Parvati's Tapasya

Uma - Abaninidranath Tagore

Parvati's Tapasya

Introduction

Her aim was nothing less than to win the heart of the supreme ascetic, silent and motionless in his abode of ice and snow. The great Shiva clothed in ashes, whom neither desire nor grief can touch, whose meditation is like Infinity contemplating Infinity, by whom worlds are created and worlds are destroyed, who can immobilise the raging Ganges streams in his matted locks and bear in his throat the fire of the primordial poison, on that god, Parvati, the lovely daughter of Himalaya, had set her eyes. This was not for the first time. She had been his from the beginning of time, in other lives, under other names. But in this birth as daughter of the Rocs, Shaila-ja, she once again had to seek Him and awaken his love and be recognised by Him as a part of Himself.

She had grown up on the slopes of the Himalaya; she had heard the music of the wind blowing in the hollow bamboos like a heavenly voice; as a child she had played on the sandy banks of the Ganges and wandered freely in the fragrant cedar woods. She was filled with the wonders and delight and vivaciousness of Nature. As for Him, somewhere on a high peak lost in whiteness, seated on a tiger's skin. He was immersed in trance, eyes closed. The dark mass of his matted hair rose upward and in the strange moonlight that streamed from his brow, one could distinguish the gleaming of a snake, that tied up the hair like a thread. She was beautiful as a lotus blooming under the sun, her gait was as graceful as if swans had been her dance masters. She had approached

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Him and placed flowers at His feet — but He had not paid any attention. Beauty did not move Him. And neither did passion:

Kama, the god of Desire, whose arrows succeed even where Indra's lightning bolt fails, had made Spring appear miraculously in this inhuman solitude; he had made trees suddenly blossom and birds sing; under his influence the elephant-cow drew closer to her bull and lovingly offered him a mouthful of water; the antelope approaching his doe fondly scratched her with his horn while she closed her eyes in pleasure; even the old sages of the mountain were hardly able to prevent sensuous images from entering their minds; but when Kama had been ready to shoot his arrow of mango-buds at Shiva's heart, a blazing fire had flown out of the third eye of the great God, angry to be disturbed in his meditation. Only ashes were left where the god of Desire had stood. Not by desire indeed was Shiva's love to be won.

Then Parvati understood that she had to go beyond beauty, beyond desire, beyond love. She had to throw at His feet some- thing more. The thing that she willed so passionately, union with Shiva, she had to will it even more; she had to make every part of her being, all recesses of her body, heart and mind will it even more intensely; she had to concentrate all her will, gather all her energies and capacities and focus them on this sole purpose. All other preoccupations had to be discarded. For His sake she must be ready to ignore social conventions and brave the reprobation of the world. Her body had to forget all needs or enjoyments, her mind reject all thoughts, her heart abandon all attachments. Only the need for Shiva, the thought of Shiva, the love for Shiva should exist. In a bold effort she must refuse to be anything else than an intense flame burning only for Shiva.

Thus for the love of Shiva, the Lord of Tapas, did Parvati resolve to undertake a great tapasya. The word tapasya so significantly derived from the root tap, to heat, is sometimes wrongly translated as "penance". But as Sri Aurobindo says, it implies "a fierce and strong effort of all the human powers towards any given end", the end being, in this case, Shiva's love. Tapasya means a tremendous concentration of the will "which sets the

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whole being in a flame, masses all the faculties in close ranks and hurls them furiously on a single objective." It is true that ancient Indians thought that this could be done most effectively by making the mind the master of the body and, in the course of time, the word came to be confined to the sense of ascetic practices having this object. It is also true that given the tendency of the ancient Indian mind to follow each pursuit of life to its farthest point and to sound its utmost possibilities, many were those who in later days sought the Eternal through extreme physical austerities (such as the dwelling between five fires), but one should not lose sight of the original meaning of tapasya, which was "concentration of the will", — a concentration so intense that it produced heat — heat, that is to say energy, force.

