King Yayati’s desire to enjoy the pleasures of youth leads him to borrow it from his son, Puru. Much later in the same lineage of kings, king Dushyanta comes close to denying his son, Bharata, the right to his name. Even later, king Shantanu’s desire for the fisherwoman Satyavati, and Satyavati’s demand that her offspring be made king, leads Devavrata — Shantanu’s son from his first wife, Ganga — to not just renege his right to the throne of Hastinapura, but to accept lifelong celibacy as well. The Pourava dynasty of Mahabharata seems full of stories in which sons are repeatedly asked to make sacrifices to accommodate the whims or desires of their fathers. In fact, compared to Yayati, Dushyanta, and Shantanu, the later king Dhritarashtra seems like model father: he has love for his children, and regard for the ambitions of his eldest son, Duryodhana.
The story of Devavrata is rather extreme compared to that of Puru or Bharata. Despite their hardships, the other two eventually got their right: they became kings and so did their sons. Devavrata’s hardship involves the renunciation of exactly these two privileges.
Like all key ‘plot points’ in the Mahabharata, Devavrata’s vow is also not only present in the epic-historical plane with Shantanu, Ganga, Satyavati, and Devavrata as the main players, but is grounded in the mythological plane as well, where the destiny that would come to be his, is constructed. Ganga, the divine being married to a mortal man, provides the connection between the two dimensions. In the mythological plane, the story begins in rishi Vashishtha’s domain, where Vasus (celestial beings) have come to frolic. There, the Vasus see a splendid cow, one that can apparently grant any wish. They steal the cow. Needless to say, they land themselves a curse from Vashishtha, one that entails that they be born on earth as men.
The Vasus try to pacify the rishi, and the rishi allows seven of them to be freed from the curse within a year. However, the Vasu named Dyou, who actually committed the act of stealing the cow, is condemned to ‘live in the world of men for a long time’, and to not have any offsprings on earth.
Elsewhere, a king named Mahabhisha becomes so powerful that he reaches the abode of the gods. There, he commits the silly act of gaping at Ganga while she suffers a wardrobe malfunction. Mahabhisha, too, is cursed to be born as a man. So then, Mahabhisha is born as Shantanu. Ganga, who has agreed to free the vasus from their curse, will be their mother on earth. She marries Shantanu and kills her first seven sons within a year of their birth. The eighth survives, and is named Devavrata. It follows that Devavrata is Dyou and also that his long life and celibacy are both pre-destined.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)