Abstract
The Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, although widely renowned as a kāvya, and, indeed, as the very origin and inspiration of the entire genre of poetry, is also understood to be an itihāsa, a history. It shares, in fact, both non-mutually exclusive genre designations with its sister epic, the Mahābhārata. Nonetheless, the central books of the work, particularly kāṇḍas two through six, in large measure read as much like a romance as they do an account of human military and political history. In this article, I argue that the lack of such history in these books was a concern of the authors of the epic’s seventh and final kāṇḍa, the Uttarakāṇḍa, and that one of the several functions of this important but generally understudied, frequently criticized and often excised book is to remedy this perceived lack. In support of this argument, I compare the treatment of history in the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata and examine a series of largely ignored Uttarakāṇḍa passages in which the authors appear to revise and extend the military and political history of the earlier kāṇḍas in ways suggestive of their reading of the Mahābhārata.
Introduction
The seventh kāṇḍa, or book, of the monumental ancient Sanskrit epic poem, the Rāmāyaṇa of Vālmīki, is entitled the Uttarakāṇḍa. 2 The name is somewhat ambiguous, perhaps intentionally so, as the adjective uttara, among various other meanings, can mean both ‘concluding’ and ‘future’. Both of these senses are apposite here as the book is indeed the last of the poem’s seven kāṇḍas, while its closing sargas, or chapters, as they are recited to the epic’s hero, narrate events that had yet to take place at the time of this narration.
Since the time of Hermann Jacobi, it has been widely argued and generally accepted among scholars that the Uttarakāṇḍa of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa is, to judge from its language and certain thematic elements, a relatively late addition to the monumental poem. 3 However, aside from a very few defining and contro-versial incidents in the kāṇḍa, such as the killing of the śūdra Śambūka, Sītā’s banishment and her subsequent oath of innocence and disappearance into the earth, the kāṇḍa has received relatively little scholarly attention. In particular, scant attention has been paid to the narrative’s implicit and explicit departures from some characteristics of the preceding kāṇḍas, while almost no work has been devoted to the ways in which the medieval Vaiṣṇava commentators on the Uttarakāṇḍa have exercised their ingenuity to explain some of the seemingly jarring episodes in this, the Ādikāvya’s concluding section.
The contents of the kāṇḍa and its receptive history are strikingly different from those of the epic’s preceding six books. Several of its episodes have rendered the text rather controversial in India from at least the time of the giants of the early medieval Sanskrit literary pantheon such as Kālidāsa and Bhavabhūti, through the medieval commentators and authors of massively influential reworkings of the epic tale—figures such as Kamban and Tulsī Dās—down to modernity. Moreover, certain episodes in the book have aroused anger and resistance on the part of writers, social reformers, political activists, feminists, Dalits, Marxists and regional movements. The Sanskrit poets named above fully represent the book in their works but use them also to mount varying critiques of the actions of the epic hero. The medieval and early modern authors of influential versions of the tale in regional languages, including the Tamil Irāmavatāram and the Avadhi Rāmcaritmānas, often simply excise the book completely. 4
Nor has the Uttarakāṇḍa fared well at the hands of modern scholars. Despite the fact that it appears in all the thousands of complete manuscripts of the poem in all of its many recensional and orthographic variations, scholarly treatments of the work generally regard it as a late and inferior addition to the poem, at best a mere epilogue to the grand epic narrative given over largely to a scattered collection of peripheral, purāṇic narratives from which the epic hero, Rāma is either entirely absent and for which he most serves merely as either an auditor or narrator. Several of these embedded narratives—despite having virtually universal manuscript support—have been excised from the critically constituted text by the editor of the critical edition, largely on the grounds that he found them incongruous or simply distasteful. 5
On the other hand, on the basis of our long, close and careful reading of the book and its numerous Sanskrit commentaries, Sally Sutherland Goldman and I have concluded that the Uttarakāṇḍa is not only an essential element of the Rāmāyaṇa but that its embedded narratives, which occupy well over half of its text, serve, like the somewhat analogous upākhyānas of the Mahābhārata, an important function in the poem. Our argument is that these tales, some of them admittedly bizarre and even distasteful, provide a consistent and critical discourse that is barely treated in the first six books of the poem. For those books end with the royal consecration of Rāma, an auspicious moment that many pre-modern authors of the Rāma story as well as modern critics and scholars regard as the original conclusion of the poem.
In fact, however, the idea that the great epic originally ended with the enthronement of the victorious hero raises a number of problems. For one thing, it would leave the work, when compared with the parallel poetic biographies of ancient Indian martial and spiritual heroes—works such as the Mahābhārata, the various versions of Kṛṣṇacarita, and the Buddhacarita—in a strangely truncated form. This is a problem since, unlike the biographies of the other principal epic incarnations of divinities, a hypothetical Rāmāyaṇa without an Uttarakāṇḍa would fail to provide the kind of closure and ascension that ancient Indian audiences and authors appear to have expected. Thus, for example, the Mahābhārata provides a complete life story of its incarnated divinities, the Pāṇḍavas, and, to a limited extent, Śrī Kṛṣṇa, from the circumstances that led to their births to their ascension to their proper heavenly realms. 6 This tradition is carried through the purāṇic accounts of the Kṛṣṇacarita, from the Harivaṃśa forward to the great narratives of the Viṣṇupurāṇa and the Bhāgavatapurāṇa. Why would the Rāmāyaṇa be an exception?
Then too, a six-kāṇḍa version of the epic ending with the consecration fails to deal with one of the Sanskrit epic poets’ most abiding anxieties, that of procreation, succession and dynasty. For although the Yuddhakāṇḍa, the sixth book, ends with the happy reunion of Rāma and his long-suffering wife, there is no mention of pregnancy or the birth of sons and heirs, issues of the most profound concern both in the Mahābhārata and the opening book of the Rāmāyaṇa itself where childless kings go to extraordinary lengths to secure sons. Did the author or authors of the poem really intend to let the great and noble lineage of the Ikṣvāku kings, descendants of the sun god himself, simply come to an end without so much as a mention?
This issue is so keenly felt that even those later texts, such as Tulsi Das’s immensely influential Rāmcaritmānas and Kamban’s Irāmāvatāram, that excise the entire Uttarakāṇḍa, tend to attract to themselves secondary traditions of the succession of the dynasty, so that all audiences of all versions are fully aware of the tale of Rāma and Sītā’s twin sons, the bardic princes Lava and Kuśa, and understand it to be a part of the epic narrative.
The matter of royal succession brings up a larger question, one that lies at the very heart of the Sanskrit epics and to a great degree serves as one of their raisons d’ȇtre. For both the Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyaṇa were intended to serve, among their principal purposes, as popular and entertaining works of dharmaśāstra and arthaśāstra, that is to say, traditional law, morality and governance. They are, as scholars from Dahlmann to Pollock and Hiltebeitel have pointed out, both gripping tales of love and war and treatises on kingship. 7
The issue becomes particularly critical in the portrayal of the royal heroes at the heart of the poems. For just as Yudhiṣṭhira is portrayed in the Mahābhārata as the ideal dharmarāja and cakravartin, so too, to a far greater degree, has Rāma been widely revered, down to the present day, as the righteous ruler par excellence. He is regarded not only as a major avatāra of Lord Viṣṇu, but also as the never equalled ideal monarch of a millennia-long period of utopian rule, the legendary Rāmarājya, a concept powerfully rooted in Hindu thought and one that continues to roil the political life of India to the present day.
