THE TALE OF KING BHARTHARI

Part I
Bharthari's Birth Story

Introduction

Bharthari's birth story^[1] is a beauty-and-the-beast fairy tale of how a rude and bold donkey wins a princess-bride. It is also a saga with political and social insight, depicting the play and consequences of various power strategies in families and kingdoms. This chronologically first segment of the Bharthari and Gopi Chand epics has a different flavor from the other parts of both tales. As if to mark its distinctiveness, Madhu performs the entire birth story except its single opening stanza in a tune that never reappears elsewhere. Each of the other three major melodies he employs in at least two, and often several, parts of his performance.

Bharthari's birth story is largely concerned with external actions. It lacks the high emotional pitch and deep psychological reflections that prevail through most of Gopi Chand's tale and emerge sporadically in the other two parts of Bharthari's. No yogi characters appear here, whereas all other parts of both epic texts either feature or star ascetic gurus. Nonetheless, Bharthari's birth story orients its audience to a cosmology where yogis hold the keys of power: the donkey Khukanyo's^[2] magic, upon which the action hinges, derives from the all-powerful name of Guru Gorakh Nath.

The opening scene of Bharthari 1 is mysterious. Why does Gandaraph Syan's father object to the prince watching his plays being performed? This violent encounter between a defiant rebellious son and a strict repressive father pushes even a nonbeliever in Freudian readings toward psychoanalytic explanations. Surely, such intense wrath on the father's part would not be evoked merely by his son's witnessing a public theatrical performance. Surely, he must have witnessed and, as he forthrightly avows, found "wondrous," what Freud calls a "primal scene." One variant of the tale (see chapter 3) supports an interpretation of Gandaraph Syan's offense as intruding on his parents' sexual domain. It presents the Gandaraph figure as a Gandharva in heaven who embraces one of King Indra's dancing girls and is punished with a donkey birth for giving way so shamefully to uncontrolled sexual urges.^[3]

When I asked my research assistant, and through him the bard and his son, whether the "play" could in fact be an allusion to sexual activity on the part of Gandaraph's father, I found them dedicated to a face-value interpretation. Bhoju explained to me that filial disobedience is the central issue here. It doesn't matter what was forbidden; the point is that a son must obey his parent.

Whether Gandaraph Syan's crime was disobedience or voyeurism, his punishment is to go into a "donkey's vagina" — that is, to be born from a donkey. Why a donkey, we may as well ask now, for that humble beast of burden appears with surprising frequency in Madhu Nath's tales—often as the transformation of a human being, either male or female. Bharthari's father is a donkey; Gopi Chand is turned into a donkey (GC 3); Charpat Nath's fourteen hundred disciples are turned into donkeys (GC 3); Hada Nath turns all the women (and later, men) of Bengal into donkeys (GC 3); Gorakh Nath grazes a potter's donkey and later forces one of Machhindar Nath's queens to remain a donkey forever (GC 4).

The donkey is, on the one hand, a pathetic, overburdened, mistreated creature. This is succinctly summed up by Gorakh Nath's instructions when he hands over his guru's former captor and wife, in the form of a donkey, to the potters who will keep her: "Load her heavily and feed her little." Such is the donkey's destiny. Its plaintive bray—rendered many times by Madhu Nath as tibhu tibhu (Rajasthani for "hee-haw")—is ever comical. Just as in Western animal stereotypes, a donkey in India is stubborn and stupid and ugly. Its sexuality, if not so blatant as a goat's, is nonetheless powerful. To call someone "donkey" or "donkey's progeny" is a common minor insult in the village, much like our "stupid ass."

But Gandaraph Syan, embodied in the donkey Khukanyo, is not wholly a figure of fun. He wants a wife, and eventually he gets one. People are frightened when he threatens to turn the city upside down with his hoofs and spare no living creature. The ambivalence with which villagers approach yogis' power may be part of what motivates the donkey-transformation motif in general, and Gandaraph Syan/Khukanyo's character in particular. There is a way in which it is appropriate as well as ridiculous to see yogis (and lady magicians) as asses. The donkey's unintelligible braying—in Gandaraph Syan's case a prelude to his demands, threats, and manifestations of power—may resonate with popular double opinions about yogis' magic spells. These are reflected in the term mantra-tantra , which may mean, according to context, either "mumbo jumbo" or "powerful verbal spells." The handsome, desirable, and fertile prince emerging from the skin of a donkey could also relate to the extraordinary sexuality that yogic adepts may hide beneath their ochre robes.

That the donkey's ally should be a potter is predictable in the cultural context of rural Rajasthan. Donkeys as beasts of burden are traditionally associated with potters, who figure almost as frequently as donkeys in Madhu Nath's tales (Bh 1, Bh 2, and GC 4). Potters, like donkeys, are lowborn. Yet they possess and manifest creative power in ways that demand respect, and they play important parts in community and domestic ritual life. How highly the villagers value their potter's services is impressively dramatized in Bharthari's birth story.

Bharthari I may not carry us to the heart of the human dilemmas concerning love and renunciation about which the corpus of Madhu Nath's tales revolves. Yet, despite all the extraordinary and magical occurrences in the narrative, the birth story takes us some way into the heart of traditional village society. A good example would be the frightened potter's attempt to leave the city and his neighbors' mobilization to prevent his untoward departure. Here we see vividly the integration and interdependence of members of a community, the power of individual resistance, and eventually the king's own depen dence on his people. Princess Pan De's father is no absolute monarch but rather a man who takes advice from his servants and negotiates with his subjects. Indeed, the ultimate authority in these tales often appears to lie with royal servants (darogas ) rather than with the monarch. Presented not only as doing the king's work but as having his ear, the royal servant caste exercises significant influence upon affairs of state.

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