Harishchandra: The King Who Would Not Break His Word

The Shout in the Forest

Harishchandra ruled Ayodhya in the line of Ikshvaku, and the thing people said about him was a short sentence with an enormous amount inside it. He had never told a lie. Not to a priest, not to an enemy, not to himself. While he held the throne there was no famine in that country, and no sickness, and nobody died before his time.

He was hunting one afternoon, far from any road, when he heard women crying among the trees, calling out to be saved. He let the deer go and answered the way a king answers. "Fear nothing. Who is behaving unjustly here while I am ruling?"

The voices belonged to the Vidyas, the sciences themselves, which Vishwamitra had been binding to himself through years of austerity nobody had completed before. They were crying because they were being taken.

Something else was listening. Raudra Vighnaraja is the demon whose whole business is spoiling what other people are trying to finish, and he had been circling that austerity for a long time without finding a way in, because he had measured himself against the son of Kaushika and knew he was the weaker by a great deal. Then a king came into the forest shouting that nobody need be afraid. The demon thought it over for a moment and entered him.

So the words that came out of Harishchandra next were not his own. "Who is the wicked man who ties fire in the corner of his cloth while I am standing here in my power? Let him show himself and take my arrows in every limb of him."

That was all it took. Vishwamitra heard the threat, and the anger of a great rishi is not a slow thing, and the sciences he had gathered grain by grain went out in a moment like a lamp. The demon left. The king was standing in the clearing with the whole ruin already behind him, shaking like a peepul leaf, and the only true thing he could have said was that he had not meant it, which mends nothing.

He did what a king of his house was raised to do instead. He fell at the sage's feet and offered payment. Gold or money, kingdom, city, his own life, whatever the sage cared to name.

"Then first give me the fee for the rajasuya sacrifice you performed," Vishwamitra said. "You never gave me mine."

"It is yours. Name it."

"Give me this earth with its ocean and its mountains, its villages and its towns. Your kingdom, with the chariots and the horses and the elephants. Your treasury and everything in it, and whatever else you own, excepting your wife, and your son, and your body. And excepting your virtue, which follows a man wherever he goes."

"So be it."

"Then whose is the lordship here, now that the ascetic is seated in the kingdom?"

"From the hour I said the words, yours."

"Then take off your waistband and your ornaments, put on the bark of trees, and leave my realm with your wife and your son."

He was already on the road out when the sage stepped in front of him and asked where he thought he was going without paying the fee for the rajasuya. Harishchandra said the kingdom had been handed over without a quarrel and there were three bodies left in the world that belonged to him and nothing else. It made no difference. A promise to a brahman that goes unpaid, Vishwamitra said, injures the man who made it. Harishchandra asked how long he had. A month, he was told, and after that the curse.

Out of Ayodhya on Foot

They left in bark cloth, the three of them. Queen Shaivya had never walked anywhere in her life and now she walked, with the boy Rohitashva beside her. The people of Ayodhya came out of the gates crying and followed them as far as the last fields, and the king turned round and told them to go back, because they were the sage's subjects now.

They came to Kashi with the month almost gone. He had chosen it because the city belongs to Shiva, who said plainly that it was not given to men to enjoy, and a king's writ counts for very little on those steps. It made no difference either. Vishwamitra was standing there when they climbed up from the water, as though he had been waiting a week.

The Selling

"The month is gone," Vishwamitra said. "Give me my fee."

Harishchandra asked for the half day that was still left. The sage allowed it, and said that if the sun reached the western hills with the fee unpaid there would be a curse, and went away.

The king stood on the steps in a crowd of pilgrims working through what a man in his position could possibly sell, and his wife was ahead of him. She spoke first, with her voice breaking, and what she said was not what he expected. She told him to stop worrying about her and keep his truthfulness. A man without truth, she said, should be avoided the way people avoid a burning ground. Then she told him to sell her, and pay the brahman, and let his word stand.

He lost his senses where he stood, and when he came round he said shame, shame, and went down on the stone. She fainted beside him. The boy, who had not eaten, stood over the two of them asking his father for food, and then his mother, and said his tongue had gone dry.

Vishwamitra found them like that and sprinkled water on the king's face to wake him for the asking. Harishchandra saw who it was and fainted a second time.

When it was done it was done quickly. He went up into the city and called out that a cruel and inhuman man had come to sell his wife, and let anyone who wanted a servant girl speak while he could still stand. An old brahman came over and said he had money and a young wife who could not manage the house. He tied the payment into the end of the king's back cloth and took the queen away by the hair.

Rohitashva ran after her with his hands in her dress and would not let go, and the brahman kicked him. She turned round and asked to be allowed one look at him, and then asked the brahman to buy the boy as well, because she would be no use to anybody separated from him. Put me with my child, she said, the way a cow is put with her calf. He weighed it, paid more, and led them off together into the streets until the houses hid them.

Harishchandra put the money in Vishwamitra's hands. The sage weighed it in his palm and said it was not enough for a man like him, and gave him what was left of the day.

So there was one thing left. He called out that whoever wanted him for a slave should say so while the sun still shone.

