Wit and Wordplay in Indian Mythology

On the 15th  day of the war, the sun was at its zenith, burning down on the Kurukshetra battlefield. The Pandavas were suffering severe losses; the Kauravas were clearing winning, and how?!! The Kaurava general, Drona was wreaking havoc on the Pandava armies. Kunti’s sons realised, the only way they could cut their losses was to rein in Drona’s ferocious advance. And there was only one way to do it. Attack his weakness – his son, Ashwattama!!

The rest, as they say,  is history, eh…well, mythology!

For the first time in his life, Yudhishtra was asked to speak a half lie! He managed to convince Dronacharya that his son was dead- ‘Ashwathama hatha’, (Ashwathama is dead) he announced loudly, following  it with a muted utterance of ‘kunjara’ (elephant) that Drona could not hear. Extremely aggrieved to hear about the death of his son from none other than the virtuous Yudhistra, Drona gave up his life. His death became the game-changer  in the war that eventually led to Pandavas' victory.

Of course, everyone  knows this story.

But the interesting thing to note here is how the Sanskrit language and its syntax have been cleverly used to communicate varying ideas. It is wonderful how the syntax of Sanskrit lends itself to tremendous opportunities for word play, which it is said, were well exploited by Kalidasa in his literary works to add glitter to his language.

Sanskrit’s rich vocabulary and unique syntax led to the composition of works such as Raghavayadaveeyam, a composition comprising 30 verses that tells the story of Rama (Ramayana) when read from top to bottom, and the story of Krishna (Bhagavatha) when read in the reverse order.

In mythology too, wordplay was used to give stories a tangy twist.

For instance, in the Ramayana, when Kumabhakarna seeks a boon from Brahma, he mistakenly asks for Nidrasana (a state of sleep) when he actually wanted to ask for Indraasana (the seat of Indra) and instead of Nityatvam (immortality), he asked for Nidratvam (state of sleep). Thus, the poor fellow was condemned to deep slumber and had to eventually pay a price with his life for his 'lapses lingua'.

In yet another story from the Ramayana, Ahalya, sage Gautama’s wife has a consensual sexual encounter with Lord  Indra when her husband is out to have his holy bath. But when Gautama returns, Indra turns himself into a cat and runs away. Seeing this, Ahalya exclaims, 'Maarjaara' meaning cat in Sanskrit. But, with a slight variation, her words could turn into 'mama' (my) 'jaara' (friend – boyfriend?!), a damning but unlikely confession by Ahalya!

Another story from the Bhagavatha Purana tells the story of sage Narada, who, owing to an intense desire to marry a princess,  asks Narayana for the face of 'Hari', meaning the handsome face of Narayana alias Vishnu. Naughty Narayana, to teach the lusty sage a lesson, gives Narada the face of a monkey, as the word 'Hari' also means monkey.

Wordplay was not confined to Sanskrit alone,  it thrived and flourished in Tamil too. In the Sthlapurana of Pazhamudircholai, one of the six heavenly abodes of Lord Muruga in Tamil Nadu, one can find evidence of it in the story of young Murugan’s encounter with Avvaiyar (Avvai), an old lady, who was both a  scholar and poet.

One hot summer day, after a long and tiring walk, Avvai reached a grove and sat under the shade of a tree. She was very thirsty. Looking up at the tree above, she found a boy sitting on one of the branches of the tree that was laden with jamun fruits. She asked the boy to throw down a few to her so she could quench her thirst. The boy agreed to help her but asked if she wanted her fruits hot or cold (sutta pazham venuma, sudatha pazham venuma?). 

Avvai was puzzled. How could fruits ever be hot or cold, she wondered. Maybe, the chit of a boy was playing pranks on her, she thought. She sternly ordered the boy not to ask silly questions and to simply throw down a few fruits for her from the tree. Chastised by the old lady, the boy did as he was told. Picking up the fruits that the boy threw down, Avvai started to blow at them to get rid of the sand and dust sticking to the fruits. Seeing her blow at the fruits, the boy asked Avvai if she was finding the fruits too hot? Avvai was stunned by the boy’s word play. Hot fruits meant the ripe ones, to which the dust sticks and had to be 'blown away' (as if in a gesture to cool them) cold fruits meant the unripe ones to which dust does not stick. 

Of course, it turns out that the boy was none other than Lord Muruga and the story is narrated in the context of how he humbled the complacent Avvai.

