The tension between the two half brothers, over Sita, is a major motivation for the plot. When Rama goes off to hunt the golden deer and tells Lakshmana to guard Sita, Sita thinks she hears Rama calling (it’s a trick) and urges Lakshmana to find and help Rama. Lakshmana says Rama can take care of himself. Sita taunts Lakshmana, saying, “You want Rama to perish, Lakshmana, because of me. You’d like him to disappear; you have no affection for him. For with him gone, what could I, left alone, do to stop you doing the one thing that you came here to do? You are so cruel. Bharata has gotten you to follow Rama, as his spy. That’s what it must be. But I could never desire any man but Rama. I would not even touch another man, not even with my foot! (3.43.6-8, 20-24, 34).” Lakshmana gets angry (“Damn you, to doubt me like that, always thinking evil of others, just like a woman [3.43.29])” and stalks off, leaving Sita totally unprotected, and Ravana comes and gets Sita. When Rama returns, Lakshmana reports a slightly different version of what she said to him: “Sita, weeping, said these terrible words to me: ‘You have set your evil heart on me, but even if your brother is destroyed, you will not get me. You are in cahoots with Bharata; you’re a secret enemy who followed us to get me.’ ” Rama ignores all this and simply says to Lakshmana, “You should not have deserted Sita and come to me, submitting to Sita and to your own anger, just because an angry woman teased you (3.57.14-21).”
But why would Sita have said such a thing if she didn’t fear it on some level? And why would it have made Lakshmana so mad if he did not fear it too? When Rama, hunting for Sita, finds the cloak and jewels that she dropped as Ravana abducted her, he says to Lakshmana, “Do you recognize any of this?” And Lakshmana replies, “I have never looked at any part of Sita but her feet, so I recognize the anklets, but not the rest of her things.” Yet, evidently, Rama had expected him to recognize the jewels that had adorned higher parts of Sita’s body. So too, though the text, insisting on Rama’s infallibility, displaces the error onto Sita and insists that Rama knew it was an ogre all along, the vice of hunting carries him along in its wake nevertheless: Rama follows the ogre as deer too far and so is unable to protect Sita from Ravana, thus inadvertently engineering his own separation from her. Just as Sita was prey to her desire for the deer, and Rama to his desire to hunt it, so Lakshmana too is vulnerable to Sita’s taunts about his desire for her; their combined triple vulnerabilities give Ravana the opening he needs.
At the very end of the Ramayana, Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. This happens as the result of an elaborate (but not atypical, in this text) set of vows and curses. Death incarnate comes to talk with Rama, to remind him that it is time for him to die. Death makes Rama promise to kill anyone who interrupts them; Lakshmana guards the door. An ascetic arrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won’t let him see Rama; Lakshmana, caught between a rock and a hard place, chooses the lesser of two evils, his own death rather than the destruction of the world. He interrupts Rama and Death, whereupon Rama says that for Lakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be the equivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana, who then commits suicide. Does this episode represent a displaced, suppressed desire of Rama to kill Lakshmana? If so, it is thoroughly submerged, one might even say repressed, on the human plane, but it bursts out in the animal world when Rama kills Valin, the monkey who took away his brother’s wife.
This is the sense in which the monkeys are the side shadows of the human half brothers:44 They suggest what might have been. They function in some ways as the human unconscious; both Valin and Sugriva (4.28.1-8; 4.34.9) are said to be addicted (sakta) to sensual behavior, to women, and to drinking. There is no monkey gambling or hunting to speak of, but the monkeys as a group get blind drunk in one very funny scene that resembles a frat party out of control. The monkeys are not merely Valmiki’s projections or projections from Rama’s mind; they are, rather, parallel lives. The monkey story is not accidentally appended; it is a telling variant of the life of Rama. But it does not mirror that life exactly; it is a mythological transformation, taking the pieces and rearranging them to make a slightly different pattern, as the dreamwork does, according to Freud. Animals often replace, in dreams, people toward whom the dreamer has strong, dangerous, inadmissible, and hence repressed emotions.45 Or to put it differently, the dreamer displaces emotions felt toward people whom he cannot bear to visualize directly in his dreams and projects those emotions onto animals. In the Ramayana, poetry has the function of the dreamwork, reworking the emotions repressed by political concerns (such as the need to deny Rama’s all too obvious imperfections) and projecting them onto animals. When Rama’s cultural role as the perfect son and half brother prevents him from expressing his personal resentment of his father and half brother, the monkeys do it for him. In the magical world of the monkey forest, Rama’s unconscious mind is set free to take the revenge that his conscious mind does not allow him in the world of humans.
