologues of these books. Readers of Cauhān’s text who are familiar with

the Mahābhārata therefore may not find these different dates disconcerting.

The penultimate book of the Mahābhārat, the Book of Clubs, begins with salutations to

the following group of Hindu deities and sages: Pārvatī, Gaṇeśa, Cauhān’s preceptor, Krishna,

Rāma, Nārada, Sarasvatī, Vālmīki, Agastya, Rāma (again), and Śiva. Cauhān then declares:

Black, 59.

For example, see CM 1.6 and 1.12

For example, see CM 1.9 and 1.24.

Lutgendorf, Life of a Text, 26.

Hudson, Disorienting Dharma, 166.

226

In Vikram Saṃvat 1730 (1673 CE)

in the month of Bhādrapad, on the seventh moon,

when Shah Aurang, the lord of Delhi, was leader,

then Sabalsingh was the singer of the attributes of Hari.

100

The seventh moon of Bhādrapad is the night before Kṛṣṇa Janmāṣṭamī, the birthday of

Krishna.

101

Cauhān’s choice to bring up the eve of Krishna’s birth in this prologue may be

related to the fact that it is in the Book of Clubs in which Krishna dies. As with the Book of Clubs

of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the Book of Clubs of Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat describes the

tragic destruction of Krishna’s entire Yadu clan in his kingdom of Dwarka. With this date in the

Book of Clubs, Cauhān is thus foreshadowing the tragic demise of Krishna and his family by

bringing up the eve of the much happier occasion of Krishna’s birth.

The juxtaposition of Aurangzeb’s name with Cauhān’s here strongly suggests that the

“ruler” of the Mughal Empire and the “singer of the attributes of Krishna” are equally important

roles. This reference to Aurangzeb in this prologue of the Book of Clubs is the last allusion to the

Mughal emperor in the Bhasha Mahābhārat. As I noted earlier, Cauhān’s composition is not the

only epic retelling with references to Aurangzeb. Two Persian retellings of the Rāmāyaṇa,

Candraman Bedil’s Nargisistān and Amar Singh’s Amar Prakāsh, are dedicated to Aurangzeb.

An important distinction between these two Persian Rāmāyaṇas and the Bhasha Mahābhārat,

however, is that while Candraman Bedil and Amar Singh pay homage to Aurangzeb at the start

of their epic retellings, Cauhān repeatedly extols Aurangzeb throughout his text. Unlike the

Tamil peruṅkāppiyams of Cēkkiḻār, Kampaṉ, and Villi, most Bhasha narrative poems that extol

royal patrons only do so once in their opening prologues. As Busch, Thomas de Bruijn, and

Francesca Orsini have all shown, while there are a number of Bhasha poems that praise Mughal

emperors, this praise is usually only found in the very beginning of the works.

102

In fact, with the

exception of praśasti praise poems and texts about the lives of kings, such as Keśavdās’s

Jahāngīrjascandrikā, Lāl Kavi’s Chatraprakāś, and Mān Kavi’s Rājvilās, the repetitive praise of

any ruler (Mughal or otherwise) within a Bhasha poem is quite unusual.

103

Cauhān commences the Book of the Ascent to Heaven, the final book of the Mahābhārat,

with invocations to his unnamed teacher, Śiva, Lakṣmī, and Durgā. The poet then calls out

“Mother!” and asks for help to write the līlā of Hari. After praising Hanumān, Cauhān informs

his audience that God (prabhu) has given him the “command” (presumably to narrate this story).

The poet proceeds to pay homage to Gaṇeśa and his teacher again before proclaiming:

100

sambata śubha satraha sai tīśā bhādramāsa saptami rajanīśā

auraṃgaśāha dilīpati nāyaka sabalasiṃha taba hari guṇa gāyaka || CM 17.1 ||

101

John Stratton Hawley, At Play with Krishna: Pilgrimage Dramas from Brindavan (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1981), 62. Hawley also notes that some Vaiṣṇavas celebrate Kṛṣṇa Janmāṣṭamī in Śrāvaṇ.

102

Busch, Poetry of Kings, 144 and 160; De Bruijn, Ruby in Dust, 56 and 59; and Francesca Orsini, “The Social

History of a Genre: Kathas across Languages in Early Modern North India,” Medieval History Journal 20, no.1

(2017): 16 and 19.

103

I am very grateful to Allison Busch for sharing this observation with me in the summer of 2017.

227

In the pure and beautiful month of Agrahāyaṇ,

on the day of Wednesday, at the auspicious feet of Hari,

in Vikram Saṃvat 1781 (1724 CE),

104

at that time, the story of Hari was illuminated.

The entire world knows the form of Hari and all prostrate before him as if planks.

105

Cauhān does not tell his audience the specific day in Agrahāyaṇ (also known as Mārgaśirṣa) on

which he composed the Book of the Ascent to Heaven of his Bhasha Mahābhārat. For those

readers familiar with the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, however, the mention of this month may remind

them of a verse in the tenth chapter of the Bhagavadgītā in which Krishna tells Arjuna on the

battlefield: “Among the months, I am Mārgaśirṣa.”

106

Mārgaśirṣa is also the month in which Gītā

Jayantī, the birthday of the Bhagavadgītā, is celebrated in contemporary North India.

As we saw in Chapter One, in the Book of the Beginnings of his text, Cauhān defines his

epic retelling as the “deeds of Hari” (haricaritra). With this preface to the Book of the Ascent to

Heaven, in which Cauhān tells his readers that he “illuminated” this “story of Hari” (harikathā)

during the month that is Krishna himself according to the Bhagavadgītā, it is clear that Cauhān’s

definition for his Mahābhārata has not changed. By calling out for help to write his līlā of Hari,

describing himself at Hari’s feet, and stating that the entire world bows before Hari in this final

prologue of his text, Cauhān emphasizes his own personal bhakti for this deity.

* * * * *

By the end of these eight dated prologues of Cauhān’s Bhasha Mahābhārat, we are left with an

immensely complex picture. Six of these eight prologues praise a royal patron, but in all eight of

these prologues Cauhān also profusely worships Krishna or Rāma or claims to have composed

this book on an auspicious day associated with the worship of Krishna or Rāma. Each of these

eight prologues reaffirm Cauhān’s statement in the very beginning of his poem in which Cauhān

says that he is retelling the Mahābhārata as the deeds of Krishna. We may never know if

Aurangzeb actually patronized Cauhān or not. But what is clear is that Cauhān is distinctly

placing his Mahābhārat in a Mughal courtly milieu. As Munis Faruqui notes, today Aurangzeb is

“mostly reviled in India as a fratricide and religious fanatic.”

107

Yet here we have a seventeenth-

century Bhasha poet continuously praising this so-called Muslim “fanatic” and claiming to have

performed his overtly bhakti retelling of the Mahābhārata at this Mughal emperor’s court.

104

Again, one manuscript gives the composition year as 1677. See Hiralal, Twelfth Report, 1276.

105

agahana māsa punīta suhāvā budhabāra hari tithi śubha pāvā

sambata satrahasai ikyāsī tāhi samaya harikathā prakāsī

hari ko rūpa sakala jaga jānā kari sabahina kahaṃ daṇḍa praṇāmā || CM 18.1 ||

106

māsānāṃ mārgaśhīrṣho ’ham || Bhagavadgītā 10.35 ||

107

Faruqui, “Awrangzīb.”

228

CONCLUSION

Larger Patterns of Retelling the Mahābhārata

In “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas,” A.K. Ramanujan notes that Kumāravyāsa states in his Kannada

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī that he “chose to write a Mahābhārata, because he heard the

cosmic serpent which upholds the earth groaning under the burden of Rāmāyaṇa poets.”

There are certainly many premodern Rāmāyaṇa retellings in regional South Asian

languages. It is worth noting, however, that in the course of this single dissertation I have

referenced or discussed at least thirty different regional Mahābhāratas that were composed

between 800 and 1800 CE (not including Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat).

Moreover, there are many other premodern regional Mahābhārata retellings that I

have not yet had the chance to mention, including Bhālaṇ’s fifteenth-century Gujarati Nalākhyān

(Tale of Nala), which draws on versions of the famous story of Nala and Damayantī from both

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and Śrīharṣa’s Sanskrit Naiṣadhīyacarita; Piṅgaḷi Sūranna’s

seventeenth-century Telugu Rāghavapāṇḍavīyamu (On Rāghava and the Pāṇḍavas), which

narrates episodes from the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata simultaneously; the seventeenth-

century Marathi Mahābhārata of Mukteśvar, who was the grandson of the renowned bhakti poet

Eknāth; and the eighteenth-century Giān Prabodh (Awakening of Knowledge), a composition

contained within the Bhasha Dasam Granth attributed to the tenth Sikh guru, Guru Gobind Singh

(1666–1708), that relates several stories involving Yudhiṣṭhira and other Mahābhārata figures.

