Hanumāna’s Leaps of Faith: Intertextuality in the Dharma-maṅgala Rebecca J. Manring Indiana University-Bloomington, USA

Dharma Ṭhākura is a god celebrated in the maṅgala-kāvya literature of the western part of Bengal dating from the mid-17th century. We can think of maṅgala-kāvya as “creative, vernacular mediations of the Puranic tradition,” as Kumkum Chatterjee1 puts so succinctly. These works “are superficially similar to the Puranas, but differ in paying more attention to social reality.”2 While other exemplars of the genre celebrate goddesses like Caṇḍī and Manasā, the Dharma-maṅgalas constitute one of only two corpora dedicated to male deities. Literary scholars were reluctant to take these works seriously, until Sukumar Sen began to insist that at least Bengali postclassical non-Sanskritic literature was very much worthy of academic attention.

We know Caṇḍī and Manasā, but who is this god Dharma? How can he be at all significant if only some segments of society have ever been interested in him? In this paper I will consider that question and explore how intertextuality helps to cement his hold in the region.

Who is Dharma Ṭhākura?

As it turns out, his identity may be something of a red herring. Outsiders have been trying to make sense of Dharma and his cult for over a century. Most often Dharma is described as formless nirguṇa Brahman, with some Purāṇic Viṣṇu attributes and stories amalgamated.3

Equally important is who worships Dharma. H.H. Risley, in his Tribes and Castes of

Bengal (1891) mentions that the Ḍoms of West Bengal at one time worshipped Dharma Ṭhākura as a man with a fish tail, but that that may be an old practice no longer in use. Some ādivāsīs of

Choṭanāgpur and Odissa referred to the sun god as Dharma Ṭhākura or Dharma Deotā. In some

1 Kumkum Chatterjee p. 91 2 Kaiser Haq p. 31 3 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 294

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areas Dharma is worshipped in the form of particular stones, much like the śālagrāma, which are considered identical with Viṣṇu. And Dharma goes by many names: Kālu Rāya, Budā Rāya,

Kautuka Rāya, Yātrāsidhi Rāya, Bānkura Rāya, and more, nearly all with the title “Rāya.”

Amalendu Mitra4 recorded ninety different names for the god!

Most of the Dharma pūjā-paddhatis, the instruction manuals for worship, according to

Sukumar Sen, are from the Odissa-Bengal border area, and some of the items used in the worship have Odiya names. Sen and Pañcānana Maṇḍala, in the introduction to their own edition of (the first several pālās of) Rūparāma Cakravartī’s Dharma-maṅgala, note that Rūparāma’s creation story is similar to (ādivāsī) Gond creation stories, and that it is not unreasonable to guess that the basic form of Dharma pūjā is an import into Bengal from the “Austrik” people, that is, autochthonous groups. Sen, however, notoriously attributed lexical items and other linguistic anomalies he couldn’t quite trace, to various indigenous peoples. It was how he indicated “I don’t know where this came from.” Amalendu Mitra even claims that Sen once asserted that the name comes from Egyptian “Ḍo-āhoma-rā” and transmogrified to “Dharma-rāya” in Bengal. He even tries to support the claim by saying that the Bengali script looks an awful lot like hieroglyphics. I can substantiate neither assertion. But given Dharma’s provenance outside the brahmanical fold and among those at the bottom of the social hierarchy, it does seem not unlikely that Dharma was an ādivāsī/indigenous/aboriginal deity whose name sounded to Brahmin ears like “Dharma.” Other scholars had a hard time taking a non-brahmanical deity seriously and seemed to want to make him fit into high-caste paradigms, but none succeeded.

Harapraśāda Śāstrī, writing in the late 19th century, thought Dharma is the Buddha, but his reasoning for that conclusion is not convincing and no one takes him seriously any more, though

4 Amalendu Mitra pp. 248-251

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his attempt is interesting. First, he claimed the name alone connected the deity with the Buddha.