TALKING ANIMALS, BESTIAL HUMANS
Monkeys are not the only talking animals who stand in for humans in the Ramayana.46 In a related corpus of myths, hunters mistake people for animals in sexual (or quasisexual) situations. These myths offer yet another set of implicit arguments for the growing movement in favor of vegetarianism.
The underlying theme is the interruption of sexuality. The Ramayana briefly narrates such an incident, in the story of Shiva and his wife, Parvati:
THE GODS INTERRUPT SHIVA AND PARVATI
Parvati (“Daughter of the Mountain [Himalaya]”) won Shiva’s heart and they married. Shiva joyously made love to her night and day—but without ever shedding his semen. The gods were afraid that Shiva and Parvati would produce a child of unbearable power, and so they interrupted them. The god of fire took up Shiva’s seed, from which the six-headed god Skanda, general of the gods, was born. But Parvati, enraged, cursed the wives of the gods to be barren forever, since they had thwarted her while she was making love in the hope of bearing a son (1.34-35).
Shiva places his seed in Fire, rather than in Parvati, as an anthropomorphization of the ritual act of throwing an oblation of butter into the consecrated fire that carries the oblation to the gods, acting out the Upanishadic equation of the sexual act and the oblation. The curse of childlessness that the frustrated Parvati gives to the wives of the gods has resonances throughout Hindu mythology. As a result of Parvati’s curse, many children of the gods (including Sita) are born from male gods or sages who create children unilaterally merely at the thought, or sight, of a woman, ejaculating into some womb substitute—a flower, a female animal, a river, a furrow—to produce a motherless child, “born of no womb” (a-yoni-ja).es Another variant of the interruption theme appears at the end of the Ramayana, in the passage we have just considered, when Lakshmana is forced to interrupt Rama and Death when they are closeted together under strict instructions not to be interrupted. This is the ultimate fatal interruption, interrupting Death himself.
At the same time, interrupted sexuality is often conjoined with the theme of addictive, excessive, careless hunting. Human hunters mistake other humans (or ogres) for animals, particularly when the humans as animals are mating, a mistake that has fatal consequences not only for the human/animals but for the unlucky hunter. In the Mahabharata, Pandu, the father of the heroes, is cursed to die if he makes love with any of his wives, his punishment for having killed, while he was hunting, a sage who had taken the form of a stag and was coupling with a doeet and whom Pandu mistook for a stag (1.90.64; 1.109.5-30). So too five years after Dasharatha has banished Rama, he suddenly wakes Kausalya up in the middle of the night and tells her about this episode, which he has only now remembered:
DASHARATHA SHOOTS AN ELEPHANT
“When I was young I was proud of my fame as an archer who could shoot by sound alone. We were not married yet, and it was the rainy season, which excites lust and desire. I decided to take some exercise and went hunting with bow and arrow. I was a r
ash young man. I heard a noise, beyond the range of vision, of a pitcher being filled with water, which sounded like an elephant in water. I shot an arrow.” He had shot an ascetic boy, on whom an aged, blind mother (a Shudra) and father (a Vaishya) depended. The father cursed Dasharatha to end his days grieving for his own son. And as Dasharatha now remembered that curse in bed with Kausalya, he died (2.57.8-38, .58.1-57).
The connection between blindness (aiming by sound alone at the child of sight-less parents) and desire (hunting as the equivalent of taking a cold shower to control premarital desire) indicates that desire was already Dasharatha’s blind spot long before Kaikeyi manipulated him by locking him out of her bedroom. He is as addicted to sex as he is to hunting.
Another tale in the Ramayana also ties together the themes of the interruption of sexuality, the curse of separation from a beloved, and the deadly nature of erotic love but now adds the element of the language of animals, particularly birds:
THE BIRD’S JOKE
A king had been given the boon of understanding the cries of all creatures, but he was warned not to tell anyone about it. Once when he was in bed with his wife, he heard a bird say something funny, and he laughed. She thought he was laughing at her, and she wanted to know why, but he said he would die if he told her. When she insisted that he tell her nevertheless, he sent her away and lived happily without her for the rest of his life (2.32).47
Significantly, the man in this story is allowed to understand the speech of animals, and the woman is not. (As the king happens to be the father of Kaikeyi, sexual mischief runs in the family.) This is in keeping with the underlying misogyny of the Sanskrit mythological texts that depict men as more gifted with special powers than women; it may also reflect the sociological fact that men in India were allowed to read and speak Sanskrit, while in general women were not, as well as the custom of patrilocal marriage, so that a woman often did not speak the language of her husband’s family. These stories express the idea that sexuality makes some humans into animals, while language makes some animals into humans.