By the end of the eighteenth century, the celestial serpent Śeṣanāga would certainly have been

groaning under the burden of many Mahābhāratas in regional South Asian languages.

Ramanujan, “Three Hundred Rāmāyaṇas,” 24. Also see Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, 1.17.

Let me list them again here in roughly chronological order: (1) Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century Tamil Pārataveṇpā,

(2) Pampa’s tenth-century Kannada Vikramārjunavijayam, (3) Ranna’s eleventh-century Sāhasabhīmavijayam, (4)

Nannaya’s eleventh-century portion of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu, (5) Tikkana’s thirteenth-century portion of the

Telugu Mahābhāratamu, (6) Pukaḻēnti’s thirteenth-century Tamil Naḷaveṇpā, (7–8) Haribar Bipra’s fourteenth-

century Assamese Babhruvāhanar Yuddha and Tāmradhvajar Yuddha, (9) Ĕṛṛāpragaḍa’s fourteenth-century portion

of the Telugu Mahābhāratamu, (10) Cĕṟuśśeri’s fifteenth-century Malayalam Bhāratagātha, (11) Śankaran’s

fifteenth-century Malayalam Bhāratamāla, (12) Kumāravyāsa’s Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, (13)

Lakṣmīśa’s fifteenth-century Kannada Jaiminibhāratam, (14) Kabi Sañjay’s fifteenth-century Bengali

Mahābhārata, (15) Sāraḷādāsa’s fifteenth-century Oriya Mahābhārata, (16) Lakhansenī’s fifteenth-century Bhasha

Virāṭparv, (17) Viṣṇudās’s fifteenth-century Bhasha Pāṇḍavcarit, (18) Bhīm Kavi’s fifteenth-century Bhasha

Ḍaṅgvaikathā, (19) Carigoṇḍa Dharmanna’s sixteenth-century Telugu Citrabhāratamu, (20) Ativīrarāmaṉ’s

sixteenth-century Tamil Naiṭatam, (21) Ayyanappiḷḷa Āśān’s sixteenth-century Bhāratam Pāṭṭu, (22) Tuñcattŭ

Ĕḻuttacchan’s sixteenth-century Bhāratam, (23) Rāma Sarasvatī’s sixteenth-century Assamese Mahābhārata, (24)

the seventeenth-century Tamil Pañcapāṇṭavar Vaṉavācam, (25) the seventeenth-century Konkani Bhārata, (26)

Kāśīrāmdās’s seventeenth-century Bengali Mahābhārata, (27) Kulapati Miśra’s seventeenth-century Bhasha

Śaṅgrāmsār, (28) Tursīdās’s seventeenth-century Bhasha Itihās Sammucay, (29) Bhagvāndās’s seventeenth-century

Bhasha Jaimanī Aśvamedh, and (30) Bulākīdās’s seventeenth-century Bhasha Pāṇḍavpurāṇ.

See Deven M. Patel, “Source, Exegesis, and Translation: Sanskrit Commentary and Regional Language

Translation in South Asia,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 131, no. 2 (2011): 247; Bronner, Extreme

Poetry, 134; Jon Milton Keune, “Eknāth Remembered and Reformed: Bhakti, Brahmans, and Untouchables in

Marathi Historiography,” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2011), 66; and Robin Rinehart, Debating the Dasam

Granth (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 28.

229

In the Introduction, I noted that this project began with two questions: (1) Why was the

Mahābhārata retold in regional languages at specific moments in premodern South Asian

history? And (2) Was the Mahābhārata retold in different regional South Asian languages for

similar purposes? My comparative study of Villi’s Tamil Pāratam and Cauhān’s Bhasha

Mahābhārat in this dissertation has provided us with one (but not the only) answer to these

questions: at various points in premodern South Asian history, the Mahābhārata epic narrative

was retold in different regional South Asian languages in order to express bhakti or “devotion.”

In Chapter One, I demonstrated that the Krishna of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata is a

confounding character who is clearly not the protagonist of this ancient epic. Yet I also detailed

how two premodern Sanskrit intellectuals from opposite ends of South Asia––the ninth-century

Kashmiri literary theoretician Ānandavardhana and the thirteenth-century South Indian Vaiṣṇava

philosopher Madhva––each argue that Krishna is at the heart of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata by

drawing on the representations of this deity in other Sanskrit kṛṣṇacaritas or works that relate

“the deeds of Krishna.” Chapter Two revealed the shared narrative strategies that both Villi and

Cauhān use to transform the overwhelmingly violent story of the Sanskrit epic into a devotional

kṛṣṇacarita. But while the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat are both bhakti narrative

poems that revolve around Krishna, each of these regional Mahābhārata retellings also speak to

specific local audiences. Chapters Three and Four focused on how Villi and Cauhān each anchor

their Mahābhāratas in specific regional Vaiṣṇava bhakti literary cultures: the South Indian

Śrīvaiṣṇava tradition for Villi and Tulsīdās’s Bhasha corpus of Rāmāyaṇa poems for Cauhān.

Let me pause here and point out that Villi and Cauhān are not the only premodern poets

to reframe their Mahābhārata retellings in regional languages as devotional kṛṣṇacaritas. In the

Introduction, I noted that Krishna is a key figure in Haribar Bipra’s fourteenth-century Assamese

Tāmradhvajar Yuddha and Sāraḷādāsa’s fifteenth-century Oriya Mahābhārata, and I described in

detail in Chapter Three how the earliest regional Mahābhārata, Peruntēvaṉār’s ninth-century

Tamil Pārataveṇpa, is a Śrīvaiṣṇava bhakti poem that centers around Māl, the distinctly Tamil

form of Viṣṇu. A regional form of Viṣṇu is also the focus of another premodern South Indian

Mahābhārata: Kumāravyāsa’s fifteenth-century Kannada Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī. Ten

verses before describing Śeṣanāga “groaning under the burden” of poets who retell the

Rāmāyaṇa, Kumāravyāsa informs us that the “bard” of his retelling is Vīranārāyaṇa and

Kumāravyāsa is only the “scribe.”

Sheldon Pollock explains that “the hero” of the

Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī “is the god Viṣṇu himself, though now Viṣṇu in a localized form–

–Vīranārāyaṇa of Gadag, the poet’s native town in northern Karnataka.”

Visitors to the

Vīranārāyaṇa Temple in Gadag today can view the Kumāravyāsa stambhā or “pillar” which

supposedly marks the spot where the poet composed the Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī.

Kumāravyāsa goes on to state that his Mahābhārata will “narrate the story of Krishna.”

Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, 1.7.

Pollock, Language of the Gods, 363.

Shrinivas Ritti, “Mahābhārata in Early Kannada Literature,” in Mahābhārata: The End of an Era (Yugānta), ed.

Ajay Mitra Shastri (Shimla: India Institute of Advanced Study, 2004), 361.

Kumāravyāsa, Karṇāṭabhāratakathāmañjarī, 1.13, trans. D. Seshagiri Rao in Kumaravyasa Mahabharata, 4.

230

As Rich Freeman notes, Tuñcattŭ Ĕḻuttacchan, the composer of the sixteenth-century

Bhāratam, is often referred to as the “father of Malayalam.”

A. Harindranath and A.

Purushothaman point out that throughout the Bhāratam “every time the poet hears Kṛṣṇa’s name,

he enters into a trance and an overflow of hymns to Kṛṣṇa follows.”

Pradip Bhattacharya

describes Kāśīrāmdās’s seventeenth-century poem as “the most popular Bengali” retelling of the

Mahābhārata and a text in which “the influence of Chaitanya’s Vaishnavism is prominent.”

Elements of the theology of Caitanya and the Gauḍīya sampradāya abound in Kāśīrāmdās’s

composition. Ayesha Irani explains that in the Gauḍīya sampradāya “the chanting of Hari’s

name was a powerful mobilizing force” and “for Caitanya, the collective singing of Hari’s name

was the preeminent means of salvation.”

Kāśīrāmdās’s Mahābhārata opens with a meditation

on the power of the name of Hari. The Bengali poet explains that all the important scriptures

(śāstra), such as the Rāmāyaṇa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa, commence with Hari’s name and he

describes the potency of the two syllables (ha and ri) that comprise the word Hari.

The

premodern regional Mahābhārata retellings of Peruntēvaṉār, Haribar Bipra, Sāraḷādāsa,

Kumāravyāsa, Villi, Tuñcattŭ Ĕḻuttacchan, Kāśīrāmdās, and Cauhān all reveal that there was a

continuous centering of this epic narrative around Krishna throughout the Indian subcontinent.

