A Carnival

Hanumān leapt back across the ocean, the hundred leagues that had seemed so impassable now crossed with the ease of a homecoming, and he came down upon the far shore where the anxious search party waited, and his coming was the signal for a joy that the tellers describe as a very carnival of gladness.

For the vānaras who had waited on the shore, who had sat in despair not so long before, preparing to die of failure, saw Hanumān returning across the sky, and they knew from his very bearing, before he had spoken a word, that he brought good news, that the errand had succeeded, that Sītā was found.

And when he alighted among them and told them, told them that he had crossed the ocean and entered Lankā and found Sītā alive and faithful in the Ashokavana, that he had spoken with her and given her Rāma’s ring and received her token, that he had wrecked the demon’s garden and slain a prince and burned the golden city, the whole company erupted into a joy beyond containing. They leapt, they shouted, they embraced one another, they cheered until the shore rang with it.

The despair of failure was transformed in an instant into the ecstasy of success, and the vānaras, who are by nature a merry and exuberant people, gave themselves wholly to a celebration as boisterous and unrestrained as their earlier despair had been deep.

And in the fullness of their joy, the tellers give us a delightful and very characteristic episode, small and merry amid the great matters, that shows the exuberant nature of the vānaras and lightens, for a moment, the gathering weight of the story before the war. For on their triumphant way back toward Kishkindhā, drunk with the joy of their success, the vānaras came upon the Madhuvana, the honey-garden, a great pleasure-grove of Sugrīva’s, a royal preserve full of honey and fruit, and they fell upon it in their exuberance and raided it.

They gorged themselves on the honey, they feasted on the fruit, they grew merry and riotous and wholly out of hand, and when the keepers of the garden tried to stop them, the vānaras, in their high spirits and their sense that their triumph entitled them to any liberty, simply overwhelmed the keepers and went on with their revel, wrecking the royal honey-garden in a great disorderly carnival of celebration.

Now this was, strictly, a serious breach, for the Madhuvana was the king’s own preserve, and to raid it and rout its keepers was an offence against Sugrīva’s royal rights. And when word of it came to Sugrīva, that his honey- garden had been stormed and plundered by the returning search party, his first response might have been anger.

But Sugrīva, hearing of it, understood at once what the raid on the Madhuvana meant, and his anger turned to joy, for he reasoned, shrewdly and correctly, that the search party would never have dared to raid his royal garden in such riotous high spirits unless their mission had succeeded, unless they were drunk with triumph as well as honey; that only the joy of success could account for such exuberant misrule; and that therefore the raid on the honey-garden was itself the happiest of news, the sign, before any messenger arrived, that Sītā had been found.

Let them raid the garden, Sugrīva said in effect; their very misrule tells me they have succeeded; a search party that returns in defeat does not storm the king’s honey-garden in triumph. And so the breach was forgiven before it was even reproached, read rightly as the overflow of a joy too great to be contained, and the raid on the Madhuvana became not a crime to be punished but a sign to be celebrated.

There is a lightness in this episode that the story sets deliberately at this point, and it is worth appreciating, for the tellers know their craft. We stand at the threshold of the war, the great and terrible Yuddha Kāṇḍa, with all its slaughter and grief ahead; and just before we cross that threshold, the story gives us this: a carnival of joy, a riotous honey-feast, the merry misrule of the exuberant vānaras, a moment of pure gladness and even comedy before the darkness of the war descends.

It is a breathing-space, a last lightness, the joy of the good news fully savoured before the heavy matters resume.

And it is fitting, too, that this lightness should belong to the vānaras, the merry monkey-people, whose exuberance and warmth and high spirits are one of the story’s great pleasures, and who bring to the solemn epic a note of joy and even of comedy that humanizes it and lightens it and reminds us that even amid the greatest matters there is room for gladness, for celebration, for the simple animal joy of a triumph well earned and a honey-garden well raided.

So the search party came home at last to Kishkindhā and to the waiting Rāma, merry and triumphant, having found the lost queen and celebrated their finding with honey and misrule, and they brought with them the two things Rāma most needed: the certain news of where Sītā was, and the token, the Chūḍāmaṇi, that would prove the news true beyond any doubt.

The great search that had begun in despair on the ocean shore, that had passed through Hanumān’s leap and Sītā’s finding and Lankā’s burning, ended now in this carnival of homecoming joy, and only one thing remained before the war could be set in motion: the delivering of the news, and the jewel, into Rāma’s own hands, and the ending, at last, of his long grief with the certain knowledge that his Sītā lived and waited and would be won back.

And so the Sundara Kāṇḍa, the book of the flight of faith, the book that belongs above all to Hanumān and his great devoted deeds, draws toward its close, and the story turns from the finding of Sītā to the winning of her, from the leap of the single faithful servant to the march of the whole great army, from the flight of faith to the war of liberation.