Unheard voice of the abused and assaulted

The story series set up for the Pandavas’ pilgrimage in the Tirtha-Yatra Parva of the Mahabharata continues to deliver, with sage Lomasha narrating tales that convey the significance of each sacred sp

The story series set up for the Pandavas’ pilgrimage in the Tirtha-Yatra Parva of the Mahabharata continues to deliver, with sage Lomasha narrating tales that convey the significance of each sacred spot that the brothers visit. The next in the sequence is the story of the death and resurrection of sage Yavakrita. It begins with the friendship of two rishis, Bharadvaja and Raibhya, who make their hermitages in the same forest.

Raibhya has two sons, Arvavasu and Paravasu, while Bharadvaja has a son by the name of Yavakrita. Yavakrita is the troubled one, envious of the adulation that the relatively gregarious Raibhya, and his sons, receive from other brahmans.

In order to acquire the knowledge of the vedas and beyond, Yavakrita decides not to take the normal, organic route of learning them from his preceptor, but to employ his asceticism and force the gods to grant all the knowledge to him. That said, there is a hint in the text that Yavakrita’s decision might have been due to his difficulties with learning: he isn’t a particularly intelligent chap. The king of the gods, Indra, is ruffled by the harsh austerities that Yavakrita performs, and, in the guise of an old brahmin, tries to impart some sense to him. But Yavakrita is stubborn, and eventually Indra grants him what he desires. When Bharadvaja comes to learn of this, he is agitated.

He considers such a shortcut to knowledge as a betrayal of destiny, and predicts that if Yavakrita became proud of his achievement, he will be miserably destroyed. One day, Yavakrita roams into Raibhya’s hermitage and, seeing her alone, rapes Parvasu’s wife. When Raibhya learns of this, he creates two beings: one a woman of beauty, whose task is to lure Yavakrita; and another a rakshasa, who is tasked with killing him.

Their mission, of course, is successful.Seeing his dead son and knowing his deeds, Bharadvaja’s grief pushes him to take his own life, but that doesn’t happen before he curses Raibhya’s eldest son with killing his own father. One day, after conducting sacrifices for a king, Paravasu returns to the hermitage almost blinded by fatigue and is terrified seeing a black figure in the dense forest: to him its an animal. It is in fact Raibhya, clad in black deerskin, but Paravasu fails to realise that and kills his own father. Thus Bharadvaja’s curse comes to pass.

In order to allow Paravasu to continue the sacrifices, Aryavasu takes the blame upon him. When the gods are pleased with this act, they allow him to bring back to life his own father, and also Bharadvaja and Yavakrita. Thus, everything becomes alright again. Only that it doesn’t. The Mahabharata doesn’t offer us any window into the plight of the raped woman, used so blatantly as a narrative device that even her name is not provided. Do the gods un-rape her somehow? Does her trauma also vanish? Or is she banished instead? We don’t know, for our Mahabharata doesn’t care.

Tanuj Solanki

Twitter@tanujsolanki

The writer is reading the unabridged Mahabharata

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