But the idea that the Vālmīkī Rāmāyaṇa, generally acknowledged to be the oldest textual version of the Rāmakathā, presents a portrait of Rāma as an ideal and exemplary monarch, becomes deeply problematic when one imagines a six-kāṇḍa version of the epic. For at the end of Vālmīki’s Yuddhakāṇḍa, Rāma, the personification of the dharmarāja, has not actually been depicted as a functioning ruler for even a single day. It is, in fact, only in the Uttarakāṇḍa that the critical epic discourse on nītiśāstra and arthaśāstra—in short, on kingship and governance—is set forth through a series of exemplary, if disturbing, actions on the part of King Rāma and through a series of strange but fascinating cautionary tales.
In the present article, I hope to lend some clarity to this complex but important text, which, as we have argued elsewhere, can be read as, among other things, a guide for royal conduct couched in a series of cautionary tales. 8 In this article I would like, however, to explore the ways in which the Uttarakāṇḍa represents itself as a self-consciously historical text, in the context of which we can set the work’s nītiśāstraic or political content. Both Sanskrit epics are described in various texts as itihāsa, history and as kāvya, poetry. 9
It has been traditionally understood by the epics’ commentators and audiences alike that both poems are, despite their many supernatural and hyperbolic characters and episodes, versified accounts of events that occurred in real, historical time, even if those times were many thousands of years before ours. In both cases, the historicity of the works is asserted by the representation of their respective authors, Vālmīki and Vyāsa, not as mere worldly historians or poets, but as inspired ṛṣis, or seers. As such, they possessed an extraordinary, divine vision that enabled them to perceive directly the events they recorded. In addition, as Brahmans they would be characterized by an impeccable truthfulness in their narration of the events they witnessed. Thus, when, in the Rāmāyaṇa’s Bālakāṇḍa, Vālmīki was commissioned to compose the history of Rāma, Lord Brahmā granted him a form of supernormal knowledge which permitted him to know everything said and done by the epic’s cast of characters, whether public or private (rahasyaṃ ca prakāśaṃ ca). 10
Although no such specific account of the origin of Vyāsa’s clairvoyance appears to be given in the Mahābhārata, it is clear throughout the long poem that he possesses this gift along with the other supernatural powers said to be possessed by seers, yogins and ascetics in the literature. This is demonstrated at many places in the work, such as where he is described as atīndriyajñāna, gifted with supersensory knowledge, or where he himself speaks of his prior knowledge of future events, ‘mayedaṃ manasā pūrvaṃ viditam’. 11 The specific nature of this divine vision was made quite clear in those instances where Vyāsa actually confers this gift on others, as he does with Gāndhārī and, most famously, with Sañjaya. 12 In the case of the latter, as in that of Vālmīki, we see the emphasis on a kind of vision that perceives all things, whether public or private (prakāśaṃ vā rahasyaṃ vā). 13
The point of all this is to lend both poems a heightened, indeed irrefutable aura of historical facticity. All cultures, from antiquity to modernity, from ancient bards to contemporary historians, have sought to provide a clear basis for making claims about the past. How can we know what is a genuine historical fact, or even if such a thing objectively exists? 14 Modern historians rely on a variety of contingent sources and forms of documentation such as primary and secondary written records, material culture, oral history and testimony, media and so forth, recognizing that all such sources are subject to personal biases, partisan views, faulty memory, limited knowledge and sheer errors. We also know that histories based on these sources are themselves subject to the same contingencies.
In the case of pre-modern cultures, however—and ancient India’s is an outstanding example—those who wrote or recited history, lacking the resources of modern research scholarship, often sought to clothe historical narrators and narratives in an aura of inerrancy. In the case of the Sanskrit epics, the tradition of seer as both poet and historian derives from the Vedas, texts that were said to have been revealed directly to the ancient ṛṣis or kavis through their faculty of supernormal vision, which enabled them to witness the creation of the world and the deeds of the gods, and so on. 15 Like them, the epic ṛṣis were understood to be, in effect, omniscient, whether, like Vālmīki, through the gift of a deity or, as in the case of Vyāsa, through their very status as inerrant seers. This, coupled with the virtually universal Indic trope concerning the infallible truthfulness (satyavāditva) of such figures, serves as the basis for belief in the unfailing historical accuracy of their compositions. That the absolute facticity of the epics is taken for granted by their intended and receptive audiences is evident in reading the copious commentarial literature the poems have engendered. Where the texts present challenges to this understanding, through such things as multiple and differing versions of the same episode, events that are at variance with the belief systems of the (much later) commentators or descriptions that strain even the capacious tolerance of these commentators for hyperbole, the scholiasts resort to a number of exegetical and philological strategies in aid of showing that the epic stories are mutually consistent and unfailingly truthful. These strategies include resorting to grammatical and lexical arguments to show that seemingly variant versions of a story are in fact consistent with one another, suggestions that variants reflect slightly different occurrences of the same event in successive occurrences of the same cosmic era (kalpabheda), variant parsing of linguistic elements to show that there is a true, latent meaning (vāstavārtha) in a passage that belies the manifest or surface meaning (spaṣṭārtha), and, in extremis, the deployment of the tools of the textual critic to characterize a problematic passage as prakṣipta, interpolated, and thus not the work of the visionary poet-seer. 16
So much for the traditional understanding of the genetic and receptive histories of the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata. Let me now turn more specifically to a discussion of the Rāmāyaṇa as a historical record of events of an ancient past and, in particular, of the life and times of an ancient king, Rāma.
Debates about the historicity of the Sanskrit epics actually first appear in antiquity as their veracity is critiqued both explicitly and implicitly in a variety of ancient and medieval texts. A particularly noteworthy example of a sustained and explicit critique is to be found in the various Jaina versions of both epic stories. Texts such as the numerous Jaina Rāmāyaṇas and the Pāṇḍavapurāṇa consistently cast their versions of the epic narratives in the form of derisive criticisms of the older texts. In their typical narrative frames, a king relates to a Jain muni a version of one or another of the epics in which the tales are significantly, even grotesquely, distorted to make them appear utterly absurd. He asks how such things could be true and the muni responds by belittling these tales as nonsense and then narrating what he represents as the true history of the epic events. These versions follow the teachings of Jainism and represent the epic heroes as pious Jain laymen, destined to become munis and tīrthaṅkaras. They make a particular point of rationalizing much of the fantastic, hyperbolic and supernatural accounts of characters and events in the original poems. 17 Implicit and sometimes explicit critiques are to be found in the many other literary, religious, performative and socio-political versions of the Rāmakathā that Vālmīki’s poem has inspired from ancient times to the present. Some modern reworkings of the Rāmāyaṇa’s narrative also explicitly contest some of the actions of Rāma as they are represented by Vālmīki, either by having some characters—including Rāma himself— critique such things as the killing of Vālin and Śambūka and the exile of Sītā. Other versions excise or modify some episodes such as Sītā’s fire ordeal (agniparīkṣā) or, in a number of cases, eliminate the entire contents of the Uttarakāṇḍa, which is the source of some of the poem’s most controversial passages, in what may be seen as a form of implicit critique. 18
In other words, virtually since the time of composition of the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa and the spread of its various recensions and sub-recensions across the length and breadth of the Indian subcontinent and beyond, audiences and authors alike have been reflecting on the historicity of the poem. As suggested above, opinions range from that of accepting the tale as told by the Ādikavi as simply a literal, if poeticized, account of actual events that occurred in real, if long past, time, or generalized reminiscences of a generalized past, through selectively and subjectively discounting episodes that one believes to be ahistorical, to regarding the entire work as a product of the poet’s imagination with no real basis in historical fact. 19 The middle path among these roughly characterized positions, which accepts that the larger epic tales may well have been based on actual early conflicts between rival princes fighting over land, wealth and women, but came to be expanded over time through the addition of mythological, theological, legendary, śāstraic and philosophical material, appears, from a modern critical perspective, to be reasonable, if not actually scientifically verifiable. One element in this sort of approach, not entirely unlike that underlying the position of the authors of the Jaina versions of the epics mentioned above, is to attempt to read the poems through a focus on their apparently more realistic social, political and historical—in short, more ‘secular’—contents. This involves either ignoring as wholly fictitious episodes that involve supernatural elements or technologies, such as flying vehicles and weapons of mass destruction, which modern historians do not believe to have existed in antiquity, or treating them as having been subject to massive hyperbole and literary flourishes through the imaginative genius of the poets, redactors and bards.