My study of the Tamil Pāratam and the Bhasha Mahābhārat in this dissertation,

however, also showed that both Villi and Cauhān claim courtly patrons in their Mahābhārata

retellings. Drawing on the theoretical conceptualizations of Dominick LaCapra, I suggested that

the references to Varapati Āṭkoṇṭāṉ in the Pāratam and Mitrasen and Aurangzeb in the

Mahābhārat might not be documenting historical patronage relationships. But whether Villi and

Cauhān were actually patronized by royal rulers or not, what is clear is that both of these poets

are placing their Mahābhāratas in courtly milieus. Chapter Five demonstrated that Villi’s

Pāratam is a markedly Śrīvaiṣṇava peruṅkāppiyam/mahākāvya, a genre that is frequently

associated with courtly life. In Chapter Six, I discussed the distinct intersection of courtly and

devotional worlds in the eight dated prologues of Cauhān’s Mahābhārat in which the praise of

Mitrasen and Aurangzeb is juxtaposed with the worship of Krishna and Rāma.

As I noted in the Introduction, Sheldon Pollock has argued in his influential and

remarkable work, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture, and Power

in Premodern India (2006), that several of the earliest Mahābhāratas in regional languages are

non-religious texts that claim to have been composed in courtly contexts. These Mahābhāratas

include Pampa’s Vikramārjunavijayam, Ranna’s Sāhasabhīmavijayam, Nannaya’s portion of the

Mahābhāratamu, and Viṣṇudās’s Pāṇḍavcarit. In this dissertation, I introduced readers to two

more premodern regional Mahābhāratas that make courtly patronage claims. But I also showed

Rich Freeman, The Literature of Hinduism in Malayalam,” in The Blackwell Companion to Hinduism, ed. Gavin

Flood (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2003), 173.

Harindranath and Purushothaman, “Mahābhārata Variations in Malayalam.”

Bhattacharya, “Variations on Vyasa,” 95.

Irani, The Muhammad Avatāra, 253.

Kāśīrāmdās, Mahābhārata 1.14–16. I am following: Kāśīrāmdās, Ādiparba, ed. Haraprasād Śāstrī (Calcutta:

Aryan Press, 1929).

I am grateful to Christopher Diamond for examining this section of Kāśīrāmdās’s text and sharing his thoughts.

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that while Villi and Cauhān place their Mahābhāratas in courtly settings, both poets also make it

abundantly clear that their retellings are steeped in local Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions.

And once again, the retellings of Villi and Cauhān are not the only regional

Mahābhāratas that exhibit a clear overlapping of courtly and devotional concerns. In the

Introduction, I noted that both Peruntēvaṉār’s Pārataveṇpa and Haribar Bipra’s Tāmradhvajar

Yuddha are bhakti Mahābhāratas that are thought to have been composed in courtly milieus. I

also mentioned Rāma Sarasvatī’s sixteenth-century Assamese Mahābhārata, a retelling that

Rāma Sarasvatī states was commissioned by the Koch king Naranārāyaṇa. He tells us:

Hail Naranārāyaṇa, the crest-jewel of kings,

great friend of the Vaiṣṇavas, a fire to his enemies.

With the greatest affection he gave me a command, [saying],

“Render the essence of the Bhārata into Assamese verse.

In my palace there are numerous grammars and commentaries,

I give them all to you, take them to your home.”

When king said this, bullocks were yoked

and he had all the books sent to my place.

Note that Rāma Sarasvatī describes Naranārāyaṇa as a “great friend of the Vaiṣṇavas.” In his

study of Rāma Sarasvatī’s Book of the Forest (Banaparba), William Smith explains that this

Assamese Mahābhārata retelling is filled with local expressions of Vaiṣṇava bhakti:

Rāma Sarasvatī refers to the Pāṇḍavas as (parama) Vaiṣṇavas and saints (santa) and calls his

Bana parba a tale of saints, santara caritra. He continually reminds his listeners of the unending

travail and dangers the Pāṇḍavas face in the “terrible forest” (ghora bana) and the suffering

which they are only able to endure because of their profound faith in Kṛṣṇa. As Vaiṣṇavas they

have nothing to fear, since Yama has no power over them and anyone foolish enough to harm a

Vaiṣṇava would soon suffer the consequences.

When we turn to premodern retellings that were composed in Sanskrit, we find that

bhakti also plays an important role in multiple Sanskrit Mahābhāratas that are associated with

courtly contexts. Consider Kṣemendra’s eleventh-century poem, the Bhāratamañjarī (Essence of

the Bhārata). Jonathan Geen points out that Kṣemendra “studied under the polymath and genius

Abhinavagupta, and served in the royal court of King Ananta of Kashmir (1029–1064 CE). It is

said that Kṣemendra was a devotee of Śiva, but later became a Vaiṣṇava Bhāgavata under the

influence of the teachings of Somācārya.”

Ashutosh Dayal Mathur observes that in the

Bhāratamañjarī, Kṣemendra describes his Mahābhārata as the “story of Viṣṇu” (viṣṇukathā).

In Chapter Three, I noted that three of the most famous examples of the Sanskrit

mahākāvya genre (Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya, Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha, and Śrīharṣa’s

Rāma Sarasvatī, Mahābhārata 3935–37, trans. Smith in “Burden of the Forest,” 93.

Smith, 104.

Geen “Marriage of Draupadī,” 300.

Ashutosh Dayal Mathur, “The Mahabharata in the Sanskrit Poetry Tradition” (paper presented at the International

Meet on the Mahabharata, Tirur, Kerala, India, December 20, 2018).

232

Naiṣadhīyacarita) are retellings of Mahābhārata episodes. Recall that the term mahākāvya is

frequently translated as “court epic” or “court poem.” Indira Viswanathan Peterson describes the

author of the Kirātārjunīya as a “court poet” and notes that “Bhāravi is named as a great classical

poet in an inscription of 634 A.D. of the Chalukya king Pulakesin II, who ruled in the Deccan

region of South India.”

Yet while Peter Khoroche claims that the Kirātārjunīya “is not

primarily a religious hymn,” Peterson demonstrates that the climax of Bhāravi’s mahākāvya

“shares motifs and images with early bhakti devotional literature,” specifically the works of the

“Tamil Śaiva authors of the Tēvāram hymns.”

Peterson informs us that in the final scene of the

Kirātārjunīya “the heroic-devotional tableau of Arjuna grasping Śiva’s feet in midair is an apt

metaphor for Bhāravi’s approach to rasa and bhakti in his poem: in this visual double-entendre

(śleṣa) the poet achieves a classical suspension of the two values and themes.”

In his study of

the intertextual relationship between Bhāravi’s Kirātārjunīya and Māgha’s Śiśupālavadha,

Hermann Jacobi suggests that Bhāravi’s mahākāvya, which tells the story of Krishna slaying

Śiśupāla, may be a response to the overtly Śaiva content of the earlier Kirātārjunīya.

Although

Paul Dundas asserts that the Śiśupālavadha “is not a ‘religious’ poem as such,” Lawrence

McCrea states that “Māgha’s Kṛṣṇa is both unambiguously the protagonist of his work” and

“fully aware of his own divinity.”

McCrea does admit that “given his central and dominating

presence in the Śiśupālavadha, it is extraordinary how little Kṛṣṇa actually says and does in the

course of the poem,” but he also points out that the sixth and seventh chapters of the Māgha’s

Sanskrit mahākāvya “are explicitly framed as a devotional episode.”

Thus, when we survey the many Mahābhāratas of premodern South Asia that were

composed by poets working in regional languages as well as in Sanskrit, we find several

retellings of the epic––including those by Villi, Cauhān, Peruntēvaṉār, Haribar Bipra, Rāma

Sarasvatī, Kṣemendra, Bhāravi, and Māgha––that all seriously challenge the current systematic

separating of religious literature and courtly literature in the field of South Asian Studies.

With the rise of the British Raj in the nineteenth century, courtly institutions came to hold

much less political power in modern South Asia than they once did. Modern Mahābhārata

retellings, however, continued to (and still continue to) display both religious and political

concerns. In her study of Hindi Mahābhāratas composed prior to India’s independence, Pamela

Lothspeich argues that the Mahābhārata tradition underwent a major transformation towards the

end of the colonial era in South Asia in which the epic was “reimagined as the primordial

textbook of Indian national history and repository of national culture. The main story of the epic,

an all-out battle between mostly good cousin brothers (with God on their side) and mostly evil

cousin brothers so conveniently captured the essence of the struggle between Indian nationalists

Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 3.

Peter Khoroche, “Pace and Pattern in the Kirātārjunīya,” in Innovations and Turning Points: Towards a History

of Kāvya Literature, ed. Yigal Bronner, David Shulman, and Gary Tubb (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2014),

122: and Peterson, Design and Rhetoric, 171.

Peterson, 184.

Hermann Jacobi, “Bhāravi and Māgha,” Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 3 (1889): 135.

Dundas, introduction to Māgha, Killing of Shishupala, xxv; and McCrea, “Conquest of Cool,” 125.

