Valmiki and Kampan: Two Ahalyas

Obviously, these hundreds of tellings differ from one another. I have come to prefer the word tellings to the usual terms versions or variants because the latter terms can and typically do imply that there is an invariant, an original or

Ur -text—usually Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana , the earliest and most prestigious of them all. But as we shall see, it is not always Valmiki's narrative that is carried from one language to another.

It would be useful to make some distinctions before we begin. The tradition itself distinguishes between the Rama story (ramakatha ) and texts composed by a specific person—Valmiki, Kampan, or Krttivasa, for example. Though many of the latter are popularly called Ramayanas (like Kamparamayanam ), few texts actually bear the title Ramayana ; they are given titles like Iramavataram (The Incarnation of Rama), Ramcaritmanas (The Lake of the Acts of Rama), Ramakien (The Story of Rama), and so on. Their relations to the Rama story as told by Valmiki also vary. This traditional distinction between katha (story) and kavya (poem) parallels the French one between sujet and recit , or the English one between story and discourse.^[4] It is also analogous to the distinction between a sentence and a speech act. The story may be the same in two tellings, but the discourse may be vastly different. Even the structure and sequence of events may be the same, but the style, details, tone, and texture—and therefore the import—may be vastly different.

Here are two tellings of the "same" episode, which occur at the same point in the sequence of the narrative. The first is from the first book (Balakanda ) of Valmiki's Sanskrit Ramayana ; the second from the first canto (Palakantam ) of Kampan's Iramavataram in Tamil. Both narrate the story of Ahalya.

The Ahalya Episode: Valmiki

Seeing Mithila, Janaka's white
     and dazzling city, all the sages
cried out in praise, "Wonderful!
     How wonderful!"

Raghava, sighting on the outskirts
     of Mithila an ashram, ancient,
unpeopled, and lovely, asked the sage,
     "What is this holy place,

so like an ashram but without a hermit?
     Master, I'd like to hear: whose was it?"
Hearing Raghava's words, the great sage
     Visvamitra, man of fire,

expert in words answered, "Listen,
     Raghava, I'll tell you whose ashram
this was and how it was cursed
     by a great man in anger.

It was great Gautama's, this ashram
     that reminds you of heaven, worshiped even
by the gods. Long ago, with Ahalya
     he practiced tapas^[5] here

for countless years. Once, knowing that Gautama
     was away, Indra (called Thousand Eyes),
Saci's husband, took on the likeness
     of the sage, and said to Ahalya:

'Men pursuing their desire do not wait
     for the proper season, O you who
have a perfect body. Making love
     with you: that's what I want.
That waist of yours is lovely.'

She knew it was Indra of the Thousand Eyes
     in the guise of the sage. Yet she,
wrongheaded woman, made up her mind,
     excited, curious about the king
of the gods.

And then, her inner being satisfied,
     she said to the god, 'I'm satisfied, king
of the gods. Go quickly from here.
     O giver of honor, lover, protect
yourself and me.'

And Indra smiled and said to Ahalya,
     'Woman of lovely hips, I am
very content. I'll go the way I came.'
     Thus after making love, he came out
of the hut made of leaves.

And, O Rama, as he hurried away,
     nervous about Gautama and flustered,
he caught sight of Gautama coming in,
     the great sage, unassailable
by gods and antigods,

empowered by his tapas , still wet
     with the water of the river
he'd bathed in, blazing like fire,
     with kusa grass and kindling
in his hands.