Let us now look at the issue of facticity or what we might think of as historical plausibility in reference to the epics. To begin with, we cannot escape the literary, and in fact novelistic, quality of the work. If we are to view the authors as historians, that is as recorders and reporters of actual historical events, we must also accept their claims, mentioned above, to possessing supernatural and supersensory knowledge, as they were neither physically present at the great majority of the events they describe, nor do they generally refer to any other normal means of obtaining knowledge of those events. Then, too, their compositions are substantially set in the form of dialogues, which the authors purport to render verbatim through, one must understand, a combination of clairvoyance, clairaudience and prodigious memory. But even if we accept that the ṛṣis possessed these powers, we cannot really think that they are reporting the actual words of the actors in the epic dramas. This is so because both texts—the Rāmāyaṇa completely and the Mahābhārata overwhelmingly—are composed in verse. Thus, if we are to accept that Vālmīki and Vyāsa reported their characters’ conversations word for word, we then have to believe that those historical characters actually spoke to one another in verse. If we do not believe this, then we must accept that, even if they were reporting real events as they happened, the epic poets were just that, poets, who rendered their characters’ speeches into metrical form, enhanced with charming literary figures, enriched with rich and gorgeous descriptions and, perhaps above all, deeply imbued with emotive and aesthetic sentiment—in short, rasa. All of these factors combine to transform their historical narratives of events, their itihāsas, into true poetry, kāvya. Indeed, this is quite explicitly stated in the well-known upodghāta, or prologue, to Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa with its famous account of the origin of poetry. There we see that the whole point of Brahmā’s granting poetic inspiration to the sage was that, rather than merely recounting the dry, historical narrative he had heard from the lips of the devarṣi Nārada, he was to expand the tale of Rāma into a grand work of literature, ‘fashioned into ślokas to delight the heart’ and ‘replete with all the poetic sentiments’. 20 After all, according to the great literary scholar Abhinavagupta, the purpose of itihāsa is edification (vyutpatti), while the purpose of kāvya is delight (ānanda). 21
The idea that a great work of literature such as the Rāmāyaṇa should be infused with all of the aesthetic–emotive sentiments, or rasas, is helpful in understanding why the poet has included so many accounts of extraordinary and supernatural characters and events. For, although, according to Ānandavardhana, the famous propounder of the theory of rasadhvani, the pradhāna, or principal, rasa of the Rāmāyaṇa is the karuṇarasa, or piteous sentiment, 22 it is also, as the upodghāta indicates, characterized by the others. Highlighted in this tale of love and war are the vīra and śṛṅgāra rasas, the sentiments of martial valour and romantic love. But there are still the other rasas that are required and which contribute to the ānanda, or delight, of those who read or hear the epic poem. These include the adbhutarasa, the sentiment of the supernatural and wonderful, and the bhayānakarasa, or the sentiment of the fearsome or terrifying. Thus, the author, whether we see him as historian, poet or both, is, by the canons of literary composition, obligated to include scenes such as the incineration of the sixty thousand sons of Sagara, Hanumān’s marvellous leap across the ocean and supernatural figures both divine and demonic, including such terrifying, shape-shifting and man-eating monstrosities as Tāṭakā, Virādha, Kabandha, Kumbhakarṇa, Surasā, Siṃhikā, Lavaṇa and the rest.
So, the idea of eliminating episodes and passages such as these flies in the face of the whole body of literature, culture and science in pre-modern India. Of course, as noted above, there has been a tendency on the part of some interpreters of the epics to eliminate the supernatural elements as they are so out of keeping with the quotidian world of urban modernity in which we live, despite our utterly modern taste for fantasy and science fiction in our popular literature and films and the use of so-called ‘magic realism’ in what we regard as serious fiction.
Considered from this perspective, it might be argued that Vālmīki himself was cognizant of a certain distinction between the ordinary day-to-day life of the people of his time and the different set of realities in the world beyond the confines of civilized society. For, his representation of the miraculous and the supernatural is almost entirely confined to the ‘enchanted’ lands beyond the urban centres and cultivated fields of Kosala and its neighbouring states. If one reads the sections of the epic tale that are set in Ayodhyā, one finds descriptions of the social, spiritual and political life and intrigues of a venerable royal family. Apart from the description of the extraordinary circumstances surrounding the conception of the epic’s four heroic brothers, there are virtually no references to miraculous events or supernatural figures appearing in the city.
It is only in the uncanny outer lands, the forests inhabited by supernaturally endowed ascetics and haunted by flesh-eating ogres and the alien settlements of semi-civilized, flying vānaras and savage rākṣasas, that the poet brings his imagination and literary skill to bear on the supernatural and the horrific, causing us to experience the adbhuta and bhayānaka rasas. In many ways, the representation of the wonders and terrors of these alien landscapes is quite similar to that found in more modern literature of the genres mentioned above and in the histories of other ancient cultures, such as that of Herodotus, in which lands, lost worlds, subterranean realms, alien planets and so forth that are beyond the experiential realm of the author and his or her audience are peopled with all sorts of benign and malignant creatures represented to charm and/or terrify audiences.
Given all of this, and given the dual nature of the Rāmāyaṇa as both a kāvya and an itihāsa, I believe that one should not discount the possibility of its underlying historicity simply on the basis of its mingling of its historical content with its hyperbolic or supernatural passages. 23 One technique, as noted, has been to try to excise or rationalize passages that contain supernatural elements in an effort to recover a more purely ‘historical’ narrative.
But in some cases, at least, it may perhaps be possible to discern some indications of social history from portions of the poem, while finding rational explanations for the poet’s recourse to the supernatural. Let us take as an example the well-known and controversial case of Rāma’s execution of the śūdra ascetic, Śambūka, as punishment for his practice of religious exercises that were reserved, in that particular era, for the members of the three higher social classes or varṇas. The narrative occupies four sargas of the Uttarakāṇḍa. 24
The episode has, from early times, been the object of criticism on the part of poets and playwrights and, in modernity, by Dalit and other social movements.