McCrea, 130 and 136.

233

and the colonial regime.”

Some of the depictions of Krishna in the late colonial period in South

Asia do not resemble those we find in premodern bhakti poems. As Ahona Panda has recently

shown, in the Kṛṣṇacaritra (Deeds of Krishna, 1886) of the Bengali litterateur Baṅkimcandra

Cattopadhyāy, “Bankim’s characterization of Kṛṣṇa differs significantly from that which we find

in the Vaiṣṇava bhakti traditions of the Bengal countryside.”

Panda explains that throughout

the Kṛṣṇacaritra, Baṅkim is focused on “humanizing Kṛṣṇa by situating him historically” and

analyzing his character in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Lothspeich adds that some Hindi poets,

such as Ayodhyāsingh Upādhyāy “Hairaudh” in his Priyapravās (Absence of the Beloved,

1914), “followed suit in appropriating the ‘historical’ Kṛṣṇa of the epic.”

In some anti-colonial Mahābhāratas, however, we find expressions of bhakti to Krishna

alongside allegorical messages about the oppression of the British Raj. Take Maithilīśaraṇ

Gupt’s Hindi poem Jayadrath Vadh (Slaying of Jayadratha, 1910), a retelling of the story from

the Mahābhārata in which Arjuna seeks revenge against Jayadratha for the role he played in

killing Arjuna’s son Abhimanyu during the Battle of Kurukṣetra. Lothspeich notes that in

Jayadrath Vadh, Gupt casts “Abhimanyu as an ideal Hindu character to inspire India’s male

youth both to reform Indian society and to engage in the struggle for independence in some

capacity.”

But Lothspeich also shows that “although vir ras (the sentiment of heroism) is the

predominant ras of Jayadrath-vadh, at times bhakti ras (the sentiment of devotion) takes center

stage.”

She directs us to Gupt’s presentation of the scene in which Arjuna expresses his

gratitude to Krishna for taking him to Śiva to obtain the weapons he needs to defeat Jayadratha:

Then Pārtha, moved and brimming with devotion, spoke these words,

‘O omniscient Hari, your divine magic [līlā] is amazing!

Who besides you could deliver me from this misfortune?

Who besides you could reveal everything and remove all of my suffering?

I will never forget what you showed me today.

Will such a vision ever appear before my eyes again?’

Saying this, Pārtha fell at Hari’s feet.

Then the Lord showed him ever-new expressions of love [prem bhav].

Lothspeich, Epic Nation, 213.

Ahona Panda, “How to Be Political without Being Polemical: The Debate between Bankimchandra

Chattopadhyay and Rabindranath Tagore over the Kṛṣṇacaritra,” in Many Mahābhāratas, ed. Nell Shapiro Hawley

and Sohini Sarah Pillai (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2021), 283.

Panda, 285.

Pamela Lothspeich, “The Mahābhārat in Hindi Literature (1910–1940) and Hindu National Identity,” (PhD diss.,

Columbia University, 2003), 23.

Pamela Lothspeich, “The Mahābhārata as National History and Allegory in Modern Tales of Abhimanyu,”

Bulletin of SOAS 71, no.2 (2008): 294.

Lothspeich, “Mahābhārat in Hindi,” 149.

Maithilīśaraṇ Gupt, Jayadrath Vadh 56, trans. Lothspeich in “Mahābhārat in Hindi,” 151. For the Hindi text, I am

following: Maithilīśaraṇ Gupt, Jayadrath-vadh: Khaṇḍa Kāvya (Ciragamv: Sāhitya-Sadana, 1966).

234

Two years after the publication of Jayadrath Vadh, the Tamil poet Cuppiramaṇiya Pārati,

more commonly known as Pāratiyār, composed another anti-colonial Mahābhārata poem:

Pāñcāli Capatam (Pāñcālī’s Vow, 1912). As Richard Frasca notes, in Pāratiyār’s Tamil retelling

of the disrobing of Draupadī “the victimized Draupadi is the symbol of India and Duryodhana

and his brothers the symbol of their colonial oppressor.”

Pāratiyār makes it clear that Draupadī

is a representation of Mother India and after Duḥśāsana fails to disrobe her, Pāratiyār describes

the gods in heaven raining flowers down on her and proclaiming “Victory! Victory to the power

of Bhārata!” (jeya jeya pārata cakti).

While the word “Bhārata” can refer to the Mahābhārata

or a member of the Bhārata clan, in modern South Asia Bhārata is a common synonym for India.

But despite its strong anti-British agenda, Pāñcāli Capatam is not devoid of bhakti. In Chapter

Two I explained that while Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna is not found in the disrobing scene in

the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the plea that the Pāṇḍavas’ wife addresses to

Krishna is an integral part of the dice game episode in many Mahābhāratas across South Asia.

Pāratiyār dedicates seven verses to Draupadī’s prayer, and each verse is filled with familiar

images of Vaiṣṇava bhakti. Just take the first two verses of Draupadī’s prayer:

‘Hari, Hari, Hari!’ she called. ‘Kanna!

Refuge, refuge! I seek refuge in you!

You showed grace on the elephant and

Killed the crocodile in the lake that day!

Oh you, the dark hued one who once

Danced on the hood of the fearsome Kaliya!

You who are the Absolute Being, Kanna!

You are the essence beyond the sacred texts!

You who bears the whirling disc, Kanna!

With the matchless Sarang bow in hand

You are the meaning in words, Kanna!

You, the child so fond of sweetened rice!

You will dispel all sorrow, merciful Kanna!

Wipe the tears from your devotees’ eyes!

You who provides succor to the faithful,

Who created the four-faced reciter of the Vedas.’

If we turn to more recent Mahābhāratas, we continue to see retellings of this narrative

with strong political messages and vivid presentations of bhakti. One of the most popular post-

independence Mahābhāratas is undoubedtly the Hindi Mahābhārat television serial that was

broadcast from 1988 to 1990 on Doordarshan, the national television network of India. In her

ethnographic study of the viewing of Doordarshan television programs among middle-class

women in Delhi, Purnima Mankekar discusses “the Indian nation-state’s attempts to use

Richard A. Frasca, “Pāñcāli Capatam (The Vow of Draupadi): Images of Ritual and Political Liberation in Tamil

Theatre,” The Drama Review 38, no.2 (1994): 99.

Cuppiramaṇiya Pārati, Pāñcāli Capatam 302. This is my own translation. I am following: Cuppiramaṇiya Pārati,

Pāñcāli Capatam (Panchali’s Pledge, trans. Usha Rajagopalan (Gurgaon: Hachette India, 2012).

Cuppiramaṇiya Pārati, Pāñcāli Capatam 293–94, trans. Rajagopalan in Pārati, Panchali’s Pledge, 255.

235

Doordarshan to construct a hegemonic, pan-Indian ‘national culture.’”

Based on interviews

with her ethnographic subjects as well as with B.R. Chopra, Rahi Masoom Raza, and Satish

Bhatnagar (the director, script writer, and researcher of the serial) about the depiction of

Draupadī’s disrobing in the forty-seventh episode of the television show, Mankekar demonstrates

“how the creators and Hindu viewers of Doordarshan’s Mahabharat participated through their

divergent readings in the reconstitution of Draupadi as a symbol of Indian Womanhood.”

But Mankekar’s description of the disrobing episode of the television show also makes it

clear that the Hindi Mahābhārat is presenting Draupadī’s prayer to Krishna as a bhakt tableau:

She struggles, then pauses with her sari between her teeth and, with her hands folded, starts to

pray to Lord Krishna … Dushasana, to the loud, contemptuous laughter of Duryodhana and his

supporters, continues to pull her sari. But the sounds of their laughter are soon drowned by the

ringing of temple bells and the blowing of conches. Lord Krishna has intervened: we see his face

in the upper left corner of the frame. He smiles down at Draupadi beatifically, reassuringly; saris

begin to flow from his palm, which he raises in blessing. As Dushasana pulls off one sari, another

drapes Draupadi’s body… All we hear for a while is Draupadi’s voice praying to Krishna and the

music of temple bells, conches, and drums.

In his work on Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat, Chinmay Sharma has observed that this television

serial incorporates several iconic stories about Krishna’s youth from well-known devotional

kṛṣṇacaritas. These stories are absent from the critical edition of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata.

Episode[s] 10 to 18 break completely with the modern critical edition in order to narrate episodes

of Krishna’s birth and childhood, including the incarceration of Krishna’s parents by his uncle

Kansa, Krishna’s father miraculously smuggling the baby out of the prison, Krishna’s childhood

mischief and exploits with demons and village girls, and Krishna finally defeating Kansa.

Episode[s] 18 to 31 show the Pandavas and their cousins [the] Kauravas growing up in the royal

household of Hastinapur, interspersing those scenes with shots of Krishna growing up as well.

