It is after the Astika Parva of the Mahabharata that the core story of the epic begins to begin. We read an account of Uparichara, king of Chedi. One day, Uparichara’s wife, Girika, informs him of her ‘fertile state’. But the king is unable to have intercourse with her, as his ancestors have asked him to go on a hunting expedition. In the forest, the king is so excited that he begins to ‘spill’ his semen.
Such ‘spilling of semen’ is a repeated theme in the Mahabharata. One of the great qualities of sages or other men of character is that they never spill theirs. Fertility, itself, seems to be a cherished quality, and any wastage of the materials of reproduction is seen as an extravagance. Elsewhere in the text, the Mahabharata talks with veneration of men who only have intercourse with their wives during the latter’s fertile periods. In other words, sex in the Mahabharata is seldom without purpose.
The Uparichara story now becomes atrociously fanciful. In order to avoid the wastage of his semen, he collects it on a leaf and and addresses a nearby hawk to take it to Girika. As the bird flies towards the royal palace, another hawk attacks it, thinking that it has a piece of meat in its beak. The fighting leads to the material falling from the hawk’s beak into the river Yamuna. There, a fish swallows it.
The epic poets would not have applied such imaginative force if that fish was the common fresh water variety. Expectedly, the fish turns out to be an apsara named Adrika, who had earlier been cursed to take the form of a fish. Her deliverance from the curse required that she give birth to children in human form, which eventually happens. The twins born to Adrika are the boy Matsya and the girl Satyavati. Uparichara accepts Matsya and makes him king (I wonder how he got the information that these were his kids), but Satyavati is abandoned. Born from a fish’s belly and raised by fishermen, Satyavati’s defining problem is the fish smell that always sticks to her body.
Satyavati’s transformation begins after she grows up, and although the text ascribes her surprisingly little agency in that transformation, I personally feel that to be a distortion. In the text, the sage Parashar has some sort of magical intercourse with her which grants her a child instantly (the child is Krishna Dvaipayana, aka Veda Vyas, the primary ‘writer’ of the Mahabharata) and yet does not compromise her virginity. Parashar also gives Satyavati a boon through which her fish smell is replaced by a sweet scent strong enough to travel kilometers.
In my version, Satyavati knowingly seduces the sage Parashar to receive the boon of sweet smell, which would eventually enable her to to seduce Shantanu, the king of Hastinapura and the great-grandfather of the Kouravas and the Pandavas.
But more on this later.
(The writer’s first novel ‘Neon Noon’ is now available)