Second, he pointed to Dharma’s worship by non-brahmins, especially members of the lowest castes. The formal officiants for Dharma’s worship are usually Ḍomas. Śāstrī’s point of reference is brahmanical Hinduism, and since what he observed of Dharma worship did not fit that model, he could not admit it as “Hindu” and said that it must therefore be Buddhist: still perfectly respectable, if not Brahmanical. He tried to prove his point by finding similarities between accounts of the Buddha’s life as set out in the Lalita-vistāra, and the Dharma tales, but the

“parallels” are not parallel:

______

Lalita-vistāra Dharma-maṅgala

The Buddha thinks of taking his last birth Dharma wants to preach his own worship

The Buddha was born as his mother hangs Rañjāvatī performs śāle-bhara to get a son

from a tree

A storm follows the birth of the Buddha a storm precedes the birth of Lāusena

Temptation episodes temptation episodes

The Buddha attains nirvāna and ascends Lāusena and his family ascend to heaven

to heaven

______

It is as if Śāstrī wanted to take the Dharma-maṅgalas as a legitimate component of the literary canon, but could not bring himself to admit anything subaltern to that canon. Śāstrī noted the references in the Dharma texts to the Sanskrit epics as well.

Some scholars have tried to connect Dharma with a Vedic antecedent. Kṣitīśaprasāda

Caṭṭopādhyāya thinks that Dharma is the modern version of the Vedic god Varuṇa. But if Dharma

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is indeed Vedic Varuṇa, asks Aśutoṣa Bhaṭṭācārya5 in his Maṅgalakāvyera Itihāsa, why is his worship so geographically limited? Moreover, Varuṇa has no connection with the Ḍom caste

Dharma priests. Bhaṭṭācārya further notes that even the pūjārīs disagree on just who Dharma is!

P.K. Maity placed the Dharma cult largely in RaṚh, and says it may go back as far as the ninth or tenth century. He echoes Sukumar Sen that “the worship of Dharma was originally a human fertility ritual,”6 and that it remains one since perhaps the 13th or 14th century. Maity places the origins of the Dharma cult “outside the pale of Brahmanical Hinduism among the primitive men who used to practice many magico-religious rites.”7

Bholanath Bhattacharya, too, claims that Dharma Ṭhākura was original a local/ādivāsī god with magical powers, and that “he has from the outset been essentially a tutelary god of the lowest classes,” who “gradually served to form a bond of unity amongst the underprivileged who virtually remained outside the pale of the varnashrama system.”8

Anthropologist Ralph Nicholas, working in the mid-20th century, observes in his Rites of

Spring that “while important local deities such as Manasā and Sītalā were absorbed into

Brahmanical practice, the Brahmans most often avoided Dharma Ṭhākur and substituted Śiva

(combining his Puranic and Bengali rural forms) in place of Dharma.”9 Their avoidance is intriguing; if they could subsume the formidable Manasā, why not Dharma, whose very name suggests righteousness? One wonders what exactly marked him as so undeniably beyond their pale. Adding to the intrigue is the brahmanical authorship of nearly all the Dharma-maṅgalas.

5 Aśutoṣa Bhaṭṭācārya p. 621 6 P.K. Maity p. 83 7 P.K. Maity p. 92 8 Bholanath Bhattacharya pp. 245-46 9 Ralph Nicholas pp. 3-4

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Kumkum Chatterjee, in her very useful work The Cultures of History in Early Modern

India: Persianization and Mughal Culture in Bengal, notes that “most deities about whom mangalakabyas were composed had Vedic/Puranic antecedents,”10 but that’s not true of Dharma.

But what does hold in the Dharma material, as with other maṅgala-kāvyas, is that “the classical order based on a Brahmanical view of the world – both social and narrative – is left behind.”11

Caste “boundaries are breached by a more radical imagination of possibilities,” and “…the life of lower-caste society is brought into the sacred sphere of literature.”12

Nonetheless, Sukumar Sen wanted to connect the Dharma tales with Ṛg Vedic 10.129 account of Creation, and with the Hariścandra story in the Aitareya Brāhmana – but it’s a reach to do so. Rūparāma’s Hariścandra, or Haricandra, Pālā, is a grisly tale about the sacrality of a promise and the strength of faith in Dharma. Although the two tales have some similarities, the maṅgala- kāvya piece is quite different from the older story.13

In his Obscure Religious Cults, Shashibhusan Dasgupta provides some details about the ways devotees worship Dharma Ṭhākura. He notes that the “Dharma cult is the result of a popular commingling of a host of heterogeneous beliefs and practices; it will therefore be incorrect to style it purely Buddhistic or Hindu or indigenous either in origin or in nature – it is as much a hotch- potch in its origin as it is in its developed form and nature.”14 He understood Dharma as something unique, who “represents the formless Brahman of the Upaniṣads, the Lord Śiva of the Śaivites and the Tantrics, Viṣṇu of the general Vaiṣṇavites, Kṛṣṇa of the Kṛṣṇite Vaiṣṇavas and Rāma of the