In the decades since the first airing of Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat serial, there have been

many other Mahābhārata television shows including 9X’s Kahānī Hamāre Mahābhārat Kī (Our

Story of the Mahābhārata, 2008), Star Plus’s Mahābhārat (2013–2014), and Epic TV’s

Dharmakṣetra (Field of Dharma, 2014–2015) in Hindi, and Sun TV’s Makāpāratam (2013–

2016) in Tamil. Reed Burnam notes that as with Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat, Kahānī Hamāre

Mahābhārat Kī devotes several episodes to Krishna’s childhood: “much as in Chopra’s earlier

serial, the large amount of focus on Krishna’s earlier life weaves scenes from the Bhagavata

Purana and Harivamsha texts into the main narrative early on, and serves to bring an elevated

Purnima Mankekar, Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation

in Postcolonial India (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 255.

Mankekar, 224.

Mankekar, 231–32.

Chinmay Sharma, “Many Mahabharatas: Linking Mythic Re-Tellings in Contemporary India,” (PhD diss.,

University of London: SOAS, 2017), 69.

236

Vaishnava focus to the story at large.”

This is also true for Sun TV’s Tamil Makāpāratam and

Star Plus’s Hindi Mahābhārat, which both use multiple episodes to narrate Krishna’s

adolescence.

As I pointed out in Chapter Two, Makāpāratam also incorporates a devotional

story about Krishna found in many Tamil Mahābhāratas (including Villi’s) in which Krishna

takes on sixteen thousand forms and Sahadeva binds the deity with just his mind.

It is also worth noting that Star Plus’s Hindi Mahābhārat begins and ends with Krishna.

The first episode of the television serial opens with the meeting of the Pāṇḍavas’ ancestor

Śaṃtanu and his second wife Satyavatī. At the end of this encounter, we see a peacock feather

(the traditional adornment of Krishna’s crown) on the riverbank where Śaṃtanu and Satyavatī

are sitting being picked up by the wind and carried to a luscious forest grove in which Krishna is

playing his flute. We then hear the following lyrics in Bhasha being sung in the background:

Krishna, beguiler of the mind, my Kānha, my Krishna.

The one who lifted Mount Govardhana, Krishna, Krishna.

The one with a peacock feather on his crown, Krishna, Krishna.

Krishna, Krishna, he is Krishna, Krishna.

Krishna goes on to introduce the Mahābhārata to the viewers and throughout the show’s other

episodes, he appears as a narrator offering commentary on the events of the epic.

The final shot

in the last episode is of Krishna smiling serenely at the camera after Yudhiṣṭhira’s coronation.

We find something very similar in Dharmakṣetra, a television serial in which all of the

main characters of the Mahābhārata appear in Dharmakṣetra, the celestial court of Citragupta

who is the record keeper of Yama, the god of death. All the characters are put on trial and must

explain why they think they deserve a spot in heaven based on their actions during their time on

earth. The first episode is the trial of Draupadī, but in the beginning of the episode she is absent

from Citragupta’s court.

Instead we see her standing by a river looking distressed until she

Reed Ethan Burnam, “Not Simply for Entertainment: The Failure of Kahani Hamare Mahabharat Ki and its Place

in a New Generation of Televised Indian Mythology,” (master’s thesis, University of Texas at Austin, 2010), 54.

In Sun TV’s Makāpāratam, these episodes are the seventeenth, nineteenth, twentieth, twenty-second, twenty-

third, twenty-fourth, and twenty-fifth episodes. In Star Plus’s Mahābhārat, these episodes are the thirteenth episode

of season seventeen, the first through sixth episodes of season eighteen, and the first episode of season nine.

kṛṣṇa manamohana more kānha more kṛṣṇa

govardhana giridhārī kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa

mora mukuṭa siradhārī kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa

kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa vo haiṃ kṛṣṇa kṛṣṇa

Mahābhārat, “Season 1, Episode 1,” aired September 16, 2013, on Star Plus, Hotstar,

https://www.hotstar.com/us/tv/mahabharat/435/shantanu-accepts-bhishma-as-son/1000011769.

For examples of this, see Star Plus, “Krishna Seekh,” Hotstar,

https://www.hotstar.com/us/tv/mahabharat/435/list/krishna-seekh/t-2154.

Mahābhārat, “Season 28, Episode 3,” aired August 16, 2014, on Star Plus, Hotstar,

https://www.hotstar.com/us/tv/mahabharat/435/gandhari-curses-krishna/1000012035.

Dharmakṣetra, “Episode 1,” aired November 18, 2014, on Epic TV, Amazon Prime Video,

https://www.amazon.com.

237

hears a flute and turns around to see Krishna. The deity assuages Draupadī’s fears and escorts

her to Dharmakṣetra. The final episode is the trial of Krishna, and the god is accused of many

transgressions including his role in the deaths of Droṇa and Duryodhana and his inability to

prevent the massive carnage of the Battle of Kurukṣetra.

Yet Krishna is easily able to address

each of the accusations and Citragupta and all those present at Dharmakṣetra are satisfied. The

final image of the show is of all the characters gathered around Krishna with their hands joined

together in prayer while Krishna lifts his right hand up in blessing.

The increased presence of Krishna in Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat, 9X’s Kahānī Hamāre

Mahābhārat Kī, Star Plus’s Mahābhārat, Epic TV’s Dharmakṣetra, and Sun TV’s Makāpāratam

all indicate that Krishna is seen as an integral part of the Mahābhārata tradition across

contemporary India. Therefore, when we encounter modern Mahābhāratas in which Krishna is

missing, his absence is felt quite heavily. But sometimes Krishna’s absence is used by the

creators of modern Mahābhārata to send specific political and social messages.

As with Doordarshan’s first Mahābhārat serial, Doordarshan Kisan’s Hindi television

serial Draupadī (2016) presents the heroine of the epic praying to Krishna during her attempted

disrobing.

In a marked departure from the earlier iconic Hindi serial, however, Krishna does

not appear in the upper left corner of the screen with saris flowing from his hand in Doordarshan

Kisan’s Draupadī as he does in Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat. In the more recent show, when

Draupadī closes her eyes and begins to chant Krishna’s name, we see all the women of the Kuru

clan who have been watching the dice game from a balcony in the assembly hall close their eyes

as well.

Then, for a fleeting second, images of Krishna appear over the hearts of these royal

women. When Duḥśāsana begins to pull at Draupadī’s sari, Satyavatī, the Kauravas’ mother

Gāndhārī, Duryodhana’s wife Bhānumatī, and all the Kauravas’ wives pull off their own saris

and fling them over the balcony to Draupadī who uses them to cover herself. When the Kaurava

women run out of saris and are left standing only in their petticoats and blouses, Bhānumatī runs

to her bedroom and grabs a yellow sari that Krishna had given her as a wedding gift. Bhānumatī

throws the sari over the balcony and the sight of Draupadī draped in this garment in Krishna’s

signature color deters Duḥśāsana from trying to disrobe her further. While the words rādhe kṛṣṇa

gopāla kṛṣṇa “Rādhā’s Krishna, Gopāla Krishna,” are chanted repeatedly in the background

during this sequence, the audience of this serial cannot help but ask if is it Krishna who has

saved Draupadī or is it the combined effort of all the Kaurava women? Are the creators of

Draupadī presenting this scene as an example of Draupadī’s bhakti for Krishna or as an example

of women coming together to protect each other from sexual assault?

Krishna is also noticeably absent from a recent political cartoon depicting Draupadī’s

disrobing that was shared over two thousand times on Twitter in March of this year.

The artist

of this political cartoon is clearly inspired by the presentation of this scene in Doordarshan’s

Dharmakṣetra, “Episode 26,” aired May 11, 2015, on Epic TV, Amazon Prime Video, https://www.amazon.com.

Doordarshan Kisan is one of Doordarshan’s multiple national channels. The target audience of this Doordarshan

channel is supposedly farmers in India, hence the name Kisan (kisān) or “farmer.”

DD Kisan, “Draupadi - Vastra Haran, Mahabharat Stories, Episode 93” YouTube video, 23:44, July 13, 2016,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoII5PP_HzY&t=82s.

PenPencilDraw, Twitter post, March 2, 2021, 4:07 AM,

https://twitter.com/penpencildraw/status/1366676463924224000.

238

Mahābhārat. Draupadī is wearing a yellow sari that mirrors the one her counterpart wears in the

serial and Duḥśāsana is sporting the same gaudy, giant, golden crown that he wears in

Doordarshan’s Mahābhārat.

Although this episode first aired over thirty years ago in 1989, the

show was re-broadcast during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. 22.9 million viewers watched

the finale of the show on the Doordarshan Bharati network during the pandemic.