What came was a chandala from the burning ground, dark and foul smelling, with a staff in one hand and a skull in the other, wearing garlands taken off corpses, with a pack of dogs around him. He said his name was Pravira and that he was known in the city as the man who kills the condemned and strips the dead. He asked the king to name his own price.

Harishchandra would not do it. He said he was born of the Solar race and would rather be burnt up by the curse than be a chandala's property. Vishwamitra came back at that moment with his eyes rolling and asked why, when the man was offering good money, the fee was still unpaid. The king took hold of the sage's feet and begged to be his servant instead. Any work, any errand, only not this.

"If you are my servant," Vishwamitra said, "then I have given you to the chandala for a hundred millions, and you are a slave."

The chandala counted it out. Vishwamitra took the money, and the rajasuya fee was settled at last, and the king of Ayodhya was tied and driven to the burning ground under blows of the staff.

The Ground at Kashi

The work was explained to him in four sentences. Stay here day and night and watch for corpses. This share goes to the king and a sixth to the dead. Three parts are mine. Two parts are your wages. Take the cloth off the bodies.

He did it for twelve months and they went by like a hundred years. He learned the ground the way a farmer learns a field: which corner drained badly in the rains, which jackals came at which hour, how many hours a fire wants before it can be left. Ash worked into the creases of his hands and would not come out in the river. His clothes were rags sewn to rags, his hair hung in ropes, and he went up and down among the fires calling out what this corpse had paid and what that one owed, this part for me and this part for the king and this for the head of the chandalas. He never once stopped collecting the fee.

One night he fell so deeply asleep on his pallet that he lived twelve years inside it. He dreamed the fee had been paid and the debt lifted, and then he dreamed himself born again as a low caste child, cursed by brahmans he had argued with over a burial price, dragged off by Yama's men into a vat of oil, cut with saws in the dark, and after a hundred years of that born as a dog, and after the dog a donkey, an ox, a goat, a heron, a fish, a worm, one body after another with a day in each of them stretching out like a century. At the end Yama himself said that Vishwamitra's anger was not a thing that could be resisted, and told him to go back to the world of men and finish the rest of his suffering there, and that afterwards he would be happy. He woke up shouting. He asked the men standing near him whether twelve years had passed. No, they said. It was one night.

After that he stopped keeping his wife and his child anywhere he could reach them in his mind, and went back to pricing corpses.

The Night

A little after midnight a woman came down the path carrying something wrapped in cloth, and she put it down at the edge of the fires and began to grieve out loud.

Harishchandra hurried over the way he always hurried over. There would be a dead man's blanket in it. That is what the year had made of him.

He did not know her. The work in the brahman's house and the months of it had changed her into somebody born in another life, and the man coming towards her with matted curls and a club looked to her like a dried tree. Two people who had shared a throne stood a yard apart and did not know each other.

He looked at the boy lying on the black cloth. The child had the marks of a royal family on him, and the sight caught in the king's chest, because his own son had eyes like that and would be about that age now if Death had not taken him somewhere.

Then she said the name. She was not speaking to him. She was asking the sky what it had done to the rajarshi Harishchandra, who had lost his kingdom and lost his friends and had to sell his wife and his child, and asking why there was no end to any of it.

He heard his own name in the wrong mouth in the wrong place and knew her. This is Shaivya, he said out loud, and this is my son, and he fell in the ash in a faint. She dropped beside him. When they came round they lay there and wailed together like two people who had been saving it up.

It was his voice she knew him by, and then his nose and his teeth, and then she saw the outcaste's staff lying next to him and fainted again.

The boy had been sent out to gather darbha grass and firewood for the brahman's rites. He had rested his bundle on an anthill and gone down to a pool to drink, and when he lifted it back onto his head a snake came out and bit him. He had been dead since the afternoon.

When the king could speak he told her he was not going to go on. He would put the boy on the fire and go into it with him, and he said what he was afraid of while he said it: that a slave who kills himself without his master's leave comes back a slave, and that there is a hell for it with a river of pus in it, and a forest where the leaves are swords. He would go anyway. Grief has a far shore and that was the only one he could see. He told her to go back to the brahman's house and serve the man well and not despise him for being what he was, and to forgive whatever the king had ever done to her, and said that if gifts and sacrifices mean anything then the three of them would be together in some other world.

She said she could not carry the weight of it either, and that she would enter the same fire that day.

He built the pile himself and laid his son on it. Then he stood beside his wife with his hands joined and put his mind on the one who sits in the cave of the heart, and stopped thinking about anything else.

That was when the sky came apart. Indra came with all the gods and Dharma walking in front of them, and the Sadhyas and the Maruts and the guardians of the quarters, and Vishwamitra among them, whom the three worlds had never been able to make a friend of and who had come to offer friendship.

"Do not be rash," Dharma said. "I am Dharma. I have come because of your patience."

Indra went to the pile and poured out the nectar that undoes an untimely death, and flowers came down out of the sky with the sound of drums, and the boy got up off the wood healthy and calm, as though somebody had woken him from an ordinary sleep. His father had him in his arms before he was properly standing.

Heaven was offered on the spot, to all three of them, for what he had done.

Harishchandra said he could not accept it. He had a master and had not been released. Dharma said that the chandala had been himself all along, in a form he had put on when he saw what was coming.

Indra offered heaven again, and again the king would not take it. He had subjects in Ayodhya who had been sunk in grief over him for a year. To abandon people who have served you faithfully, he said, weighs the same as killing a brahman or a cow. If they go, I go. If they cannot, I will go to hell with them instead.

Indra said the thing that was obvious. They are thousands of people with thousands of different accounts, some heavy with merit and some with sin, and heaven is not entered in crowds.

Harishchandra said that a king performs his sacrifices with the strength of the householders who feed him, and that everything he had ever given away had come out of their hands first, and that whatever fruit was owed to him for it could be shared out among them and eaten in a single day, and then they would be even.

Indra thought about it, and said so be it, and went down to Ayodhya with ten million chariots and told the city to climb.

Vishwamitra himself brought Rohitashva back and seated him on his father's throne. Then the people went up, moving from one chariot to the next, and the king went with them.

Shukra, who teaches the demons and has no reason to flatter anybody, watched the whole city rise and said there had never been a king like Harishchandra and there would not be another.

The Version the Stage Made Famous

Something is missing from that night, and most readers will have felt it go missing.

In the telling that people in India actually know, from the Marathi and Tamil and Telugu companies that played it in village grounds for a hundred years, and from the films that grew out of those companies, the scene at the burning ground runs differently.

The rule of the ground is that no body burns without the fee. The woman standing in front of him with a dead child has nothing. He will not make an exception, not for her and not for his own son, because the money is not his and he took his master's wage. So he asks his wife for the fee. She is wearing one garment. She takes the edge of it in her teeth, tears it across, and holds out the half.

That is the image on the calendar prints, and it is a large part of why anybody still tells this story. It is also not in the Markandeya Purana and not in the Devi Bhagavata. In both of those the fee is never mentioned at that hour, nothing is torn, and the two of them simply decide to burn with the boy. The stage put the demand back into the scene where an audience could watch him make it, and from that night on the half garment has been the centre of the story, whatever the Puranas say.

The stage gave her a new name too. She is Shaivya in the Markandeya Purana. The Devi Bhagavata calls her Shaivya as well and also Madhavi. Taramati is what she is called on the stage and in the films, and it is the name most people in this country would give you if you asked.

What the Devi Bhagavata Does Instead

The Devi Bhagavata tells the whole story again in its seventh book, with the Goddess at the centre of it and the old quarrel between Vishwamitra and Vasishtha underneath it, and in one place it is harder than anything the stage invented.

In that telling the queen carries her dead son out past the edge of Kashi at night and grieves over him until the city watchmen wake up and come out to see who is screaming. They ask her who she is and whose child that is and where her husband is. She is crying too hard to answer any of it. They decide that a woman who will not speak at that hour with a dead child in her lap is not a woman at all but a child eating Rakshasi. They tie her hair, take her by the neck and the arm, drag her to the chandala's house and tell him to take her to the killing ground and finish her.

The order comes down to the slave who does that work.

He does not know her and she does not know him. He tells her he must be a great sinner to be willing to do this, and that if his hand is able to kill her it will cut off her head, and he takes up the axe and steps forward. She asks for one thing before it happens: her son is lying dead outside the city, and she would like to burn him first. He says very well, and lets her go and fetch him. That is how the two of them come to be standing at the same pyre.

So the execution scene is not something the stage added. It is in the Purana, and it is the Purana that the stage was drawing on.

The Devi Bhagavata also finishes with a line the Markandeya Purana does not have. When Dharma admits he was the chandala, he does not stop there. I was also the brahman who bought your wife, he says, and I was the serpent that bit your son.

The Older Harishchandra

There is a much older Harishchandra, and his story is not this one. In the Aitareya Brahmana he is a childless king who begs Varuna for a son and promises to sacrifice the boy back to the god. Rohita is born and the father starts postponing: let him have teeth first, let his teeth fall out, let him be old enough to carry a shield. When the day cannot be put off any further the young man takes his bow and walks into the forest instead, and stays there six years while Indra keeps telling him to keep walking. He comes back with a poor brahman's middle son, Shunahshepa, bought for a hundred cows to die in his place. The boy is tied to the stake, his own father offers to do the killing for another hundred cows, and Shunahshepa saves himself by praising Varuna verse by verse until the ropes come loose. Vishwamitra adopts him. No cremation ground, no selling of the queen, no test of anybody's word.

The Harishchandra people mean when they say the name is the Puranic one. He is the king who was pushed into an insult he never intended, and paid for it to the last coin, and did not once say the sentence that would have ended it.

Sources

• The Markandeya Purana, cantos VII and VIII, translated by F. E. Pargiter (Asiatic Society of Bengal, 1904), Wisdomlib
• Devi Bhagavata Purana, Book 7, chapters 24 to 27, translated by Swami Vijnanananda, Wisdomlib
• Aitareya Brahmana 7.13-18, the older Rohita and Shunahshepa legend, translated by A. B. Keith in Rigveda Brahmanas (Harvard Oriental Series 25)