25
But several modern scholars have read in the episode an indication of a shift, a rigidification, in attitudes toward social class during the period between the composition of what is regarded as the core portions of the poem, sargas 2–6, where Rāma appears to be on relaxed social terms with non-dvija individuals such as Śabarī and Guha. Thus, Brockington takes the episode to indicate an ‘enormous shift in attitudes and the increase in rigidity of the varṇa system’.
26
Chatterjee took an even stronger position on this, stating that:
The present writer strongly feels that the story of the assassination of this innocent Śūdra ascetic by Rāma is an invention of some bigoted Brāhmaṇa poet who had inveterate faith in the infallibility of the Smṛtis. It is utterly inconsistent with the character of the broad-minded Rāma, who is described elsewhere as a sincere friend of the Niṣāda chief Guha… The whole episode…appears to be the work of a vainglorious, casteconscious fanatic who had no faith in the unconquerable spirit of man.
27
Let us assume that the episode records either a specific event or a general trend in social and legal thinking, as suggested by the scholars quoted above. A king acting on a harsh interpretation of śāstraic laws for the different social classes might well carry out the punishment the episode details. But nonetheless, for a variety of reasons, the author of the tale felt it necessary to incorporate a number of supernatural elements in the narrative.
First, the incident that provokes the search for and the punishment of Śambūka is the death of a young child. Such a thing is, alas, all too common in the world. But in the utopian world that is posited as having existed under the benign power of Rāma’s ideal rule, such a thing is repeatedly stated throughout the poem as impossible; impossible, that is if the king’s reign is, as claimed, truly and perfectly dharmic. 28 But the father of the dead child, a pious Brahman, lays the blame for his son’s death squarely on Rāma who, he argues, must be derelict in his royal duties in that someone, somewhere in his realm has been guilty of a transgression which has led to the boy’s death. He thus accuses the king of having been the cause of the death and instructs him to restore the dead child to life through the proper punishment of the miscreant. 29
Rāma evidently accepts the charge of the Brahman and summons his counsellors and some visiting sages. One of them, Nārada, after giving an unusual account of which varṇas were authorized to perform asceticism in which yugas, concludes that the untimely death of the child must be the result of a śūdra practicing unauthorized penances somewhere in Rāma’s realm. He urges Rāma to search out the responsible party and administer punishment, thus bolstering his reputation for righteousness, increasing the lifespan of men and miraculously restoring the child to life. 30 The king then mentally summons the magical flying and speaking vehicle the Puṣpakavimāna and conducts an aerial surveillance of his realm. 31 Ultimately, he finds Śambūka performing austerities in the southern region, interrogates him and summarily executes him. Although this act delights the gods, who offer to restore the child to life as a boon, it turns out that the child automatically revived the instant that the śūdra died. 32
It could be argued that the two supernatural elements in the narrative—the death and miraculous revival of the child and the use of the flying vehicle—serve particular purposes in the context of the construction of Rāma as the ideal sovereign and his rule, the so-called Ramarājya, as the utopian kingdom of God on earth. In the first case, Rāma’s draconian punishment of the śūdra ascetic is represented as both an act of righteousness, in eliminating the single flaw in an otherwise perfect realm, and as a mission of mercy that restores the innocent child to life and relieves the suffering of its grieving parents. Moreover, it conforms to the overarching discourse on the duties of kingship as set forth in the dharmaśāstras and the epics, according to which a monarch’s failure to attend to the needs of his subjects, particularly Brahmans, leads him, after death, to hell. 33
The second supernatural element in the story, the use of the flying Puṣpakavimāna to search out the transgressive śūdra, also serves the narrator’s purposes in a number of ways. For one thing, it enables Rāma to quickly inspect his kingdom for signs of adharmic activity and so assure himself, and the epic’s audience, that, but for the unauthorized austerities of Śambūka, there is no other transgression, however minor, in the otherwise utopian kingdom. 34 Then, too, it enables the author to situate the place of the sole transgression in the distant southern quarter of the realm, thus, perhaps, accounting for the king’s being unaware of it until the crisis of the dead child and his consequent need of the assistance of Nārada in diagnosing the problem. This, in turn, provides the context for the seer’s history of the successive admission of members of the four varṇas, yuga by yuga, to the ranks of those authorized to perform austerities, a narrative that may be seen as a reflection of the sort of rigidification of practices of social hierarchy, as suggested by Brockington and Chatterjee. This example may then be seen as demonstrating the way in which the epic can judiciously weave supernatural elements into a narrative that can be, if not specifically historical, possibly indicative of a development in social history.
But this sort of implicit historiography is not the only indication that the author of the Rāmāyaṇa, or, to be more specific, of the Uttarakāṇḍa, was well aware of the issues of facticity and credibility in the reportage of historical events. There is some evidence to the effect that the author, without actually casting doubt directly on the more supernatural or mythological elements of the central narrative of the Rāmakathā, may have had some desire to supplement some of the tale’s more fantastic episodes with material which, if not literally historical, is more in keeping with historical expectations.
Here, let me take as a prime example what is generally accepted as the central, historical element in the epic narrative, the war in Laṅkā and the killing of Rāvaṇa, which is the very raison d’ȇtre of Rāmā’s avatāra and the account of which occupies the longest of the poem’s seven kāṇḍas, the Yuddhakāṇḍa. For, as we know from Homeric epics, the writings of Herodotus and Thucydides, and the Mahābhārata, there is no subject more attractive to historically minded authors than war.
Anyone who possesses even the most passing familiarity with Rāmakathā in great majority of its innumerable renderings in the literary, artistic, religious and performative cultures of South and Southeast Asia must know the account of the great war at Laṅkā. The conflict was an unusual one by most historical standards, but one that is in keeping with the aura of the supernatural that is so palpable in Vālmīki’s kāṇḍas three through six. For in the campaign, Rāma and his younger brother Lakṣmaṇa are the only humans present in either of the vast hosts that fight to the death on the killing fields outside the walled citadel of Laṅkā. The remainder of the hero’s forces consists of a handful of rākṣasa turncoats and an astronomical number of semi-divine monkeys who have been mustered by Rāma’s ally, the vānara king Sugrīva. 35
Now, from a historical perspective, Rāma is represented as a prince and the future king of a kingdom that is shown as having virtually imperial sway over northern India and is being administered in his absence by his devoted younger brother Bharata. Nonetheless, despite the fact that he is confronted with the necessity of staging an overseas invasion of a fortified island citadel ruled by a powerful warrior king and protected by a huge and heavily armed force of expert fighters, Rāma, the master of dhanurveda, is content to rely on an army of semi-civilized simians who, described as dantanakhāyudhāḥ, are armed only with fangs and claws, and use at most sticks and stones for weapons. At no point during his long search for his abducted wife and his lengthy preparations for the impending war does he appear to send word back to Ayodhyā for professional troops with serious armaments from Kosala and its vassal states to assist him. During a prolonged and bloody struggle, Rāma and his forces are repeatedly driven to the point of defeat and death by the supernaturally powerful forces of the demon-king and especially his son, the terrifying sorcerer-prince Indrajit Rāvaṇi. Nonetheless Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa, with the assistance of Garuḍa, Vibhīṣaṇa and his simian allies, is at last victorious, killing the mighty Rāvaṇa in single combat.