It is told that Max Mueller, the much-revered Indo-German scholar firmly believed that mythology was 'the disease of language'. Surprising! When these stories actually tell you the contrary!!

Myths & Mythology - What, Why & How

Why?
In 2016, among the top selling books on Amazon's environment section was The Myth Gap, authored by Alex Evans. Interestingly, the tagline of the book reads: What happens when evidence and arguments aren't enough.
(http://mythgap.org/)
And that's precisely why mankind needs myths - to explain the world around us when evidence and arguments are not enough. Myths are the stories we tell ourselves that help us navigate the infinitely complex world we live in.

What?
Myths could be elusive religious beliefs such as Karma or Moksha (that the followers of Indic religions - Hindus, Buddhists, Jains- believe in) or secular beliefs such as democracy, socialism and free trade, or even political/economic concepts such as that of a state, government, nationhood and currency.

Israeli social scientist Yuval Noah Harari refers to these myths as 'fictional realities' and attributes the success of our species on this planet to our mutual agreement to believe in these 'fictional realities'. (Ted talk by Yuval Harari) Contemporary Indian mythologist, Devdutt Pattanaik labels these myths the 'subjective truths' of a society.

So, mythology is not merely about stories from the Ramayana and Mahabharatha or Iliad and Odyssey; it is all those stories on which our civilizational edifice is built. As Alex Evans says, "without shared myths to bind societies together, the risks of fragmentation, polarization and conflict increase dramatically - just as we see all around us today."

How?
So it is important we tell stories to each other. After all, one key reason how India as a 'union of states' has survived despite its tremendous cultural and geographical diversity is because of its shared interest in our epics, especially Ramayana (Refer Three hundred Ramayanas - An essay by AK Ramanujan for the different existing versions of the epic), apart, of course, from cricket and Bollywood.  The fact that we are able to identify specific sacred geography associated with each and every episode from the epic across the length of India is proof of our belief in the shared myth.

In the following posts, I hope to engage you with interesting myths about ourselves, our gods, our rituals & practices, and our cultural expressions through symbols and art.

But learning is enriched only when there are debates and discussions. So, hope to hear your view points too, that'll make the myth-sharing an exciting experience for all of us!!


Note: The idea of this blog is to admire and appreciate the beauty of the stories we share, and to explore the various possibilities that could have led to their formation and dispersion. 

Ravana’s Lanka: The geographical history of mythology

Asko Parpola, an eminent Indus Valley enthusiast, has used the similarity in the names of places to infer the linguistic pre-history of the Indus valley civilisation. Parpola points out that several place-names in the northwestern region (where most Indus-valley sites are found) like nagara, palli, pattana and kotta have Dravidian etymological roots. Even today, these words indicate the names of places in South India. He presents these names as evidence in support of his theory that the Indus valley people probably spoke a Dravidian language.

People moving from one place to another are known to carry the names of places with them. When Britain established its colony in America, the British immigrants took the names of the cities they dwelt in along with them. Thus York (in UK) became New ‘York’ in America and England became New ‘England’. Could people movement then explain the similarity in the names of north-west Indian settlements and south Indian towns?

Driving down to mythology, could the same thing have happened to Ravana and his Lanka? The Gond tribes of central India trace their ancestry to Ravana, whom they deem the founding father of their tribe. This makes one wonder where Ravana’s Lanka really was?! Was it really the island country we think it was? Or was it somewhere 400 miles (100 yojanas) south of Vindhyas as mentioned in the epic? (Sri Lanka is much more than 400 miles away from the foothills of the Vindhyas.)

For sometime now, certain Indian and foreign archaeologists and scholars have been toying with an alternative viewpoint on the location of Ravana's Lanka. Basing their arguments on certain logical inconsistencies in the epic, they propose that the mythical Lanka and the island country are in reality two different places. For one, they state that Singhala or Tambapanni are the names (and not as Lanka) by which the island country is referred to in our epics. In fact references are made to both Lanka and Singhala simultaneously as if they were two different kingdoms.
(Refer https://www.academia.edu/…/LANKA_OF_THE_RAMAYANA_THE_PROBLE… for a detailed discussion on this topic.)

Some archaeologists have even traced Ravana’s Lanka to modern day Orissa.

This 2013 India Today article (http://m.indiatoday.in/…/not-sri-lanka-but-so…/1/401734.html) talks about an excavation of a city in Orissa, dating to the 3rd to 4th century BCE, that is being mapped to Ravana’s Lanka. One of the key arguments presented by these enthusiasts is based on the beliefs and traditions of the various tribes populating parts of Orissa and Central India.