Seeing him, the king of the gods was
     terror-struck, his face drained of color.
The sage, facing Thousand Eyes now dressed
     as the sage, the one rich in virtue
and the other with none,

spoke to him in anger: 'You took my form,
     you fool, and did this that should never
be done. Therefore you will lose your testicles.'
     At once, they fell to the ground, they fell
even as the great sage spoke

his words in anger to Thousand Eyes.
     Having cursed Indra, he then cursed
Ahalya: 'You, you will dwell here
     many thousands of years, eating the air,
without food, rolling in ash,

and burning invisible to all creatures.
     When Rama, unassailable son
of Dasaratha, comes to this terrible
     wilderness, you will become pure,
you woman of no virtue,

you will be cleansed of lust and confusion.
     Filled then with joy, you'll wear again
your form in my presence.' And saying
     this to that woman of bad conduct,
blazing Gautama abandoned

the ashram, and did his tapas
     on a beautiful Himalayan peak,
haunt of celestial singers and
     perfected beings.

Emasculated Indra then
     spoke to the gods led by Agni
attended by the sages
     and the celestial singers.

'I've only done this work on behalf
     of the gods, putting great Gautama
in a rage, blocking his tapas .
     He has emasculated me

and rejected her in anger.
     Through this great outburst
of curses, I've robbed him
     of his tapas . Therefore,

great gods, sages, and celestial singers,
     help me, helper of the gods,
to regain my testicles.' And the gods,
     led by Agni, listened to Indra

of the Hundred Sacrifices and went
     with the Marut hosts
to the divine ancestors, and said,
     'Some time ago, Indra, infatuated,

ravished the sage's wife
     and was then emasculated
by the sage's curse. Indra,
     king of gods, destroyer of cities,

is now angry with the gods.
     This ram has testicles
but great Indra has lost his.
     So take the ram's testicles

and quickly graft them on to Indra.
     A castrated ram will give you
supreme satisfaction and will be
     a source of pleasure.

People who offer it
     will have endless fruit.
You will give them your plenty.'
     Having heard Agni's words,

the Ancestors got together
     and ripped off the ram's testicles
and applied them then to Indra
     of the Thousand Eyes.

Since then, the divine Ancestors
     eat these castrated rams
and Indra has the testicles
     of the beast through the power
of great Gautama's tapas .

Come then, Rama, to the ashram
     of the holy sage and save Ahalya
who has the beauty of a goddess."
     Raghava heard Visvamitra's words

and followed him into the ashram
     with Laksmana: there he saw
Ahalya, shining with an inner light
     earned through her penances,

blazing yet hidden from the eyes
     of passersby, even gods and antigods.^[6]

The Ahalya Episode: Kampan

In 550, Rama asks Visvamitra why this lovely woman had been turned to stone. Visvamitra replies:

Let me rapidly suggest a few differences between the two tellings. In Valmiki, Indra seduces a willing Ahalya. In Kampan, Ahalya realizes she is doing wrong but cannot let go of the forbidden joy; the poem has also suggested earlier that her sage-husband is all spirit, details which together add a certain psychological subtlety to the seduction. Indra tries to steal away in the shape of a cat, clearly a folklore motif (also found, for example, in the Kathasaritsagara , an eleventh-century Sanskrit compendium of folktales).^[8] He is cursed with a thousand vaginas which are later changed into eyes, and Ahalya is changed into frigid stone. The poetic justice wreaked on both offenders is fitted to their wrongdoing. Indra bears the mark of what he lusted for, while Ahalya is rendered incapable of responding to anything. These motifs, not found in Valmiki, are attested in South Indian folklore and other southern Rama stories, in inscriptions and earlier Tamil poems, as well as in non-Tamil sources. Kampan, here and elsewhere, not only makes full use of his predecessor Valmiki's materials but folds in many regional folk traditions. It is often through him that they then become part of other Ramayanas .

In technique, Kampan is also more dramatic than Valmiki. Rama's feet transmute the black stone into Ahalya first; only afterward is her story told. The black stone standing on a high place, waiting for Rama, is itself a very effective, vivid symbol. Ahalya's revival, her waking from cold stone to fleshly human warmth, becomes an occasion for a moving bhakti (devotional) meditation on the soul waking to its form in god.

