The other heroes of Ramayana

A professor I enjoyed learning from would begin her lecture on Ram by asking us what we thought about this hero from our epics. Most of us would groan and mutter about how Ram was no god. He was no hero. All he was, was a male chauvinist king who had no qualms sentencing his pregnant wife to death. Like dolls to a puppeteer, we had moved to her strings. She would gently tell us that is precisely why Ram is the perfect hero. He evokes passion. He has his followers and detractors and both defend and accuse him with equal fervour. He is revered in the religious texts and censured in folk songs and literature. He is the hero that makes the epic timeless. So many eons later we were still getting worked up about what he did or did not do!


But Ram is not the only interesting character in Ramayana. There are several but the Valmiki Ramayana pushed them to the margins and airbrushed the blotches and patches that would have made them real and memorable. One such character is Urmila, Lakshmana's wife. In the mainstream versions of the epic she has a minor role. But in regional literature, in songs and stories, she has an important part. For instance there is a Telegu ballad called Urmiladevi Nidra (In search of Sita: Revisiting Mythology, Ed. Malashri Lal and Namita Gokhale. Penguin Books New Delhi). The song sung mostly by women and composed by an anonymous bard tells us Urmila’s story.

Urmila was Lakshmana’s child bride -- in some accounts --  in some she is just referred to as a princess. She was left behind in Ayodhya while her husband followed Rama and Sita into the jungle. The song begins at the point when the three are leaving the palace for their 14-year exile. 

Urmila is grief-stricken. She asks Lakshmana to let her accompany them but he says that the scriptures won't allow that. A younger sister-in-law can not walk the same ground as her eldest brother-in-law. Nor can she be within his earshot. Urmila retires to the palace and then the bard asks, whose sacrifice was greater – was it Sita who gave up the palace but had her husband or was it Urmila who gave up her husband but continued to live in the palace.

A lonely and grieving Urmila slips into a state of comatose slumber. She lies like that for 14 years till the three come back to Ayodhya. But that is not the end of her woes. Because when Lakshmana comes back, he gets busy with Rama’s coronation. Sita rebukes him and forces Rama to send him to Urmila. But instead of waking her up gently Lakshman is rough and brusque. He walks into their chambers and asks her to look at how he, her moon faced lover, has come back for her.

Urmila is enraged but her character is that of a shy and bashful bride so she does not erupt with anger. But she does not recognise him and treats him like an intruder who has brought shame to the house of Rama. She warns him with stories about the fate of others who coveted other people’s wives. Indra, Ravana have all come to nought she tells him so why do you dare where they have failed. Finally when Lakshmana apologises for his behaviour Urmila gives in. And the two are feted and feasted in full royal splendour. They are treated like a newly-wed couple with their chambers decorated with flowers and songs sung teasing them about their future together.

The ballad goes on but there are two interesting bits here: one is Urmila’s sleep. Sleep in myths is death’s twin. We experience death daily when our souls roam free and when life takes a break from our bodies. In myths and regional literature, sleep brings life to a stop and it has often been used as a metaphor. We also see this in the fairy tales -- Snow White and the seven dwarves and Sleeping Beauty. The sleeping princesses have to be kissed awake. In India the kiss may have been too tame an awakening or it may have been too bold an imagery. One will never know but what is evident is that sleep mystified our ancestors and they were looking at possible explanations. Myths and stories allowed them to explore the options.

The other interesting bit is the fact that the ballad tells a woman's story from her point of view. Sita too is portrayed as a woman first and the perfect wife later. Also Urmila is no weak damsel. Her slumber is her choice as is the manner in which she wants to be woken up. Her disciplining of Lakshmana also shows that she is well versed in the scriptures. Thus learning was not the preserve of men alone. And no matter what we may think today, women could hold the stage too, even if they were bit characters in a play named after its hero.

The mystery of death

In almost everything we do in our lives, death is never far away. In the seasons, in our celebrations, in our relationships and in our rituals; death as an end, death as sadness, death as loss and death as a debt that we owe the ultimate creditor, Yama (in the Hindu pantheon) is omnipresent. It is the invisible thread that ties our lives together -- gives it a meaning so to say.


This is true of almost every culture in the world. As I read the myths that once defined these cultures, I was drawn by the similarities in the way death was depicted and the rituals that are associated with it. Equally interesting was the difference -- death is universal but the philosophy of mortality differs from culture to culture -- in nuance and character.

For instance in many ancient civilisations (Greeks, Mayans, Aztec), death is something man or humanity has always sought to conquer. To borrow a cliche: it is the final frontier. The heroes of these myths are therefore on a quest for immortality. They seek the ultimate elixir, the plant or the root or the drink that will keep death away from the living. Their adventures defy death but circumstance, manifest in many different forms, conspires them out of a victory.

The quest of the occidental hero, shaped by the philosophy and myths of these cultures, was born out of a need for understanding why we die. Why is it that the elixir is elusive? This has in turn given rise to literary characters and stories on what death means to us -- The Economist recently carried a brilliant report on a book on immortality (read it here: http://www.economist.com/node/21553411). But this is the story of the occident.

