The Marriage of Devayānī

The story of Devayānī does not end with Kacha's departure, for her pride, which we glimpsed in her love, was about to draw her into a quarrel that would reshape the whole line, and the quarrel began, as such things often do, over a small thing: a tangle of clothes by a forest pool.

One warm afternoon Devayānī went to bathe in a woodland pool, and with her went Sharmishṭhā, the daughter of Vrishaparvā, the king of the demons, a princess of royal blood. They left their garments and their garlands on the grassy bank and went into the water; and while they bathed, a sudden wind blew through the forest and tumbled their clothes together into a heap.

Coming out in haste, Sharmishṭhā by accident put on Devayānī's garment; and Devayānī, vexed, spoke sharply, half in jest and half in earnest, reminding the princess that it was improper for a disciple's daughter to wear the clothes of the master's daughter, and that the king's house owed its spiritual guidance to her father.

It was a small remark, but it struck the princess's pride, and Sharmishṭhā answered with venom. Your father, she retorted, is only a beggar who stands at our gates singing for his bread; my father is the king, and it is his charity that feeds you; how dare you speak to me of equality? And in her fury she struck Devayānī, and pushed her into a dry, overgrown well, and left her there, believing she would die in the wilderness, and went home.

But Devayānī did not die, for it happened that the emperor Yayāti, hunting in that forest and grown thirsty, came to the well in search of water and heard, instead of water, the cries of a woman. Looking down, he saw the beautiful Devayānī, and she reached up her right hand, and he took it and drew her up out of the well. And when she stood on dry ground, Devayānī spoke to him in a way that bound him: You have taken a maiden by her right hand, she said, and by the sacred law you must now accept me as your wife.

But Yayāti drew back, for there was a difficulty of dharma. I am a kshatriya, a man of the warrior caste, he told her, and you are a brāhmaṇa maiden, of the priestly caste; and the law forbids such a union, where the woman is of the higher caste and the man of the lower, for the sake of the purity of the lineage. Return home, and let us both obey the scriptures. And with that the king departed.

Devayānī, however, would not return to the demon capital where she had been so insulted, and she sent word to her father; and Shukrāchārya came and found her weeping beneath a tree, and heard the story of Sharmishṭhā's insults. And the proud preceptor lifted his daughter up with words meant to console her, and they are worth hearing, for through them the sage Vyāsa gives counsel to all of us.

You are not the daughter of a beggar, Shukrāchārya told her; your father does not live by flattery; you are the child of one whom the whole world reveres, whose spiritual power upholds this very kingdom. But mark this: no worthy man boasts of his own merits. Be patient. And then he spoke the deeper teaching, on the mastery of anger, which the story sets down as wisdom for the ages. He conquers the world, he said, who patiently endures the abuse of his neighbours.

He who reins in his rising anger, as a skilled horseman masters an unruly horse, is the true charioteer, not the one who merely holds the reins while the horse runs where it will. He who sheds his anger as a snake sheds its old skin is a true hero. The man who never yields to anger is greater than the one who performs a hundred years of sacrifices. For anger drives away everything a man holds dear: his friends, his family, his wife and children, his virtue, and his truth.

It is among the finest passages of counsel in the whole epic, and we should let it sink in, for anger is the commonest and the most destructive of our failings, and the mastery of it is set here above even a lifetime of ritual devotion. The man who cannot be angered has a strength that no ceremony can give.

Devayānī heard her father's teaching with respect, and yet she answered it with a truth of her own, and her answer too has its wisdom. I understand the greatness of forbearance, father, she said; yet it is not right to go on living among people who have no decency, who insult one's family; the wise do not keep company with the ill-mannered. And she added a thing that is painfully true: that wounds made by weapons heal in time, but wounds made by words stay painful as long as one lives.

My mind is still ablaze with what Sharmishṭhā said; I cannot go back to a place where I am so insulted. And in this she and her father were both right, each holding a piece of the truth: he, that anger must be mastered; she, that one need not remain where one is degraded. Wisdom is not always all on one side.

Shukrāchārya then went to King Vrishaparvā, and his word carried the weight of the kingdom's very survival, for without his spiritual power the demon realm was defenceless against the gods. He named the wrongs: the repeated murder of his disciple Kacha, which he had borne; and now the insult to his daughter and her casting into the well. My daughter cannot stay in your kingdom, he said, and without her I cannot stay either; I am leaving.

And the king, knowing that his kingdom's whole defence would crumble if the preceptor left, threw himself at Shukrāchārya's feet and cried that if the sage abandoned them he would enter the fire and die.

I care more for my daughter's happiness than for your whole realm, Shukrāchārya answered; appease her, and I stay; otherwise I go. So the king and his ministers hurried to the forest and prostrated themselves before Devayānī, begging her to be reconciled. And Devayānī, still proud, named her price: that Sharmishṭhā, who had called her a beggar's daughter, should become her handmaiden, and attend upon her in the house of whatever husband her father should choose for her.

It was a hard demand, that a king's daughter should become a servant; and yet Sharmishṭhā, when it was put to her, showed a nobility that rose above her earlier pride, and accepted it, for her father's sake and her kingdom's. Let it be as Devayānī wishes, she said; my father shall not lose his preceptor for a fault of mine; I will be her attendant. And so, at the cost of a princess's freedom, the quarrel was patched, and they returned to the capital, carrying with them, all unknowing, the seed of the next generation's sorrows.