The unbearability of patricide


Why is patricide so difficult to confront for Indians, especially Hindus? Why does it produce such massive repression in the Hindu psyche that no serious interrogation of the meaning of Gandhi’s murder is possible? Why, in other words, have we still not come to terms with the event? Why is there a national compulsion, instead, to turn away from it to a recounting of Gandhi’s life? Or to turn the murder into a martyrdom so as to be able better to cope with its after-effects? To examine the implications of these questions we shall have to go deep into the innards of Hindu mythology, that inexhaustible source of symbols and significations that still shed their light, however dim, on our benighted present.

The horror of killing one’s father is unimaginable and intolerable to the Hindu mind. In all of Hindu mythology there are very few instances of the killing of the father or the mother. Though the status of the mother is primary, there is one rather famous matricide in the Mahabharata, but the catastrophe is reversed. Parashuram at his father Jamadagni’s behest beheads his mother Renuka because the sage has detected in her an act of mental infidelity. But the story hints that Parashuram knows that his father’s anger is only short-lived, so after carrying out his ghastly commission, he entreats its reversal. His prayer is granted; the sage restores his wife and Parashuram’s mother, back to life. Interestingly, Jamadagni had commanded his other four sons to do the same: that they refused him one by one, knowing full well the consequences of their disobedience, attests to the heinousness of the crime. Indeed, they are burned to death by their extremely powerful father’s angry look. When Parashuram, who has been away during this domestic disaster, returns, he finds his mother whimpering inconsolably beside the heaps of the ashes of his four incinerated elder brothers. The story, however, ends happily, as already mentioned.1

Patricide, too, is very scarce, if not impossible to find in Indian myths. If it is anywhere, the place to look for it is obviously the Mahabharata because, as the Adi Parva puts it, ‘What is not found here will not be found elsewhere’ (Yannehasti na tadkavacit).2 The lone instance that occurs in the Mahabharata is Paravasu’s killing of his father by mistake. In C. Rajagopalachari’s abridged retelling (1978), it occurs in chapters 32 and 33, in the interlinked stories of Yavakrida, the son of Bharadwaja, and Raibhya, Bharadwaja’s peer, who was also a rishi of great repute, and his two sons Paravasu and Aravasu. Yavakrida is jealous of Raibhya’s sons and wishes to be the greatest Vedic scholar of his time. Undergoing severe austerities to reach his goal quickly, he violates the established order. He is persuaded many times to find a proper teacher to study the scriptures as other people do. But he persists stubbornly, even threatening to offer his limbs one by one as oblations to the sacrificial fire, to achieve his purpose. In the end the Gods grant him the wish. But he lacks the moral character commensurate with the wisdom he seeks and therefore grows vain. Even his father warns him to cultivate self-restraint and not to transgress the limits of Dharma. Unfortunately Yavakrida falls.

Chancing upon Paravasu’s beautiful wife, he is so overwhelmed by lust that he drags her to a lonely spot and ravishes her. When Raibhya returns to his hermitage, he finds his daughter-in-law raped and heartbroken. Enraged, he creates out of two hairs from his head vengeful demonic energies to kill Yavakrida. Yavakrida is hunted down to the very entrance of his father’s hermitage and speared to death. As Bharadwaja confronts his son’s corpse he guesses that Yavakrida has offended Raibhya, which has lead to his death. But unable to control his grief and anger, he curses Raibhya that he will die at the hands of his own son. That is why Paravasu unwittingly kills his father, thinking him to be a wild beast about to spring upon him. But his grievous error is prepared for by his own lust. While conducting the king’s sacrifice, Paravasu wishes to visit his wife one night, the same beautiful woman whose rape had led to Yavakrida’s downfall. Mistaking his deerskin-clad father for a wild beast he kills him. But he is the official priest in the king’s sacrifice: though both horrified and ashamed, he requests his younger brother to expiate his doubly heinous crime, not just of killing a Brahmin, but his own father. Aravasu’s penance on his brother’s behalf however does not wash off the latter’s sins because penance cannot be done, nor sins be washed away, by proxy. When Aravasu returns to the sacrificial assembly, Paravasu, jealous of his brother’s lustre, defames him as a Brahmin-killer unfit to participate in the gathering. Aravasu, humiliated and distraught, repairs to the forest concluding that there is no justice on earth. After years and years of penance, however, he finds it in his heart not only to forgive his brother but to pray of the restoration of his father’s life and the cleansing of his brother’s sins. The Gods, pleased with his virtue and austerity, grant him his wish. Thus the cosmic order is restored through purity, forgiveness and compassion, not through vengeful retaliation.3 In both of these somewhat seriously told stories, where the instances of matricide and patricide are real with visible distress and suffering, the crimes are shown, ultimately, to be reversible.