Rāmite Vaiṣṇavas, and again sometimes the Sun-god of the Sun-worshippers.”15 That is to say,

10 Kumkum Chatterjee p. 519 11 Sheldon Pollock p. 517 12 Sheldon Pollock p. 518 13 See Rebecca Manring, Child Sacrifice in Rūparāma’s Dharmamaṅgala, The Journal of Hindu Studies, hiy003, https://doi.org/10.1093/jhs/hiy003 14 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 260 15 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 263

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“Dharma-Ṭhākura does not represent the conception of any particular deity, - he rather represents the general idea of Godhead or of the sovereign deity over the universe, and as such he has been associated consciously with all the conceptions of Godhead or of the sovereign deity popularly current in Bengal and Orissa from the tenth century AD.”16

Nicholas takes a different perspective to make essentially the same point: “Indian myths constitute a staggeringly elaborate multidimensional web in which acts and personalities that figure prominently in the narratives about one god appear multiple times – sometimes slightly transformed, sometimes inverted – in narratives about other gods.”17 Perhaps his origin, intriguing as the speculation may be, is immaterial.

Seely and Miller note that the “…boundaries between Buddhism, Tantra, or even

Brahmanism…, and the so-called folk religious cultures were permeable and porous. The advent of Islam in Bengal may have served as a wake-up call to Brahmanism to reach out and initiate strategies of accommodation with a range of religious practices and ideas prevalent among…the antyaja (subaltern, marginal) population of less Brahmanized parts of Bengal. The religious cultures current among the antyaja people revolved around the worship of deities such as Dharma

Thakur, Manasa the snake goddess, Chandi…”18 Shashibhusan Dasgupta takes this thought further when he says that “Muslim conquest of Bengal and the persecution of the Hindus by the Muslims were regarded by Dharmites to be the gracious device of the Lord himself to save the Dharmites from the hands of the persecuting Hindus.”19

16 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 284 17 Ralph Nicholas p. 6 18 Clint Seely and Frederika Miller p. 36 19 Shashubhusan Dasgupta p. 266

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Dharma’s gājana, the twelve-day festival during which Dharma is worshipped with elaborate rituals and nightly recitation of the Dharma-maṅgala, takes place in the month of

Vaiśākha, when the weather is at its hottest. Bhattyacharyya notes that the gājana “changed its appearance from time to time by absorbing the influences of the then prevailing religious trends…so that a newly emerging popular deity became at the same time the deity of Gajan.” He is uncertain about the origins of the gājana, considering it either Śaivite or a primitive remnant of a Buddhist festival.20 He eventually concludes that “the cult of Dharma Ṭhākura together with the ritual of his Gajan has thus come to be so confused and entangled an affair that it is hazardous to venture any precise identification of the origin of any of its characteristics.”21

Although Śiva gājana takes place a month before the Dharma gājana, in some places,

Dasgupta notes, Dharma has completely become Śiva, “and the Gājana of Dharma really means the Gājana of Śiva.”22 However, the Dharma-maṅgala literature developed in a Vaiṣṇava milieu, later than much other maṅgala-kāvya material, and the older tradition of identifying Dharma with

Śiva may be fading away.23 This Dharma is often called, among other things, Svarūpa-nārāyaṇa, and lives in Vaikuṇṭha, so he has been transformed into a form of Viṣṇu.24 In the Dharma-maṅgala, he has epithets like “Arjuna’s charioteer.” He is never specifically called “Kṛṣṇa” or “Viṣṇu” but the use of epithets associated with Kṛṣṇa and Rāma and his in Vaikuṇṭha are telling.

Scholars working more recently have been less concerned with assigning a single familiar identity to Dharma. In describing the literature itself, France Bhattacharyya notes that the Dharma- maṅgalas show “a rare combination of some elements belonging to the ‘Great’ tradition and most

20 Bholanath Bhattacharya p. 240 21 Bholanath Bhattacharya p. 243 22 Shashubhusan Dasgupta p. 279 23 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 293 24 Shashubhusan Dasgupta p. 293

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others of the ‘popular’ one in a blend that favours integration … but condemns exclusion…Dharma subsumes all the gods of the Hindu pantheon.”25 Accepting and then subsuming predecessor cults is nothing new. That move is the way new schools of thought assert their connections with the past and their significance for the future. Here, though, that subsuming has transcended social boundaries.

