TY - JOUR
AU - Manring, Rebecca, J
AB - Abstract The theme of sacrifice recurs in religious literature of many traditions, times, and places, and notions of parental sacrifice are even more common. But tales of human sacrifice are almost unheard of. Among the sacrifices parents make, the sacrifice of a child is the most unlikely; why would a deity demand such an offering, and what does that demand tell us about the deity’s followers? Through skillful use of social inversions, bībhatsa rasa, and sacrifice, Rūparāma Cakravartī weaves a masterful tale early in his epic the Dharmamaṅgala which sets the tone for the rest of the epic and prepares his readers for the wonders to follow. The theme of sacrifice recurs in religious literature of many traditions, times, and places, and notions of parental sacrifice are even more common. But tales of human sacrifice are almost unheard of. Among the sacrifices parents make, the sacrifice of a child is the most unlikely; why would a deity demand such an offering, and what does that demand tell us about the deity’s followers? Can it serve as an index to changing religious priorities? The ‘Haricandra Pālā’ of Rūparāma’s mid-seventeenth century Bengali epic poem, the Dharmamaṅgala (DhM), presents the reader with a particularly gruesome tale of the demand that a child be served up to the deity to eat, and the even rarer demand that the horrified parents also partake of the meal. In this article, I will examine the Haricandra episode in detail with reference to other tales of cannibalistic child sacrifice from South Asia and consider the aesthetic role of horror in the performance of devotion. The Haricandra Pālā comprises a parenthetical canto, a chapter devoted to the heroine Rañjāvatī’s explanation of why she is willing, indeed obligated, to take some very drastic measures to conceive a son. Why does Rūparāma, like authors of the other Dharmamaṅgalas, interpolate the story of Hariścandra (Rūparāma calls him ‘Haricandra’), when Queen Rañjāvatī is being asked not only to sacrifice her yet-to-be-conceived son, but first, herself, for the sake of her husband’s lineage, and what does the recounting of this already-terrible story of the sacrifice of an only-begotten child in so horrific a manner tell us about the power of the god Dharma and the humanity of his devotees? Introduction and background Dharma Ṭhākura, Lord Dharma, is a uniquely Bengali deity, object of worship primarily in the Rāṛh area of West Bengal, particularly around the towns of Barddhaman and Birbhum. His devotees are anything but elite: largely non-brahminical farmers and others tied closely to the land. They worship him in the spring, when the fierce heat has all but dried up the ponds that dot the countryside. They pray for the life-giving rain that will restore fertility of the land during the monsoon season to come.1 Scholars have been trying to identify the Bengali cultic Dharma for over a century, and the secondary literature is rife with speculation on the subject. Clearly Dharma is important, but not among elites, who feel they must explain his presence and often try to subsume him under something brahmanical. We can say conclusively that he is not the classical Sanskrit Dharma who fathered the hero Yudhiṣṭhira of the Mahābhārata. He is not Yama the god of death, who is often called ‘Dharma’ (and vice versa). Haraprasāda Śāstrī may have been the first, in 1894 (pp.135–38), to speculate, albeit unconvincingly, that Dharma is Buddhist. In a second brief article the following year he listed what he perceived as similarities between the Dharma Ṭhākura tales and the Lalitāvistara account of the Buddha’s life. Those ‘similarities’ were neither striking nor even particularly similar. For example, he observed that Dharma gājana (the all-night recitations and enactment of various rituals) coincides with the birthday of the Buddha. However, the gājana continues for twelve days, while Buddha’s birthday is a single day. Sen and Maṇḍala published their critical edition of the first third of the DhM in 1945. In their introduction they note that scholars of Śāstrī’s time—Sen was writing some fifty years later—tried to tie everything ancient in Bengal to Buddhism. Doing so was something of an intellectual fad. Sen and Maṇḍala in turn introduce and refute several ideas about Dharma’s origins. Bholanath Bhattacharya (1971, p.245) claims that Dharma Ṭhākura was originally a tribal or folk god with magical powers important among those who remained outside the pale of the varṇāśrama system. S.K. Caṭṭopādhyāya thinks the word ‘Dharma’ in this context is a Sanskritised form of a Kol word, and may represent a pre-Aryan god (Sen and Maṇḍala 1956 (1945), p.9). Sen claims that the name Dharma is Austric and does not refer to the Aryan Dharma; rather the Austric word, if there was one, must have been a homophone for Dharma. That phonetic similarity would then open a door for ‘the Brahminical guardians of the Hindu society to readmit this into a completely Puranic deity’ (Bholanath Bhattacharya p.243). The Dharma cult today shows elements of Śaivism, and one must wonder about ‘the selection of the birthday of Buddha as the occasion for the Gajan of Dharma’ (Bhattacharya 1971, p.243). Perhaps there is some ascetic connection between the respective cults of the Buddha and of Dharma Ṭhākura that allowed Dharma to easily replace the Buddha among the lower classes. Dasgupta describes the cult of Dharma as a mix of ‘decaying Buddhism, popular Hindu ideas and practices, a large number of indigenous beliefs and ceremonies, and ingredients derived also from Islam’ (1946, p.259), ‘… a mixture of late Buddhistic ideas and practices with the popular Hindu beliefs and practices including a mass of the beliefs and practices of the Non-Aryan aborigines’ (Dasgupta 1946, p.260). He seems to want, but hesitates, to link Dharma conclusively with anything non-Buddhist, but describes the Dharmamaṅgala literature as ‘the continuation of the spirit of the Purāṇic literature in the vernacular’ (p.407). That is, Dasgupta seems to see the Dharma literature in Middle Bengali as a vernacular (speaking both linguistically and culturally) extension of the classical Sanskrit purāṇas. All the poets of Dharma come from western Bengal (Dasgupta 1946, p.25). His worship is confined to Rāṛha, bounded by the Bhāgīrathī River in the east, the Mayurākṣī in the north, the Dāmodara in the South, and Choṭanāgpura in the West. Today, these are the districts of Hugly, Bankura, Burdwan, Birbhum, and Murshidabad (Bhaṭṭācārya 1964, p.619). We have no evidence of Dharma pūjā occurring prior to the 16th–17th centuries (Kayāla 1986, p.32). In some parts of West Bengal, Dharma gājana and Śiva gājana have been conflated. This Śiva, like Dharma, expects ‘severe penance and self-mortification’ (Bhattacharya 1971, p.248) of his devotees. Ralph Nicholas, in his ethnographic work with gājana throughout Bengal, observed (2008, p.4) that while Brahmanical Hinduism absorbed some local deities like Manasā and Sītalā, high-caste people generally avoided Dharmamaṅgala. And yet most of the Dharmamaṅgala authors are brahmin. Dharma Ṭhākura is the resort of people suffering from leprosy and of childless women. The latter is the focus of the first third of the epic, and of this essay.2 Like many other Indian epics, the DhM features a king with no heir. That king had lost his first family in battle, and is now a miserable old man who seems not to be entirely aware of what is going on around him. He is not the main character. Rather this portion of the epic reveals the perspective of the would-be mother, his second wife, who is determined to produce a son. The author very effectively evokes her yearning for a child and all her attempts by means both natural and supernatural to conceive. In investigating Rūparāma’s 17th century use of the theme of child sacrifice, we first examine Hariścandra’s earliest appearance and his first Bengali manifestation, in Kṛttivāsa’s 15th century Rāmāyaṇa. We will then move to Rūparāma’s tale. In the following section, we consider cannibalism cross-culturally before returning to South Asia and a strikingly similar Śaivite tale from South India, and then one Muslim and one Buddhist tale from Bengal. Rūparāma’s tale is the most horrific of them all. His evocation of bībhatsa rasa highlights the majesty and omnipotence of Dharma, and uses equally dramatic social inversions to do so. South Asian tales of son sacrifice The gruesome tale of the sacrifice of a son dates back, in India, to no later than the 5th century BCE and the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa of the Ṛgveda. Here we find the legend of Hariścandra, who had one hundred wives but no son. Wondering why sons are so important, he engages in a dialogue with Indra, king of the gods, who tells him, among other things, that ‘a sonless one cannot attain heaven’ (Keith 1920, p.300), referring to the role sons play in their parents’ funeral rites and in turn, to assuring the parents properly move on to their next births. Hariścandra then placates the god Varuṇa, who does grant him a son, Rohita. (We do not learn who Rohita’s mother is, or anything more about his advent.) Varuṇa immediately asks that the boy be sacrificed to him, as Hariścandra had promised, but Hariścandra equivocates. In an almost humourous passage he stalls repeatedly, insisting that a child would not make a fit sacrifice until he is ten days old; then, until his teeth appear; then, until his baby teeth fall out; then until his new teeth come in; and finally, until he is old enough to bear arms. By this time the child himself realises what is happening, and refuses to participate, running off to the woods. Varuṇa is not pleased, and knows he will have to resort to trickery to get his due. To that end the god inflates Hariścandra’s stomach, making him deathly ill. Concerned upon hearing of his father’s illness, Rohita heads home but is waylaid by Indra and sent off again. Indra repeats this diversion annually five times, and finally in the sixth year Rohita meets a starving brahmin family headed by Ajīgarta Sauyavasi. The family has three sons, and Rohita persuades them to sell him Sunaḥśepa (Dog Penis), the middle son, to serve as stand-in for himself in the sacrifice, to save his own life and redeem that of his father Hariścandra. The family agrees, for a fee. Varuṇa also agrees to accept the substitution; brahmins are, after all, of higher status than kṣatriyas, so Varuṇa stands to profit even more than anticipated. Preparations for the sacrifice begin. Ajīgarta is also present, suspecting, we read, that there may be yet more money to be made. For a price, he offers to bind his own son, and for a further price, to slaughter him for the ritual. Meanwhile Rohita begins praying to one god after another. Indra gives him a gold chariot and instructs him to pray to the twin gods the Aśvins, who in turn send him to pray to Uṣas, goddess of the dawn. Finally Varuṇa is satisfied and Hariścandra is freed of the disease that had afflicted him. And neither child is actually slaughtered or sacrificed. Once the ritual is complete, the father asks for the return of his biological son, now seated on Viśvāmitra’s lap. The sage refuses, saying that Ajīgarta is no better than a śūdra for having sold his own child and having been so willing to slaughter him. Śunaḥśepa asks Viśvāmitra to adopt him, and is accepted, with the eventual acquiescence of all 101 of the sage’s sons. The chapter ends with the admonition that ‘Those who desire sons also should have it narrated; they obtain sons’ (Keith 1920, p.309). The key element in the Vedic tale is the correct performance of ritual sacrifice. The tale is oft retold, with variations. Most subsequent versions emphasise Hariścandra’s generosity; Rūparāma describes him as ‘as generous as Karṇa’. This king was even the subject of the first feature-length Indian movie, released in 1913. And yet in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa version of the story, there are no admirable characters and Hariścandra exhibits none of what comes to be his legendary generosity. The originally promised son does whatever it takes to save his own skin; the poor brahmin not only sells his own apparently expendable middle son, but continues to try to milk the situation for more profit while Hariścandra evades his sacred promise (however reprehensible that promise). We have no sympathy for any of them. One may wonder why such a reprehensible story is included in the Vedic canon. The tale does not demonstrate the power of the deity beyond the point at which the desired son appears. It does not even answer Hariścandra’s initial question of why sons are important. Apparently sons are interchangeable and promises can be ignored by those making them. Though this Vedic story provides the earliest traceable template for Rūparāma, it is not likely Rūparāma’s direct influence, as Bengal had no system of Vedic education until the 18th century. More likely Rūparāma encountered Hariścandra through his purāṇic variations or through the one found in Kṛttivāsa’s 15th century Rāmāyaṇa. We also find tales of child sacrifice in Islamic Middle Bengali literature like the Kāchāchol Ambiyā and the tale of Mānik Pīr.3 Rūparāma was very likely familiar with the Hariścandra upākhyāna in Kṛttivāsa's prologue to his Rāmāyaṇa, in which we meet Rāma's Sūryavaṃsa forebearers. Kṛttivāsa’s tale is quite different from Rūparāma's though it does include a cherished son who dies and is subsequently resurrected. And while Dharma makes a brief appearance near the end of the episode, in Kṛttivāsa he is Yama, not at all Rūparāma's Dharma. In Kṛttivāsa, King Hariścandra succeeds his father Haribīja on the throne of Ayodhyā. He marries the princess Śaivyā, daughter of King Somadatta, and in time they have a son, Ruhidāsa. Meanwhile, up in Indra's heavenly court, five young dancing girls are one day so carried away by their own talents that they lose the beat to which they are dancing. This so offends Indra that he banishes them for their pride to Viśvāmitra’s hermitage until Hariścandra should touch them. At the hermitage they pick flowers, often breaking branches in the process. Viśvāmitra is upset to see the broken branches, and declares that the perpetrator will be trapped in the creepers that cover the trees. And so the next day the girls are caught. Shortly thereafter Hariścandra, out hunting, happens by, hears their cries, and frees them. Now the girls' hands are free from the creepers, and the touch of Hariścandra has also freed them from the curse and Viśvāmitra's hermitage. Hariścandra goes home. Viśvāmitra returns and is furious to learn that his prisoners have been freed, and goes in pursuit of Hariścandra. Hariścandra receives him respectfully, recalls his many pious donations, and asks why Viśvāmitra is angry. Viśvāmitra replies that Hariścandra's very mention of his meritorious acts is a sign of pride, and demands a gift. Still confused, Hariścandra agrees, noting that he is prosperous and it is only proper for Viśvāmitra to receive a gift from him, and says he will grant whatever the sage wants. Viśvāmitra first asks him to promise to keep his word (which the king does), and then asks him for the world. Hariścandra grants him land, and then asks for seven million gold pieces. As Hariścandra begins to command his treasurer to bring the gold, Viśvāmitra reminds him that as he had already given away the earth, he no longer has any rights to the things contained therein, and orders Hariścandra to go into exile immediately as punishment for his excessive pride. He, with his wife and child, go to Vārānāsī, but as they depart, Viśvāmitra again demands his gold, and the king promises to deliver it in seven days. And seven days later, Viśvāmitra appears to the family on the road and again asks for that gold. Hariścandra despairs, but his wife Śaivyā suggests selling her to get it. A brahmin buys her as a slave for four million gold pieces. Viśvāmitra is not satisfied and insists on getting all seven, not just four, millions. At that point a caṇḍāla named Kālu appears and buys Hariścandra as a slave, for three million, renaming him Haridāsa. Kālu tasks him with tending his pigs and working at the burning ghāṭas, for which he will be paid. Meanwhile, the brahmin who had bought Śaivyā notes that her son has been eating her daily ration of food, and suggests that the child pick wildflowers for the brahmin's daily rituals to supplement his food allowance. And so, equipped with a gold knife, the boy sets out to collect flowers at Viśvāmitra's hermitage, breaking branches in the process. Viśvāmitra realises who the culprit is through his meditation, and ordains that a snake will bite the child's chest and kill him. Śaivyā dreams of this, and tries to prevent her son from going out the next day, to no avail. When the boy does not return in the evening, his mother, correctly fearing the worst, sets out to find him. She sees him lying on the ground. Embracing her dead son, she cries out for her husband. Meanwhile the brahmin asks her why she is so upset, since death always follows birth and birth, death, and sends her to the burning ghāṭas with the boy’s body. Hariścandra, not recognising his own wife, approaches, offering to do the cremation. Her plaintive cries for Hariścandra to come see his son effect the return of the king’s memory. As they prepare the funeral pyre and are about to light it, Dharma himself appears and restores the child's life. Immediately thereafter both Kālu and the brahmin come and forgive Hariścandra his debts to them, as does Viśvāmitra, sending Hariścandra back to his own kingdom. There he performs the rājasūya and lives to confer his kingdom on his son. In Kṛttivāsa we see the importance of action—karma—beyond the sacrificial arena. Individuals must behave properly and accept the consequences when they fail to do so, even if they had been unaware of rules and expectations. The need for obedience to the social conventions drives the story. Rūparāma’s Hariścandra Rūparāma’s treatment of the story of Hariścandra is quite different from Kṛttivāsa’s. Before Rañjāvatī enters the DhM and shortly after the epic begins, we learn a bit about her husband’s history. King Karṇasena has lost his six sons in a battle against the rebellious Ichaī Ghoṣa, who has the Goddess on his side. Karṇasena’s daughters-in-law all immolated themselves on their husbands’ funeral pyres, and the sons’ mother died of her grief. Bereft, with nothing to live for, the king left his throne to wander the forests in rags. His friend the Gauḍeśvara (the Lord of Gauḍa) takes pity on him and to cheer him up and reinstill his interest in living, arranges for him to marry the Gauḍeśvara’s young sister-in-law Rañjāvatī. The Gauḍeśvara himself has only just noticed the girl, sitting with his wife, and he decides she is just what his friend needs to rekindle his interest in life and all its pleasures. The marriage takes place hastily while the women’s brother Mahāmad, the king’s minister, who would strenuously object to her marrying a much older man, has been sent away on business. The text describes the wedding preparations and the adornment of the bride in particular in great detail, with every jewel, all her makeup, her elaborate hairdo, and every fold of her sari. This is an important alliance that will set in motion the main arc of the epic, and the attention Rūparāma gives to the wedding highlights its significance. Rūparāma depicts the wedding night of this mismatched couple very humorously: the aged groom dodders to the nuptial bed which has been, according to local wedding customs, covered with flowers, where he keels over with exhaustion. Rañjāvatī’s attendants work hard to rouse him, but he falls back to sleep the moment his head hits the pillow. The marriage appears unlikely to produce children, but Karṇasena needs an heir. The humour of the situation becomes dark some time later when Mahāmad returns home, notices his favourite little sister’s absence, and discovers the Gauḍeśvara’s deceit. He is furious, but he does not blame his boss, the culpable party, for this breach of normal etiquette. Instead he blames his young sister, who at this point is really a mere pawn in the unfolding game. In open court Mahāmad insults the new couple, cursing his sister to barrenness, the fate worse than death. His jealous rage will never allow him to accept the marriage, and impels much of what follows in the epic. In time Rañjāvatī seeks to overcome her brother’s curse, and learns that the god Dharma may be able to remedy her problems. Meanwhile a priest of the god Dharma happens to pass through town. Fixated on her project, she asks him if worshipping Dharma will result in a son, and he says it will. She constructs a temple and commissions worship of Dharma as the priest had prescribed, but it yields no results. She again consults the priest. This time he tells her that the guaranteed method for obtaining a son is to perform the ritual known as śāle bhara as an act of worship. Karṇasena tries to dissuade her from impaling herself on a bed of spikes, but she is determined. To help convince Karṇasena of the power of the god Dharma and his ability to grant sons, Rañjāvatī tells the