Thus it is not

surprising that the artist of this political cartoon draws inspiration from Doordarshan’s

Mahābhārat. Draupadī’s hands are joined in prayer in the political cartoon as Duḥśāsana tugs at

her sari, but Krishna is nowhere to be seen. Instead, in the upper right corner we see a judge in

black robes sitting on a raised bench with a gavel asking Duḥśāsana, “So will you marry her?”

This political cartoon is a response to the comments of Chief Justice Sharad Bobde, a

member of the Indian Supreme Court. In the beginning of March of this year, thousands of

people in India demanded that Justice Bobde resign after he told a man who raped a sixteen-year-

old-girl “If you want to marry (her) we can help you. If not, you lose your job and go to jail.”

The survivor and her family had initially not gone to the police because the rapist’s mother

promised that her son would marry the survivor. As journalist Gita Pandey points out, “in a

country where victims are often blamed for rape, and sexual assault carries lifelong stigma, her

family agreed to the arrangement.”

The rapist, however, married someone else, the survivor

went to the police, and they appeared before Justice Bobde. This political cartoon brings up

several important questions. Draupadī is clearly praying in this political cartoon, but who is she

praying to? Is Krishna choosing not to answer Draupadī’s plea? Is Krishna Justice Bobde? Is

having survivors marry their attackers the only way to save modern Draupadīs in India today?

In the first chapter of the first book of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the bard Ugraśravas

describes the epic he is about to narrate by saying: “poets have told it before, poets are telling it

now, other poets shall tell this history on earth in the future.”

For two thousand years, people

have been retelling the Mahābhārata using nearly every South Asian language and artistic genre.

This epic has sometimes been retold for religious purposes, sometimes for political purposes, and

sometimes for religious-and-political purposes. The Mahābhārata has an immensely potent

ascribable power and it will clearly continue to have this power in centuries to come.

Pen Bhakti, “Draupadī kā Vastraharaṇ, Mahabharat Stories, B.R. Chopra, Ep- 47,” YouTube video, 41:40,

December 26, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RajCJUdEDH8.

Shweta Keshri, “Mahabharat becomes the most-watched show,” India Today, May 22, 2020,

https://www.indiatoday.in/television/top-stories/story/mahabharat-becomes-the-most-watched-show-doordarshan-

witnesses-major-dip-in-ratings-1680680-2020-05-22.

Gita Pandey, “India Supreme Court: Calls for Justice Sharad Bobde to quit over rape remarks,” BBC, March 4,

2021, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-56263990.

Pandey, “India Supreme Court.”

MBh 1.1.24, trans. van Buitenen in Mahābhārata 1:21.

239

APPENDIX:

Glossary of Names

What follows is a glossary of the names of some of the characters and deities in the

Mahābhārata, the Rāmāyaṇa, and other South Asian narrative traditions.

Abhimanyu– the son of Arjuna and Subhadrā, the husband of Uttarā, the father of Parikṣit

Acyuta– a name of Viṣṇu/Krishna

Aditi– a Vedic goddess

Agastya– a sage

Aghāsura– a demon slain by Krishna

Agni– the Vedic deity of fire

Ahalyā– a woman Rāma liberates from a terrible curse, the wife of Gautama

Airāvata– the elephant of Indra

Ajamīḍha– a descendant of Bharata, an ancestor of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas

Ājamīḍhas– the descendants of Ajamīḍha

Ajāmila– a Brahmin who became a devotee of Viṣṇu on his deathbed

Aḻakar– a form of Viṣṇu worshipped in Madurai, the brother of Mīnākṣī

Alli– a Pandya warrior-queen of Madurai, a wife of Arjuna

Ambā– a princess who is reborn as Śikhaṇḍinī before transforming into Śikhaṇḍin, the sister of

Ambālikā and Ambikā

Ambālikā– the wife of Vicitravīrya, the mother of Pāṇḍu, the sister of Ambā and Ambikā

Ambikā– the wife of Vicitravīrya, the mother of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the sister of Ambā and Ambālikā

Aniruddha– a grandson of Krishna

Aṇṇāmalaiyār– a form of Śiva worshipped in Tiruvannamali

Aravāṉ– the Tamil name of Irāvān

Arjuna– the third Pāṇḍava brother, the biological son of Indra and Kuntī

Arundhatī– the wife of Vasiṣṭha

Aśvasena– the son of the serpent king Takṣaka, an enemy of Arjuna

Aśvatthāman– the son of Droṇa, an ally of the Kauravas

Aśvins– the twin Vedic deities of healing, the fathers of Nakula and Sahadeva

Atri– a sage

Ayaṉ– a Tamil name of Brahmā

Babhruvāhana– the son of Arjuna and Citrāṅgadā

Bakāsura– (I) a demon slain by Bhīma

(II) a demon slain by Krishna

Balarāma– an incarnation of Viṣṇu, the older brother of Krishna and Subhadrā

Bāṇa– a demon slain by Krishna

In Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, Ambā is the wife of Vicitravīrya and the mother of Dhṛtarāṣṭra. See CM 1.9–12.

In Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, Ambālikā (not Ambā) is reborn as Śikhaṇḍinī. See CM 1.9–12.

In Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, Ambikā is the wife of Citrāṅgada (not Vicitravīrya) and the mother of Pāṇḍu. Ambālikā

(not Ambikā) is Pāṇḍu’s mother in most retellings of the epic. See CM 1.9–12.

240

Bhagadatta– the king of Pragjyotisha, an ally of the Kauravas

Bhagavān– “the blessed lord,” a name often used for Krishna/Viṣṇu

Bhānumatī– a wife of Duryodhana

Bharata– (I) the son of Śakuntalā and Duḥṣanta, the founder of the Bhārata Empire

(II) a brother of Rāma

Bhāratas– the descendants of Bharata (the founder of the Bhārata Empire)

Bhavānī– a name of Pārvatī

Bhīma– the second Pāṇḍava brother, the biological son of Vāyu and Kuntī

Bhīṣma– the son of Gaṅgā and Śaṃtanu, the great-uncle of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas

Bhūdevī– the goddess of the earth

Bībhatsu– a name of Arjuna (Vibhatsa in Bhasha)

Bijayi– see Vijaya

Brahmā– the deity of creation

Brahman– the ultimate reality of the universe, the Supreme God

Cānūra– a wrestler slain by Krishna

Citragupta– the record keeper of Yama

Citrāṅgada– the eldest son of Śaṃtanu and Satyavatī

Citrāṅgadā– a wife of Arjuna, the mother of Babhruvāhana

Citraratha– a gandharva (celestial musician)

Dakṣa– the father of Satī

Damayantī– a queen whose story is told in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the wife of Nala

Dambhodbhava– a king whose story is told in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Dāmodara– a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Dāruka– the charioteer of Krishna

Daśaratha– the father of Rāma

Dehalīśa– “lord on the porch,” a form of Viṣṇu worshipped in Tirukkovalur

Devakī– the biological mother of Krishna, the wife of Vasudeva

Dhanañjaya– a name of Arjuna

Dharma– (I) the Vedic deity of dharma, the father of Yudhiṣṭhira

(II) a name of Yudhiṣṭhira

Dharmarāja– “king of dharma,” a name of Yudhiṣṭhira

Dhārtarāṣṭras– the one hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Gāndhārī, the brothers of Duḥśalā and

Yuyutsu

Dhṛṣṭadyumna– the brother of Draupadī and Śikhaṇḍin, a son of Drupada

Dhṛtarāṣṭra– the blind father of the one hundred Kauravas, Duḥśalā, and Yuyutsu, the husband

of Gāndhārī, the brother of Pāṇḍu and Vidura, the son of Vyāsa and Ambikā

Dhruva– a devotee of Viṣṇu

Draupadeyas– the five sons of Draupadī

Draupadī– the shared wife of the Pāṇḍavas, a daughter of Drupada, the sister of

Dhṛṣṭadyumna, and Śikhaṇḍin

Droṇa– the teacher of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas, the father of Aśvatthāman

Drupada– the king of the Pāñcālas, the father of Draupadī, Dhṛṣṭadyumna, and Śikhaṇḍin

Duḥśalā– the daughter of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Gāndhārī, the sister of the one hundred Kauravas and

Yuyutsu, the wife of Jayadratha

See footnote 167 on page 154.