France Bhattacharyya writes that “…the question of the identity of the god seems to be the key to the understanding of the special involvement of the low castes, both in the Dharma story and in the Gājan.”26 She describes him as

1 the eternal Brahman who is both nirākāra (formless) and nirañjana (stainless); and

2 “the undifferentiated Absolute as it wishes to create the world and is said to assume

for that an anthropomorphic form.” He creates Creation as a whole, the Trimūrtī

gods, and the dharma/order that he embodies.27

Dharma’s identification with Yama Dharmarāja connects him with the Ḍoms, she claims, although while the Ḍom caste is normally associated with cremation duties, at least in Rūparāma, they are pig farmers. But she feels that that identification is “the most important factor explaining the presence of many low castes … in the story.”28 If Dharma is the god of Death, then logically those who have professional rights and duties to work with the dead would be his devotees.

Although the god is generally formless, sometimes worshipped in the form of stones, popular descriptions of Dharma say he is all white, and dressed entirely in white, and all his accessories are white. Some have suggested that the “white” may be an unconscious mixture of

25 France Bhattacharya p. 362 26 France Bhattacharya p. 377 27 France Bhattacharya p. 377 28 France Bhattacharya p. 382

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the notions of Śiva and the Buddha,29 but Projit Mukharji makes the almost shocking claim that the white god that the young Rūparāma reports, in his Ātmakāhini, meeting at a crossroads at a critical point in his young life, was an Augustinian missionary!30 Mukharji’s arguments are compelling, given Portuguese presence in the area at the time and Rūparāma’s descriptions of

Dharma’s many houses, which sound something like churches.

Formulaic nature of maṅgala-kāvyas

Maṅgala-kāvyas all open with praise of Gaṇeśa and the five main gods and the reason for the particular work’s composition. They include a Creation story. Most of the maṅgala-kāvyas treat goddesses, so they include a great deal about Śiva and Pārvatī, their courtship and marriage, and their marital squabbles. The Dharma-maṅgalas, however, substitute the Hariścandra story for the Śiva-Pārvatī material. It is a very strange story in which Dharma appears, in disguise as a renunciate, to King Hariścandra and his queen Madanā, and demands to be fed a feast of various elaborate dishes prepared with the flesh of their young son.

Other factors common to the genre include detailed descriptions of marriage rituals and costuming; of battles; and of dress and ornamentation in general. We have a lot of lists of flora and fauna, and details about the cities visited and countryside traversed in the course of the narrative.

One part of the formula is the presence of Hanumāna (and also Viśvakarma). In the

Dharma-maṅgalas, Hanumāna repeatedly saves the day. He rescues newborn Lāusena, Dharma’s champion, from his bumbling kidnappers; he serves as the young man’s wrestling instructor, he whispers the secret to killing ferocious Kāmadala the tiger in Lāusena’s ear. But while Hanumāna serves to keep the plot moving by coming to the rescue at points where the hero would appear to be in grave danger, he is also an important bit of intertextuality linking the regional epics with

29 Shashibhusan Dasgupta p. 301 30 Projit Mukharji article

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something much larger culturally. When we first see him, he needs no introduction, because everyone already knows him. Other characters, when they first appear, have to introduce themselves and explain their presence. Dharma, and sometimes Hanumāna himself, just reminds us of something Hanumāna did in his Rāmāyaṇa context that proves he can succeed at Dharma’s present task, but no introduction is needed. In these texts Hanumāna has no family drama of his own at play. He is, like in the Sanskrit epic, attached to the deity, but he seems to be in control of the Dharma-maṅgala plot, unlike in the Rāmāyaṇa, and plays the role of advisor to the oft- befuddled Lord Dharma. In fact it is Hanumāna who first tells Dharma how to get people on earth to worship him.

We have characters from other sources appearing in the maṅgala-kāvyas, and we have the

Sanskrit epics mentioned repeatedly by name. Often the king is sitting in his audience hall listening to recitations from the Bhāgavata Purāṇa or watching enactments from the Mahābhārata. And sometimes the maṅgala-kāvya narrative reproduces episodes from classical sources in part, but twisted or even reversed. I will discuss one: when a gang of thieves kidnaps Dharma’s newborn champion Lāusena, reminiscent of events early in the life of Kṛṣṇa. Each of these three (characters, texts, events) is a type of intertextuality, and each may provide clues about just who this god

Dharma is.