story of King Hariścandra, or here, Haricandra, king of Amarāvatī, and his queen Madanā. Rūparāma’s version of the story is set in the forests and along the rivers of Bengal. Like Karṇasena, Haricandra went into self-imposed forest exile with his queen to worship Viṣṇu/Kṛṣṇa in hopes of getting a son. The couple fasted and prayed for days on end, not even drinking a sip of water. They grew thinner, sadder, and dirtier over time. Rūparāma tells us they looked like a couple of grubby earthworms (Sen and Maṇḍal 1956 (1945), p.75). Nearly wasted away with hunger, they happen across a Dharma temple served by lovely young female acolytes who ask what they are doing in the forest. They reply that they want to learn how to worship Dharma so that he will grant them a son. The women instruct them, and all proceed to the bank of the Ballukā River. They worship throughout the hot dry months of spring, and eventually Lord Dharma, pleased, takes pity on them. He appears before them to proclaim that their suffering is over, but also asks what they will give him in return for the son they so desperately seek. He instructs them to name their son Luicandra, and to give him to Dharma in sacrifice. And they agree, the father promising to sacrifice the baby as soon as he sees him. One wonders, of course, what the point is of going through all that austerity, numerous rituals, and then nine months of pregnancy only to surrender the newborn to this demanding deity. But so desperate are the would-be parents that this is what they have agreed to do. Hoping against hope to ultimately be delivered of a healthy child, they seem not to register Dharma’s requirement before agreeing to it. Time passes, and a son is born. The promised sacrifice is apparently forgotten as the boy grows in years and mischief. The child becomes the scourge of the forest with his slingshot, killing every bird in sight. One day he hits the owl who is Dharma’s vehicle. The bird manages to limp back to Dharma and report what had happened, and then dies. The owl’s story reminds Dharma that King Haricandra had promised this child to him and he makes plans to collect what he is owed. The god disguises himself as a renunciate and proceeds to Barddhaman/Amarāvatī. He looks like a typical ascetic: tigerskin around his waist, kuśa grass ring on his finger, necklace of the dried rudrākṣa seeds sacred to Śiva around his throat, basket of manuscripts on his arm, Vedas on his lips. He appears in town singing the purāṇas, the ancient tales of the gods. He is pleased to see Dharma temples everywhere filled with people worshipping him. He asks the king’s priest, Ratinātha, for directions to the court and hears about the king’s generosity and the preparations for the upcoming festival dedicated to Dharma. He heads for the palace, still disguised, and asks the gatekeeper to let the king and queen know that ‘the Ballukā renunciate is sitting at the gate’ (Sen and Maṇḍala 1956 (1945), p.80), knowing that mention of the Ballukā would remind them of their promise. And he announces that he has been observing a six-month fast. The mnemonic device and the arrival of this guest trigger no memory for Haricandra, but his wife realises who he must be. Fearfully Madanā says she cannot repay their debt. Still, the couple welcome their guest with suitable offerings, and give no hint that they are aware of his true identity. The ‘renunciate’ says he is hungry, famished after all the fasting, and is now ready to feast on meat, and lots of it, fried and in broth. The king is honoured, and prepares to go hunting to feed his guest. But now the renunciate says that not just any meat will do. He demands mahāmāṃsa, the ‘great meat’ of a human being! And specifically, the sacrificial offering that Haricandra and Madanā owe him: not just any human, but ‘that little boy there’. He tells the king to butcher the child and the queen, to cook him. This request stuns the couple, each of whom offers their own body in place of their son’s. But the god berates them for reneging on their prior commitment and threatens to raze the entire kingdom for Haricandra’s uncharacteristic miserliness. He demands that they produce the child. Young Luicandra asks his parents what the problem is, and in a reversal of the normal order of things, instructs the parents in their duty. He warns them that the renunciate at their gate could well be Nārāyaṇa4 himself. His parents, he insists, must give him in sacrifice. The child knows something his parents do not: this guest is Dharma, Nārāyaṇa, Arjuna’s charioteer. ‘He’s put you in an impossible situation’, the child says, ‘and you simply must do his bidding’. With that, the boy’s chest splits open as if to assist them in their repugnant duty and he leaps, laughing, into his mother’s lap. His parents cannot imagine doing any such thing, and keel over in shock. Finally, seeing no way out of the situation, the king gathers his courage and the things he will need, including a very sharp cleaver, and organises the ritual. He brings several varieties of flowers, different sorts of chickpeas, pistachios, rice pudding and other milk sweets, as well as rich buffalo milk, honey and raw sugar, bananas, rice, and jewels. He puts vermilion on his son’s forehead as a sign of the consecration and garlands him with hibiscus, the red flower usually offered to a bloodthirsty god, meticulously preparing the child for ritual slaughter. Madanā feels as if she has been struck by an arrow and is too terrified to say a word. The child, full of love for Dharma, puts his own hands on the scimitar, and then with the cry ‘Rādhā Kṛṣṇa!’ Haricandra decapitates his only child. The head flops around before coming to rest in front of the apparent renunciate, and the parents collapse at his feet. Now the ‘renunciate’ tells them to cook the boy lovingly, and itemizes all the dishes they are to prepare with the meat: various sorts of patties prepared with different spices and mango paste; sweet cakes; the lentil-rice donuts called vaḍās, and even a special dish made with the boy’s skin. The story becomes progressively more gruesome and horrific as the guest recites a veritable cookbook of ordinarily delicious preparations he orders his hosts to prepare with the meat of their only child’s body. Despite their obvious horror and repulsion, they obey. Madanā sets her son’s head aside and proceeds to butcher the rest of the corpse, carefully flaying the skin for that special dish. Haricandra grinds the mustard paste, turmeric, and other spices, and sets the pot on the fire with oil and ghee. They prepare broth with spices in ginger juice; meat cakes with peppercorns; patties with the bones, and then cook rice to accompany the meal. When the food is ready, the queen arranges it on a golden platter for her husband to serve to their guest. But the guest notices they had not included a particular sour broth preparation, and complains that the feast must include green mango. However, they point out that mangoes were simply not available at this time of year. Then miraculously the trees are filled with mangoes, so the king collects them and takes them to the queen to cook, along with pāñcaporan, the Bengali mix of five spices. And again, the king prepares a place for the guest to eat. Just as the reader, repulsed, is asking how much worse it can get—and Rūparāma’s description is graphic and repetitive—it gets much worse. Now the guest insists that the food be placed on three plates so that the three of them can feast together. The parents are even more horrified than they had been before. ‘And be sure to take generous helpings!’ he instructs them. This is too much for the mother, who says she will die before raising her son’s flesh to her mouth to eat. But their guest says that if they will not eat, he will not eat, either, forcing them into the dilemma of choosing between the serious social infraction of not feeding a hungry guest, or eating their own son. He picks up his mat and his waterpot and heads toward the door, making his intentions clear. The parents call him back and agree to his terms. In an inversion of the rules of hospitality, he tells Madanā to dish up her own helping first, then to serve her husband a large portion, and finally to give the rest to their guest. Dharma Ṭhākura puts the mother in the position of guest, a doubly transgressive move because of her gender. She, Rūparāma is telling us, is the main actor here, not her aged husband the king. This reversal further foreshadows Dharma's eventual reversal of the sacrifice itself. The guest urges the king to first take the name of Dharma with a handful of water, and then takes the king’s hand to place the first bite into the king’s mouth. The gesture itself is one with which a person might honour a special guest at a feast, but in this context only serves to increase the reader’s/listener’s horror. As he does so, the guest is full of praise for his host; ‘No one in the world is as generous as you!’ reiterating Haricandra’s legendary generosity. The cruel guest is finally satisfied, and reveals himself as ‘Arjuna’s charioteer’ Dharma in disguise, and praises the couple for their devotion and generosity. Dharma asks them to choose a boon. The couple acknowledge the god, and apologise for their bad behaviour, for having been so upset about their child that they could not think straight (Sen and Maṇḍal 1956 (1945), p.86). As their boon, they ask for their son Luicandra. Dharma tells them that the boy has been with them all along, and when his parents call his name, their son comes running and dives into his mother’s lap and wraps himself in the end of her sari. The happy parents cover him with kisses. ‘How could I eat your son Lui?’ Dharma asks. Lui sees his parents’ tear-stained faces, and asks them why they were crying for him, and berates his parents for calling Dharma cruel, telling them that he was sitting in the lord’s lap all along. He orders his parents to apologise for their rude behaviour and worship the god, and so they do. Comparative cannibalism This tale has changed considerably since its appearance in the Aitareya Brāhmaṇa (7.13-18), but the parallels are obvious: a sonless king and queen, a disguised deity, and finally the long-awaited son. In Rūparāma, however, it turns out that although the parents carry out all the activities and emotions associated with sacrifice, ultimately the child lives. The focus now is devotion to a particular supreme god, what happens to those who fail to worship that deity, and what happens to those who do surrender to the deity. Tales of human sacrifice are not unique to Hinduism. In the widely known Hebrew Bible tale of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22: 1–19), God, pleased with the strength of the father’s faith and devotion, intervenes at the last minute to stay Abraham’s hand. In that tale, there is no instrumental reason for Abraham’s sacrifice; God is merely testing the strength of the man’s devotion. Jon Levenson explores whether child sacrifice in the Hebrew Bible is deviation or norm, and begins with the passage in Exodus (22: 28) in which God demands first-born sons in general. Later God indicates that the sacrifice is to happen through redemption rather than literally, and explicitly condemns child sacrifices made in fire to the god Baal (Levenson 1993, p.4; Jeremiah 19: 5–6). Clearly it was important for worshippers to give up something of great value to them, a first-born son or his ritual equivalent, in fulfillment of their commitment to a god. Levenson claims that the father’s willingness to make the sacrifice is more important than whether or not the sacrifice actually takes place; Abraham’s story is one of the testing of faith. Abraham was willing to make this sacrifice, and his son was a willing victim. His was a ‘culture profoundly imbued with the conviction that the first-born son belonged to God, and thus overjoyed that God might accept a sheep in the son’s stead’ (Levenson 1993, p.177). Here, then, the issue is not what kind of god would seek such a horrible sacrifice, or on the power of a deity who makes such demands. Rather the focus is on the devotion of the worshipper. Many of the Indian tales of child sacrifice reveal a different motivation than what we find with Abraham and Isaac. The South Asian parents are certainly trying to please their god, but do so with the hope of obtaining a child. In Rūparāma’s tale, the couple promises to sacrifice their first-born to Dharma if only the god will grant them a son. David Shulman (1993) has written at length of Tamil tales of a hungry god. One in particular is quite similar in many respects to the Bengali episode. In the twelfth century Periya Purāṇam, the god Śiva demands that Ciṟuttoṇṭar and his wife joyfully sacrifice and offer dishes prepared with the meat of their five-year-old son. The father in this story is a devout Śaivite, a worshipper of Śiva, whose main purpose in life is to feed Śaivas every single day. He is not merely a conscientious host who attentively feeds every guest at his door; rather he goes out of his way to find devotees to feed. One day Śiva himself appears to Ciṟuttoṇṭar as a particularly wild and ferocious-looking devotee known as a Bhairava, and asks to eat Ciṟuttoṇṭar’s five-year-old son (Shulman 1993, p.23). Up until then, the father had found no hungry Śaivites to feed that day, so he and his wife without thinking twice delight in this opportunity to serve even in such a gruesome circumstance. The god’s instructions include the demand that the sacrifice be carried out joyfully. Ciṟuttoṇṭar goes through with the sacrifice that ‘love of god cannot deny – indeed, must eventually bring to pass – the most precious offering of all’ (Shulman 1993, p.30). The story is quite detailed as we see the parents’ loving devotion applied to the culinary preparation of their only child for their guest’s dinner plate. The couple obey, apparently joyfully, and are ultimately permanently united with their lord Śiva as a result (Shulman 1993, p.30). Why is the god so hungry that he needs to consume a living human being? Why such a gruesome tale of sacrifice, in which the hosts themselves must also partake? This story