The story, as it is found in the text, must certainly strain the credibility of a modern audience, just as it did of the ancient authors of the Jaina Rāmāyaṇas, who may take the tale to be more of a romance than a history. Of course, one can have recourse to the tradition that the events of the Rāmāyaṇa took place in a far distant past era, the Tretā Yuga, when men and indeed all beings were of greater strength and valour than those of our own, diminished and degenerate age of Kali. For the Rāmāyaṇa, like other ancient works that purport to record history such as the Iliad or the Bible, is set in a long-past age when gods walked the earth and miracles abounded.
Nonetheless, if we compare the war at Laṅkā as described by Vālmīki with the Kurukṣetra war recorded in the Mahābhārata, a text that has many of its own supernatural elements, we see a profound difference in their degrees of what we might call in literary parlance as verisimilitude. Granted, the warriors of the Bhārata, such as those in the Rāmāyaṇa, use supernatural weapons of mass destruction, shoot arrows at a prodigious rate and endure wounds that no actual human could survive for a moment. The Pāṇḍavas even have among their allies a superhuman, half-rākṣasa warrior, Ghatoṭkaca, endowed with magical powers and strength. But, allowing for epic hyperbole, the Bhārata war is described as an actual, if unusually sanguinary, human military engagement. There are no talking monkey warriors who can leap the ocean in a single bound, take on shapes at will, and fly the length of India carrying a mountain. There are no ten-headed, shapeshifting enemies, none who can make himself invisible and shoot from a flying chariot and none who are hundreds of meters tall and sleep for months at a time.
It is this kind of supernatural representation that, as I noted above, led the authors of the Jaina versions of the Rāmāyaṇa to regard the inherited versions of the tale as filled with absurdities and falsehoods, written by bad poets and believed by foolish people. As King Śreṇika reports to the sage Gautama in the opening section of Vimala Sūri’s Paumacariya, he had great doubts as to the veracity of the tales of the Rāmāyaṇa that he had heard and remarks that one might as well believe that a deer killed a lion or a dog, an elephant. 36 Indeed, if one closely reads the Uttarakāṇḍa, a kāṇḍa that many either reject or do not know well, there is an important issue that is generally overlooked. It appears that the author of the book, too, had at least some hesitation, if not scepticism, about the poem’s central section, kāṇḍas three through six, specifically concerning the account of Rāma’s alliance with the vānaras and their campaign against Rāvaṇa.
I do not mean to suggest that there is an attempt to or even any scope for questioning, denial or serious revision of the central story of the epic and of the Rāmāvatāra. Still, there is some suggestion that the author is not fully satisfied with the narrative of Rāma’s foregoing reliance on a traditional military force and assaulting the heavily defended rākṣasa capital with an army of what appear to be untrained, unarmed and undisciplined monkeys.
In the thirty-seventh sarga of the Uttarakāṇḍa, we find Rāma bidding a fond farewell to the subordinate kings who, it seems, had been recruited by Bharata along with their armies to form a great armada, an expeditionary force to undertake the invasion and siege of Laṅkā:
When Rāghava had dismissed his friend (Pratardana, the king of Kāśī), he smiled and addressed this sweet-syllabled speech to the lords of the earth who had come willingly. ‘Through your strength of character, you gentlemen have maintained your unshakable affection for me. Your righteousness is ever unwavering and you are always true. It was through the power and blazing energy of you great kings that the evil-minded lord of the rākṣasas was slain. It was through the blazing energy of you noble men that Rāvaṇa, together with his hosts, his sons, and his kinsmen, was slain in battle. I was merely the proximate cause of all that. It was great Bharata who, upon hearing that Janaka’s daughter had been abducted in the wilderness, assembled you gentlemen. A very long time passed, while all you great kings were here making your preparations. Now you must resolve to depart’. Filled with the greatest delight, the kings replied to him: ‘Thank heavens you have been victorious Rāma and that your reign has been established!’
37
The passage is rather surprising in light of what was reported in the earlier books. However, in their glosses on this passage, the commentators Govindarāja, Mādhava Yogīndra, Maheśvaratīrtha and Nāgeśabhaṭṭa, each of whom is deeply committed to verifying the historicity of the epic, all readily provide an adjusted history of the Laṅkan campaign, interpreting these verses to demonstrate that Pratardana, along with Bharata, had made major military preparations in order to assist Rāma in his war against Rāvaṇa. 38 The passage and its commentaries are rather striking in light of the fact that no mention is made in any of the earlier kāṇḍas of Pratardana or any other human king being solicited for or offering any assistance to Rāma. Moreover, when Hanumān makes his report to Bharata of Rāma’s immanent return to Ayodhyā towards the end of the Yuddhakāṇḍa, it is made quite clear that Bharata was unaware of Sītā’s abduction, Rāma’s invasion of Laṅkā and, indeed, of anything that happened to his brother after his own return from Citrakūṭa to Nandigrāma, as reported in the Ayodhyākāṇḍa. 39
Despite this, the commentators understand that, in order to aid Rāma in his campaign to recover his abducted wife, Bharata had assembled a host of loyal warrior kings (in some manuscripts as many as three hundred), who had apparently spent several years in Ayodhyā preparing for battle. The commentators offer no explanation as to why this vast host never joined the battle or why it never even set out from Ayodhyā. Perhaps we are to understand that while this vast armada was being mustered, Rāma, Lakṣmaṇa, a few rākṣasas and the vast host of monkeys grew tired of waiting for them to arrive and undertook the assault themselves.
What these largely ignored passages suggest to me is that the author is attempting to interpolate a sense of historical verisimilitude into the received text of the earlier books. It appears that he is thinking of a military campaign much in the mode of the one central to the Mahābhārata. In other words, a powerful king facing war will recruit his tributary kings and allies to supply troops, mounts and supplies to bolster his own forces preparatory to either defence or attack. Reading the revisionist history presented in the passage under discussion, it seems that we are to understand that this is exactly what has taken place in preparation for an invasion of Laṅkā and, to judge by Rāma’s words of gratitude to his departing allies, these kings and their armies actually took part in the battle with Rāvaṇa and his rākṣasa hosts, despite the fact that there is no mention of this in the Yuddhakāṇḍa.
Moreover, this curious episode is not the only one in which the author or authors of the Uttarakāṇḍa seek to more convincingly historicize the Rāmāyaṇa. The fact is that although Vālmīki represents the Ikṣvākus as something like High Kings, if not actual cakravartins or universal monarchs, the older and more central sections of the text actually make no clear territorial claims for the Kosalan state beyond the region surrounding its capital city of Ayodhyā, neither when they describe the idealized reign of Daśaratha nor in their depiction of Rāma’s legendary eleven thousand-year utopian reign.
40
In the first six books of the epic, the only suggestion that the Kosalan king holds sway over sāmanta, or feudatory kings, comes in a mere two verses found in the late, framing narrative of the Bālakāṇḍa, where we learn that Daśaratha had expanded an already great realm and that his city was filled with crowds of neighbouring kings who came to pay tribute.