Indian myths tell a different tale. But since they are treated as children's literature fit for comic books and animation films or as religious doctrine, they are rarely examined for their underlying philosophy on death. But if they were, you will find that heroes in the Indian epics don’t go for immortality. They look for deliverance of humanity at large, their raison d’être is to topple evil from its pedestal and give good its rightful due. Arjun, Ram, Krishna, Indra, Yudhisthira and Karna are all heroes, all on a quest but not for everlasting life. There are some heroes that did: Garuda looks for amrita to free his mother, the Gayatri (a mantra today but a meter that could fly like a bird in the Vedas) finds it for the gods but these are older myths. Over the years, Indian myth gave up its search for immortality and looked for other causes.

What happened? Perhaps, as the philosophy of this region engaged with dying more closely, death was not seen as an end of life but as the means to begin a new one. Or the sceptic might say death became a lost cause. Whatever the truth, the cycle of life -- birth, death and rebirth -- gained currency among the gurus of the times and therefore their people.

The quest was therefore redefined. Mankind and its heroes began a search for things that would give them spiritual release and not tie them down to an illusory world. Heroes were mortal representatives of gods who were immortal but; in their earthly avatars, they were a part of the cycle of life and death and karma. The philosophy of the region freed the hero of his and her need to rescue mankind from death.

On a recent trip to Benares, I was once again shown the relevance and importance that dying has for us as a people. In that city, death lives among its people. It is not a stranger, leave alone an opponent that needs to be vanquished.

The yellow robed god

Vishnu is the yellow robed god or Pitambari. But how he became one is an interesting aside in the larger mythic play.

To begin at the very beginning, Prajapati the creator god had just finished creating and was sitting back, satiated, on a lotus leaf. The myths (in the Vedic hymns) tell us that he made all beings that inhabit this universe from the heat generated from his own body or his 'tapas'. The heat led him to perspire and from his perspiration, came the world.  This is a motif that many creation myths follow where the creation process is usually faciliated by a liquid -- it could be spit, sweat, rain, the foam on the waves in the sea and even sweetened milk. But that's not the point of this story.

As Prajapati watched his world go past, he called out to the tortoise. "You have been created from my body," he told him. But the tortoise was disdainful and perhaps, a tad dismissive.  "I have been here long before you", it said. The myths leave it there, capturing our society's collective inability, at that time, to verify the truth of who came first. That too is not the point of the story but, the tortoise is.

From being identified as a timeless creature, it moves on to becoming a symbol of the sun in later myths. According to folklore, once upon a time, very long ago, the sun grew afraid of his own lustre. He ran away from himself and sought refuge in the tortoise. He did go back as the world had stopped without him but, he left behind his heart in the tortoise. Thus an entire tribe of sun worshippers also became tortoise worshippers. The tortoise and the sun were now looped in a link and preserved as collective memory. Interestingly the tortoise family is among those animals that aestivate -- or monitor their metabolic levels by going dormant during dry periods where they conserve their energies by staying out of the sun.  






Vishnu on a tortoise, Thrissur Pooram procession

 Vishnu, the preserver god of the trinity, rests on water, lies on a snake and flies on an eagle. He is closely associated with the tortoise which is one of his avatars and a permanent fixture in all his temples. Given the association between tortoise and the sun, Vishnu also became a solar god. The disc in his hand and his yellow robes, the direct symbols of an indirect relationship with the Sun God.

(Photograph: Rajrishi Singhal)

Eternal mysteries

Myths were born when we tried to resolve some universal mysteries. Where do we come from? How did the universe come to be and why is the sky above and the ground below our feet? Frankly, some of these questions still have no answers but science has taken us close to the truth or, to put it more accurately, the facts of the case.

Still, the joy of some of old myths persists. A Maori myth,which is common to many civilisations, is one such. It explores the relationship between the sky and earth and their children.

The two, the story goes, were caught in a tight embrace. Darkness found itself trapped between the two. It wanted a way out as did the children of sky and earth who were the gods and human beings. They all pleaded with their parents for some air and some light but, sky and earth were unmoved. Finally the great big god (not sure if it was one or many) decided to stand upside down and push the two apart. The head pushed earth down while the feet shoved sky up and the two were separated and are kept that way till date. The two did not take this too well but had to give in to their children and even today, sky and earth pine for each other. Every monsoon, the sky sheds tears of sorrow for his wife, earth while she weeps all summer.

The separation of the earth and sky is said to be the genesis of the eternal separation motif which has found its way into all our stories -- myths, fairy tales and even contemporary fiction. So what if we now know that this is not how things came to be or that the seasons are explained by a water cycle; the story enthralls, perhaps even more today than when it was first told.

Sons and society

A son is a son is a son in English but in Sanskrit, he is known by many names. Each name symbolises an aspect or tells the story of his birth. Some examples are: Aurus which is the name given to a biological son or an adopted one; Pratram is not formally adopted but regarded as one's own son; Sahod Putra is a son who comes with marriage (he is a biological son but was conceived before the formal marriage); Gudo is a son born when the husband is traveling, but from one of the members of the family; Kaanani is born before marriage and is brought up by the maternal grandfather; Putrika is a daughter who is like a son and Putrika Putra is the daughter's son who may belong to the maternal grandfather or inherit his maternal grandfather's kingdom.

The names not only tell us how important a son has always been to Indian society and the cultural importance attached to bearing one but in some manner, they also indicate that we did not always apply a strict moral code to marriage. A woman could have a relationship before marriage and bear a child; the son was not called a bastard as he would be today but was given a name, a place in the family and a purpose within the broad societal framework. Of course, such a courtesy was unlikely to have been extended to the girl child. If it had been, we would have been a completely different country.