Baladeva now arrives. During the war, he has been on a pilgrimage along the old River Sarasvatī, a pilgrimage Vaishampāyana describes in detail (9.34–53). Vaishampāyana then narrates the climactic mace duel between Bhīma and Duryodhana, which Krishna helps Bhīma to win unfairly by striking Duryodhana below the belt and breaking his legs. Baladeva condemns the Pāndava tactics, and Krishna defends them. Baladeva declares that Duryodhana has the moral victory, and returns to Dvārakā (9.57–59).
Thinking the war to be over, Yudhishthira sends Krishna ahead to Hāstinapura to try to comfort and placate Dhritarāshtra and his wife Gāndhārī, who are now sonless. Meanwhile Ashvatthāman, to avenge the ignoble death of his father Drona, becomes possessed by Shiva, and aided by Kritavarman, he enters the camp of the Pāndava army at night and kills all the warriors in their beds, including all of Draupadī’s family and sons (10.7–8). Krishna is instrumental in protecting the Pāndavas from Ashvatthāman in this attack (he makes them spend the night elsewhere, 9.61.35), and also in its aftermath. Ashvatthāman curses Abhimanyu and Uttarā’s unborn child to be stillborn, but Krishna says he will revive the child and, together with Vyāsa, he banishes Ashvatthāman (10.13–16).
In the war’s immediate aftermath, Krishna saves Bhīma from being crushed to death by Dhritarāshtra (11.11), and then Krishna accepts the curse that Gāndhārī pronounces on him for having desired this slaughter and allowed it to occur—namely, that in thirty-six years’ time he will cause the massacre of his own kinsmen (11.25.35–42).
Yudhishthira, bereft and also smarting after hearing the news that Karna was his elder brother, announces his wish to renounce and not be king. Krishna and Sātyaki are still there, and Krishna helps persuade Yudhishthira to do his duty (12.29–30, 38). When Yudhishthira is anointed king in Hāstinapura, he praises Krishna at length (12.43). Krishna now takes Yudhishthira back out to the battlefield to receive teachings from Bhīshma. Bhīshma is still lying there on a bed of arrows, and Krishna persuades and enables him to teach (12.45–55). Bhīshma’s copious teachings then follow, prompted by Yudhishthira’s questions about royal propriety and profit, and about release from the world of suffering.
Vishnu features in Bhīshma’s teachings on many occasions. According to Bhīshma, Vishnu champions kshatriyas as the upholders of Vedic and brahminical propriety (12.64–65). Vishnu created the institution of kingship and the rod of force (12.59.93–140, 122.22–33). Vishnu is the highest of all gods (12.321–39); he has one thousand names (13.135); he was manifest as the boar in the past (12.202); and he is manifest as Krishna in the present (12.111, 200).
Krishna Vāsudeva also features elsewhere in Bhīshma’s teachings. Bhīshma relates Krishna’s dialogues with Nārada, the celestial reporter, about relations with one’s kinsfolk (12.82) and about who is worthy of reverence (13.32); his dialogues with the earth about the importance of honouring brahmins (13.34) and about the hospitality duties of householders (13.100); his dialogue with Ugrasena about Nārada’s good qualities (12.223); his dialogue with Arjuna about his own names and his relationship with Shiva (12.328–30); and also his wife Rukminī’s dialogue with the goddess Shrī about Shrī herself (13.11) and his mother Devakī’s dialogue with Nārada about what types of generosity are appropriate at which lunar conjunctions (13.63). Bhīshma also narrates some episodes from Krishna’s life: Krishna’s encounter with King Nriga, who was in the form of a lizard (13.69), and Krishna’s incineration and restoration of a mountain while he was performing austerities to enable the birth of his son, presumably Sāmba (13.126). During interludes in Bhīshma’s teachings Bhīshma asks Krishna to narrate. Krishna on one occasion narrates how he paid homage to Shiva to obtain his son Sāmba and how he learned Shiva’s one thousand names (13.14–18) and, on another occasion, how he and Rukminī respectfully hosted the brahmin Durvāsas even while the latter behaved abominably and humiliated Rukminī, and how Durvāsas is actually a form of the great god Shiva, whom Krishna reveres (13.143–46).
