Many Ramayanas "d0e1810"

The Ahalya Episode: Kampan

They came to many-towered Mithila and stood outside the fortress. On the towers were many flags.
There, high on an open field, stood a black rock that was once Ahalya,
the great sage's wife who fell because she lost her chastity, the mark of marriage in a house.	547

― 29 ―

Rama's eyes fell on the rock, the dust of his feet wafted on it.
Like one unconscious coming to, cutting through ignorance,
changing his dark carcass for true form as he reaches the Lord's feet,
so did she stand alive formed and colored again as she once was.	548

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

"Listen. Once Indra, Lord of the Diamond Axe, waited on the absenceLord of the Diamond Axe,
of Gautama, a sage all spirit, meaning to reach out for the lovely breast of doe-eyed Ahalya, his wife.		551
Hurt by love's arrows, hurt by the look in her eyes that pierced him like a spear, Indra writhed and cast about for stratagems;
one day, overwhelmed and mindless, he isolated the sage; and sneaked into the hermitage wearing the exact body of Gautama
whose heart knew no falsehoods.		552
Sneaking in, he joined Ahalya; coupled, they drank deep of the clear new wine of first-night weddings;
and she knew.
	Yet unable
to put aside what was not hers, she dallied in her joy, but the sage did not tarry, he came back, a very Siva with three eyes in his head.		553

― 30 ―

Gautama, who used no arrows from bows, could use more inescapable powers of curse and blessing.
When he arrived, Ahalya stood there, stunned, bearing the shame of a deed that will not end in this endless world.
Indra shook in terror, started to move away in the likeness of a cat.	554
Eyes dropping fire, Gautama saw what was done, and his words flew like the burning arrows at your hand:
'May you be covered by the vaginas of a thousand women!' In the twinkle of an eye they came and covered him.	555
Covered with shame, laughingstock of the world, Indra left.
The sage turned to his tender wife and cursed:
'O bought woman! May you turn to stone!' and she fell at once
a rough thing of black rock.	556
Yet as she fell she begged: 'To bear and forgive wrongs is also the way of elders. O Siva-like lord of mine, set some limit to your curse!'
So he said: 'Rama will come, wearing garlands that bring the hum of bees with them. When the dust of his feet falls on you, you will be released from the body of stone.'	557
The immortals looked at their king and came down at once to Gautama in a delegation led by Brahma and begged of Gautama to relent.

― 31 ―

Gautama's mind had changed and cooled. He changed the marks on Indra to a thousand eyes and the gods went back to their worlds, while she lay there, a thing of stone.		558
That was the way it was. while she lay there, a thing of stone. From now on, no more misery, only release, for all things in this world.
	O cloud-dark lord
who battled with that ogress, black as soot, I saw there the virtue of your hands and here the virtue of your feet."^[7]		559

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

― 32 ―

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: