Climbing Chamundi Hill Read online

  CLIMBING CHAMUNDI HILL

  1001 Steps with a Storyteller and a Reluctant Pilgrim

  Ariel Glucklich

  For Jennifer Hansen

  Contents

  Preface

  Literature

  Hindu Dharma

  Climbing Chamundi Hill

  The Frame

  Sources

  Further Readings and Translations

  Introduction

  The Leper

  The Brahmin and the Goat

  The Death Sentence

  The Minister's Death

  The Boy's Sacrifice

  Too Many Lovers

  The Brahmin's Quest for Magic

  The Turtle Boy

  To Trust a Woman

  Fate or Curse

  Fried Kings

  The Test

  Love for the Dead

  My Uncle in Hell

  The King who became a Woman

  Father Sacrifices Son

  The Purifying River

  Shiva's Fool

  The Weaver who became God

  The Girl in the Stone

  Ruler of the World

  Glossary

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About The Publisher

  Preface

  Like most travelers, I was struck by my first sight of Chamundi Hill, a lone-standing mountain rising to just over one thousand meters, three kilometers south of the city of Mysore in southwestern India. Mysore is an attractive city of roughly one million people in the southern state of Karnataka. It is an old city, mentioned in the ancient Sanskrit epic Mahabharata as Mahishamati, a place the Pandava brother Sahadeva visited. Much later Mysore was the capital of old Mysore State, then a part of the Chola, Hoysala, and Vijayanagara kingdoms. These left the city and its area with magnificent monuments that, along with the city’s royal palace of Shri Chamaraja Wodeyar, the yoga and Ayurvedic centers, and Chamundi Hill, draw many tourists each year.

  The hill is renowned as the abode of Chamundi, one form of the Hindu goddess Kali, who is worshiped as Shiva’s consort and who is the family deity of the maharajas of Mysore. According to the Puranas, the ancient sacred texts, the buffalo-headed demon Mahishasura, along with his army of Asura demons, was terrorizing the gods. Unable to withstand his power, the gods united all of their powers and weapons to produce a powerful goddess. With these divine powers, the goddess slew the demon and is now pictured seated on a lion with a triton in her right hand piercing the body of the evil Mahishasura.

  One thousand or so steps now lead up the northern face of Chamundi Hill for pilgrims visiting the sacred spot. Close to the top of the long flight of steps and facing the mountain is a huge sculpture of Nandi, the bull who is Shiva’s vehicle. At the top, devotees from all over India and abroad worship at the ancient Mahabaleshwara temple of Shiva and next to it seek divine blessings at a twelfth-century temple that houses a golden statue of Chamundi, mother supreme and primordial force.

  I first visited Mysore and climbed Chamundi Hill in 1982 while visiting from Pune in Maharashtra, where I was working on my doctoral dissertation. It was a tourist’s visit; the mountain attracted me more for its physical beauty than for the temples or its sanctity to followers of the goddess. Since that time I have been drawn back to the city on a number of occasions, including a recuperative stay in 1993 at the charming old Metropole Hotel before it went out of business. It was then, under the influence of the beautiful city, that I began to plot a narrative about Chamundi Hill.

  One afternoon I was wandering in the alleys of the city with a close friend when we stumbled into a tiny workshop where several members of a single family were chipping away at blocks of sandalwood. They were fashioning exquisite figures of Hindu gods and animals. Slivers of wood and discarded pieces covered the floor. Although this was not a retail shop, they invited us to sit and pulled out a couple of chairs. An older gentleman, who was not working, chatted with us about our nationality and halfheartedly tried to sell us a few expensive items. I found a broken image on the floor, abandoned in mid-sculpting. It looked like Krishna and Radha embracing, but the details had not been worked out yet. I asked how much the piece would cost, and everyone in the room broke into laughter. The older man said five rupees—a nominal figure—but congratulated me for identifying the gods. He sent out for some tea, and we spent several hours there, until the alley turned dark.

  The spirit of this old man, with his unrushed hospitality and his endless stream of anecdotes, lies behind my decision to write Climbing Chamundi Hill. Of course, our host, whose name I do not remember, is far from unique in India. I have met many others like him, especially in Varanasi. Visiting the homes of sorcerers, healers, guides, priests, or just neighborhood pandits, I became accustomed to men who communicate through narrative, illustrating abstract or ethical concepts by means of vivid tales. Climbing Chamundi Hill is not just a book of stories and a book about stories, it is a book about storytelling and storytellers.

  LITERATURE

  India possesses long and diverse traditions of storytelling. They include folktales and myths, both as oral performance and written texts. In fact, the boundary between these ostensibly distinct genres is extremely fuzzy. Some of the oldest and most sacred literary sources in Indian history, the Brahmanas (eighth century BCE) and early Upanishads (sixth century BCE), contain stories or fragments of stories that employ universally known folk motifs. One of the stories in Climbing Chamundi Hill, “Father Sacrifices Son,” derives from the Brahmanas, where it is told to illustrate a point concerning one of the most prestigious rituals of the Vedic period. The ritual—Rajasuya—was the elaborate coronation of a new king, which was a major rite of passage for the young prince. Nonetheless, the theme of the story—a god who demands the sacrifice of an elder son—is prevalent around the world. It is a known folk motif in the Stith Thompson motif index.