In the Mahabharata a king who has been cursed to become a man-eating ogre devours a sage who is making love to his wife (still in human form), and the wife, furious because she had not yet achieved her sexual goal, curses the king to die if he embraces his own wife (MB 1.173), a combination of Pandu’s curse and Parvati’s curse of the wives of the gods. Nor are these hunting errors limited to the sexual arena. Krishna, in the Mahabharata, dies when a hunter fatally mistakes him for a deer:
THE DEATH OF KRISHNA
Angry sages predicted that Old Age would wound Krishna when he was lying on the ground. Krishna knew that this had to happen that way. Later he realized it was the time to move on, and he obstructed his sensory powers, speech, and mind and lay down and engaged in terminal yoga. Then a fierce hunter named Old Age [Jara] came to that spot greedy for deer and mistook him for a deer and hastily pierced him with an arrow in the sole of his foot. But when he went near him, to take him, the hunter saw that it was a man with four arms, wearing a yellow garment, engaged in yoga. Realizing that he had made a bad mistake, he touched the other man’s two feet with his head, his body revealing his distress. Krishna consoled him and then rose up and pervaded the two firmaments with his glory (MB 16.2.10-11, 16.5.18-21).
Three different stories seem to be told here at once. In one, Krishna, a mortal, is wounded by a hunter, like an animal or, rather, as a human mistaken for an animal. In another, Krishna seems to die of old age.eu In the third story, Krishna, an immortal, decides to leave the world by withdrawing his powers, like a god or a very great yogi. But he didn’t need the hunter or old age if he really just died by his own will. Are traces of one story left ghostlike in another?
These stories from the Mahabharata argue that humans are different from animals and must rise above animal sexuality and, sometimes, animal violence; the Ramayana adds that it is language, particularly poetry, that makes this possible. ev The theme of language appears in this corpus on the outside frame of the Ramayana, in the vignette of “The Poet, the Hunter, and the Crane” cited at the beginning of this chapter, about the invention of the shloka meter (the meter in which both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana are composed). In that story, the female crane (they are Indian sarus cranes) is so moved at the sight of her dying mate that she utters words of compassion (karunam giram). (Some later commentaries suggested that it was the female crane who died and the male crane who grieved, foreshadowing the disappearance of Sita and the grief of Rama.48) Compassion at the sight of the dying bird inspires Valmiki too to speak. He sees a crane who is killed in a sexual situation, hence separated from his mate, making him cry and inspiring him to invent an unusual language of humans. This story is in many ways the inversion of the story of the king who hears a bird talking when he is in a sexual situation and laughs, exposing him to the danger of death and separating him from his mate.
But it is the grief of the female crane and Valmiki’s fellow feeling with her—as well as, perhaps, the touching example of the cranes, who are said to be “singing sweetly” (immediately equated with “at the height of desire”) as the hunter strikes—that inspire Valmiki to make his second, more significant utterance; the birdsong turns to compassionate speech and then inspires human poetry. As a result, the Nishada, a member of a tribal group regarded as very low caste, is cursed, and poetry is born. The text treats the Nishada as a nonperson, hostile and evil, a man who violates dharma, kills for no reason, and is cursed to be forever without peace; in direct contrast with the compassionate crane hen and the compassionate poet, the Nishada never speaks. Since the animal he killed was just an animal, not a human in animal form, he receives only a relatively mild punishment—restlessness, perhaps guilt—prefiguring the more serious curse of Dasharatha in the story that is to follow, the tale of the boy mistaken for an elephant. With this link added to the narrative chain, the corpus of stories combines five major themes: succumbing to the lust for hunting; mistaking a human for an animal and killing the “animal”; interrupting the sexual act (by killing one or both of the partners); understanding the language (or song) of animals; and creating a poetic language. Killing an animal interrupts the sexual act, the animal act, killing sex, as it were, and producing in its place the characteristic human act, the making of language.