Krishna is still there when, fifty nights after Bhīshma’s teachings have finished, Bhīshma dies (13.154). Yudhishthira is downcast again, and Krishna tells him to master himself, rule the kingdom, and perform a horse sacrifice, as Vyāsa advises (14.2, 11–13). Then, while Krishna and Arjuna are spending time in Indraprastha, Arjuna asks Krishna to repeat what he told him just before the war (that is, in the Bhagavad-Gītā). Krishna says that he is not inspired as he was then, and so he can’t repeat it exactly, but he agrees to present something similar. This is the Anu-Gītā (14.15–50), a series of teachings that set out the problem of karma and rebirth and a way of solving it by becoming a dispassionate yogi. The Anu-Gītā does not have the strong emphasis the Bhagavad-Gītā does on doing one’s class duty (the imperative to fight is not so pressing as it was), or on devotion to Krishna.
Krishna and Sātyaki now return to Dvārakā, taking Subhadrā for a visit. On the way they meet the sage Uttanka. Hearing of the slaughter that has taken place, Uttanka at first wants to curse Krishna, but Krishna explains that he was unable to stop the war, and he also shows his cosmic form to Uttanka, who is satisfied (14.52–54). Back in Dvārakā, Krishna describes to his father Vasudeva what happened in the war, including the death of young Abhimanyu, who is now mourned by his maternal family (14.58–61).
Soon Krishna and a party of Vrishnis return to Hāstinapura for Yudhishthira’s horse sacrifice. Shortly after their arrival, Uttarā’s son (Janamejaya’s father) Parikshit is stillborn, but Krishna miraculously revives him, as promised (14.65–69). Yudhishthira now says that Krishna should perform the horse sacrifice, not him; but Krishna insists that it is Yudhishthira’s rite (14.70). The ancient Indian horse-sacrifice involves the king allowing his horse to roam freely for a year, protected by a small army (here, Arjuna), before it is brought home and sacrificed. Among other places, Yudhishthira’s horse roams through Dvārakā, where some Yādava youngsters are prevented by King Ugrasena from detaining it (14.84).
Thirty-six years after the war, Gāndhārī’s curse takes effect. There is also a more proximate cause. A group of Vrishnis disguise Krishna’s son Sāmba as a pregnant woman and ask some visiting seers whether she will have a boy or a girl, and they say he will give birth to a club that will destroy them all. The next day, Sāmba produces a club. King Ugrasena has it ground up and thrown into the ocean, and bans liquor in a doomed attempt to prevent the inevitable (16.2). Krishna reads the signs and leads the Vrishnis on a pilgrimage to the ocean at Prabhāsa, and there, during a drunken party, Sātyaki reviles Kritavarman for his role in the night attack at the end of the Kurukshetra war. The argument intensifies, and Sātyaki beheads Kritavarman. Sātyaki is killed in the resulting brawl. Krishna’s son Pradyumna is killed trying to assist him, and then Krishna joins in. Handfuls of grass turn into clubs, and all the Yādava men except Krishna and Baladeva kill each other (16.4). Baladeva then gives up his life while absorbed in yoga and enters the ocean in the form of a snake, and Krishna is killed when he is absorbed in yoga and the hunter Jaras, mistaking him for a deer, shoots him in the foot (16.5).
Krishna’s charioteer Dāruka brings the news to Hāstinapura. Arjuna travels to Dvārakā and performs funerals for the fallen, and then taking the Yādava widows and children and the remaining citizens with him, he heads towards Indraprastha. Behind them, the ocean swallows Dvārakā. During the journey most of the women are abducted by bandits, and Arjuna is powerless to stop this. Eventually Arjuna settles Kritavarman’s son in Mrittikāvatī, Sātyaki’s son on the banks of the River Sarasvatī, and Krishna’s great-grandson Vajra in Indraprastha (16.8.67–70). Then Vyāsa tells Arjuna that everything has happened as ordained, that the earth has been relieved of her burden, that Krishna is the almighty, and that Arjuna’s work is done (16.9.25–36).
Overview of the Harivamsha
After the story of the Pāndavas has been completed in book 18 of the Mahābhārata (the ‘Book of Their Ascension into Heaven’), the Harivamsha continues the dialogue between S
haunaka and the storyteller Ugrashravas, and also the dialogue between King Janamejaya and Vaishampāyana at Janamejaya’s snake sacrifice. Both listeners, Shaunaka and Janamejaya, request to hear more about the Vrishnis, who have been rather neglected in what they have heard so far. So Ugrashravas says he will repeat, for Shaunaka, what Vaishampāyana said to Janamejaya in response to that request.