41
In other words, Kosala is mainly represented as a significant regional power able to exert its authority to a limited degree beyond its borders, only into the realms of its sāmanta princes. This is generally the understanding of historians of the so-called janapada period, who see the state as in tension and contestation with Kāśī and Magadha during the sixth century
Compare this minimalist account of the territorial reach of the Ikṣvākus with the grandly imagined and richly detailed military and political hegemony of the Kurus as described in the Sabhāparvan of the Mahābhārata, with its marvellously hyperbolic account of Yudhiṣṭhira’s digvijaya, during which his four heroic brothers lead their victorious armies on sweeping campaigns of conquest and make vassals of every king in India. These military expeditions are said to have left the Dharmarāja in command of a vast empire encompassing not only the entire Indian subcontinent but stretching from Antioch in the West to China in the East. 43 This is entirely consonant with the Indic concept of the cakravartin and is indeed perhaps the original textual model for the concept, which in turn may have been derived from early contact with the Achaemenid Empire of Iran, in emulation of which this imagined imperium may well have been envisioned. In contrast, the earlier kāṇḍas of the Rāmāyaṇa, although they do not hesitate to indulge in wonderful hyperbole when it comes to the numbers of the vānaras or the duration and virtues of Rāma’s rājya, have, in contrast, virtually nothing to say about Kosala’s military or the extent and expansion of its territorial control.
However, it appears that just as the authors of the Uttarakāṇḍa found it beneath the dignity of their hero that he, a prince and heir apparent to the legendary Solar Dynasty, should have to march off to war supported only by a host of monkeys, they also seemed to regard it as inappropriate that his long-awaited and ideal kingdom should be confined only to the Ikṣvākus’ janapada. And yet, despite their desire to construct Rāma as a true dharmarāja and cakravartin, ruling over, in effect, the entire known world as we see, for example, Yudhiṣṭhira doing in the Mahābhārata, they are also cognizant of and no doubt influenced by the poem’s construction of Rāma as a merciful and salvific monarch who conquers only when his righteous anger is provoked and never simply to acquire tribute or territory. 44
In what I would suggest is an attempt to negotiate these two opposing ideals of Hindu kingship—the violent and passionate kṣatriya conqueror and the compassionate and self-controlled dharmarāja—the Uttarakāṇḍa authors indulge in an awkward dance around the critical issue of the agonistic nature of the two great śrauta rites associated with the political power of the divine king, the royal consecration, or rājasūya, and the ritualized subjugation of neighbouring kingdoms through the means of the horse sacrifice, or aśvamedha.
In order to better understand the way in which this problem is framed and managed in Vālmīki’s Rāmāyaṇa, it will be helpful to compare the way in which these two royal rituals are integrated into the narrative of the Mahābhārata. In that epic, Yudhiṣṭhira’s first act as king after he has subjugated and laid waste to all rival kingdoms is to perform a grand rājasūya, the purpose of which is to ritually confirm his new status as the cakravartin or universal sovereign. 45 Then too, after his victory over his enemies in the civil war of the Bhāratas, the despondent king is urged to purify himself and once again assert his suzerainty over all other kings and their territories by performing an aśvamedha. In the course of this ritual, a war party follows a consecrated stallion in its wanderings for a year, giving battle to or demanding the surrender of every king into whose territory the beast wanders. Arjuna, appointed to lead his brother’s forces, duly circumambulates the earth in the hoof prints of the horse, defeating and subjugating the kings of the world once again in the name of the newly re-established universal monarch. 46
In the Uttarakāṇḍa as well, Rāma, establishes himself as a righteous king and demonstrates his adherence to Brahmanical codes of kingly righteousness (rājadharma) through the banishment of his wife and his summary execution of Śambūka. He then decides that he must ritually validate the righteousness of his accession to the throne through the performance of the rājasūya. He tells his brothers Bharata and Lakṣmaṇa:
I have fully accomplished the unsurpassed task for the twice-born brahman (through the execution of Śambūka). And therefore, Rāghavas, I now wish to firmly establish the bulwark of righteousness. I wish to perform the unsurpassed rājasūya together with you two, who are my second selves, for in this lies everlasting righteousness. For, it was only after having sacrificed with the rājasūya rite, accompanied by excellent oblations and excellent subsidiary rites, that Mitra, destroyer of his foes, attained the position of Varuṇa. And it was through having sacrificed with the rājasūya rite in accordance with righteousness, that Soma, who knew righteousness, attained fame among all the worlds and an eternal domain.
47
Thus, Rāma proposes to undertake this royal ritual of consecration after simply executing an individual who, by the socio-religious mores of his era, was considered to have committed a capital offence by performing religious penances not authorized for his social class. But recall that in the Mahābhārata, Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya is performed only after the completion of a prolonged and very sanguinary military campaign involving the slaughter of many kings and their armies.
Nothing quite like this sort of agonistic digvijaya is recorded at any point in the Rāmāyaṇa, apart from Rāvaṇa’s wild career of the conquest of the kings of the earth, the heavenly gods, the demons and the lords of the underworld. 48 The only account of any territorial conquest on the part of a member of Rāma’s immediate family up to this point in the poem has been the tale of Śatrughna’s founding of the city of Madhurā in the Śūrasena region, after killing the pestilential rākṣasa Lavaṇa in single combat after, for some reason, leaving his vast army behind. 49 At no time does Rāma, directly or through his surrogates, engage in the normative digvijaya expected of a claimant to the title of a cakravartin. His martial exploits in the poem are confined to violent skirmishes with forest rākṣasas and a major punitive campaign against the demonic king who had abducted his beloved wife. Neither before nor after his victory does he show any interest in occupying or annexing his enemy’s conquered territory. Instead, he merely consecrates his enemy’s brother on the Laṅkan throne and, taking nothing from that fabulously wealthy kingdom but the loan of the Puṣpakavimāna, returns home to rule in peace. This is not a war of conquest but merely, to use a modern idiom, an example of regime change.
But now, in the Uttarakāṇḍa, when Rāma proposes to perform the signature ritual of a conquering king, Bharata understands immediately what is at stake in light of the violent context of the rājasūya and in consideration of his brother’s peaceful and compassionate nature. He sets himself immediately to the job of dissuading Rāma from his plan:
Your majesty, how can you undertake such a sacrifice, which would witness the destruction of all the royal lineages on earth? For, as in the universal destruction itself, so in that performance, the annihilation of all the kings on earth, who have attained manly valour, will come to pass, your majesty. Tiger among men, you who are of unequalled valour through your virtues, must not destroy the earth; for it is already under your sway.
50
Rāma needs little persuasion and is evidently relieved by Bharata’s intervention.
