Chapter 1 Listening for ambiguity and intertextual play: HMK’s ‘eulogistic’
1.5 Kali’s dice game
Apart from the somewhat incongruous modelling on the patron-centered epic, the tragic nature of Hammīra’s story can already be felt in the first two introductory verses.
Nayacandra purposefully situates his exemplarity in the temporal framework of successive time eras (yuga) and its degenerative logic. Hammīra, supposedly, is the only king worthy of praise in the present, last and worst age: the dark kaliyuga, the age of Kali.
He is put in line with the tragic ‘ideals’ from former eras: Māndhātṛ, Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira.
There is however an underlying irony by putting Hammīra next in line to the
“foremost” (mukhyāḥ) kings of the former eras. Thus, conspicuously, Nayacandra chose to refer to Yudhiṣṭhira - the deeply flawed hero of the Mahābhārata who gambled away his kingdom - as Kaṅka. This is the ‘false’ name he adopted when spending the last year of exile incognito, quite ironically disguised as a master of dice and advisor to king Virāṭa.
By referring to the righteous king Yudhiṣṭhira under his ‘disguised’ gambler name Kaṅka Nayacandra seems to adopt the Mahābhārata’s parodic dig at itself in the much-debated Virāṭaparvan (book four), where the Pāṇḍava brothers have to undergo all kinds of humiliations. Moreover, the tragic, apocalyptic outcome of the Mahābhārata war is
76 McCrea 2010: 506.
77 I discuss this verse at length in chapter five, section 5.6 “Nayacandra’s dream-vision”.
generally said to be the start of the kaliyuga.78 The word kali, often translated as ‘conflict, strife’, is typically presented as the demonic, dark spirit of the present age, also in HMK.79 In the story of Nala and Damayantī - the famous sub story told in the Mahābhārata to Yudhiṣṭhira himself to console him and mitigate the personal tragedy of his dice game–
the demonic spirit of Kali is said to have entered Nala by entering the dice.80
To understand the playful and tragic conception of time, it is worth noting that in the purāṇic framework of the four successive yugas each era represents the number of a throw in the dice game. The first kṛta “accomplished” era thus represents the winning throw, showing four dots, the tretā and literally “third” age is the dice with three dots, the dvāpara or “second” age is the dice showing two dots, and finally the age of kali is the losing throw, showing one dot. This diminishing, counting-down logic runs parallel with a general decline of moral order (dharma).81 The present dark age of Kali is therefore imagined quite literally to roll forth from the losing throw of the deeply flawed ruler of the previous era. From this temporal perspective, Hammīra’s story about the hero of the kaliyuga, can be said to issue forth from Yudhiṣṭhira’s tragedy and dice game. And taking in account the degenerative logic of time – the former age is always better – we might suspect that Hammīra’s story will be more tragic than that of the gambler Kaṅka/Yudhiṣṭhira, the tragic ideal of the former age.
I will highlight in the next chapters how HMK is indeed full of Mahābhārata parallels, including a significant reference to the fatal outcome of the dice game, making the Pāṇḍava brothers become an object of ridicule (viḍambaṇām, 8.104). In some sense the opening verse can be said to literally ‘count down’ the yugas. The verse ends perhaps not coincidentally with the number one (eka), the losing throw, the number of the kaliyuga.
The poem will be about hammīra-mahībhṛd ekaḥ, “king Hammīra, the one”. Might the Chauhan king be symbolic of the losing dice, representing Kali?82
Although this reading might seem far-fetched, Mahābhārata parallels connected to Kali’s demonic force and the play imagery of dicing or gambling occur at crucial points in the chapters about Hammīra’s tragedy, as we will see in chapter four. Even though no real dicing match takes place, I will suggest that Nayacandra in fact aims to retell Hammīra’s story as a new kind of apocalypse, similar to that of Mahābhārata. We will for example
78 The precise time is a matter of debate, whether it started before or after the Mahābhārata war. The kaliyuga is generally calculated to have started around 3102-1 BC, see Thapar 1996: 29.
79 The etymology of kali is uncertain, although popular etymology links it to Time as kāla (black)and the ‘dark’ goddess Kālī, as discussed in Rocher “Concepts of Time in Classical India” (2004: 93).
80 See Shulman 1994 for an insightful analysis of this story.
81 Rocher 2004: 93.
82 For example, the rhetorical question in verse 8.67, where Hammīra is praised as the ‘example’
(udāharaṇam) in the kaliyuga, without specifying of what quality, seems to purposefully leaves open the idea that he might be representing the kaliyuga itself.
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learn that in the Chauhan kingdom too there is “now one blind man who gambles”
(adhunâiko ‘ndhaḥ paraṃ dīvyati, 10.28).83 Kali too will take over the Chauhan kingdom, taking possession of Hammīra’s favorite general and traitor Ratipāla “Protector of Pleasure”, who will betray the mentally (and morally?) blind king and ‘play’ in his kingdom (dīvyati, 8.102). Ironically, while all this happening, the oblivious Hammīra will imagine his relationship to Ratipāla as that between Rāma and his devoted general Hanumān. We could say HMK plays with both the Rāmāyaṇa and Mahābhārata template, which are purposefully made to clash. Although the Rāmāyaṇa is more triumphalist than the Māhābhārata, both are deeply tragic in its own distinct ways.84 Wendy Doniger, drawing attention to how the Mahābhārata cites Rāma’s story as being sadder than Yudhiṣṭhira’s personal tragedy, aptly observes that the “contrast between triumph and tragedy could stand as the general tone of the two great poems.”85
Of course, Hammīra’s replication of the Mahābhārata tragedy is not evident from the introduction. My point is that Nayacandra implicitly introduces the degenerative and playful logic of the time era’s (yuga) by referring to Yudhiṣṭhira as (the gambler) Kaṅka and putting his own ‘unique’ (eka) story in line with the ‘foremost’ rulers of the former ages. Hammīra might - and will indeed - embody a new kind of tragic gambler, who will blindly stake the kingdom’s fortune. I will argue that Nayacandra deliberately hollows out the idea of being called the ‘one’. He makes several heroes – both protagonist and antagonist – take claim to this status, as if to expose the heroic and delusional desire to excel, to be the best (often at the cost of other pursuits). Nayacandra may be exposing this as a worn-out cliché, repeated many times in the tradition of royal panegyric, where everyone aspires to be the luminous ideal of the present age. From the (Jain) Chaulukya perspective it is Kumārapāla (or Vastupāla, the Jain minister), from the Paramara perspective, it is king Bhoja, and from the Chauhan perspective, it is Hammīra, etc. I will argue that Nayacandra confronts such claims to uniqueness by presenting Hammīra’s story as a (tragi-comic) re-enactment of his deeply flawed predecessor Pṛthvīrāja.
Of course, even a near-perfect hero like Rāma has his flaws. But unlike the two flawed epic heroes of the former age, Rāma and Yudhiṣṭhira, Hammīra will not succeed in restoring the Chauhan lineage’s Fortune (śrī/lakṣmī). When Hammīra, supposedly the
‘only praiseworthy’ hero of this age, stakes the Fortunes of his kingdom, it leads to the complete destruction of his dynasty. There will be no heir to pass on his charming symbolic wife, Royal Fortune (rājya-śrī), which brings us to the all-important ambiguous question of verse 1.9.
83 I discuss this episode in chapter two.
84 See for example Shulman’s reading of the distinct historical poetics of the Sanskrit epics, included as the first essay in Shulman 2001.
85 Doniger 2009: 303.