Sunahsepha, the boy who was sold to be sacrificed

A king who wanted a son

Harishchandra of the Ikshvaku line had a hundred wives and no child by any of them. This is the older of two stories that carry his name, from a text called the Aitareya Brahmana, and the king it describes wants a son in a way that turns out to be much colder than it first sounds.

The sage Narada told him what to do about it. Go to Varuna, lord of the waters, and ask for a son. Promise the god that whatever child is born will be given back to him, as a sacrifice, in return. Harishchandra made the vow. Varuna granted it. A son was born and named Rohita.

Then Varuna came to collect.

Every reason to wait

He asked for the payment that had been agreed to before the boy had a face to go with it, and Harishchandra answered with a stall. An animal under ten days old is not fit for sacrifice, he said. Wait until he has teeth.

Varuna waited, and came back when the teeth had come in, and was told to wait until the milk teeth fell out. He came back when they had fallen out, and was told to wait until new ones grew in their place. He came back once new teeth had grown, and was told to wait until the boy was old enough to carry weapons as a kshatriya should.

Each excuse was true as an argument and false as a reason. The boy was growing into someone his father knew, rode with, argued with, and the debt owed to a god got harder to pay with every year that made Rohita more particular and more loved. Varuna did not forget any of it. When the excuses ran out, he told Harishchandra plainly what would happen next.

Into the forest

Harishchandra told his son the truth, or as much of it as a father tells a son he is about to hand over to an altar. Rohita took his bow and left for the forest instead of waiting to find out what came after.

Varuna's answer was a swelling disease of the belly that would not lift from Harishchandra, punishment for a vow made and not paid. Word of his father's illness reached Rohita among the trees, and more than once he thought about going back to end it by finally doing what had been promised. Each time, a wandering brahmin found him first and talked him out of it. The tradition holds that this was Indra in disguise, and that what he told Rohita, across six years of the same conversation, was to keep moving. A man who stays home wears down like feet planted too long in one place; a man who walks wears the road down instead, and finds his luck further along than he would have found it at the door he never left. Rohita kept walking. Six years is a long time to be talked out of going home.

A family with nothing left

In the sixth year, deeper in the forest than he had gone before, Rohita found a starving priest named Ajigarta, his wife, and their three sons. Ajigarta had run out of whatever a poor brahmin's household lives on when the austerities stop feeding anyone. When Rohita explained what he needed, a substitute to stand in for a sacrifice he owed, paid for with a hundred cows, Ajigarta did not take long to decide.

He would not part with his eldest son. That one he favored. His wife would not part with the youngest. That one was hers. What remained was the middle boy, Sunahsepha, who belonged to neither of those attachments and so had no one in the house arguing to keep him. He was the son handed over, for a hundred cows, to go and die in a stranger's place.

The selling, the binding, and the price of each

At Harishchandra's court, the priests decided a brahmin's son could stand in for a kshatriya's at the altar, and Varuna, who wanted the debt closed more than he wanted a particular throat, accepted the substitution. Vishwamitra officiated. So, in other roles, did Jamadagni and Vasishtha.

Then it came time to tie the boy to the sacrificial post, and every priest standing in that clearing found a reason not to be the one who did it. Ajigarta, who had already sold his son once, stepped forward and offered to bind him himself, for another hundred cows. He was paid, and he tied his own son to the post.

Then it came time to actually kill him, and again no priest would do it. Ajigarta stepped forward a second time. For one more hundred cows, he said, he would do that too.

Nobody forced him to make either of the second two offers. One hundred cows had already bought Sunahsepha out of his father's house. A second hundred bought the hands that bound him to the stake, and those hands were his father's. A third hundred was on the table for the hand that would swing the knife, and it would have been his father's hand again, had the boy not spoken first. The refusal of every other man present to do what Ajigarta kept volunteering for is not a side detail in this story. It is most of the story.

What Sunahsepha said at the post

Tied to the stake with his own father approaching, knife in hand, Sunahsepha did not fight the ropes. He prayed instead, and what came out of him were hymns, composed there or remembered and reshaped for the moment, addressed in turn to Prajapati, to Agni, to Savitr, to Varuna himself, then on through the dawn goddess Ushas to the twin healers, the Ashvins. Verses from that recitation were kept afterward and folded into the Rig Veda under his name.

As he finished each hymn, one binding loosened. By the last of them, every rope had come free on its own, and Varuna, who had by then been praised more fully than any formal rite had ever praised him, let the boy go. Harishchandra's illness lifted in the same hour, as if the god had been holding two debts closed with the same knot.

What did not come undone

Sunahsepha lived. That much of the story is a relief, and it would be easy to stop here and let it read as one.

It should not read as one, or not only as one. His own father sold him for a hundred cows, took a second hundred to tie him to the post with his own hands, and offered, unasked, to take a third hundred and be the one who killed him. Nothing that happened afterward changes the order those payments came in. The hymns Sunahsepha sang at the stake are addressed to Prajapati and Agni and Varuna and the dawn. None of them are addressed to Ajigarta, and no line anywhere in what survives has the son forgiving the father for any part of it.

A new name

Vishwamitra, who had watched the boy talk himself free with nothing but verses, adopted him afterward as his own eldest son and gave him a new name, Devarata, given by the gods. Not all of Vishwamitra's existing sons accepted this. Fifty of the elder ones refused to treat a bought and rescued brahmin's boy as an older brother, and the tradition remembers them cursed for the refusal, sent off to found lineages that later texts looked down on. Fifty younger sons accepted him and were blessed for it, and it is through that line that Devarata, once Sunahsepha, is counted among the ancestors of the Kaushika gotra.

This is not the Harishchandra most people in India grew up with, the one who sells his kingdom and his wife and himself rather than break a promise, and spends a year working a cremation ground in Kashi rather than let anyone else pay his debt for him. That is a separate, later story, and it does not include Rohita, or Ajigarta, or a boy named Sunahsepha. Both kings share a name and very little else. The son who fled into the forest in this older telling escaped becoming a story about obedience. The boy his father sold in his place did not escape the post. He talked his way off it, which is not the same thing as never having been tied there.