When truly valorous Rāma had heard that speech of Bharata, which seemed to consist of the nectar of immortality, he experienced unequalled delight. And he said these splendid words to the increaser of Kaikeyī’s joy, ‘I am indeed pleased and gratified this day by your words. These words in conformity with righteousness, which you have boldly uttered, tiger among men, will be the salvation of the earth. Because of your excellent words, knower of righteousness, I will surely desist from that intention of mine, which was to perform that foremost of rites, the rājasūya’. 51
Lakṣmaṇa then joins the conversation, proposing that instead of the massively destructive rājasūya rite, Rāma should perform the other great ritual of sovereignty, the aśvamedha. But in putting forth his rationale for this substitution, Lakṣmaṇa makes no mention of the rite’s equally martial and sanguinary associations. Instead, he dwells on the ritual’s power to purify its patron of sins. In substantiation of this he tells Rāma how, in mythic times, Indra, smitten by the debilitating sin and pollution of brahmahatyā as a consequence of his having slain the great asura Vṛtra, was purified and restored to his senses through a performance of the horse sacrifice. 52 Rāma takes Lakṣmaṇa’s advice and performs the rite but, although it is described with numerous digressions over several chapters, there is no mention of any military campaign or conquest associated with it. 53 Interestingly, however, many later versions of the Rāmakathā in the purāṇas and literary texts will revert to the normative understanding of the context of the aśvamedha and have Rāma’s twin sons engage in battle with the warrior and army appointed to accompany the sacrificial horse. 54 As the rite is described by Vālmīki however, we learn only that, in keeping with the ritual’s prescriptions, Lakṣmaṇa follows the wanderings of the consecrated stallion for a year. No mention is made of his engaging in any conflict with any rival kings during that period. 55
It is also quite noteworthy that the other elaborately described aśvamedha in the epic, that performed by Daśaratha, similarly makes no mention of any conflict or conquest during the consecrated horse’s year-long wanderings. 56 Given all of this, one would think that the authors of the Uttarakāṇḍa would be content to portray King Rāma as a pacific and righteous monarch, more of a cakravartin in the spiritual and moral sense of the term than in its political sense. Besides, Rāma, in Bharata’s rather vague terms, is already a ruler who holds the whole earth under his sway, a sway for which the text provides neither history nor explanation.
But although Rāma’s aśvamedha appears to have only a pro forma martial component and does not serve to add either territory or sāmanta kings to his realm, the closing sections of the Uttarakāṇḍa do, rather hastily, add accounts of actual martial conquest of kingdoms which, if not actually incorporated into the Kosalan state, are represented as having been seized by members of Ayodhyā’s royal family. Although, as I have shown, Rāma is never again—after his conquest of Laṅkā and the slaying of Rāvaṇa—shown to engage in warfare or to appoint ritual proxies to do so for him through the rājasūya or the aśvamedha rites, that does not mean that he does not employ his kinsmen to extend the influence and reach of the Kosalan monarchy.
The first example of such a move is narrated, again with several digressions, in sargas 53–63 of the kāṇḍa. Here, as noted above, Rāma, responding to the petition of the sages who live along the banks of the Yamunā and their spokesman, the Bhārgava ṛṣi Cyavana, concerning the depredations of a terrible and immensely powerful demon named Lavaṇa, deputes his brother Śatrughna, who hitherto in the long epic has had a minor role at best, to destroy the monster, which after a heroic battle, he does. The episode is, in a way, a minor reprise of Rāma’s own history of the destruction of the fearsome Rāvaṇa who, with his rākṣasa hosts, had similarly preyed on Brahman sages. The difference is that Rāma now instructs his brother to found a city and a kingdom at the site of the battle and consecrates him as king of the new political formation of Madhupurī or Madhurā. 57 In this way, the Doab heartland of the Śūrasenas at Mathurā is represented as becoming a satrapy or a client state of Kosala. After twelve years of ruling his new kingdom, Śatrughna returns to Ayodhyā to see his beloved brother but is told, rather sharply, that this is inappropriate and that he must betake himself after only five days back to Madhurā, where he is to remain and rule. 58
Then, many years later, just as the whole book and, indeed, the entire epic are within a few brief sargas of their end, the authors suddenly seem to feel the need to return to a historical–political framework of the story. Here they briefly narrate a few more territorial conquests for the ruling House of the Ikṣvākus. In three short chapters totalling a mere fifty-eight ślokas, they outline not one but two previously unknown and unheralded wars of conquest and annexation.
In sargas 90 and 91, we are told that Rāma’s maternal uncle, Yudhājit of the Kekeyas, sends a messenger to Ayodhyā to request him to invade, subdue and occupy the rich and beautiful country of the Gandharvas, which lies along the banks of the Indus. Once he has done so, Rāma is to found there two capital cities. Delighted at the prospect of a military campaign against thirty million powerful Gandharvas, Rāma immediately resolves to send out an army led by Bharata and the latter’s two sons Takṣa and Puṣkala, with instructions to annihilate the Gandharvas and take their kingdom. 59
Bharata, his two sons and Yudhājit duly proceed to the country of the Gandharvas with a huge army where, after a tremendous week-long battle, described in but a single verse, Bharata instantaneously annihilates all thirty million of the Gandharva warriors with the terrifying weapon of Death himself, the saṃvartāstra. 60 Following this stunning act of genocide, Takṣa and Puṣkara occupy the land, now known as Gāndhāra (presumably in memory of the slaughtered Gandharvas), founding the two splendid eponymous capitals Takṣaśīlā and Puṣkarāvatī. 61 Clearly this sketchy and far-fetched account, which is crafted to explain the geographical names Gāndhāra, Takṣaśīlā and Puṣkarāvatī, has been designed largely to further enhance the imperial pretensions of the Sūryavaṃśa by extending the reach of the Kosalan monarchy to what would today be Pakistan and Afghanistan.
When Rāma learns of the success of this campaign of conquest, he is delighted and decides to expand his dynasty’s territorial reach still further. He now instructs Lakṣmaṇa to find yet another large and well-endowed country over which he, Rāma, will set his devoted brother’s two sons, Aṅgada and Candraketu, as rulers. Only this time, perhaps a bit disturbed by the massive and unprecedented violence preceding the foundation of Gāndhāra, he insists that this next conquest be done in a kinder, gentler fashion. He tells Lakṣmaṇa, ‘Please, gentle brother, seek out a country in which there will be no oppression of kings and no destruction of ashrams, so that we may give no offense’. 62 Bharata, the Conqueror of Gāndhāra, now recommends the delightful country of Kārāpatha as a likely target for this gentler subjugation. The text provides no description at all of the way in which the conquest is accomplished, but, in short order, Rāma is able to consecrate Aṅgada in the charming city of Aṅgadīya in the west and Candraketu in the northern city of Candrakāntā, said to be in the country of the Mallas, which may be the site of the contemporary city of Multan in West Punjab. 63 The commentator Nāgeśabhaṭṭa, in keeping with the constant tenor of the Uttarakāṇḍa, is at pains to note that Rāma himself plays no direct part in the conquest of the region or in the establishment of Aṅgada, commenting that he accomplishes these tasks through the agency of his junior brothers Bharata and Lakṣmaṇa. 64 Here too, even more than the case of Gāndhāra, the treatment of the campaign of conquest has a very slapdash feel, with little thought behind it other than to add some further remote territories to the imagined extent of what we would have to imagine as an Ikṣvākuid Empire, organized in what would appear to be something like the Napoleonic Empire in which a powerful, hegemonic ruler places various countries under the governance of his kinsmen.
