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  Valmiki’s Uttara Kanda

  Valmiki’s Uttara Kanda

  THE BOOK OF ANSWERS

  Translated with Commentary by

  ARSHIA SATTAR

  ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

  Published by Rowman & Littlefield

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  The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.

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  Copyright © 2016 by Arshia Sattar

  First Rowman & Littlefield edition 2018

  Originally published in 2016 by Penguin Random House India.

  Reprinted by permission.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Valmiki, author. | Sattar, Arshia, translator, writer of added

  commentary.

  Title: Valmiki's Uttara kanda : the Book of answers / Translated with

  Commentary by Arshia Sattar.

  Other titles: Ramayana. Uttarakanda. English

  Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. | Includes

  bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017025995 (print) | LCCN 2017032251 (ebook) |

  ISBN 9781538104217 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538104194 (cloth : alk.

  paper) | ISBN 9781538104200 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC BL1139.242.U88 (ebook) | LCC BL1139.242.U88 E5

  2017 (print) | DDC 294.5/92204521--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017025995

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  And again, for Sanjay

  Who always had the right questions

  CONTENTS

  Acknowledgments

  INTRODUCTION

  UTTARA

  Sarga 1The Sages Come to Rama’s Court

  Sarga 2The Birth of Vishravas

  Sarga 3The Birth of Vaishravana

  Sarga 4The Birth of Sukesha

  Sarga 5Malyavan, Sumali and Mali Are Born

  Sarga 6The Gods Ask Vishnu to Protect Them from the Rakshasas

  Sarga 7Vishnu Fights Malyavan, Sumali and Mali

  Sarga 8Vishnu Defeats the Rakshasas

  Sarga 9Ravana and His Siblings Are Born

  Sarga 10Ravana and His Brothers Earn Their Boons

  Sarga 11Ravana Takes the City of Lanka

  Sarga 12Ravana and His Brothers Get Married

  Sarga 13Ravana Challenges Vaishravana

  Sarga 14Ravana Takes on the Yakshas

  Sarga 15Ravana Defeats Vaishravana and Takes Pushpaka

  Sarga 16Ravana Encounters Shiva

  Sarga 17Ravana Meets Vedavati

  Sarga 18The Gods Disguise Themselves as Birds

  Sarga 19Ravana Defeats Rama’s Ancestor

  Sarga 20Narada Tells Rama about Death

  Sarga 21Ravana Fights Yama, Lord of the Dead

  Sarga 22Brahma Protects Ravana

  Sarga 23Ravana Kills the Sons of Varuna

  Sarga 24Ravana Sends His Sister to Dandaka

  Sarga 25Ravana Saves Madhu

  Sarga 26Ravana Rapes Rambha

  Sarga 27Sumali Is Killed in Battle

  Sarga 28Ravana Fights Indra

  Sarga 29Meghanada Defeats Indra

  Sarga 30The Reason for Indra’s Defeat

  Sarga 31Ravana Relaxes on the Banks of the Narmada

  Sarga 32Ravana Is Captured by Arjuna of the Haihayas

  Sarga 33Arjuna Frees Ravana

  Sarga 34Ravana Challenges Vali

  Sarga 35The Story of Hanuman’s Birth

  Sarga 36Hanuman’s Childhood

  Sarga 37Praise for Rama

  Sarga 38Rama Gives the Kings Leave to Depart

  Sarga 39The Kings Depart

  Sarga 40Rama Dismisses the Monkeys and the Rakshasas

  Sarga 41Sita Is Pregnant

  Sarga 42Rama Hears the Townspeople’s Gossip

  Sarga 43Rama Summons His Brothers

  Sarga 44Rama Decides to Banish Sita

  Sarga 45Lakshmana Takes Sita to the Forest

  Sarga 46Lakshmana Abandons Sita

  Sarga 47Lakshmana Turns Away

  Sarga 48Valmiki Rescues Sita

  Sarga 49Lakshmana Criticises Rama’s Decision

  Sarga 50Sumantra Shares a Secret

  Sarga 51Lakshmana Consoles Rama

  Sarga 52The Sages Appeal to Rama for Help

  Sarga 53Lavana the Invincible

  Sarga 54Rama Appoints Shatrughna to Fight Lavana

  Sarga 55Rama Gives Shatrughna Vishnu’s Arrow

  Sarga 56Sharughna Sets off to Confront Lavana

  Sarga 57Shatrughna Visits Valmiki

  Sarga 58Sita’s Sons Are Born

  Sarga 59Shatrughna Learns about Lavana’s Spear

  Sarga 60Shatrughna and Lavana Confront Each Other

  Sarga 61Shatrughna Kills Lavana

  Sarga 62Shatrughna Is Crowned

  Sarga 63Shatrughna Misses Rama

  Sarga 64The Death of the Brahmin’s Son

  Sarga 65Narada’s Counsel

  Sarga 66Rama Addresses the Problem

  Sarga 67Rama Kills Shambuka

  Sarga 68The Story of the Corpse Eater

  Sarga 69Shveta’s Hunger

  Sarga 70Rama’s Ancestor

  Sarga 71Danda Rapes Araja

  Sarga 72The Origins of Dandakaranya

  Sarga 73Rama Takes Leave of Agastya

  Sarga 74Rama Consults His Brothers about a Sacrifice

  Sarga 75Lakshmana Suggests the Ashvamedha

  Sarga 76The Killing of Vritra

  Sarga 77The Sin of Brahminicide

  Sarga 78The Story of Ila

  Sarga 79Ila and Budha

  Sarga 80King Ila Becomes a Woman

  Sarga 81The Power of the Ashvamedha

  Sarga 82Preparations for the Sacrifice

  Sarga 83Rama’s Great Sacrifice

  Sarga 84Valmiki Brings Rama’s Sons to the Sacrifice

  Sarga 85Rama Listens to Valmiki’s Poem

  Sarga 86Rama Summons Sita

  Sarga 87Valmiki Confronts Rama

  Sarga 88Sita Enters the Earth

  Sarga 89Rama’s Sorrow

  Sarga 90Rama Settles Bharata’s Sons

  Sarga 91Bharata Secures His Sons’ Kingdoms

  Sarga 92Rama Settles Lakshmana’s Sons

  Sarga 93Time Approaches Rama

  Sarga 94Rama Is Called Back to the Gods

  Sarga 95Durvasas Visits Rama

  Sarga 96Lakshmana’s Death

  Sarga 97Rama Prepares to Join the Gods

  Sarga 98Rama Says Farewell

  Sarga 99Rama’s Departure from Ayodhya

  Sarga 100Rama Enters Vishnu

  ESSAYS

  The Uttara Kanda as a Mahapurana

  The Story of Ravana

  The Banishment of Sita

  The Killing of Shambuka

  The Death of Lakshmana

  “Rama’s Last Act”

  Endnotes

  Glossary

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS r />
  In 1996, almost exactly twenty years ago to the release date of this book, Penguin India published my abridged translation of the Valmiki Ramayana. David Davidar had commissioned the book and Ravi Singh was my editor. I was told to keep to a strict seven hundred English pages, and how and what I edited out of the Sanskrit text was entirely my choice. I chose to abridge my translation for the ‘main’ story, so, apart from shortening repetitive passages, I chose to slash away at the Yuddha Kanda where this one killed that one. More critically, I chose to miniaturise the hefty Uttara Kanda, picking from it what I considered (at the time) the most important narrative moments—Sita’s banishment, Rama’s reunion with his sons and Sita’s final and irrevocable departure. The rest of the Uttara Kanda, I thought, simply retold stories and created back stories for the characters in the preceding books of Valmiki’s text.

  As the story of Rama became more and more politicised in contemporary India, I was forced to look back on my own work, to see it for what it was, for what it might be seen as, for what I had intended it to be. In that sense, I was forced to confront my own politics about the Ramayana and how I understood and re-presented the Valmiki text in English. After 2002, I had the opportunity to teach and talk about Ramayana in many places. Often, students and audiences asked me questions about why things in the story had happened the way they had, why we received the Ramayana in the way we did. These were questions for which I had only tentative suggestions rather than the definitive answers they expected from an ‘expert.’ At some point, I began to see these questions as germane and inherent, even, to the Valmiki text itself. I realised then, that perhaps many of the problems twentieth- and twenty-first-century readers had with the text might have their answers in the Uttara Kanda, the book that I had failed to truly acknowledge in my translation of Valmiki. This volume is, in many ways, in recompense for not having previously understood the significance of the Uttara Kanda and what it does to Valmiki’s story of Rama.

  It was the Ramayana scholar Paula Richman who first suggested that I should do a stand-alone translation of Valmiki’s Uttara Kanda. I did not think that anyone would care to read it. But she persisted in her gentle and persuasive way. Other gentle persuaders made the same suggestion soon after, among them Rustom Bharucha. Without the faith and conviction that Paula and Rustom expressed in a new reading of Valmiki’s Uttara Kanda, I would not have had the courage to suggest this as a book to R. Sivapriya, my then-editor at Penguin. Sivapriya’s commitment to the idea of the book made it real and I thank her for her unstinting belief in my work and the secure confidence she radiated about why such a book had to be done. Always, the lodestone of what I write about Ramayana is Wendy Doniger—my constant teacher, personal Sanskrit dictionary and grammarian, on-call editor, fastest emailer in the west, ready reckoner for anyone and any thing in myth and epic—but more than all of these, a loving and beloved friend. This book would not exist without Paula, Rustom, and Sivapriya, but it exists as an altogether better book because of Wendy.

  I have used the fourth edition of the Sri ValmikiRamayana Satika published by the Nirnay Sagar Press, Bombay (1938), for this translation. For this U.S. edition, thanks are due to my indefatigable agent, Priya Doraswamy, and to Chandni Ananth for her patience with the index and for casting one more critical eye on the text.

  Time and space to write was provided by Sangam House and, in the last phase of untying the knots in troublesome and often garbled thoughts, by D. W. Gibson’s generous invitation to Writer’s Omi in the spring of 2016.

  More and more, I learn that I can be who I am because of my mother Nazura, the backbone of my adult life. For all that she has remained critical of what I wear, she has always supported what I do and how I do it. From letting me cross turbulent waters to go away to graduate school, to years later insisting that I remain true to my desire to teach and read and write in the face of other pressures, Nazura always made me believe that what I was doing was not simply the right thing, it was the only thing I could and should do. No thanks will ever be enough for that.

  For love and strength and food and drink and flowers when there weren’t no sunshine, thank you Anna Hammond, Bob Madey, Bronwen Bledsoe, Priya Sarukkai Chabria, and Rachel Saltz.

  Tyler Norman, when I count my blessings, I think of you.

  Anmol Tikoo, Arati Rao, Aseem Shrivastava, Lynne Fernandez, Maya (who used to be called Digger), Mrugank Sanghvi, Mythri Surendra, Nayana Currimbhoy, Pascal Sieger, Pavi, Raghu Karnad, Raghu Srinivasan, Raghu Tenkayala, Rahul Soni, Rohan Agarwal, Shai Heredia, Sonali Sattar, Sunil Shetty, Tabasheer Zutshi, Trupti Prasad, Vivek Madan—you helped me to keep singing when the music died. This book is for each of you as much as it is for our beloved Sanjay.

  INTRODUCTION

  What we call the Valmiki Ramayana consists of seven books or kandas—Bala, Ayodhya, Aranya, Kishkindha, Sundara, Yuddha and Uttara. They vary in length and, often, in language and style. Even the most inexperienced Sanskrit reader will notice that the greatest variation in these elements is evident in the difference between the Bala and Uttara Kandas and the so-called middle books of the text. The poignant human emotions in Ayodhya, the exquisite beauty in Sundara, the leaps of imagination in Kishkindha, are all replaced (barring a few magnificent passages such as the rape of Rambha) by largely uninspired language in the Bala and Uttara Kandas. In these, the first and the last books, the fundamentally prosaic and essentially narrative metre of the shloka is punctuated by formulaic constructions rather than elevated by the soaring images that rip through it in the middle books. While the middle books feel like kavya, the poesy to which the Ramayana stakes claim, the first and the last books resemble sectarian Puranas in both language and attitude.

  Much has been written and said about Valmiki’s composition. Some of that writing has concerned itself with text-critical issues. Text-based scholarship is largely agreed that though we regard the Valmiki Ramayana as a unitary text, it cannot have been composed by a single person at a single time. It is very likely that the story of Rama, the exiled prince whose wife was abducted during their time in the forest, was in circulation for a long time before it came together in the Sanskrit poem that we attribute to Valmiki, who is perhaps a construct rather than a flesh-and- blood writer. While this does not matter in most instances (the text we have is the text we know and love and cite as such), there are times when the idea of a single author and a continuous period of composition for the Sanskrit Ramayana becomes problematic, most especially when these ideas impinge upon our understanding of the text as a whole.