is not at all about testing the devotee, Shulman asserts, but rather is ‘a drama of intimacy’ (Shulman 1993, p.44), of love and a god with a nearly insatiable craving for love. The god’s hunger for human love is satisfied in quite literal terms through his actual consumption of the offering of the child. The act of consumption allows the devotees, or their surrogate, the offering, to cross the critical boundary between what is within the god, and what is external to him (Shulman 1993, p.35). First, the hungry god consumes the body of the child, taking it into himself. Later, when Śiva makes the parents summon their son to share in the feast, the child appears. He is now external to the god, even though he had been killed, butchered, and cooked; he had indeed satisfied Śiva’s hunger. They all enjoy the meal. The parents’ joy is boundless because they can feed their Bhairava guest (Shulman 1993, p.29). And finally, the family all melt into the deity, that is, they are all absorbed by him. The child crosses—or seems to cross—the border between inner and outer twice, while his parents do so only once. But this hungry god initiates the aggressive impulse both through his original demand for the child before he had ever been conceived, and now, as he comes to claim him. The father then completes the task, and the Bhairava/Śiva internalises the sacrifice through his consumption of it (Shulman 1993, p.36), marking ‘the acceptance and final internalization of the devotee’s gift’ (Shulman 1993, p.41). That is to say, Ciṟuttoṇṭar and his wife are committing the ultimate act of devotion first through their joyful acceptance of the deity’s command, and then through the offering of their most precious possession—the son who should serve as guarantor of their ultimate place in heaven. And finally, that offering itself becomes a part of the body of god. In the Tamil story the parents do not partake of this offering; their divine guest interrupts the father just as he is about to take his first bite. This is a tale of joyous devotion—the father’s joy in his ability to feed a Śaivite on a day he had not expected to be able to do so, and the joy of the couple as they prepare and serve the meat of their only son’s body. Their sacrifice is not the overdue fulfillment of a promise. Indeed no one would routinely offer a guest a meal of human meat. It simply reflects their joy in serving Śiva. The Ciṟuttoṇṭar story tells of sacrificium interruptum, and so the sacrifice in that story is not a true one. Perhaps better known in Bengal is the story of Ibrahim’s sacrifice not of Isaac but of Ismail, his first-born son. Ibrahim has a vision which he understands as Allah’s command to sacrifice Ismail. Both father and son acquiesce to the order, needing to obey Allah no matter what. Ultimately the child is spared, but not until it is clear that Ismail was a willing sacrifice and Ibrahim prepared to comply. We find a very similar account in the 18th–19th century tale of Mānik Pīr and his friend Isa (Jesus) retold by Asim Roy (Roy 1983, pp.245–8). Mānik and Isa decide to team up for a joint Muslim–Christian missionary expedition, but Isa is initially sceptical of his friend’s abilities. Mānik begs Allah’s forgiveness and summons the personification of fever, Jarāsura, to strike Isa down, and leaves him beside the road. Some other travelers happen along and pray to Allah for help for Isa, and Mānik appears. Mānik sends the good Samaritans for the remedy Isa needs: the liver of the only surviving son of a family who had already lost seven children. The would-be rescuers have to travel far and wide to find such a child, but eventually come to a wealthy family in Arabia that meets the criterion. The family’s host obligations require them to do whatever a guest asks, so when their son hears what is being asked, ‘he set aside all other considerations in favour of upholding his father’s word’ (Roy 1983, p.246), though everyone else is horrified. Thus the boy is killed and his liver excised and taken to Mānik. Mānik recites the kalima, the Muslim statement of faith, four times over the liver, and touches Isa, who is cured immediately. Moved by the mother’s lamentations, Mānik then also decides to resurrect the liver donor. The pair travels back to Arabia to the family, in disguise, and finds them deep in mourning. Mānik cites various South Asian tales of lost sons: Hariścandra ‘sacrificing his son to uphold the will of Dharma, and of Karna, killing his son to honor his commitment’ (Roy 1983, p.247), as well as Śacī when her son Caitanya renounced the world, and Yaśodā when her son Kṛṣṇa left Gokula for Mathurā. The visitors ask for food. Their host is initially reluctant to serve them, as doing so would constitute a violation of the death rituals, but Mānik tells them there is no such Koranic prohibition. So food is prepared and served, but Mānik and Isa will not eat unless their host joins them. So the merchant sits; they need a fourth person, but the mother, as a woman, is not an acceptable dining companion. Mānik asks the man to call his (dead) son by name. And the boy ‘sprang to life as soon as his father complied with Mānik’s instruction. The boy rushed to the eager arms of his mother. The joy and gratitude of the couple knew no bounds’ (Roy 1983, p.247). Another South Asian tale with a similar plot line is that of the Vessantara Jātaka, one of the stories the Buddha is said to have remembered of his previous lifetimes. The Buddha was born as Vessantara, son of King Sañjaya and Queen Phusatī, and was something of a child prodigy, able to speak from the very day of his birth. Vessantara developed a great reputation for his generosity. At one point he and his wife Maddī along with their children Jali and Kanhanjana were exiled, after giving away all their possessions, including even the chariot and horses intended to convey them into the forest. There they began living in a hermitage. One day when Maddī and the children were away, an old brahmin, Jūjaka, appeared and demanded the children as slaves for his wife. Vessantara tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. Meanwhile, the terrified children had run and hidden. Their father, however, succeeded in summoning them back, but they clutched their father’s legs, not wanting to go. Jūjaka bound them and took them away forcefully, as they screamed and pleaded to be released. When their mother came home and asked about the children, Vessantara did not reply. She eventually came to accept what had transpired, praising her husband’s generosity. And soon Sakka/Indra himself got wind of all this, and appeared to test Vessantara for himself, asking for his wife Maddī. Without a word, Vessantara complied, and Maddī, also silently, acceded to his demand. Sakka was amazed, and so impressed that he revealed himself and restored the wife and children to Vessantara, and sent them all home. Although neither the Vessantara tale nor Kṛttivāsa's Hariścandra story involves either cannibalism or the sacrifice of a life, both tales present one man’s sacrifice of what he holds most dear. Indra punishes Hariścandra (in the Kṛttivāsa version) for his pride, and the Vessantara story is, in essence, a Buddhist retelling of the Hariścandra story. Vessantara as the bodhisattva performs an act of incredible generosity, a dāna which far exceeds what anyone could reasonably expect. Vessantara expects no reward, but Sakka is so impressed by his sacrifice that he restores his family to Vessantara. Dharma in the Kṛttivāsa version restores the son's life and reunites the family. Rūparāma’s Dharma restores Haricandra’s son to him but he is the same Dharma in name only. The focus in the various tales is quite different: dāna in the Buddhist tale, the sin of pride in Kṛttivāsa, and unflinching devotion in the DhM, and that difference marks an important shift of religious form. Rūparāma makes use of the aesthetics of horror, the bībhatsa rasa, and social inversion to highlight the power of the god Dharma and the importance of devotion to him. The Aesthetics of Horror The actions are the same in the Tamil and the Bengali stories, but the deities and the reasons they demand the sacrifice and the attitudes of the parents are quite different. What purpose does the cannibalism serve, then, in the Bengali tale? Clearly we are meant to understand it as repulsive, as do the child’s parents. Rūparāma evokes what the classical Indian aesthetic theorists call ‘bībhatsa’ (disgust/horror/revulsion) for his audience to savor. Bībhatsa is one of eight or nine rasas, or flavours, tastes, intended to evoke particular emotions in an audience. The elaborate detail paid to the menu and its preparation quite effectively ignite bībhatsa in a reader, and certainly in an audience for its oral performance. The revulsion is connected to the awesome power of the god Dharma but is also an essential part of the epic’s oral presentation, as I will discuss in a later section below. It serves to enhance that power in the minds of the DhM audience when the god reverses the horrific deeds. The cannibalism of the DhM is neither a sustained cultural practice nor one of situational exigency. If Shulman is right that the situation with a hungry god is not a test of the devotee’s devotion, what is it? Dharma threatens to raze the kingdom if Haricandra and Madanā fail to comply with his demand. But the demand itself is not out of the blue. Years prior, when the couple were trying to conceive a child, they had worshipped Dharma. Pleased with their devotion, Dharma appeared and offered them a boon. They asked for a son, and Dharma replied ‘then what will you give me?’ and said they will have a son, Luicandra, but must sacrifice him to Dharma. And they agreed, perhaps overlooking, in their deep desire for progeny, the unlikelihood that the god would forget their promise. And so now, in the narrative present, the son-sacrificing long overdue, Dharma comes in disguise to claim what he is owed. And he is not happy about having been put off for so long. Dharma stands to gain nothing by consuming the child. Rather the situation provides the deity a venue for demonstrating his own omnipotence and his subjects’ devotion. But why in this way? Why not sprout extra limbs, or pick up a mountain, or part the sea? For it is not the deity, really, who is committing cannibalism. He is not a human being. The parents, forced to join him in his meal, are the cannibals, devouring their own kind. This is a far more unimaginable act of devotion. A god whose followers comply with his most repulsively unthinkable demands must be very powerful indeed. The Bengali deity, once satisfied of his subjects’ devotion, reverses the sacrifice and restores the child to life. The deity intends to proselytise his own worship, and the reversal of the effects of the grisly act allows him to display his own power. In both Rūparāma and the Periya Purāṇam, all concerned are willing to go through with the sacrifice of the child. This sacrifice, though seemingly in compliance with the laws of hospitality, actually constitutes a reversal of social norms. So how does the horrific help us see the ties that bind the religious community together? Kilgour’s analysis of cannibalism may prove useful. She says that ‘the act of cannibalism is the place where self and other, love and aggression, meet, where the body becomes symbolic, and at the same time, the human is reduced to mere matter’ (Guest 2001, p.viii). The relation between the eater and the eaten is constructed ‘not by essential differences but by position, suggesting in turn that they … are infinitely reversible’ (Kilgour 1990, p.4). Eating is essential to life, ‘yet is invested with a great deal of significance, an act that involves both desire and aggression, as it creates a total identity between eater and eaten while insisting on total control – the literal consumption – of the latter by the former’ (Kilgour 1990, p.7). The ascetic in the DhM episode is in complete control of the situation: he comes as a hungry guest to the home of Haricandra and Madanā, and the social laws of hospitality demand that the couple provide him with food. But unlike stereotypical Indian ascetics who constantly live on a very modest diet of fruits and roots, this ascetic has stated from the outset that he has been fasting for a very long time and is ready, even eager, to abandon his asceticism. He is hungry for meat, and only human meat will do. Very young human meat. The demand for meat at all is somewhat transgressive; the guest’s insistence that meat be human is beyond the pale, and yet in a very literal application of the laws of hospitality, his hosts feel they must provide what has been asked for. Again, as Kilgour says, consuming human flesh ‘… involves both the establishing of absolute difference, the opposites of eater and eaten, and the dissolution of that difference, through the act of incorporation which identifies them, and makes the two one’ (Kilgour 1990, p.240). In this DhM tale we are actually working with a triad rather than the pair that Kilgour describes. The parents must actualise their devotion by making the sacrifice to the god, who will then force them to share in it. And so in following his instructions to butcher and prepare their only son for the visitor’s dinner plate, the parents are offering their most prized possession (not entirely readily) to what we (but they may not) know is a divine entity. The boundaries between parent and child, god and devotee, inside and outside are breached as the parent butchers the child and the god absorbs that ultimate offering. The deity will then consume the child—take him into his own body—making him a part of the divine. But the parents must also share this meal! Not only have they had to sacrifice their only child, now they must join with the deity in consuming that child’s flesh. Rūparāma draws his description out in excruciating detail. The parents must allow the deity to wholly absorb their child so that the boy—the savior of the lineage his father had thought doomed—is inseparable from that deity. But simultaneously the parents are also going to absorb, or perhaps reabsorb, their child. And then suddenly