Intertextuality as Index

Jonathan Culler writes that we can think of intertextuality as the “family archive.”31 It

“provides a context for the current story without having to spell it out.”32 When our authors invoke the well-known figure of Hanumāna, they simultaneously invoke the power and prestige with

31 Jonathan Culler p. 1386 32 Tony K. Stewart p. 119

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which he is associated, and attach those qualities to their own compositions.33 Why Hanumāna?

The presence of this mighty semi-divine warrior links centuries-old Sanskrit literary traditions to the local Bengali traditions. But he’s not Aryan – not a priest, and not the scion of the solar or lunar dynasties. He is noble in origin within his own tribe, but not in the same way as Rāma or

Lakṣmaṇa. Authors also remind us that he is one of the cīranjīvin, those who live so long they are practically immortal. So Hanumāna is certainly remarkable, even if he belongs on a different social stratum.

In the Dharma-maṅgala he often seems wiser than the god he serves. At the same time, this connection enhances the audiences’ pleasure when they hear the recitations. They have ideas about what to expect of this half-divine monkey.

Hanumāna is more than just the deus ex machina. Sometimes he is the “machina” itself.

Early in the epic, his comments in the court of heaven impel Indra to summon his best dancing girl, Jambuvatī, to perform for the gods. Jambuvatī is an accomplished dancer, and a beauty, but she is also overly proud of her talent and skill. During her performance for the gods she thinks about what a marvelous dancer she is, gets distracted, and misses the beat. She tries to carry on as if nothing has happened, but the entire court has seen the missteps and is now laughing derisively at her. The situation is quite literally a matter of “pride goeth before a fall,” as earlier that same day, while she was bathing at the river and getting ready for her performance, she behaved rudely with an elderly woman whom she encountered on the road. She berated the old lady for having the audacity to block the path of the best dancer in Indra’s court. The old woman, though, was the

Goddess herself, come to test the younger woman. And so the gods curse Jambuvatī to be born on earth as punishment for her pride, but the Goddess extends the punishment to include having an

33 Tony K. Stewart p. 119

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elderly husband, to teach her compassion for the elderly. Not only will she have to marry an old man, but she’ll never get a son until her seventh earthly birth. And this is all part of Hanumāna’s plan to initiate worship of Dharma.

In that seventh birth the dancing woman, now known as Rañjāvatī, indeed has an elderly husband. Her marriage has yet to be consummated because the old man falls asleep as soon as he hits the bed. Desperate for a son, she realizes she won’t acquire one in the usual way. However, she has learned that the god Dharma can grant her desire if he is pleased with the worship she offers. To that end she has been performing terrible austerities to Lord Dharma and has perished repeatedly in the process. But no son appears. Finally, she performs the dreaded śāle bhara ritual: she impales herself on a plank of burning iron spikes. At last, Dharma is pleased. He restores her life (again) and sends her to bathe in the Gaṅgā. Meanwhile he takes two coconuts and places the life of the son of the divine sage Kaśyapa, chosen to become Rañjāvatī’s son, into the smaller of them. Dharma entrusts the coconuts to Hanumāna, who invisibly floats them upstream to the young woman. She breaks the larger one and offers it to the Sun, then cracks and eats the smaller, and then returns home for a night of erotic activity with her husband, made possible when Madana, god of love, takes over the old man’s body.

At these early points in the epic, Hanumāna is setting the stage for establishing the worship of the god Dharma on earth. Much like the sage Nārada in the purāṇic tales, but without Nārada’s mischievous streak, he has important knowledge that others lack, and so imparts that knowledge at times and places that will impel others to behave as needed to secure his desired result. Although he is neither protagonist nor central character, he is someone without whom the story could not be told, for it is Hanumāna who knows what must be done to install Dharma to his rightful position

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and gain him mortal reverence and ritual worship. And so it is not surprising that Dharma comes to depend on Hanumāna whenever things are not going as Dharma wishes.

The next such event comes shortly after the birth of the infant Lāusena, Rañjāvatī’s son. In the Dharma-maṅgalas, like in the Bhāgavata Purāṇa and the Mahābhārata, the champion has an evil uncle. Here that evil uncle is Mahāmada,34 elder brother of Rañjāvatī and prime minister of the Gauḍeśvara, who is married to his elder sister. For reasons I will not detail here, the Gauḍeśvara has contrived to marry Rañjāvatī to his old friend King Karṇasena. Knowing that Mahāmada would never allow his baby sister to marry such an old man, he conducts the marriage in secret after sending Mahāmada off on a wild goose chase to Ḍhekura. When he returns and learns of the marriage, Mahāmada is furious, and curses his sister to the most horrible fate possible: barrenness.

