Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic: The Kiratarjuniya of Bharavi

8. The Theater of Combat

Chapter 8
The Theater of Combat I sing of warfare and a man at war.1 In the twelfth canto of the Kirātārjunı̄ya the Great God himself assumes responsibility for the “action” in the poem’s final segment, becoming both director and actor in the theater of the hero’s con- flict with God. When the troubled sages of the Himalayan forests approach Śiva for relief from the terrifying effulgence and power of Arjuna’s tapas, Śiva unfolds his plan to test the hero’s capability. He will send the demon Mūka in disguise to attack Arjuna. The hero will shoot an arrow in self-defense; meanwhile, Śiva himself, as the kirāta chief, will also shoot an arrow into the animal and will thus initiate a quarrel with Arjuna. Arjuna will have no choice but to fight with the kirāta. In sum, Śiva tells the sages, the cosmic tension created by the hero’s austerity can be resolved only through physical combat, and on the battlefield, the natural arena for heroic deeds. Actualizing Arjuna’s heroism will be the supreme purpose of the play—lı̄lā, God’s sport, and the theater of combat—that is to be enacted on the mountain: XII.39 Witness the matchless, inborn strength of his arms as he unleashes his fury in combat, wasted by austerity, unaided by allies and friends! Śiva’s plan is set in motion. Disguised as a “chief of the kirātas”, the god appears in the forest with a large retinue of hunters. The 139 140 Design and Rhetoric in a Sanskrit Court Epic demon Mūka, disguised as a huge, fierce boar, is dispatched to attack Arjuna. Suddenly Indra’s son saw the beast with the menacing visage and solid tusks and a massive torso fit to uproot mountains. (XII.1) Seeing the boar racing toward him with raised bristles, Arjuna becomes perturbed. He suspects that this is no ordinary boar, but a magical creature (a demon, perhaps?) conjured up by his enemies to attack him, at the very least to disturb his austerity, so that he would not be able to achieve his goal. All goes according to plan. Pierced by the arrows of the hunter-chief and the hero, the beast dies, but Śiva’s magical arrow disappears. The “chief” sends a messenger to retrieve “his” arrow from the animal’s carcass, but Arjuna stops him, pointing out that the arrow seen in the boar’s carcass could only be his own. A long debate follows, ending in Arjuna’s refusal to give up the arrow. The hunter-chief sends his army, led by Skanda (Śiva’s son), to attack Arjuna. Arjuna successfully repulses the army, whereupon the “chief” himself appears and engages in combat with the hero. The assault of the wild boar is a major turning point in the Kirāta ̄rjunı̄ya’s plot. The long debates in the forest and on the mountain peak, Arjuna’s endorsement of action as the warrior’s prerogative and duty, the strange figure of the armed ascetic, all have their logical culmination in a series of acts of war for the hero. The poem makes another major swing from deliberation to “action as spectacle , as geste,” paralleling Arjuna’s movement from heroic potential and yogic discipline to heroic action. We will consider this moment in the course of the discussion in this chapter and the next. Meanwhile, it will be useful to examine the generic aspects of the treatment of combat in the poem. Following Arjuna’s altercation with Śiva’s messenger (sarga XIII–XIV), four and a half cantos of battle description allow the vı̄ra rasa to be fully established as the poem’s dominant mood. Combat also brings the poem firmly into the realm of the older war epic—in one of its forms the Mahābhārata is Jaya, “victory,” the narrative of the war between the Kuru princes.2 But where does the Mahābhārata end and kāvya begin in the battle scenes? What does Bhāravi do with the rich repertoire of imagery and commonplace inherited from the older epics and kāvya works on the theme of The Theater of Combat 141 heroic combat? Specific aspects of the structure and imagery of the battle cantos offer insight into these...