  From the very beginning of Indian literary history, stories, along with parables, riddles, and even jokes, were told in a variety of contexts for various purposes. The large corpus of ancient Sanskrit and Pali literature is rich with examples. The sages of the Upanishads illustrated philosophical insights with the aid of narrative and poetry. Buddhist narrators, including the Buddha himself, told stories to guide followers on the difficult path to nirvana or to illustrate moral and spiritual virtues, as the Jataka tales or Ashvaghosha’s Buddhacarita (“Life of the Buddha”) demonstrate.

  Some ancient collections of stories combine such religious purposes with more prosaic themes, including narratives about the lives of heroes, the rise and fall of dynasties, or the virtues or follies of gods and humans. The Mahabharata (second century BCE) and the Ramayana (third century BCE) are two such vast collections, gathered and told over centuries. Considerably later collections, possessing a stronger religious ideology, are the Puranas, in which the gods themselves act as the characters in a story: Krishna in the Bhagavata Purana stands out as the foremost example.

  The art of storytelling found a specialized niche in Indian literary history, and religious ideas were not necessarily at the forefront, not even when the stories served didactic purposes. The most renowned example of this genre—known as katha (story) literature—is the Pancatantra (third century CE), a collection of stories and parables with animal actors. These stories successfully migrated westward by way of the Muslim world to Europe, and through Shakespeare and Boccaccio all the way to Hollywood. Scholars believe that these stories belonged in a royal context and illustrated educational points about statecraft, cunning, and strategic thinking, Several centuries later, additional collections of stories became prominent, pointing perhaps to a huge and now lost corpus of narratives. These collections include Somadeva�
�s Kathasaritsagra (eleventh century CE), Kshemendra’s Brihat-kathamanjari (eleventh century CE), the Vetala Pancavimshati (perhaps eleventh to twelfth centuries CE) and the Shuka Saptati (twelfth century CE). These collections seem to delight in storytelling for its own sake, but they nicely illustrate the complexity of a life lived for pleasure and profit. The premise of the Shuka Saptati, for instance, is that the wife of an absent husband must be entertained to avoid adultery. The Kathasaritsagara is even dedicated to Kubera, the Vedic god of wealth. All of these books, and many others besides, are repositories of stories from a vast folkloristic and literary imagination that encompasses all areas of life and delights in the affairs of humans, gods, animals, ghosts, vampires, sprites, and godlings. Although these story books are not regarded as sacred, they are widely loved and may paint, in fact, a far more realistic picture of popular Hindu religious life than do the scriptures.

  HINDU DHARMA

  Several hundred years after the first appearance of religious literature in India, priestly authors began to sort out its goals and social implications. Books called Dharma Sutras, and later Dharma Shastras, fashioned a coherent synthesis out of the multiple norms that previously had guided the lives of Indians. India’s now-famous unitary caste system was outlined from the myriad of social and professional groups that proliferated in village and urban societies. The four main castes, or varnas, of this new order were the Brahmins (priests and teachers), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (mercantile and professional groups), and Shudras (servants). The life of each individual male in the upper three castes was further divided into three, then four, chronological stages: the student stage, the householder, the “forest dweller” or religious retiree, and finally the renouncer (sannyasin). Implicit in these stages of life was the recognition—perhaps formed in response to Buddhist monastic ideals—that life can be shaped by a variety of values, all of them legitimate. The four primary values or goals explicitly promoted were the four purusharthas: for the student, love (kama); for the householder, wealth or means (artha); for the forest dweller, morality (dharma); and for the sannyasin, spiritual liberation (moksha). The scholars who authored these texts encouraged their readers to value the fullness of life and to seek release from spiritual bondage only as the final goal of maturity.

  This social and ethical synthesis reflects a long-standing tension that runs throughout Indian religious history: should one live an active life guided by social concerns (dharma), or should one renounce such a life in pursuit of supreme Truth? At the same time that the dharma books created their graduated approach, the Bhagavadgita, India’s best-known sacred book, also grappled with the question. The revolutionary answer of that revered text was devotion to God (Krishna) as the ultimate compromise between dharma and moksha. But the question is still far from resolved, and many Hindus today do not regard the matter as simply theoretical.

  Millions of Hindus who lead the lives of householders in modern India go on pilgrimages to sacred centers throughout their vast country. The most powerful draw is to Varanasi, where the Ganges River is said to emerge from the locks of Shiva’s hair, where it became ensnared as it fell from heaven to earth. A dip in the river, or cremation on its banks, permanently frees the soul from the cycles of death and rebirth. But there are hundreds of lesser pilgrimage sites (tirthas) throughout the subcontinent, including Chamundi Hill. For most Hindus, it is the pilgrimage, with its discomforts and deprivations, that most resembles the life of a renouncer on a quest for liberation. In pilgrimage, both men and women become temporary sannyasins, freed from the preoccupations of daily life in order to focus on God and on moksha. And it is the pilgrimage too that provides a superb opportunity to listen to stories and to reflect on the subtle and paradoxical relationship between the life of dharma and the pursuit of liberation. Stories, even entertaining katha stories, offer a rich and nuanced context for meditating on that fuzzy boundary between competing goals and on the mysteries of Hindu thought.