And swears never to see her. Rañjāvatī is at this point a mere pawn in the action and her brother’s anger is clearly misplaced.

For some time, Rañjāvatī knows nothing of this, and only wonders why no one from her family has come to visit or even written to inquire about her after the marriage. When she learns of her brother’s curse, she is of course distraught, and from then on dedicates herself to nullifying that curse. She does finally succeed in producing a son and heir, and Karṇasena sends the good news far and wide throughout the region, and specifically despatches his barber and washerman to his brother-in-law. When word reaches the Gauḍeśvara, he is thrilled and rewards the messengers handsomely. But Mahāmada burns with rage, and insists the king take back the riches he has bestowed on the barber and washerman who brought the news. He convinces the Gauḍeśvara that he must destroy the newborn child, lest he usurp his uncle’s kingdom and bring about its ruin. He

34 Mahāmada repeatedly describes himself as Kaṃsa and, slightly less frequently, as Rāvana, further complicating the issue of identities in the text.

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tells his boss that the only way to secure the future of his authority is to bathe in the blood of this young prince. And the Gauḍeśvara agrees.35

So Mahāmada recruits a master thief, who enlists his entire gang and sets out for Mayanā to kill the infant. Rūparāma paints lovely pictures of the countryside they traverse with its flora and fauna and the rivers. When they reach the outskirts of the city of Mayanā, they stop to rest and to worship the Goddess. Pleased, she appears, and instructs them to request a boon. They ask for help to kidnap the baby, and she gives them a sleeping spell.36

As the thieves cast the spell, one by one every person in town falls asleep, and the poet shows us all of them:37

Unsuspecting, the city of Mayanā falls asleep: All the guards sleep at their posts.

Sellers of oil and salt spread out their garments and fall asleep on them.

Young women sleep in their boyfriends’ laps, cooks fall asleep in their kitchens.

Beautiful garments slip off delicate bodies. A mother of three sons, doing her hair,

collapses as she pins her hairdo. Her child stays tied to her and doesn’t cry. The

housecat sleeps, and the dog at the gate. The snakes and the peacocks in the garden

flop on the ground. They had grabbed frogs but hadn’t swallowed them. Whatever

food they had been eating, stuck in their throats. The sleeping spell enters the

weavers’ places and strikes their eyes. The weavers at their looms snore loudly.

The burgling thieves cut into the residents’ houses; everyone had been struck by

the sleeping spell and sprawled on the ground.

35 Another generalization we can make, at least with regard to the Dharma Maṅgalas, is that those in command often cannot figure out what course of action to take. They are thus easily led by stronger characters. The Gauḍeśvara seems kind and generous but his evil Prime Minister consistently redirects him to take ethically questionable action. 36 Dharma’s main competition for devotees is the Goddess. While the two gods never directly confront each other, their respective champions do. Neither deity is seeking sole allegiance. Rather Dharma just wants people to worship him, but neither Dharma nor the Goddess demands exclusive attention. 37 All translations are my own.

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Crows, birds, cuckoos sleep sitting on their branches. Alligators, crocodiles, fish

fall asleep in the water.38

The description is both vivid and humourous. The thieves can now freely enter and conduct their search for the baby. It takes them a while to find the palace, for some reason, but they do so, and then go room to room looking for Lāusena. The poet tells us that they are just like Putanā approaching baby Kṛṣṇa, peeking in windows as they go door-to-door searching. This sleeping spell is reminiscent of the spell cast the night of Kṛṣṇa’s birth, when everyone in Kaṃsa’s palace, including the guards at the jail, fall asleep so Kṛṣṇa’s father Vasudeva can spirit his newborn across the river to be raised in the cowherding community there. He is removing the baby from imminent danger. But in Rūparāma, much more is happening: the thieves need the town asleep so they can first enter and search, and then leave unimpeded with their prey. It’s at once an overt and an implied intertextuality. Rūparāma makes the comparisons clearly, but it is up to us to see that their significance is quite the opposite in the two tellings. At the same time, the comparison makes us think of Lāusena as Kṛṣṇa.