Other stories of patricide, again owing mostly to mistaken identities or curses, are in the variants or subplots of the Ramayana and Mahabharata sagas. In the Krittibas Bangla retelling, for instance, Lava and Kusha, Rama’s estranged sons, not only defeat but kill their father unwittingly when he goes to retrieve the sacrificial horse from their custody. However, Valmiki, the ‘author’ of the story, who has contrived these events to reunite the family, revives Rama.4 There is also the story of Arjuna’s ‘death’ at the hands of his son Babruvahana in the Ashvamedha Parva of the Mahabharata. The episode is interesting because it shows a rivalry between Arjuna’s two wives, the Manipuri princess Chitrangada, Babruvahana’s mother, and Uloopi, the Naga princess, who is Babruvahana’s nurse and stepmother. In this case Arjuna and Babruvahana recognize each other, but fight over the sacrificial horse. When his arrows kill Arjuna much to Chitrangada’s horror, Uloopi revives Arjuna with a special gem, explaining how this ‘death’ was the only way to release Arjuna from the curse of the Vasus and expiate his killing of Bheeshma, the grandsire of the clan. Arjuna’s own parricidal sin leaves him only after his mock death at the hands of his own son. Uloopi scores over Chitrangada, both in egging on Babruvahana to combat, and also in revealing the mystery of ‘invincible’ Arjuna’s defeat in the curse, besides claiming the credit of bringing him back to life with her gem.5 It would seem that there is no pure or irreversible tragedy in Hindu mythology!

If patricide is ‘impossible’ in Hindu thought, it is quite common in the Western tradition. There, the Oedipal myth is defining if not definitive, given the status of a master-narrative by Sigmund Freud himself. Even prior to Oedipus, an Oedipal pattern is already established in Greek mythology, with a series of patricides – and infanticides – from Cronos to Zeus. Uranus (sky) was both the son and husband of Gaea (earth). He visited her each night, covering the earth with darkness. His son, Cronus (later worshipped as Saturn by the Romans), tore open the sky (his father) with assistance from his mother, Gaea, to rule the world with his sister-wife, Rhea. Gaea fashioned the stone sickle or scythe which he used to castrate his father. The latter’s cut testicles were flung into the sea, where they caused the white foam from which Aphrodite was born. Gaea had warned Cronus that his own offspring would upstage and depose him. Therefore, he began to eat them – Demeter, Hestia, Hera, Hades and Poseidon – soon after they were born. There is a particularly gruesome painting by Peter Paul Rubens showing Cronus devouring the infant Poseidon; the terror in the latter’s face is unmistakable. Rhea, however, saved Zeus, the youngest of her children, tricking Cronus into swallowing a stone instead of him. Zeus forced his father to imbibe an emetic whereupon he disgorged his offspring in reverse order. A huge battle called Titanomachy ensued in which the Titans were defeated by the Gods; the victorious Zeus assumed overlordship of the heavens while many of the routed Titans were relegated to Tartarus. This series of patricides from Cronus to Zeus – sons killing, castrating and ousting their fathers; fathers killing or devouring their offspring; and sons in turn killing or overthrowing their fathers – has no parallel in India.6 The Oedipus complex, according to Freud, is of course the source of all neurosis, the name of the Father serving as the repressive interdiction of the son’s illicit desire for his mother, leading to the primal trauma that is the cause of every civilization’s anguish, a thesis most famously advanced in Freud’s Civilization and its Discontents, which affirms the same repression of illicit desire as the defining action of civilization itself.

Ramanujan in ‘The Indian Oedipus’ sums it up quite succinctly: ‘There are very, very few stories of actual patricide in Hindu myth, literature and folklore’ (1999: 385). He lists, very briefly, the ‘few marginal instances’ of ‘Arjuna killed by his son, Rama killed by his sons, both in battle, both revived later’ (ibid.) and though he and the other Oedipus-seekers in India have missed the story of Paravasu’s killing of his father Yavakrida, his conclusion stands. That is why what is so shocking about Godse’s deliberate and cold-blooded execution of the Father of the Nation is that it is not an act of ignorance, mistaken identity, or the outcome of a curse. It is a planned and deliberate patricide, which makes it all the more loathsome. Hindus complicit to whatever extent in this crime bear a perpetual burden of guilt. It is this guilt that produces the requisite defence mechanism in us whereby we repress and evade the fact of Gandhi’s murder and our responsibility for it.

Notes

1  See W. J. Wilkins, Hindu Mythology, Vedic and Purāni (1882; 1913: 164–169).

2  There is actually a book edited by T. S. Rukmini by this title, though it mentions nothing of patricide (Rukmini 2005).

3  Girish Karnad retells this extraordinary story in his play, Agni Mattu Male, which he translated himself as The Fire and the Rain (1998). It is not clear, however, whether he did so because it has the lone instance of patricide in Hindu tradition. The blurb glibly declares

This play by one of India’s foremost playwrights and actors is based on a story from the Mahabharata which tellingly illuminates universal themes – alienation, loneliness, love, family, hatred – through the daily lives and concerns of a whole community of individuals.

Patricide is nowhere mentioned. The play was very poorly adapted by Arjun Sajnani into a movie of the same name.

4  See Richman (2000: 243–264); apparently there are some Telugu songs that also tell the same story (Richman 1991: 123).

5  See Subhash Mazumdar’s Who is Who in the Mahabharata (1988: 32); Dowson’s Classical Dictionary of Hindu Mythology (1897; 1979) remains a handy ready-reference on Hindu mythology and literature.

6  Robert Graves’s Greek Myths (1955) continues to be a stimulating and absorbing source for these narratives. The stories of the Titans and Gods are mostly derived from Hesiod; see Jenny Strauss Clay’s Hesiod’s Cosmos (2009) for a readable overview.