Although these theories are yet to gain wide-spread acceptance, one does wonder how the geographical epicentre of the story can be as varied as eastern India and Sri Lanka. Here, possibly the rich maritime trade history of Orissa/Bengal provides us with a clue.

The founding history of Sri Lanka - the island country - starts in 543 BCE with the arrival of Prince Vijaya, a semi-legendary prince from the Vanga Kingdom (present-day Bengal and parts of Orissa) who sailed to Sri Lanka, after being banished from his home state. All the subsequent kings who ruled Singhala trace their ancestry to this prince. Their royal history has been recorded in the Sinhalese epic called the Mahavamsa.

More recently, based on cultural, linguistic and genetic studies, historians have come to believe that the Sinhalese are actually the descendants of the migrants from eastern parts of India. (Refer chapter: Kingdoms of the Lion from ‘The Ocean of Churn’ by Sanjeev Sanyal.)

Considering the clear evidence of the link between eastern India and Sri Lanka, would it be presumptuousness to consider the possibility of Ravana’s story travelling from Lanka to Singhala along with the migrants and taking fresh root there? Is it possible that Ravana's Sri Lanka is the ancient precedent to USA's 'New' York?

Only due research and the political climate to accept its repercussions can get us the answers!

Note: The research to locate Ravana's Lanka is real, and so is the research to establish the genetic and cultural origins of the Sinhalese. But the attempt to connect the dots is sheer speculation on my part. The idea is to open up these topics for debate.

Pumsavana - The Vedic Sex Selection Ritual

In the Ramayana, Dasharatha's queens, Kausalya, Sumithra and Kaikeyi gave birth to four sons.
In the Mahabharatha, Gandhari, Kunti and Madri, each gave birth to 100, 4 and 2 sons, respectively. Prior to that Ganga and Satyavathi too bore many sons including Bhishma, Vyasa, Chitrangadha and Vichitraveerya.

Again, in the story from the Mahabharatha on the descent of the Ganga, one finds mention of King Sagara's 60,000 sons.

It's a no brainer to identify what's common in the above stories from the Indian epics - the sheer numeracy of the male progeny!

Surprisingly, the female protagonists in these epics are not shown to have 'normal' birth. Sita was 'found' when King Janaka was ploughing a field. Draupadi 'rose' out of the sacrificial fire. Satyavathi's embryo was 'formed' inside a fish. And Shakunthala, born of the union of Vishwamithra and Maneka, was abandoned as an unwanted child.

In other words, the arrival of these females into the world was shown to be either accidental or undesirable.

No prizes for guessing why!!

Kings, priests and merchants needed sons for the continuity of their respective professions.
Ok, so, what's new? We've always known that our society was patriarchal and sons were the preferred progeny.

But did you know that there is an ancient Vedic ritual by the name 'Pumsavana' which is performed to ensure that only a male child was produced inside a woman's womb.

In other words, Pumsavana was a sex selection ritual performed on a pregnant woman to ensure the masculinisation of her foetus. (The Sanskrit word 'Puman' means son.) It was performed around the third month of pregnancy or immediately after the detection of pregnancy, whichever was earlier.

Juice from the buds of a banyan tree was extracted and squeezed into the right nostril of the pregnant women to strengthen her pingala, the solar channel of her body that signifies her masculine energy. A stronger pingala meant a male progeny.

The earliest references to the pumsavana samskara are found in the Atharva Veda dated to around 1200-1000 BCE. A later medical composition, Charaka Samhita, dated to around 200 BCE gives very specific instructions on the ideal day and time, besides other specifications, to perform the pumsavana so as to ensure the masculinisation of the foetus. The Garbhadana ritual or the ritual to impregnate a woman even prescribes specific dates for copulation to ensure a male progeny!

Maybe, this technique is one of the reasons behind the skewed gender ratio in our society (and reflected in our mythology) that continues to date. (Surprisingly, this ritual continues to be performed even today in the Tamil Brahmin community that I come from, but without any knowledge of the purpose of the ritual.)

Interestingly, this whole business of pumsavana raises two questions:

1. A significant increase in males would have resulted in a drastic correction in population over time because men can't bear children. Were the ancient Indians so short-sighted as to oversee this simple fact of life?
2. In a society starved of females, how in heavens name did Narakasura manage to have 16,100 wives?

Answers, anyone?