Our thieves, like Vasudeva, are successful in their mission, and take the boy and run for their lives. He’s a cute little boy and they’re quite charmed by him, and are not entirely sure they should fulfill their charge and kill the child so they can bring his blood back to the Gauḍeśvara to bathe in for strength. They stop to rest at the riverbank, and place the baby in some tall grass while they prepare dinner and discuss the situation.

Meanwhile Dharma in heaven gets wind of this, and summons Hanumāna to go rescue the baby. If anything happens to this child, he will be unable to grow up and establish worship of

Dharma on earth, so of course his life is beyond valuable. Hanumāna heads to earth. He disguises

38 Akṣayakumāra Kayāla p. 128a

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himself as a kite, a large raptor bird, and easily seizes the baby and returns to Dharma’s throne with him.39 Dharma is sitting on his throne chewing pān. The sight of the adorable baby gurgling on the floor in front of him so charms the god that he laughs out loud, and a piece of camphor from the pān falls out of his mouth. That camphor immediately turns into an identical baby boy. Dharma not very imaginatively names him Karpūra Pātara, and decides to send him along with Lāusena back to the bereft mother, who will now be happy to raise two sons instead of the one she already had. Maṅgala-kāvya protagonists must have their seconds, their inseparable companions. From here on the two boys will be described as “Kṛṣṇa-Balarāma” and “Rāma-Lakṣmaṇa.”

Several of the main characters in the epic have been born on earth to propound worship of

Dharma, sometimes as punishment for misbehavior in heaven. Kaśyapa’s son was deliberately chosen to come as Lāusena, though he had done nothing wrong. Karpūra literally arose from the mouth of God. Certainly they have a close connection with the divinity. Lāusena is also sometimes equated with him, as in the examples cited in this paper.

Later, Hanumāna will come in disguise as an elderly athlete to train the boys in wrestling.

And still later, when Lāusena is doing battle with a ferocious tiger,40 Dharma again sends

Hanumāna to tell the young prince what it will take to slay the animal. Dharma commands,

“In the Satya Yuga, when Śrīrāma avatāra rescued Sītā via the bridge you built,

Rāvana and his lineage died because of you. Now rescue the ascetic of Mayanā.”41

39 Much later, Hanumāna will again become a kite to seize something about the size of a baby, namely the head of his enemy Ichāi Ghoṣa’s mighty warrior Lohāṭa. That is itself a foreshadowing of the fate of Ichāi himself. 40 The tiger had been another member of Indra’s court. He once laughed at the sight of the Goddess astride her tiger mount, so she cursed him to be born as a mortal tiger. He did not accept this punishment graciously, and became the terror of the countryside. 41 Akṣayakumāra Kayāla p. 191b

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In this case Hanumāna does not himself attack the enemy tiger, but rather conveys the message from Dharma about why the tiger keeps coming back from death when beheaded, and what it will take to kill him permanently.

The tiger gazes upon Lāusena’s magical shield, and realizes he has finally met his match:

“When the tiger gazed upon the amazing inscriptions on the shield, his heart froze in horror.

He paced back and forth in front of those images; he could neither look, nor look away.

He saw the entire Mahābhārata and the Bhāgavata Purāṇa at once, saw all the gods

manifest there together: Duryodhana having the lac house set on fire, the sons of Pāṇḍu

fleeing underground. When he saw all this depicted, Kāmadala wept.

Then he saw Kṛṣṇāvatāra, and his eyes filled with tears.

Before his very eyes he saw the dāna-khaṇḍa: Govinda at the foot of the kadamba tree

asking for the tax, the cowherd maidens going to Mathurā with their dairy products on their

heads to sell them. Rādhā-Candrāvalī outshines them all, and Kṛṣṇa holds her hand and

flirts.

When they set their goods on the ground he takes their cream and milk.

“Let me see, let me see,” said Kṛṣṇa, and pours it into his mouth.

The tiger saw the full rāsa līlā illustrated: the daughter(s) of the cowherds danced in

Kṛṣṇa’s arms.”42

Viśvakarma himself had constructed this shield as the appropriate partner for the sword the

Goddess gave Lāusena when he completed his education in the royal martial arts. When an enemy gazes upon it, he sees his own impending doom. It seems to have something of the character of

42 Akṣayakumāra Kayāla p. 183b-184a

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Snow White’s evil stepmother’s magic mirror that will reveal what the viewer needs to see, for no two descriptions of this shield reveal the same images.