Vaishampāyana’s immediate response presents a variety of materials. Some of them are quite technical, and some contain long lists of names. All of them are brilliant. But any reader who is impatient and keen to get on to the parts of the Harivamsha that are about Vishnu could perhaps be forgiven for skipping ahead to Hv 30 and coming back to the skipped parts later; and any reader who is even more impatient and keen to get on to the parts of the Harivamsha that are about Krishna could perhaps be forgiven for skipping ahead to Hv 46 and coming back to the skipped parts (especially Hv 28–29) later.
Vaishampāyana begins by describing how Vishnu made the cosmos, what the stages of the process were, how the cosmos works, and how it is kept working by important beings playing important roles in different but overlapping domains. The creation narrative operates in mythological terms and is presented as a genealogy in which some of the characters are abstract forces—a mode of presentation seemingly belied by the assertion that sexual reproduction only became customary after a certain stage. The king is a most crucial role, and the origin and deeds of Prithu Vainya, the first king, are narrated in some detail. The role of the Manus is also crucial, though in a more abstract way: fourteen Manus preside in succession over equal stretches of time within the thousand ages that constitute a cosmic cycle. We are in the era of the seventh Manu, Manu the son of Vivasvat the sun.
Vaishampāyana narrates in detail two great kshatriya lineages: a straight one descending from the sun, and a branching one descending from the moon. All the genealogical materials in the text—not just these two main lineages—are pictorially represented in the appendix to the translation, which the reader is advised to consult for clarity as required. Each of the two main lineages begins with stories about its originary luminary and pauses at various points to tell stories about noteworthy kings along the way. The solar lineage (Hv 8–10) is the lineage of the kings of the ancient town of Ayodhyā. It begins with an amazing story about the sun’s marital difficulties, and it also features Manu’s daughter Ilā, who had a sex change; Raivata and his daughter Revatī, who stepped outside time (like Rip van Winkle); Kuvalāshva, who killed a monster in the desert; Satyavrata, who lived in exile for twelve years before becoming king; Sagara, who was born in exile after the ousting of his father but returned and took back the throne; and Sagara’s sons, who nearly lost their father’s sacrificial horse. King Rāma of Rāmāyana fame is in this lineage too, but he is also a manifestation of Vishnu, and his story is told later (in Hv 31), alongside those of other manifestations of Vishnu.
Between the two lineages is a nine-chapter section discussing the ancestors (Hv 11–19). This section is presented as Vaishampāyana repeating part of the long didactic dialogue that took place between Bhīshma and Yudhishthira after the Kurukshetra war. Bhīshma recounts a meeting with his dead father Shantanu and narrates teachings and a story that he received from the long-lived sage Mārkandeya on that occasion. Between the teachings about the ancestors and the accompanying story, Bhīshma presents several genealogies and narrates a touching story of his own younger days.
The teachings about the ancestors contain more lists of names, but they also demonstrate the ancestors’ involvement in the business of the world. The ancestors have a particular connection to the practice of yoga, and to illustrate the ancestors’ effects in the world, a beautiful story is told, about seven brothers over a sequence of seven rebirths (Hv 14–19). The brothers kill and eat their guru’s cow, a deed with severe karmic consequences, but because they also performed the beef-offering to their ancestors, they remember their former births and, as a result, they eventually develop into great yogis and, in one case, also into a great king.
The lunar lineage is then told (Hv 20–29). It is the story not of one kingdom but of a network of related kingdoms, and it often doubles back on itself to describe a different line of descent from the same ancestor. The principal common ancestor is King Yayāti, whose five sons include Pūru, ancestor of the Pauravas (who include the Bhāratas, who include the Kauravas, who include Janamejaya), and Yadu, ancestor of the Yādavas (who include the Vrishnis and Krishna). Amid the lunar line are stories about Soma the moon, who stole someone else’s wife and started the war between the gods and the demons over Tārakā; Raji, who took over the role of Indra the king of the gods; Yayāti, who disinherited four sons and composed magnificent verses (Hv 22.37–40); Arjuna Kārtavīrya, who gained and lost one thousand arms; Jyāmagha, whose wife had a child when she was old; and Devāvridha, who married a river. The Yādava lineage is presented in two slightly conflicting versions, one leading to Krishna’s father, the other to his mother. It also introduces Kālayavana, who goes on to be one of Krishna’s worst enemies, and it ends with the strong and strange story of the Syamantaka, a miraculous jewel for possession of which several Yādavas were prepared to kill, including Krishna, and which was held by Akrūra for many decades.