  Of all the many realms that the Ramayana inhabits—the literary and the religious, the devotional and the poetic—and for all that it signifies to the people of the subcontinent and beyond, it also, more or less, conforms to the generic idea of the Indo-European epic in its structure and its concerns. One of the theories that underpins the idea of epic as a literary genre is that epics are a record of what happened, albeit retold in a hyperbolic and exaggerated style. The idea that Valmiki put together a story that was already in circulation serves the purposes of those who would like to believe that the story of the Ramayana is true, that all Valmiki did was record these real events in the most beautiful language available to him. While it may well be that there was once a prince who was unjustly exiled after a palace intrigue that placed his younger brother on the throne, and it may also be that when he lived in the forest, his wife was abducted by the powerful ruler of a distant land and it may further be that the exiled prince had to find allies and fight a great war to win her back and regain his kingdom, that story is not the Ramayana. The Ramayana is a story where monkeys fly and demons have ten heads and creatures change their shapes and forms at will. It is a story that contains flying chariots and magical weapons powered by secret utterances. It is a tale where dharma and karma act together to make things happen, where making the right choice does not always lead to the right (or the happiest) consequences.

  Eventually, over centuries of tellings and re-tel
lings, of religious shifts and reforms, the story of Rama becomes a story of a god acting on earth, in the world of men. But until that theological moment which occurs in historical time, the story, as exemplified in Valmiki’s telling, is many things, including an epic. Once Rama is established as god, as Vishnu descending to earth as an avatara to restore dharma, the Ramayana becomes a Vaishnava text. It is unlikely that it was always thus—the composition of the Sanskrit Ramayana pre-dating the appearance of Vaishnavism as a sectarian creed by several centuries. However, throughout the Valmiki text, there are instances of Rama being referred to as god and of people around him behaving as if he were god. Despite this, Rama does not actually exhibit the special powers of a god. His extraordinary gifts and talents, like Ravana’s or Hanuman’s, appear to be the generic qualities of a hero and predicated on the narrative necessities of the Ramayana as an epic rather than on Rama’s uniqueness in his own story.

  One of the most poignant existential moments in the Valmiki text is at the end of the Yuddha Kanda, when all the gods have gathered to celebrate Sita’s triumph at the trial by fire that she puts herself through to prove her chastity to her husband and his allies.

  [The gods] raised their strong arms that were adorned with jewels and addressed Rāma who stood in front of them with his palms joined.

  ‘You are the creator of the worlds and the foremost of the wise! How could you let Sītā walk into the fire? Don’t you know that you are the greatest among the gods?

  ‘Long ago, you were R. tadhāmā, the best of the vasus. Then you were the self-born Prajāpati, the creator of the three worlds. You were the eighth rudra and the fifth pancama. The aśvins are your ears, the sun and the moon are your eyes. You are visible in the time between the end and the beginning of the worlds. And yet, you have humiliated Sītā as if you were an ordinary man!’

  Rāma, the lord of the worlds, the best among those who practise dharma, said, ‘I always thought I was human, that I was Rāma, the son of Daśaratha. Tell me who I am. Where did I come from? Why am I here?’1

  The question of whether Rama is aware of his divinity in Valmiki’s text has been asked and answered many times over the centuries. As one might expect, for such a crucial and multilayered question, the answers have been multiple and complex. Each of us who reads the Ramayana chooses the answer that suits us, for there are a number of possibilities with regard to the extent and knowledge of Rama’s divinity within the text. But since we know that the text we call Valmiki’s was compiled over a long period of time and through several moments in the history of what we now call Hinduism, we presume that passages and verses were added and subtracted, each transaction shading the larger narrative not simply with a theology but also with a politics. Nowhere in Valmiki is this theology, of Rama as Vishnu, more emphatically stamped on the story as it is in the Bala and Uttara Kandas. In the Bala Kanda, the gods together beseech Vishnu to take human form to deal with Ravana, who cannot be killed by gods, gandharvas, yakshas and danavas because of the boon he secured from Brahma.