On another adventure much later Lāusena encounters a woman who finds him sexually irresistible. The attraction, however, is not mutual. The woman is determined to get her way, and when the young man continues to refuse and cites his vow of celibacy, she drowns her young son in the well and blames Lāusena for the crime. He is imprisoned and tortured. Dharma of course gets wind of this, and once again, summons his deputy:

“Go rescue Lāusena from his plight. It won’t take long; I know how great you are.

When Jānakī was imprisoned in Rāvana’s palace, you leapt across the ocean and

rescued her. You saved her from death. Mighty Hanumāna, go rescue Lāusena!”43

On the eve of the final battle, Dharma once again commands Hanumāna:

“Because of you, Rāvaṇa was completely destroyed. Kṛttivāsa wrote all about it in

the Rāmāyaṇa.”44

Nearly every time Lord Dharma summons Hanumāna, he refers to a key episode in the

Rāmāyaṇa. What, then can we make of all this? Hanumāna rescues devotees in dire straits, and also ensures the demise of those who stand in his lord’s way.

It helps to remember that the maṅgala-kāvyas were composed for recitation and/or performance. Over each of the twelve nights of the Dharma Gājana, two pālās are performed. The gājana is an annual affair. Just as no one ever hears the Mahābhārata for the first time, so in rural

Barddhaman is the Dharma-maṅgala very familiar. Rūparāma’s is the oldest, and arguably the best loved, of the roughly two dozen of them. Although I know of only two extant complete manuscripts of the text, the many partial manuscripts indicate the popularity of particular episodes.

43 Akṣayakumāra Kayāla p. 241b 44 Akṣayakumāra Kayāla p. 429a

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A perusal of manuscript catalogues confirms this: in the Barddhamāna Sāhitya Sābhā/Sukumar

Sen manuscript catalogue, for example, we find five manuscripts of the Bāgha-vadha (Slaying of the Tiger) Pālā alone, and another five of the episode of the final battle with main villain Ichāi

Ghoṣa. Pālās copied and distributed individually like these would have been especially popular; these would be the tales people wanted to hear over and over again.

People like to hear of the exploits of their heroes, and see the “bad guys” beaten. Hanumāna plays a key role in both battles cited above, but not by participating in the fighting. Both Ichāi and the tiger have secured a boon from the Goddess: when Lāusena cuts off their heads, the heads will simply reattach. Rūparāma recounts Lāusena’s fights with these two opponents almost identically, though nine intervening pālās separate them. In both cases Hanumāna knows how to vanquish the enemy, since Lāusena’s repeated decapitations are not working. To slay the tiger, Lāusena must grab him by the tail, swing him around, and then dash his body on the ground.

Getting rid of Ichāi is more difficult. Ichāi can be decapitated, but then the problem remains of ensuring his head’s continued separation from the rest of the body. The gods hatch a plan: just as Lāusena yet again slices off Ichāi’s head, Hanumāna catches it before it can touch the ground.

Hanumāna races to hell with the head in his arms, and tosses it to Vāsuki, who immediately swallows it.

Audiences are of course very familiar with the tales of the epics and purāṇas, and so hearing more about one of their favourite characters is probably something like getting to watch the latest iteration of Spiderman at the movies. Or perhaps another franchise in which Spiderman has a role, but is not the central character. As many scholars have noted, we can think of this genre as a vernacular, regional, continuation of the purāṇas, full of tales of the marvelous and miraculous.

Just as Rāma, mighty as he is, cannot find Sītā himself, or figure out how to rescue her once he

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knows where she is, so Dharma, mighty god, needs help to establish his worship on earth. He has a champion, Lāusena, but that champion needs direction and sometimes rescue to ensure his success. Hanumāna steps in every time to save the day.

But what does all this say about Dharma’s identity? His might does not seem to be all- encompassing, which might lead us to wonder what would compel people to worship him. Aside from desire for progeny. The intertextual entailments tell us. We tell our undergraduate students in introductory Hinduism classes that they can identify the deity in a calendar art poster by seeing what else is there: what are they carrying, what are they riding, and who else is in the picture?

Similarly, if we ask whom does Hanumāna assist in the Rāmāyaṇa? Who resides in Hanumāna’s heart? The Lord of All. Hanumāna is an indispensable accessory to the lord, ensuring his success, and wherever the ultimate lord and his champion are, there too is Hanumāna. He leaps from the forest of Kiṣkinda to riverine Bengal…Thus if Hanumāna is serving a deity, that deity must be the all-powerful, whatever his current name.

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