To awaken Shiva from his trance, all the beauty of this world, the need and aspiration of this earth took the form of a woman. Parvati is Nature, Prakriti, and from her union with the Eternal Purusha, a being will be born who will defeat evil. She is the soul of us all searching for God. She is destined to meet Him and unite with Him. Yet, for attaining Him, whom Kama's weapon could not touch, in a fierce effort she has herself to become the bow, stretched to the extreme, and the arrow, solely pointed at Him. Although she is the great goddess, in order to take her right place on Shiva's lap she has to give up entirely what she was. What a paradox that for conquering the supreme Soul the divine Mother must throw herself into the fire of sacrifice! Even for her, there was a price to pay, as it were. Thus this "supreme fable" conceals a great lesson in human life and demonstrates the nature of action. One is reminded of the Gita, in which it is stated that all action involves a tapasya, all action involves a giving of what we are, and all action supposes a sacrifice. These are the three elements inherent in all works. They are inevitable, though they may be undertaken more or less voluntarily, more or less actively, more or less consciously. So the story of Parvati seeking after Shiva (symbolic at more than one level) is an image of man's condition in the world. Striving to realise our own perfection, we have no other choice than to move, to act — and tapasya, giving

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and sacrifice, are the means of our action.

Parvati's tapasya and its achievement are described by Kalidasa in the fifth canto of his great epic poem Kumarasambhava, the Birth of the War God, which many critics regard as his crowning work. Indeed what "the most splendidly sensuous of poets" describes in great detail and with an obvious delight is the contrast between Parvati's delicate, young and graceful body, and the rigour of practices that one usually associates with the hardened body of hermits. Here was a scene that contained too many potential marvels to be ignored by a poet of love and beauty and the joy of life. The greatness of ascetic mastery had been depicted many times before in Indian epics, but it had never been made a part of the beauty of life, while Kalidasa's appreciation is aesthetic in its nature. The picture of Parvati, immobile, standing in water during the nights of the cold season while the winds blew sheets of sleet and a pair of birds cried out for each other, is but one of the vivid, brilliant and richly coloured series of images that is offered to us in a magnificent succession of stanzas. The softness of Parvati's body immersed in icy water, the harshness of the wind, the frightening sound of the storm, the plaintive moan of the birds, all those notations speak forcefully to the reader's imagination and add sensuous pleasure to his admiration for Parvati's heroism.

Kumarsambhava is classified by sanskritists as a Mahakavya, or Great Poem. According to poetic rules, the main characters of a Mahakavya must be gods, heroes or persons of royal descent. And it is true that the subject of the poem is the union of the supreme god and the supreme goddess. But Kalidasa excels in the blending of divine loftiness with the sweetness of very human feelings. As Sri Aurobindo said, "Under his slight touch,... the sublime yields to the law of romance." All the gods described in the poem, and particularly the two lovers, are at the same time cosmic beings and earthly creatures whose speech, thought and passion are human. All their traditional and mythic attributes are present but transformed by the poet into romantic elements that are part of the charm and power of their personality. We could

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give as an example a passage of the second canto in which Kalidasa depicts the gods complaining to Brahma about the atrocities committed by the demon Taraka. These deities have been terribly harassed and humiliated by the Asura; they feel totally helpless and there they stand, in front of Brahma, crestfallen and resembling faded flowers: Varuna's noose droops in his hand, Yama aimlessly scrapes the ground with his rod as if with a wooden stick, Indra's thunderbolt has its edges blunted and the Rudras hang their head from where the crescent moons dangle. The attributes that one associates usually with divine powers, here are part of a description of a psychological state and therefore are brought onto our own plane of experience (the fact that these attributes are so well-known adds a delightful touch of subtle humour to the scene). These heavenly creatures could almost be our brothers — but brothers belonging to a more refined, more beautiful, more conscious, more harmonious world than ours, a world in which even sadness is charming. Himalaya is successively and sometimes simultaneously described as mountain range and living god. Similarly in Parvati the human and divine features blend with an astounding ease. The great being that she is, who moves from life to life, and who can perceive Shiva's greatness because she too lives on those heights, has also all the fragility of a young girl protected from the coarseness of the world by the tender care of loving parents. When she resolves to undertake tapasya, (so frightening a decision that her mother is said to have exclaimed U Ma! "Don't!" — a cry supposedly at the-origin of Parvati's other name Uma), she does it with a fierce determination, but this austere discipline does not make her lose any of her charm; on the contrary her tapasya enhances the beauty of her frail body like some strange and unique ornament. The divine Parvati appears to us with all the shyness of a maiden in love; she blushes when questioned about the object of her love and almost faints with emotion when suddenly faced with her lover. These are touching details because one recognizes in these movements simple things of life, that have kept their simplicity hut that are permeated with and transmuted by beauty.