Finally, at the very end of the kāṇḍa and the epic itself, the text mentions, in passing, what appears to the apparent division of the kingdom of Kosala between his twin sons, Lava and Kuśa, at the time of Rāma’s departure from the earthly realm. This final, political action of King Rāma is described rather vaguely in the text. All we learn is that Kuśa was installed as the ruler of Kosala proper, ruling from the newly founded capital of Kuśāvatī in the Vindhya range, while Lava was consecrated as king in the new city of Śrāvatī, located in the nebulously defined ‘northern country’ (uttareṣu). 65 It appears that following Rāma’s mahāprasthāna, Ayodhyā, the ancient capital of the Ikṣvākus, was abandoned, as its entire populace was said to have followed Rāma on his final earthly journey. 66
What can the material discussed above tell us about the Uttarakāṇḍa authors’ sense of the historical and the geo-political and about their purpose in including these episodes? These questions take us to the heart of what we and they understood as the nature and purpose of history. Modern academic historical studies of ancient India in the pre-Mauryan period of the contesting early janapada kingdoms and ‘republics’ lend no more scientific credibility to the book’s claim of a Sūryavaṃśa imperium, stretching at least from what is today eastern Uttar Pradesh (Ayodhyā) to Afghanistan (Kandahar/Gāndhāra) in the west, any more than they would accept the Mahābhārata’s account of a Candravaṃśa empire extending from Antioch in the west to China in the east. Now, it is generally understood that the tradition of itihāsa developed out of the bardic tradition of sūtas and cāraṇas, whose duties included storytelling and singing the panegyrics of their royal patrons. 67 This would naturally centre on tales of the heroic deeds, conquests and perfect righteousness of their king and, equally importantly, on the accounts of their illustrious forebears. Such recitations and, later, inscriptions and literary works, would serve to affirm the greatness of the monarch and his often - divine lineage and, ideally, would work to impress his courtiers and subjects at large with his grandeur and divine authority. 68 It is a genre in which, one must imagine, hyperbole would by no means be considered a defect. And it is these compositions in praise of the dynasts of the Rāghava and Bhārata lineages that ultimately coalesced and grew, respectively, into the monumental works of itihāsa/kāvya, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.
Conclusion
Thus, as we can see from this sort of reading of the Utttarakāṇḍa, the very mode of conceptualizing and reporting history as it was recorded and disseminated in early India was both deeply imbued with and amply rewarded for its tradition of grand hyperbole. 69 There is little doubt that the great epic tales with their amazing accounts of titanic figures, supernatural warriors, shape-shifting vānaras and rākṣasas would have thrilled and delighted ancient audiences just as they do us in the present day. It is not that they are not historical in the sense in which we use that term today, but they are a form of what we might call an enhanced or augmented rendering of history, one that is cast into poetic form not only to describe the heroes and events of the past but also to extol them.
But the two epics are not telling quite the same kind of history and it is in their difference that we seek to understand the particular work of the Uttarakāṇḍa in enhancing the historicity of the Rāmāyaṇa. The Mahābhārata, as suggested above, has been read as a preeminent political and military history as its title in its Persian translation, Razmnāma, ‘the Epic of War’, indicates. Thus, it represents its central monarch, Yudhiṣṭhira, as the classic model of the cakravartin, the righteous conqueror who, as the literal son of Dharma, brings, however reluctantly, all directions under his sway and fights a grand dharmayuddha under the guidance of the Supreme Being, Puruṣottama Vāsudeva, to rid the earth of oppressive kings and restore it to peace and righteousness. In a rather different way, the Rāmāyaṇa, despite the bloody battle, that lies at its heart, frames its narrative much in the mode of a poetic romance as a historical record of a conquering king. It is only in the Uttarakāṇḍa, which appears to represent universal lordship much in the manner of the Mahābhārata, that we see Rāma cast in the role of cakravartin within a geo-political and historical frame.
This is how, I suggest, we might read the above five curious episodes including the Uttarakāṇḍa’s introjection, early in the book, of the peculiar episode of the mustering of Pratardana and the forces of the three hundred kings, as well as the accounts, towards the kāṇḍa’s end, of the conquest and annexation of Śūrasena, Gāndhāra and Kārāpatha, and the division of Kosala. With regard to the four extensions of the Ikṣvāku dynasty’s imperial power through conquest and partition, we see an interesting pattern that is no doubt intended to further establish the ‘real time’ historical authenticity and specificity of the epic narrative. Rāma’s brothers are his co-incarnations and will, at the epic’s conclusion, return with him to their heavenly form. 70 Thus, each of the three newly conquered regions will be divided into two kingdoms or fiefdoms, one for each of the two sons of each of the three brothers. In this way, Śatrughna partitions his madhyadeśa kingdom of the Śūrasenas between his sons Subāhu, who inherits the city of Madhurā, and Śatrughātin, who is established in Vaidiśa. 71 In the far Northwest, Bharata, after his conquest of Gāndhāra, founds two new capital cities for his sons, Takṣaśīlā for Takṣa and Puṣkarāvatī for Puṣkara. 72 Similarly, in the vaguely defined region of Kārāpatha, Rāma respectively consecrates Lakṣmaṇa’s sons Aṅgada and Candraketu in the two newly established, eponymous capitals of Aṅgadīyā and Candrakāntā. 73
In addition, in one of its closing chapters, the text mentions in passing the apparent division of the kingdom of Kosala after Rāma’s departure from the earthly realm between his twin sons, Lava and Kuśa. This last act is described only rather vaguely in the text. All we learn is that Kuśa was installed as Rāma’s successor in Kosala proper, ruling from his newly founded capital of Kuśāvatī in the Vindhya range, while Lava was consecrated as king in the new city of Śrāvatī, located in the rather nebulously defined ‘northern country’ (uttareṣu) further up towards the headwaters of the Sarayū. 74 It appears that Ayodhyā itself, the ancient capital of the Ikṣvākus, was abandoned, as its entire populace was said to have followed Rāma on his final earthly journey.
So, we see that before closing the grand narrative of the Rāmāyaṇa with the dramatic account of Rāma’s mahāprasthāna, his ritual procession to the holy Gopratāra tīrtha on the Sarayū River, and his ascent to his true, heavenly abode, the author or authors of the Uttarakāṇḍa felt it necessary to include, somewhat hastily, a significant ‘historical’ component to a tale that had, in its earlier books, very little to say about political or military events on the Indian mainland. Apart from the supernatural accounts of the killing of Lavaṇa and the subjugation of Gāndhāra, these episodes fit a pattern of conquest and rule that, although alien to the earlier books of the Rāmāyaṇa, is more reminiscent of what we find in the Mahābhārata. 75 In constructing this extensive network of eight far-flung kingdoms, all ruled by the sons or nephews of Rāma, it would appear that whoever composed the Uttarakāṇḍa was well aware of the Mahābhārata and eager to document for Rāma the same claim of the status of a dharmarāja and a cakravartin, or universal emperor, as that acquired ritually by Yudhiṣṭhira through the latter’s performances of the rājasūya and aśvamedha rites and militarily through directing his four brothers’ campaigns of military conquest and territorial expansion.
What all of this points to, I believe, is a keen desire on the part of the author or authors of the Uttarakāṇḍa to lend the epic narrative a more clearly defined political and historical framework than appears to have been a concern in books one through six. If this is so, it would contribute to our understanding of the sense of the historical that animated the authors of these historical poems or, if one prefers, poetic histories. It may also cast some further incremental light on the ongoing discussion of the complex relative chronology, in whole and in parts, of the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata.