The Hindus (41 page)

THE HORSE SACRIFICE

Sita’s final disappearance takes place on the occasion of a horse sacrifice. This is appropriate, for she herself lives out the paradigm of an equine goddess, and she is brought to the horse sacrifice by her twin sons, who are bards, related to the Charioteer bards who perform in the intervals of the ritual. The names of the sons, Kusha and Lava, are the two halves of the noun
kushilava
, designating a wandering bard, as if one son were named “po-” and the other “-et.” By coming to Rama’s horse sacrifice, Kusha and Lava preserve Rama’s family, and as the
kushilava
they preserve the story of Rama’s family. So too Valmiki both invents the poetic form, the
shloka
, and raises the poets.

The horse sacrifice plays a crucial role at both ends of the
Ramayana
. At the start King Dasharatha, childless, performs the horse sacrifice not for political and martial aggrandizement but to have a son, another express purpose of the ritual. Yet the list of kings whom he invites to the sacrifice constitutes a roll call for the territories that had better come when he calls them, and it is a wide range indeed, from Mithila and Kashi to the kings of the east and the kings of the south (1.12.17-24). The stallion roams for a year and is killed, together with several aquatic animals, while three hundred sacrificial animals, reptiles, and birds are killed separately. Queen Kausalya herself cuts the stallion open with three knives and then lies with him for one night, as do the two other queens (1.13.27-28). The king smells (but does not eat) the cooked marrow. The sacrifice, described in great detail, is a total success: Vishnu becomes incarnate in Rama and his half brothers.

Years later, after Rama has banished Sita, he resolves to perform a ceremony of royal consecration, but Lakshmana tactfully persuades him to perform, instead, a horse sacrifice, “which removes all sins and is an infallible means of purification (7.84.2-3).” To persuade him, Lakshmana tells him stories of two people who were restored by a horse sacrifice: Indra was purged of Brahminicide after killing a Brahmin antigod,
^ep
and a king who had been cursed to become a woman regained his manhood. Thus Rama performs the ceremony to expiate his sins, which are never mentioned, but which surely include his killing of Ravana (a necessary Brahminicide, but Brahminicide nonetheless, for Ravana, though an ogre, is not only a Brahmin but a grandson of Prajapati), corresponding to Indra’s killing of several Brahmin antigods, and the banishing of Sita, a sin against a woman that corresponds, roughly, to the error of the king who became a woman. Lakshmana follows the horse as it “wanders” for a year. But since Rama has banished Sita, there is no queen to lie down beside the stallion or to bear the king an heir.
^eq
It is therefore necessary for Sita (and the heir[s]) to return, and they come to the horse sacrifice (7.86-8).

These two horse sacrifices are successfully completed, though the second one is flawed by the absence of the queen, who reappears only to be lost again. This second sacrifice, intended to produce offspring, does so indirectly (by attracting Kusha and Lava), but it is also intended to give the king, through the queen, the fertile powers of the earth.
^er
In the end Rama loses both the queen and his connection, through her, with the earth, her mother.

 

MONKEYS

The central characters of this text—Rama, the perfect prince; Sita, his perfect wife, and Lakshmana, his perfect half brother (later to form the template for the perfect worshiper of the fully deified Rama)—were born to be paradigms, squeaky clean, goody-goodies (or, in the case of the perfectly ogric ogre Ravana, a baddy-baddy). If that were all there were to the
Ramayana
, it would have proved ideologically useful to people interested in enforcing moral standards or in rallying religious fanatics, as, alas, it has proved all too capable of doing to this day in India, but it would probably not have survived as a beloved work of great literature, as it has also done. We have seen how the ogresses express the shadow side of Sita. The bears and monkeys, the two species often said to be closest to the human in both their appearance and their behavior, give the male characters their character. Let us concentrate on the monkeys, as the bears play only a minor role.

Neither so glamorous as horses nor so despised as dogs, the monkeys are the star animal act in the
Ramayana
. The
Ramayana
draws a number of parallels, both explicit and implicit, between the humans and the monkeys.
⁴²
The appropriateness of these parallels is supported by such factors as the human characters’ assumption that though they cannot understand the language of the deer (Rama explicitly laments this fact when he runs off after the golden deer that he suspects—rightly—of being an ogre in disguise), they do not comment on the fact that they can understand the language of monkeys, who are called the deer of the trees. Hanuman not only speaks a human language, but he also speaks Sanskrit. When he approaches Sita on the island of Lanka, he anxiously debates with himself precisely what language he will use to address her: “Since I’m so small, indeed just a small monkey, I’d better speak Sanskrit like a human. I must speak with a human tongue, or else I cannot encourage her. But if I speak Sanskrit like a Brahmin, Sita will think I am Ravana, who can take any form he wants [as she mistook the real Ravana, a notorious shape changer, for a Brahmin sage]. And she’ll be terrified and scream, and we’ll all be killed.” He finally does address her in Sanskrit (he begins to tell a story: “Once upon a time there was a king named Dasharatha . . . ”), and she is suitably impressed. She does not scream (5.28.17-23, 5.29.2).

Special monkeys are the sons of gods, as special people are. Sugriva is the son of Surya (the sun god), Valin is the son of Indra (king of the gods), and Hanuman is the son of Vayu, the wind. (Hanuman later became a deity in his own right, worshiped in temples all over India.
⁴³
) But monkeys also unofficially double for each of the major human characters of the
Ramayana
. These monkey doubles are, ironically, more flesh and blood, as we would say, more complex and nuanced, indeed more human than their human counterparts. Or rather, added to those original characters, they provide the ambiguity and ambivalence that constitute the depth and substance of the total character, composed of the original plus the shadow. All the fun is in the monkeys.

After Ravana has stolen Sita, Rama and Lakshmana meet Sugriva, who used to be king of the monkeys and claims that his brother Valin stole his wife and throne. Rama sides with Sugriva and murders Valin by shooting him in the back when he is fighting with Sugriva, an episode that has continued to trouble the South Asian tradition to this very day. Why does Rama kill Valin at all? Apparently because he senses a parallel between his situation and that of Sugriva and therefore sides with Sugriva against Valin. But Rama sides with the wrong monkey. The allegedly usurping monkey, Valin, is, like Rama, the
older
half brother, the true heir; the “deposed” king, Sugriva, the younger brother, originally took the throne (and the monkey queen) from the “usurping” brother, and Valin just took it back. Valin, not Sugriva, is the legal parallel to Rama. Yet Rama sympathizes with Sugriva because each of them has lost his wife and has a brother occupying the throne (and the queen) that was his. The plots are the same, but the villains are entirely different, and this is what Rama fails to notice. Moreover, unlike Sita, but in keeping with Rama’s fears about Sita, Valin’s wife was taken by the brother who took the throne. On another occasion, Rama says he would gladly give Sita to Bharata (2.16.33). Does he assume that you get the queen when you get the throne? He kills Valin because the rage and resentment that he
should
feel toward his half brother and father, but does not, are expressed for him by his monkey double—the “deposed” monkey king, Sugriva—and vented by Rama on that double’s enemy, Valin. We have noted that when Bharata is given the throne instead of Rama, the half brothers graciously offer each other the kingdom (2.98). But the monkeys fight a dirty battle for the throne, and for the queen too.

Even if we can understand why Rama kills Valin, why does he shoot him in the back? The monkeys’ access to human language also grants them access to human ethics, or dharma. The dying Valin reproaches Rama, saying, “I’m just a monkey, living in the forest, a vegetarian. But you are a
man
. I’m a monkey, and it’s against the law to eat monkey flesh or wear monkey skin (4.17.26-33).” Rama defends himself against the charge of foul play by saying, “People always use snares and hidden traps to catch wild animals, and there’s nothing wrong about this. Even sages go hunting. After all, you’re just a monkey, but kings are gods in human form (4.18.34-38).” Rama is on thin ice here; the text judges him to have violated human dharma in his treatment of the monkey. And the monkeys remind him that he is a man (i.e., higher than a monkey), just as the gods elsewhere remind him, when he behaves badly, that he is a god (i.e., higher than a man).

Valin also takes on the displaced force of Rama’s suspicions of another half brother, Lakshmana. The text suggests that Rama might fear that Lakshmana might replace him in bed with Sita; it keeps insisting that Lakshmana will
not
sleep with Sita. It doth protest too much. (Recall that when Rama kicks Sita out for the first time and bitterly challenges her to go with some other guy, he lists Lakshmana first of all.)

The tension between the two half brothers, over Sita, is a major motivation for the plot. When Rama goes off to hunt the golden deer and tells Lakshmana to guard Sita, Sita thinks she hears Rama calling (it’s a trick) and urges Lakshmana to find and help Rama. Lakshmana says Rama can take care of himself. Sita taunts Lakshmana, saying, “You want Rama to perish, Lakshmana, because of me. You’d like him to disappear; you have no affection for him. For with him gone, what could I, left alone, do to stop you doing the one thing that you came here to do? You are so cruel. Bharata has gotten you to follow Rama, as his spy. That’s what it must be. But I could never desire any man but Rama. I would not even touch another man, not even with my foot! (3.43.6-8, 20-24, 34).” Lakshmana gets angry (“Damn you, to doubt me like that, always thinking evil of others, just like a woman [3.43.29])” and stalks off, leaving Sita totally unprotected, and Ravana comes and gets Sita. When Rama returns, Lakshmana reports a slightly different version of what she said to him: “Sita, weeping, said these terrible words to me: ‘You have set your evil heart on me, but even if your brother is destroyed, you will not get me. You are in cahoots with Bharata; you’re a secret enemy who followed us to get me.’ ” Rama ignores all this and simply says to Lakshmana, “You should not have deserted Sita and come to me, submitting to Sita and to your own anger, just because an angry woman teased you (3.57.14-21).”

But why would Sita have said such a thing if she didn’t fear it on some level? And why would it have made Lakshmana so mad if he did not fear it too? When Rama, hunting for Sita, finds the cloak and jewels that she dropped as Ravana abducted her, he says to Lakshmana, “Do you recognize any of this?” And Lakshmana replies, “I have never looked at any part of Sita but her feet, so I recognize the anklets, but not the rest of her things.” Yet, evidently, Rama had expected him to recognize the jewels that had adorned higher parts of Sita’s body. So too, though the text, insisting on Rama’s infallibility, displaces the error onto Sita and insists that Rama knew it was an ogre all along, the vice of hunting carries him along in its wake nevertheless: Rama follows the ogre as deer too far and so is unable to protect Sita from Ravana, thus inadvertently engineering his own separation from her. Just as Sita was prey to her desire for the deer, and Rama to his desire to hunt it, so Lakshmana too is vulnerable to Sita’s taunts about his desire for her; their combined triple vulnerabilities give Ravana the opening he needs.

At the very end of the
Ramayana
, Rama is tricked into having to kill Lakshmana. This happens as the result of an elaborate (but not atypical, in this text) set of vows and curses. Death incarnate comes to talk with Rama, to remind him that it is time for him to die. Death makes Rama promise to kill anyone who interrupts them; Lakshmana guards the door. An ascetic arrives and threatens to destroy the world if Lakshmana won’t let him see Rama; Lakshmana, caught between a rock and a hard place, chooses the lesser of two evils, his own death rather than the destruction of the world. He interrupts Rama and Death, whereupon Rama says that for Lakshmana, being separated from him (Rama) would be so terrible that it would be the equivalent of death, and so he satisfies the curse by merely banishing Lakshmana, who then commits suicide. Does this episode represent a displaced, suppressed desire of Rama to kill Lakshmana? If so, it is thoroughly submerged, one might even say repressed, on the human plane, but it bursts out in the animal world when Rama kills Valin, the monkey who took away his brother’s wife.

This is the sense in which the monkeys are the side shadows of the human half brothers:
⁴⁴
They suggest what might have been. They function in some ways as the human unconscious; both Valin and Sugriva (4.28.1-8; 4.34.9) are said to be addicted (
sakta
) to sensual behavior, to women, and to drinking. There is no monkey gambling or hunting to speak of, but the monkeys as a group get blind drunk in one very funny scene that resembles a frat party out of control. The monkeys are not merely Valmiki’s projections or projections from Rama’s mind; they are, rather, parallel lives. The monkey story is not accidentally appended; it is a telling variant of the life of Rama. But it does not mirror that life exactly; it is a mythological transformation, taking the pieces and rearranging them to make a slightly different pattern, as the dreamwork does, according to Freud. Animals often replace, in dreams, people toward whom the dreamer has strong, dangerous, inadmissible, and hence repressed emotions.
⁴⁵
Or to put it differently, the dreamer displaces emotions felt toward people whom he cannot bear to visualize directly in his dreams and projects those emotions onto animals. In the
Ramayana
, poetry has the function of the dreamwork, reworking the emotions repressed by political concerns (such as the need to deny Rama’s all too obvious imperfections) and projecting them onto animals. When Rama’s cultural role as the perfect son and half brother prevents him from expressing his personal resentment of his father and half brother, the monkeys do it for him. In the magical world of the monkey forest, Rama’s unconscious mind is set free to take the revenge that his conscious mind does not allow him in the world of humans.