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Duḥśāsana– the second-eldest of the one hundred Kaurava brothers

Durgā– a goddess of war, a consort of Śiva

Durvāsas– a sage with a terrible temper

Duryodhana– the eldest of the one hundred Kaurava brothers

Dūṣaṇa– a demon slain by Rāma

Gajendra– an elephant king who Viṣṇu saves from a crocodile

Gālava– a student of Viśvāmitra

Gaṇapati– a name of Gaṇeśa

Gāndhārī– the wife of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, the mother of the one hundred Kauravas and Duḥśalā

Gaṇeśa– the elephant-headed remover of the obstacles, the first scribe of the Sanskrit

Mahābhārata, the son of Śiva and Pārvatī, the brother of Kārttikeya

Gaṅgā– the goddess of the Ganges River, the mother of Bhīṣma, the first wife of Śaṃtanu

Garuḍa– the divine eagle mount of Viṣṇu

Gautama– a sage, the husband of Ahalyā

Ghaṭotkaca– the half-demon son of Bhīma and Hiḍimbā

Giridhārī/Girivardhārī– “mountain lifter,” a name of Krishna

Girijā– a name of Pārvatī

Gopāla– “protector of cows,” a name of Krishna

Gopīs– the cowherdesses of Vrindavan

Govinda– “tender of cows,” a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Guha– the king of the Nishad community, a devotee of Rāma

Haladhara– a name of Balarāma

Halāyudha– a name of Balarāma

Hanumān– a monkey deity, the most famous and dedicated devotee of Rāma, the son of Vāyu,

the brother of Bhīma

Hara– a name of Śiva

Hari– a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu/Rāma

Hastin– an ancestor of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas

Hiḍimba– a demon slain by Bhīma, the brother of Hiḍimbā

Hiḍimbā– a demoness, the sister of Hiḍimba, a wife of Bhīma, the mother of Ghaṭotkaca

Himavat– the personification of the Himalayas, the father of Pārvatī and Gaṅgā

Hiraṇyakaśipu– a demon slain by Narasiṃha, the father of Prahlāda, the brother of Hiraṇyākṣa

Hiraṇyākṣa– a demon slain by Varāha, the brother of Hiraṇyakaśipu

Hṛṣīkeśa– a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Indra– the leader of the Vedic deities, the father of Arjuna

Irāvān– the half-serpent son of Arjuna and Ulūpī

Īśvara– a synonym for God which is used for both Śiva and Viṣṇu

Jagannātha– a deity worshiped in Puri who is sometimes identified with Krishna/Viṣṇu

Jamadagni– the father of Paraśurāma/Rāma Jāmadagnya

Jāmbavān– the king of the bears, an ally of Rāma, the father of Jāmbavatī

Jāmbavatī– a wife of Krishna, the daughter of Jāmbavān

Janaka– the father of Sītā

Janamejaya– the son of Parikṣit

Janārdana– a name of Viṣṇu/Krishna

Jarāsandha– the king of Magadha, an enemy of Krishna and the Pāṇḍavas

Jaṭāyū– a divine bird, an ally of Rāma

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Jayadratha– the husband of Duḥśalā, the brother-in-law of the one hundred Kauravas

Jiṣṇu– a name of Arjuna

Jīvantī– a prostitute who attained salvation by teaching her parrot to recite the name of Rāma

Kabandha– a demon slain by Rāma

Kālī– a fearsome goddess, a consort of Śiva

Kalki– the final incarnation of Viṣṇu who is yet to come

Kāmadeva– the god of love

Kaṃsa– Krishna’s relative (often identified as the brother of Devakī)

Kānha– a name of Krishna that is often used in Bhasha and other regional languages

Kaṇṇaṉ– a distinctly Tamil name of Krishna

Kapidhvaja– “monkey-bannered,” a name of Arjuna

Karṇa– the biological son of Sūrya and Kuntī, the closest friend of Duryodhana

Kārttikeya– the god of war, the son of Śiva and Pārvatī, the brother of Gaṇeśa

Kauravas

– the one hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Gāndhārī, also known as the Dhārtarāṣṭras,

the brothers of Duḥśalā and Yuyutsu

Kauśalyā– the mother of Rāma

Keśava– a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Keśī– a horse demon slain by Krishna

Khara– a demon slain by Rāma

Kīcaka– the brother-in-law of Virāṭa

Kirīṭa– see Kirīṭin

Kirīṭin– a name of Arjuna (Kirīṭin in Bhasha)

Kirmīra– a demon slain by Bhīma

Krishna (Kṛṣṇa)– (I) an incarnation of Viṣṇu, the maternal cousin and advisor of the Pāṇḍavas

(II) a name of Arjuna

Kṛṣṇadvaipāyana Vyāsa–– see Vyāsa

Kubera– the god of wealth

Kuvalayāpīḍa– an elephant slain by Krishna

Kumaraṉ– a name of Murukaṉ

Kumbhakarṇa– a demon slain by Rāma, a younger brother of Rāvaṇa

Kuntī– the first wife of Pāṇḍu, the biological mother of Karṇa, Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, and Arjuna,

the sister of Vasudeva, the paternal aunt of Krishna

Kuntibhoja– the adoptive father of Kuntī

Kūrma– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a tortoise

Kuru– a descendant of Bharata, an ancestor of the Kauravas and the Pāṇḍavas

Kurus– the descendants of Kuru

Kuśa– a son of Rāma and Sītā, the brother of Lava

Lakṣmaṇa– a brother of Rāma

Lakṣmī– the goddess of wealth and beauty, the consort of Viṣṇu, also known as Śrī

Lava– a son of Rāma and Sītā, the brother of Kuśa

Madanagopāla– a form of Krishna worshiped in Vrindavan

See footnote 57 on page 68.

Although the term “Kaurava” literally means “descendent of Kuru” and can thus technically refer to the Pāṇḍavas

as well, the name “Kaurava” usually refers to the one hundred sons of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Gāndhārī.

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Mādhava– “descendant of Madhu,” a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Madhu– (I) an ancestor of Krishna

(II) a demon slain by Viṣṇu

Madhusūdana– “destroyer of Madhu,” a name of Viṣṇu

Mādrī– the second wife of Pāṇḍu, the mother of Nakula and Sahadeva

Mahirāvaṇa– a demon defeated by Hanumān, a relative of Rāvaṇa

Māl– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māyaṉ, Māyavaṉ, Māyōṉ, Neṭumāl, and Tirumāl

Mallikārjuna– “lord white as Jasmine,” a Kannada name of Śiva

Mārīca– a demon slain by Rāma

Mārkaṇḍeya– a sage, a devotee of Śiva

Mātali– the charioteer of Indra

Matsya– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a fish

Māyaṉ– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māl, Māyavaṉ, Māyōṉ, Neṭumāl, and Tirumāl

Māyavaṉ– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māl, Māyaṉ, Māyōṉ, Neṭumāl, and Tirumāl

Māyōṉ– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māl, Māyavaṉ, Māyaṉ, Neṭumāl, and Tirumāl

Mayūradhvaja– a devotee of Krishna, the father of Tāmradhvaja

Mīnākṣī– a Pandya princess, a goddess worshiped in Madurai, the consort of Sundareśvara, the

sister of Aḻakar

Mohinī– a female form of Viṣṇu/Krishna, the wife of Aravāṉ in some Tamil traditions

Mukunda– a name of Krishna/Viṣṇu

Murukaṉ– an ancient and distinctly Tamil god, often equated with Kārttikeya

Nakula– the second youngest Pāṇḍava brother, the twin of Sahadeva, the biological son of the

Aśvins and Mādrī

Nala– a king whose story is told in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, the husband of Damayantī

Nanda/Nandagopa– the adoptive father of Krishna and Balarāma, Yaśodā’s husband

Nara– a sage and the companion of Nārāyaṇa

Nārada– a mischievous traveling sage, a devotee of Viṣṇu

Narasiṃha– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes on the form of a man-lion

Nārāyaṇa– (I) a name of Viṣṇu

(II) a sage and the companion of Nara

Naṭarāja– “lord of dance,” a form of Śiva

Neṭumāl– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māl, Māyaṉ, Māyavaṉ, Māyōṉ, and Tirumāl

Padmanābha– a name of Viṣṇu

Pāñcālas– the people of Drupada

Pāñcālī– a name of Draupadī

Pāṇḍu– the “father” of the five Pāṇḍavas (in name only), the husband of Kuntī and Mādrī, the

brother of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Vidura, the son of Vyāsa and Ambālikā

Pāṇḍavas– the five “sons” of Pāṇḍu who have actually been fathered by different Vedic gods

Parāśara– a sage, the father of Vyāsa, the grandson of Vasiṣṭha

See footnote 80 on page 146.

