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Hinduism
One of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen is a male and a female deer united in coitus. I can still vividly recall the scene from three decades ago because every small detail of it is indelibly etched in my mind – so radiant was the sight. There was the deer park, with a tall net fence around it, surrounded by huge trees in verdant green. In the distance was a hillock and nearby, a large lake with branches of ancient trees bending into it, under which I often sat with a book in my hand as the sun serenely journeyed towards the ocean in the western sky. The mating deer couple stood there, the front legs of the male over the doe, their bodies united. The female was absolutely still, not a muscle moved in her body, her eyes did not blink; and in those eyes, in her entire body you could see total surrender, surrender to the act that was going on, surrender to life, surrender to existence. She was no more she then, she had lost her individuality, her identity as an individual animal, and had become one with her Mother, with mother nature, she had ceased to exist as separate from her. It looked as though she was in some deep trance, a trance that had filled her being with the bliss of surrender to the total. The movement of life all around the united couple, the quiet, unhurried movement of the other deer in the park as they nibbled here and there, the gentle swinging of the trees in the soft breeze, all seemed to add to the stillness in which the doe stood. I was so overwhelmed by the sight that after I moved away from the park it took me hours to come back to the reality of everyday living. The
Mahabharata tells us Pandu saw exactly this same sight when he was out
hunting one day. The next moment he took out five sharp arrows, golden
and shining, with beautiful feathers attached to them, and shot the male
and the female. The male, who was a sage who had changed himself into a
deer, the epic tells us, cursed Pandu in his moments of death that Pandu
would meet with his death when he made love to his wife because he had
killed him while he was engaged in coitus. The question Kindama asked Pandu puzzled me for a long, long time. In my attempt to understand Pandu and the nature of his action, I read repeatedly all that the Mahabharata tells us about Pandu. And the deeper I delved into his life and his personality, the more puzzled I became. Everything about Pandu seemed to be a riddle. For instance,
why would a young prince after spending thirty nights with his new wife
and with an earlier wife, leave them and go on a world conquest in which
he ruthlessly, to use the words of the Mahabharata, reduces ‘his rival
kings to ashes’? Why would that young prince, the long awaited occupant
of the throne of the Kuru-Bharatas, adored by all, immediately after
completing a world conquest, at the height of his glory, leave
everything behind and go to the forest taking his two wives with him to
make hunting his full time occupation? The Mahabharata tells us that his
wives advised him to do so. Why would two young wives of a lustrous
young king ask him to leave behind his kingdom and all its comforts as
well as the challenge and responsibility of ruling it and go and live in
the forest, spending his time hunting? Pandu had to ask his wives to beget children for him with the help of other men through the ancient custom of niyoga, in which a man other than the husband impregnated women. Why exactly did he have to do that? Was it because of the curse of Kindama? Or had Pandu been impotent all along? How exactly did he die? And the day he chose to die: the fourteenth birthday of his son Arjuna. And the time: It is while mantras were being chanted by a section of the brahmanas and a feast was being served to other brahmanas by Kunti that Pandu leads Madri away into the quietude of the jungle where he later makes love to her and meets with his death. Why did he do that? Was Arjuna’s birthday no occasion for celebration for Pandu? Was he registering his protest against the celebration, and against Arjuna and Kunti, by walking away from the feast of which he was the host and hence shouldn’t have left? If so, what was he protesting against? My first clue
came from a verse in the epic. As Pandu lay dead after engaging in sex
with his younger wife Madri, Kunti who comes rushing to the scene blames
her for their husband’s death. And then she says: “Blessed are you,
Madri, and more fortunate than I am. For, you were able to see the face
of the king rapturous.” (DhanyA tvam asi bAhleeki matto bhAgyatarA
tathA, drshtavatyasi yad vaktram prahrshtasya maheepateh – Adi 124.21).
Kunti was referring to the ecstasy of a sexual climax that still
lingered on the dead Pandu’s face – an expression Kunti was familiar
with on other men’s faces, on the faces of the four different men who
had fathered her children, but was never lucky to see on the face of
Pandu, her husband. Kunti had never once in her life seen Pandu’s face lost in the throes of sexual ecstasy. She had never once seen on his face that post-coital smile of contentment that was there in his death. And yet nothing in the Mahabharata tells us that Pandu had rejected her sexually. He was deeply in love with her from the day she chose him for a husband to the last day of his life. So if this first wife of his, this beautiful woman he had obtained for himself in a swayamvara and had brought home proudly, the woman he had lived with in regal comforts in Hastinapura and in the loneliness of jungles and mountains, the woman who was his constant companion all through his lonely, tortured life, hadn’t once seen his face so in all their life together, and that in spite of Pandu being desperate for children, then the conclusion is clear and inevitable: Pandu was impotent all through his married life. That explains a lot of things about Pandu. For instance, it explains why Bheeshma was in a hurry to get a second wife for him. The Mahabharata does not tell us how long it was before Bheeshma went and got Madri for Pandu as a wife, paying a bride price as the Madra-Bahleeka custom demanded to her brother Shalya. It just tells us a word that means ‘then’ or ‘afterwards’ in the beginning verse of a new chapter – this then could be immediately after the Kunti-Pandu marriage, it could be sometime later too. Getting young Pandu a second wife as soon as he had obtained for himself one wife does not make sense, unless it was meant to be an urgent political alliance, which it does not look like. Besides, Bheeshma would have been very, very reluctant to offer his nephew two young beautiful wives at the same time – he had done it with Pandu’s father Vichitraveerya and the consequences were disastrous. Vichitra had been obsessed with his two pretty queens that he spent his entire time in sex with them and eventually died of the dreaded royal disease of the day, rajayakshma, all the royal physicians from the kingdom and abroad failing to save his life. It is this death that had made necessary the hated niyogas which produced Dhritarashtra, Pandu and Vidura. It is extremely unlikely that a once scalded Bheeshma would want to repeat his experience. |
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