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And this leads us to another observation on Kalidasa's universe: it is a paradise of beautiful things. A paradise that belongs neither to this world, nor to the other: all the gods, men and animals, mountains and vales, trees and creepers which live there are Kalidasa's creatures. To all of them Kalidasa lends elegance, kindness, sweetness. In this world of innocence, everything is purified by beauty. Even the lion's claws stained with the blood of the elephant are graceful. Even the rocs and the clouds are sentient and friendly beings. Even grief loses its bitter taste and becomes an ecstasy that is delicious to our heart. In fact, the beauty and the joy of life concealed in all objects are now revealed to our enchanted eyes and their appeal is so strong that thereafter it influences our own vision; we, too, start to see our world in a subtly different way; our eyes and all our senses have learnt to seek for the underlying delight in human life; we have begun to experience a different kind of a thirst; what we are now looking for is the soul hidden in matter. This is what the poet taught us to seek. 'After reading a poem of his", says Sri Aurobindo, "the world and life and our fellow creatures human, animal or inanimate have become suddenly more beautiful and dear to us than there were before... Our own common thoughts, feelings, and passions have also become suddenly fair to us, they have received the sanction of beauty." Thus, "by a singular paradox", we reach God not through the spirit or reason, but "through the senses."

The central theme itself of the poem is a symbol of this kind of spiritual search. For Parvati's love is a very sensuous passion, but the very fact that it has for object the Eternal Being makes it into a seeking for the divine; it gives it a strange charm which partakes of the body and of the spirit. Shiva's well-known marks, such as his blue throat, his moon-crescent, his third eye, which are part of a symbolic language and normally pertain to mythological stories or religious discourse, here are evoked by Parvati as things of physical beauty for which she pines, which she desires to see, to touch, to caress. She seeks for the Spirit, not as an object of worship, but as her lover by whom she wants to be embraced. One is not very far here from the subsequent development in Indian

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religion when the relation between the human soul and the Supreme will be seen and experienced as the love of a woman for her lover. In these religions of bhakti, the emotional being of man, illumined and uplifted by the love for a representation of the divine, will participate and even be the main lever in the spiritual quest. So one can measure how much Kalidasa's works must have prepared the Indian temperament for this new step in the exploration of a more and more complete spirituality. As Sri Aurobindo says, "One can see how powerfully Kalidasa's poetry must have prepared the national mind for the religion of the Puranas, for the worship of Kali, our Mother and of Sri Krishna of Vrindavan, our soul's Paramour."

Although Kumarsambhava contains seventeen sargas or cantos, it is admitted by most critics that only the first eight cantos are from Kalidasa's hand. The poet opens the first sargas with a description of the Himalaya, "a god concealed in mountain majesty", recounts his union with Mena, "that mind-born child of the world-fathers" and the birth of their daughter, Parvati. We are told that Shiva has renounced marriage after the death of his first wife, Sati, but that Sati has been reborn as Parvati, to whom sciences and wisdoms came back "out of the former life, like swans that haste in autumn to a sacred river's shores". She grows up and Kalidasa describes the blossoming of Parvati's perfect body, beautiful curve after beautiful curve, like a painting unfolding under the brush of a great master. Then we discover the peak where Shiva meditates, "desireless in the blind desire of things". The scenery changes in the second canto and the reader is transported to Brahma's abode: all the gods have gathered there. They are harassed by the demon Taraka, and they complain that they are powerless against this great evil being; Brahma reveals that only a son born from Shiva and Parvati (Kumara, also known as Skanda or Kartikeya) will lead the armies of the gods to victory against Taraka. In order to awaken passion in the great anchorite, Indra asks Kama to launch his flower-arrows against Shiva's concentration. Kama accompanied by his wife, Rati, and followed by his friend. Spring, appear in Shiva's meditation

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grove. That desolate place is suddenly transformed by the Spring into a paradise of beauty and love. Parvati approaches the great god and "bends her head so low that the flower shining in the darkness of her hair slides down". Kama is all set to discharge his arrow when Shiva discovers him. Angry to be disturbed, the great god burns him to ashes with flames shooting out of his third eye. The canto ends with the great Himalaya removing in haste his daughter from the scene "like the elephant of the gods holding a lotus sticking to his tusk". The fourth canto is devoted to the lamentation of Rati, Kama's wife. The gods promise Rati that Kama will regain his body once Shiva and Parvati are joined in marriage. Then in the fifth canto, presented here, the spotlight is again on Parvati, her tapasya and her success. The following two cantos describe the preparations for the marriage and the ceremony, and the poem as we have it concludes in the last canto with a magnificent description of the divine couple enjoying the pleasures of marriage on the summits of the world while the sun sets below them in a grandiose symphony.

Let us turn now to the central event of the epic, the decision of Parvati to undertake tapas.

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