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Paraśurāma– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a Brahmin sage and warrior,

the

teacher of Bhīṣma, Droṇa, and Karṇa, also known as Rāma Jāmadagnya

Parikṣit– the son of Abhimanyu and Uttarā, the father of Janamejaya

Pārtha– “son of Pṛthā,” a name that could technically be used for Karṇa, Yudhiṣṭhira, Bhīma, or

Arjuna but that is frequently used for Arjuna

Pārvatī– a consort of Śiva, the daughter of Himavat, the reincarnation of Satī, the mother of

Kārttikeya and Gaṇeśa

Phalguna– a name of Arjuna

Piṉṉai– the Tamil cowherdess wife of Krishna

Prahlāda– the son of Hiraṇyakaśipu, a devotee of Viṣṇu

Pṛthā– a name of Kuntī

Puruṣaṉ– a Tamil name of Viṣṇu

Pūtanā– a demoness slain by Krishna

Rādhā– a gopī and Krishna’s most famous and beloved consort

Rādhāramaṇa– “Rādhā’s lover,” a form of Krishna worshiped in Vrindavan

Raghava– “descendant of Raghu,” a name of Rāma

Raghu– an ancestor of Rāma, the founder of the Raghu lineage

Raghus– the descendants of Raghu

Ramā– a name of Śrī

Rāma/Rāmacandra– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a warrior-prince, the

husband of Sītā, the hero of the Rāmāyaṇa narrative tradition

Rāma Jāmadagnya– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a Brahmin sage and

warrior, the teacher of Bhīṣma, Droṇa, and Karṇa, also known as Paraśurāma

Raṅganātha– a form of Viṣṇu worshiped in Srirangam

Rāvaṇa– the demon king of Lanka who is slain by Rāma

Rukmiṇī– a wife of Krishna

Śabarī– a female ascetic, a devotee of Rāma

Śabdabheda– see Śabdavedhin

Śabdavedhin– a name of Arjuna (Śabdabheda in Bhasha)

Sabyasācī– see Savyasācin

Saccidānanda– “existence, consciousness, and bliss,” a synonym for Brahman

Sahadeva– the youngest Pāṇḍava brother, the twin of Nakula, the biological son of the

Aśvins and Mādrī

Śakaṭa– a cart demon slain by Krishna

Śakuni– the brother of Gāndhārī, the maternal uncle of the one hundred Kauravas

Śakuntalā– the mother of Bharata, the wife of Duḥṣanta, the daughter of Viśvāmitra

Śalya– the brother of Mādrī, the maternal uncle of Nakula and Sahadeva

Śaṃtanu– the father of Bhīṣma, Citrāṅgada, and Vicitravīrya, the husband of Gaṅgā and

Satyavatī

Note that while Paraśurāma/Rāma Jāmadagnya is not described as an incarnation of Viṣṇu in the critical edition of

the Sanskrit Mahābhārata, multiple different Vaiṣṇava traditions list him as the sixth incarnation of Viṣṇu in the

daśāvatāra (ten primary incarnations) cycle of Viṣṇu.

In Cauhān’s Mahābhārat, Sahadeva is the biological son of Pāṇḍu and Mādrī. See page 93 and CM 1.23.

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Sanaka– one of the four child sages known as the Kumāras who are described as incarnations of

Viṣṇu in the Bhāgavatapurāṇa

Sañjaya– the charioteer of Dhṛtarāṣṭra who narrates the events of the Bhārata War to him

Sarasvatī– the goddess of knowledge and the arts

Satī– the first wife of Śiva who was reborn as Pārvatī, the daughter of Dakṣa

Satyabhāmā– a wife of Krishna

Sātyaki– a member of the Yādava clan, a close friend of Krishna, an ally of the Pāṇḍavas

Satyavatī– the second wife of Śaṃtanu, the mother of Vyāsa, Citrāṅgada, and Vicitravīrya

Savyasācin– a name of Arjuna (Sabyasācī in Bhasha)

Śeṣa/Śeṣanāga– the celestial serpent Viṣṇu reclines on

Śikhaṇḍin– the reincarnation of Ambā who was born as Śikhaṇḍinī before transforming into

Śikhaṇḍin, a son of Drupada, the brother of Draupadī and Dhṛṣṭadyumna

Śikhaṇḍinī– the reincarnation of Ambā, a daughter of Drupada, the sister of Draupadī and

Dhṛṣṭadyumna, transforms into Śikhaṇḍin

Śiśupāla– the king of Chedi, a maternal cousin of Krishna

Sītā– the wife of Rāma, the mother of Lava and Kuśa, the daughter of Janaka

Śiva– a major Hindu deity

Skanda– a name of Kārttikeya

Śrī– the goddess of wealth and beauty, the consort of Viṣṇu, also known as Lakṣmī

Śrīdāmā– a Brahmin, a childhood friend of Krishna, also known as Sudāmā

Śrīdhara– a name of Viṣṇu

Sṛñjayas– a sub-group of the Pāñcālas

Subāhu– a demon slain by Rāma

Subhadrā– the sister of Krishna and Balarāma, a wife of Arjuna, the mother of Abhimanyu

Sudāmā– see Śrīdāmā

Sugrīva– a monkey king, an ally and devotee of Rāma, the brother of Vālī

Śuka– a son of Vyāsa, one of the narrators of the Bhāgavatapurāṇa

Sundareśvara– a form of Śiva worshipped in Madurai, the consort of Mīnākṣī

Supratīka– the elephant of Bhagadatta

Śūrpaṇakhā– a demoness, the sister of Rāvaṇa

Sūrya– the Vedic god of the sun, the biological father of Karṇa

Sutīkṣṇa– a sage

Śvetabāji– see Śvetavāhana

Śvetavāhana– a name of Arjuna (Śvetabāji in Bhasha)

Takṣaka– a serpent king, the father of Aśvasena

Tāmradhvaja– the son of Mayūradhvaja

Tapatī– the mother of Kuru

Tāṭakā– a demoness slain by Rāma

Tirumāl– the Tamil form of Viṣṇu, also known as Māl, Māyaṉ, Māyavaṉ, Māyōṉ, and Neṭumāl

Trisirā– a demon slain by Rāma

Trivikrama– a name of Vāmana/Viṣṇu

Tṛṇāvarta– a demon slain by Krishna

Ugraśravas– a bard and one of the primary narrators of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Ulūka– the son of Śakuni in the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Ulūkaṉ– the priest of the Pāṇḍavas in the Tamil Pāratam

Ulūpī– a serpent princess, a wife of Arjuna, the mother of Irāvān

246

Umā– a name of Pārvatī

Uttaṅka– a sage

Uttara– the son of Virāṭa

Uttarā– the daughter of Virāṭa, the wife of Abhimanyu, the mother of Parikṣit

Vaiśampāyana– a sage and one of the primary narrators of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata

Vālī– the brother of Sugrīva who is slain by Rāma

Vālmīki– the author of the Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa

Vāmana– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a dwarf

Varadarājasvāmī– a form of Viṣṇu worshipped in Kanchipuram

Varāha– an incarnation of Viṣṇu who takes the form of a boar

Vasiṣṭha– a sage, the husband of Arundhatī

Vasudeva– the biological father of Krishna, Balarāma, and Subhadrā, the husband of Devakī,

the brother of Kuntī

Vāsudeva– “the son of Vasudeva,” a name of Krishna

Vatsāsura– a calf demon slain by Krishna

Vāyu– the Vedic deity of the wind, the father of Bhīma and Hanumān

Veṅkaṭeśvara– a form of Viṣṇu worshipped in Tirupati

Vibhatsa– see Bībhatsu

Vibhīṣaṇa– a demon, a brother of Rāvaṇa, a devotee of Rāma, the king of Lanka

Vicitravīrya– the younger son of Śaṃtanu and Satyavatī, the husband of Ambikā and Ambālikā

Vidura– the illegitimate son of Vyāsa and Ambikā’s maid, the brother of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Pāṇḍu,

often considered a devotee of Krishna

Vijaya– a name of Arjuna (Bijayi in Bhasha)

Vikarṇa– one of the one hundred Kaurava brothers

Virādha– a demon slain by Rāma

Vīranārāyaṇa– a form of Viṣṇu worshipped in Gadag

Virāṭa– the king of Matsya, the father of Uttara and Uttarā, an ally of the Pāṇḍavas

Vīravarma– a king who Arjuna battles

Viṣṇu– a major Hindu deity

Viśvāmitra– a sage, the father of Śakuntalā, the preceptor of Rāma

Viśvarūpa– a three-headed beast slain by Indra

Vṛtra– a formidable beast slain by Indra

Vyāsa– the traditional “author” of the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and the eighteen mahāpurāṇas, the

compiler of the Vedas, the biological father of Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Pāṇḍu, Vidura, and Śuka, the

son of Satyavatī and Parāśara, often considered to be an incarnation of Viṣṇu

Yādavas– the descendants of Yadu, the clan of Krishna

Yadu– the founder of the Yādava lineage, the son of Yayāti

Yājñasenī– a name of Draupadī

Yama– the Vedic deity of death, sometimes equated with Dharma

Yaśodā– the adoptive mother of Krishna and Balarāma, Nanda’s wife

Yayāti– an ancestor of the Kauravas, the Pāṇḍavas, and the Yādavas, the father of Yadu

Yudhiṣṭhira– the eldest Pāṇḍava brother, the biological son of Dharma and Kuntī

Yuyutsu– the illegitimate son of Dhṛtarāṣṭra and Gāndhārī’s maid, the brother of the one

hundred Kauravas and Duḥśalā, an ally of the Pāṇḍavas

247

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