Finally, the Ahalya episode is related to previous episodes in the poem such as that in which Rama destroys the demoness Tataka. There he was the destroyer of evil, the bringer of sterility and the ashes of death to his enemies. Here, as the reviver of Ahalya, he is a cloud-dark god of fertility. Throughout

Kampan's poem, Rama is a Tamil hero, a generous giver and a ruthless destroyer of foes. And the bhakti vision makes the release of Ahalya from her rock-bound sin a paradigm of Rama's incarnatory mission to release all souls from world-bound misery.

In Valmiki, Rama's character is that not of a god but of a god-man who has to live within the limits of a human form with all its vicissitudes. Some argue that the references to Rama's divinity and his incarnation for the purpose of destroying Ravana, and the first and last books of the epic, in which Rama is clearly described as a god with such a mission, are later additions.^[9] Be that as it may, in Kampan he is clearly a god. Hence a passage like the above is dense with religious feeling and theological images. Kampan, writing in the twelfth century, composed his poem under the influence of Tamil bhakti . He had for his master Nammalvar (9th C.?), the most eminent of the Srivaisnava saints. So, for Kampan, Rama is a god who is on a mission to root out evil, sustain the good, and bring release to all living beings. The encounter with Ahalya is only the first in a series, ending with Rama's encounter with Ravana the demon himself. For Nammalvar, Rama is a savior of all beings, from the lowly grass to the great gods:

By Rama's Grace

Why would anyone want
     to learn anything but Rama?

Beginning with the low grass
     and the creeping ant
with nothing
     whatever,

he took everything in his city,
     everything moving,
     everything still,

he took everything,
     everything born
of the lord
     of four faces,

he took them all
     to the very best of states.
          Nammalvar 7.5.1^[10]

Kampan's epic poem enacts in detail and with passion Nammalvar's vision of Rama.

Thus the Ahalya, episode is essentially the same, but the weave, the texture, the colors are very different. Part of the aesthetic pleasure in the later poet's telling derives from its artistic use of its predecessor's work, from ring-

ing changes on it. To some extent all later Ramayanas play on the knowledge of previous tellings: they are meta-Ramayanas . I cannot resist repeating my favorite example. In several of the later Ramayanas (such as the AdhyatmaRamayana , 16th C.), when Rama is exiled, he does not want Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first she uses the usual arguments: she is his wife, she should share his sufferings, exile herself in his exile, and so on. When he still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, "Countless Ramayanas have been composed before this. Do you know of one where Sita doesn't go with Rama to the forest?" That clinches the argument, and she goes with him.^[11] And as nothing in India occurs uniquely, even this motif appears in more than one Ramayana .

Now the Tamil Ramayana of Kampan generates its own offspring, its own special sphere of influence. Read in Telugu characters in Telugu country, played as drama in the Malayalam area as part of temple ritual, it is also an important link in the transmission of the Rama story to Southeast Asia. It has been convincingly shown that the eighteenth-century Thai Ramakien owes much to the Tamil epic. For instance, the names of many characters in the Thai work are not Sanskrit names, but clearly Tamil names (for example, Rsyasrnga in Sanskrit but Kalaikkotu in Tamil, the latter borrowed into Thai). Tulsi's Hindi Ramcaritmanas and the Malaysian Hikayat Seri Ram too owe many details to the Kampan poem.^[12]

Thus obviously transplantations take place through several mutes. In some languages the word for tea is derived from a northern Chinese dialect and in others from a southern dialect; thus some languages, like English and French, have some form of the word tea , while others, like Hindi and Russian, have some form of the word cha(y) . Similarly, the Rama story seems to have traveled along three routes, according to Santosh Desai: "By land, the northern route took the story from the Punjab and Kashmir into China, Tibet, and East Turkestan; by sea, the southern route carried the story from Gujarat and South India into Java, Sumatra, and Malaya; and again by land, the eastern route delivered the story from Bengal into Burma, Thailand, and Laos. Vietnam and Cambodia obtained their stories partly from Java and partly from India via the eastern route."^[13]