King Janamejaya now makes a chapter-long speech that praises Vishnu and asks how he could have become Krishna, a mere human being (Hv 30). Vaishampāyana explains that Vishnu has become manifest within the cosmos on many occasions for the good of the gods and the world, and he gives examples (Hv 31). Then, over the course of seven chapters (Hv 32–38), Vaishampāyana describes the war between gods and demons over Brihaspati’s wife Tārakā, who was abducted by Soma the moon. The two armies are described in detail, as is the progress of the conflict, which is rich in meteorological imagery and ends when Vishnu uses his discus to kill the arch-demon Kālanemi. This narration introduces demons that Krishna and his brother will later kill again on earth.
After the war with the demons, Vishnu visits Brahmā’s heaven—a very Vedic kind of place—and then goes to his own ashram for a sleep. He is awoken because there is trouble in the world and an intervention is required. As Brahmā and then the goddess Earth herself explain, the earth is suffering from overpopulation, and particularly from a surfeit of kshatriyas. So the gods must be born on earth and perpetrate a cull: the Kurukshetra war. Brahmā has already laid the groundwork by arranging a weak point in the Bhārata line after Shantanu, where a war of succession may now take place. This divine plan is the one described to Janamejaya in the first book of the Mahābhārata (Mbh 1.58–61), with the addition of an extra role for Vishnu. Vishnu not only must enable the cull, but also must kill the various demons who have taken up residence in Mathurā and the surrounding area. Mathurā was once the area of Madhu’s Forest, whose history is told by Nārada the celestial reporter. Brahmā arranges Vishnu’s birth accordingly, in Mathurā.
Thus ends the introductory Book of Krishna’s Lineage (Hv 1–45). The scene is now set for Vishnu’s manifestation as Krishna, which has already been partially described in the first sixteen books of the Mahābhārata, and which is described further, and more systematically, in the Book of Vishnu (Hv 46–113), the first part of which is the centrepiece of the Harivamsha. It tells of Krishna and Baladeva’s childhood living as cowherds in the bushland outside Mathurā, their defeat of various demons, and their return to Mathurā to kill Kamsa, who is Kālanemi reborn.
Krishna and Baladeva are smuggled out of Mathurā and fostered in the cowherd community for their own safety because the evil Yādava king Kamsa, usurper of the throne of his father, Ugrasena, has heard a prediction of his own death and will stop at nothing to try to avert it. There are similarities with the story of King Herod trying to kill the baby Jesus, but the theory that the Harivamsha story was borrowed from Christian sources was effectively refuted by Raychaudhuri in 1920.3
Krishna and Baladeva’s childhood and the countryside over which they and their cows roam is
lovingly and poetically described. Particular highlights are the descriptions of the monsoon (Hv 54), the River Yamunā (Hv 55.27–39), and the autumn (Hv 59); but such descriptions are strikingly juxtaposed with violence when the young superheroes kill demons—most of them animal demons—in various brutal ways. Along the way, Krishna famously dances on the head of the snake Kāliya (Hv 56), lifts up Mount Govardhana and uses it as an umbrella to shelter the cows from a storm sent by Indra (Hv 61), and has amorous pleasure with young cowgirls (Hv 63). When Kamsa finds out that Krishna is alive and well at the cattle station, he sends Akrūra to fetch him and Baladeva, and announces the holding of a bow festival at which he plans to have the two of them killed by ace wrestlers, or by the trained elephant Kuvalayāpīda.
So the boys return to Mathurā. On the way there is a beautiful scene in which Akrūra enters a pool and has an underwater vision of Krishna as Vishnu and of Baladeva as Shesha, the cosmic serpent upon which he rests (Hv 70). Once in Mathurā, Krishna and Baladeva explore the town and break the festival bow. The next day they go to the festival games in the sumptuous purpose-built stadium, and there, in thrilling scenes, they kill the elephant Kuvalayāpīda, a series of murderous wrestlers, and then Kamsa himself, who dies without putting up a fight, and his brother. Then Krishna and Baladeva are reunited with their true parents. Against the intense background of Kamsa’s wives mourning, Krishna arranges Kamsa’s funeral and Ugrasena’s re-installation as king. He tells Ugrasena that he himself will never be king.
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