Secondary Tales of the Two Great Epics

Author(s): Rajendra I Nanavati
Publisher: L D Indology Ahmedabad

Page 46

The Tales in Ramayana
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necessity of making allowance for other queens even if only for sacrificial purposes renders the insistence for Sitä to the extent of putting her golden image pointless. The contradiction is, as if, built in. The author wants to show Rama's greatest love for Sit the ideal of monogamy, of conjugal love, and makes him put a golden image of Sitä even for the sacrificial purposes, but the very sacrifice that he is shown to perform primarily requires at least four wives.
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Or, was Rama originally not intended to provide an ideal of monogamy ? Perhaps, even the author of these late portions did not intend Rama to be that idealof conjugal constancy which he later on came to be regarded as ! At one place, at least, in the original portions of RM, mention has been made of "Rama's noble women!"""
The second alternative is also equally unpalatable, but we should set it for whatever worth it has. As Karmarkar shows, the custom of Pariplava is unique to the Aśvamedha sacrifice.14 According to the custom, ten different types of lores are narrated on ten consecutive days, cyclically throught the year during which the sacrificial horse is moving about. Among these lores, those of the itihasa and the puraṇa are narrated on the eighth and the ninth days of the cycles, and it is only natural for us to suppose that, for this purpose, experts in the lores i.e. the sūtas and the paurānikas - must have been employed. This means, the narration, preservation and propagation of the itihasa-puraṇa lores took place under the custom of pariplava within the set-up of the Asvamedha sacrifice. In this situation, when some genius. poet put some of the itihasa-tales into an epic-form, and when, thereafter, it, again, fell to the lot of these traditional bards themselves to preserve the epic-itihasa-poems, nothing would be more natural than their tendency to set up the epic in the same. environment, to frame the poem with the same episode, of the Alvamedha sacrifice within which they were actually narrating the tale. They were narrating the Ramastory in the päriplava setting of Aśvämedha, so they provided the tale with the same. frame of Asvamedha, and to make it more effective, they made Rama, the hero of the tale itself, perform the sacrifice and showed his own tale being narrated at hist own Aśvamedha sacrifice. This is very plausible.
What is implausible is the implied assumption that either the author of this episode was not aware of the implications of the situation of Rama's performing Aśvamedha, or he was deliberately ignoring them; unless, of course, we contend that
13 vide Manthara's words in AyK, 8.5
bṛtāḥ khalu bhavisyanti ramasya paramäḥ striyah / apraha bhavisyanti snusis te bharata-kṣaye !!
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The parallel construction of the two halves of the sloka makes it inevitable that 'striyah' be taken to mean, in the light of 'snuṣaḥ' (daughters-in-laws), the 'wives' of Rama.
14 vide "The Pariplava (Revolving Cycle of Legends) at the Aivamedha." R. D. Karmarkar, Annals of Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, Vol. XXXIII, 1952, pp. 26-40; History of Dharmasastra, Vol. II, ii, Kane, pp. 1231-1233.