What binds the humans and animals together is compassion, a more nuanced form of the guilt and concern for nonviolence that have colored Hindu stories about animals from the start. The Ramayana is compassionate and inclusive in its presentation of animals, including Jatayus, an old vulture, a scavenger, who is to birds what dogs are to mammals, normally very inauspicious indeed. But Jatayus bravely attacks Ravana when Ravana is carrying off Sita; when Jatayus lectures Ravana on dharma, Ravana responds by cutting off Jatayus’s wings and flying away with Sita, and the dying vulture tells Rama where Ravana has taken Sita. Rama says that he holds the old vulture, Jatayus, in the same esteem that he holds Dasharatha (3.64.26) (which may also be a backhanded indirect dig at Dasharatha), and he buries him with the full royal obsequies as for a father. Rama does, however, use balls of stag’s flesh in place of the balls of rice that are usually part of these rituals (3.64.26, 32-33), a reversal of the historical process that led many Hindus to use balls of rice in place of a sacrificial animal.
Another unclean bird plays a role in Rama’s story, and that is a crow. When Hanuman visits Sita and asks her for a sign that will prove to Rama that Hanuman has seen her, she tells him of a time when a crow attacked her until his claws dripped with blood; Rama had the power to kill the bird but, in his compassion, merely put out his right eye and sent him away (5.36.10-33). The crows are said to be eaters of offerings, greedy for food, terms often applied to dogs, and Manu (7.21) explicitly links crows and dogs. The crow is a Pariah. Sita compares the crow with Ravana, and the scene foreshadows the abduction of Sita by Ravana. Yet Rama has compassion for the crow, merely taking out his eye, a mutilation that will become part o
f the vocabulary of bhakti, when a devout worshiper willingly gives his own eye to the god.
Dogs too occupy a moral space here. During the period of Sita’s exile, a (talking) dog comes to Rama and complains, first, that dogs are not allowed in palaces or temples or the homes of Brahmins (whereupon Rama invites him into the palace) and, second, that a Brahmin beggar beat him for no reason. Rama summons the Brahmin, who confesses that he struck the dog in anger when he himself was hungry and begging for food; when he told the dog to go away, the dog went only a short distance and stayed there, and so he beat him. Rama asks the dog to suggest an appropriate punishment for the Brahmin, and the dog asks that the Brahmin, whom he describes as filled with anger and bereft of dharma, be made the leader of a Tantric sect. (The dog himself had this position in a former life and regarded it as a guaranteed road to hell.) This granted, the Brahmin feels certain he has been given a great boon and rides away proudly on an elephant, while the dog goes to Varanasi and fasts to death (7.52).49 Clearly, the dog is morally superior to the Brahmin, and Rama treats him with great respect throughout this long and rather whimsical episode.
SYMBOLIC OGRES
Dogs in these stories stand both for dogs (a cigar is just a cigar) and sometimes for Pariahs or Nishadas (more than a cigar), often for both at once. Tribal people stand for themselves (a Nishada is just a Nishada), but can Nishadas stand for anyone else? (Apparently not.) On the other hand, can anyone else, besides dogs, stand for Nishadas? More precisely, can ogres stand for Nishadas?
Unlike dogs and Nishadas, ogres and antigods cannot represent themselves because, in my humble opinion, they do not exist; they are imaginary constructions. Therefore they are purely symbolic, and the question is, What do they symbolize? Later in Indian history, they are often said to symbolize various groups of human beings: tribal peoples,50 foreigners, low castes, Dravidians, South Indians, or Muslims. Various Hindus have named various actual human tribes after ogres and antigods and other mythical beasts (such as Asuras and Nagas), and others have glossed ogres such as the ogress Hidimbi, who marries the human hero Bhima, in the Mahabharata, or the Naga princess Ulupi, who marries Arjuna, as symbolic of tribal people who marry into Kshatriya families. One scholar identified the ogres of Lanka as Sinhalese Buddhists, oppressed by hegemonic Brahmins represented by Rama;51 another argued that the ogres represented the aboriginal population of Australia,52 a loopy idea that has the single, questionable virtue of correlating well with the Gondwana theory that Australia and India were once linked. Indeed writers have used the ogres as well as other characters of the Ramayanaew throughout Indian history to stand in for various people in various political positions. But what role do the ogres play in Valmiki’s Ramayana?
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