  CLIMBING CHAMUNDI HILL

  The stories collected in Climbing Chamundi Hill represent the didactic goals of storytelling in pilgrimage. The book follows the example of the student and householder, who are guided by morality (dharma), with its attendant concern with karma—the ethical consequences of worldly action. The storyteller, a retired librarian from Mysore, initially guides his listener through the world of dharma, bringing him, as they climb the hill, to the boundary between worldly life and renunciation. Ultimately, the student and the householder must also decide if and when to unmake their social and professional ties and embark on the demanding discipline that leads to moksha. Most people, of course, opt to stay with their families, often resigning themselves to the notion of living a second-best life. However, some teachers, among them pilgrimage guides, argue that in some vitally important sense the distinction between renouncing or remaining behind is false—as are all distinctions. Tantra Yoga and, famously, the Bhagavadgita emphasize this point. Consequently, as the narrator of the book continues to climb, his librarian-guide begins to take him away from the ethical lessons of the early stories in the direction of Tantra and the Bhagavadgita. The stories he tells as they near the top and, more important, his interpretations, become increasingly paradoxical. The wall that seemed so real at first between dharma and moksha, between the point of departure and the destination, dissolves.

  The readers of Climbing Chamundi Hill are invited to listen to the librarian as he teaches his confusing lessons: moksha and dharma are one, reality and fiction are the same, all duality is false. The most weighty matters are trivial, and pleasure and pain are the same thing. Without a doubt, additional study of Hindu theology and philosophy will be required for those who wish to deepen their understanding of these teachings. Climbing Chamundi Hill represents just a starting point. A short bibliography of recommended readings is attached for those who wish to learn more.

  THE FRAME

  Climbing Chamundi Hill borrows from the ancient Indian story collections not just its subject matter but also a structural feature. This feature is the frame narrative surrounding the individual tales in the book. A frame is a story that contains another story; often the narrator of the internal (framed) story is a character in the frame. Indian literature is famous, some would say notorious, for using this device, which contemporary scholars call “emboxment.” Perhaps the best-known example of serial emboxment is the Pancatantra, where the largest, most external box (or narrative) is the story of the lion Pingalika and the bull Samjivaka, and in which eleven stories are contained, some of them leading to still new ones. Other frames in Indian literature are messier, never fully concluding at the end. Still others are neater. A coherent and fully enclosing frame can be seen in the twenty-five stories told by the vampire to king Vikramaditya in the Vetala Pancavimshati. Another famous example is the parrot who tells Madanasena’s wife seventy stories to keep her from adultery in Shuka Saptati.

  The practice of framing in India is old and respected. Both the Mahabharata and the Ramayana feature it on multiple levels, and even the law books, such as Manu Smriti and Narada Smriti, begin with framing narratives. Scholars of Indian literature have proposed a variety of reasons for framing. These include literary considerations (explaining the narrator’s knowledge), the need to integrate borrowed stories into a single new context, traces of oral technique, and even philosophical considerations. For instance, placing the narrator in a narrative within the stories helps to blur the distinction between fiction and reality, between storyteller and character. Pursued to its logical consequence, such a device can lead to a complete dissolution of distinctions between mind and reality (the subjective and objective worlds). This can be seen at work in religious literature such as the Yoga Vashishtha, which is a source of the last two stories in Climbing Chamundi Hill, “The Girl in the Stone” and “Ruler of the World.”

  My use of the frame, with its American biologist and librarian storyteller, is thus not merely a literary conceit. It goes to the heart of the ph
ilosophical lesson taught by the stories of Climbing Chamundi Hill. Ultimately, the boundary between the mundane and the transcendent is false. In some mysterious way we are all enlightened. This insight, and the literary technique, represents a distillation of the time-honored Hindu philosophical and literary tradition.

  SOURCES

  Ancient Indian stories have traveled widely. Many have been retold in European collections, but even within India stories are told in many ways. Oral tradition, still a powerful impetus for performed literature, probably accounts for this diversity. The stories I have selected for translating and retelling in Climbing Chamundi Hill all have been previously published in English and other European languages, many of them in a number of places. Still, most are obscure and rarely approached, either by translators or theologians. Some of the stories are extremely old and originate in Sanskrit sources like the Brahmanas. Others, as far as I know, are far younger and appeared first in regional Indian languages such as Bengali. I have reproduced none of the stories precisely in Climbing Chamundi Hill. In other words, I am retelling them, shortening or lengthening some, changing the plot sequence in others, just as storytellers today in Varanasi or Mysore might change a story to suit their needs. Readers interested in the scholarly study of Indian literature and folklorists of India should refer to the original sources and list of translations below.