in a great cosmic joke after all the butchery and cookery, the child reappears. Now he is separate, apart from the god and whole again. Having been a part of Dharma’s body, the boy is now marked as his champion on earth. Equally significant is Kilgour's notion of reversibility, which I want to extend. It is not merely the cannibalism that is reversible in Rūparāma, but the entire set of circumstances surrounding it. Ascetics normally accept whatever food is given, and are rarely offered non-vegetarian meals. Unexpectedly, this ascetic asks for meat and then further subverts the laws of hospitality when he specifies that the meat must be that of his hosts' young son, and then goes on to describe the menu in gruesome detail. At the end, as the couple are about to serve the meal, their guest insists that the mother Madanā, who would normally not eat at all until the men have had their fill, take the first helping, followed by her husband, with the guest himself served last. The tale is thoroughly nested in the earthy maṅgalakāvya literary tradition. The genre does not hesitate to make horror a motivating factor in inciting its readers to worship the god in focus. In several episodes in the various recensions of the Manasāmaṅgala, the epic in praise of the snake goddess, Manasā revives the dead. Some are sacrificial offerings, but more often the dead are people whom she has had slain for obstructing her plans. Most dramatically, she restores the lives of all the crew members on the merchant Chando’s fleet of fourteen ships, as well as his six sons. She even resurrects Chando’s son Lakshmindar, husband of Behulā, whom she had killed via a poisonous snake on his wedding night. Behulā travels with his rotting corpse on a raft for months as the body decomposes in the tropical heat. By the time Lakshmindar is restored to life, nothing but bones remains of the body and his revivification reminds the contemporary reader of a scene from a horror film as we see him re-fleshed. We can find clues to the mystery of the horror of the Dharmamaṅgala tale by stepping back from the text to consider its mode and manner of delivery. True, Rūparāma presents a beautifully written epic, but in what context is that epic presented? In the annual twelve-day gājana festivals at which it is publicly recited and enacted, participants and spectators alike stay awake all night. But the gājana festivals during which the tales are recited take place annually, so the audiences already know the stories and take pleasure in hearing them yet again. The point of the bībhatsa then must be more sophisticated than just a means to keep the audience awake. The horror is part of the audience’s pleasure, and the reciters’ skill in invoking audience bībhatsa is crucial to a successful performance. Just as the well-known tale of Dracula enthralls modern readers and movie viewers with each new encounter, so the public performances of the DhM do their audiences. Our shudders of horror and repulsion contain an element of the delicious as we savour the thrill and fear they conjure up. As awful as the bībhatsa is, it is only a tool to make sure the audience takes note. The ‘deliciousness’ of the rasa, then, in turn highlights the power of Dharma over his devotees, and his ability to impact their lives for ill or good. This episode comes early in the epic and allows the heroine to set the stage for the audience. Her tale of Haricandra marks the first time we see that Dharma demands complete surrender of his devotees, and what that means. He will always restore what is surrendered, but the devotee of course does not know that when making the requisite sacrifice. Conclusions Reading the DhM tale of Haricandra, the scholar is repulsed. The idea of sacrifice—of giving up something held dear—is one thing, but sharing in the consumption of that sacrifice is another quite entirely. When Rūparāma was writing his DhM, the goddess traditions were at odds with the new version of Vaiṣṇavism in Bengal, and the matter of animal sacrifice was very much a controversial topic. We can safely assume that many of his readers would have found this section as abhorrent as we do. Its shock value for an audience of either insiders or outsiders is not insignificant, and the author succeeds in arousing bībhatsa in his audience precisely because the events he describes are socially wrong. Only later and with great relief do we discover that the child was sitting unharmed in Dharma’s lap all the time. Leaving aside the matter of how we decide what the parents were actually doing as they cut up and cooked the meat, and what the whole feast before them was, the story tells us as much about the child as it does about the depth of his parents’ devotion. This boy has the protection of the god Dharma. The god both shelters him in his lap, and incorporates him into his own body, demonstrating once the child is revealed to be safe, that the boy is a part of that god, that he carries that divinity with him. Rūparāma’s Haricandra Pālā is a tale of social inversion. Most children would never tell their parents how to behave. Most women would never serve themselves first at a meal. And most people would never serve their children to a guest. This entire episode is not actually part of the tale of Dharma spun out by Rūparāma in the DhM, but rather peripheral, to illustrate the importance of sons and the extreme lengths to which prospective parents will go to obtain them, as well, of course, as the omnipotence of the deity. Dharma does not figure in the Vedic tale which may be its original source; there Varuṇa, god of the oceans who recedes into the background in post-Vedic Hinduism, is the demanding deity. But even by the time of Rūparāma the tale has appeared in many, many forms. Rūparāma and the other DhM authors insert Dharma into the older story in place of Varuṇa. As the epic progresses, Rañjāvatī will not be asked to sacrifice her child, but herself, more than once, as she prepares for pregnancy and motherhood. And later, others will do the same for Dharma. Rūparāma’s tale of Hariścandra is followed immediately by the account of Rañjāvatī’s perilous journey to Cāmpā to perform the various arduous tasks through which she has been assured she will conceive and bear a son. For the final task she impales herself upon a bed of spikes in the ritual known as śāle bhara. This of course kills her, but Dharma, pleased, revives her and promises her the son she so ardently desires.5 Was Rañjāvatī, who tells the Haricandra tale, so angry with her brother Mahāmad for having cursed her to barrenness, that she would do anything to avenge her family honour? Was she upholding her husband Karṇasena’s status and honour? Was she simply being the submissive wife we might expect? I do not think so! Rather she is tremendously offended at her husband’s ill treatment by her own brother, and resolves to prove him wrong. From then on, her sole purpose is to produce a child to counter the charge of barrenness. In so doing she will ensure the survival of her husband’s lineage. Her personal story, however, is merely the vehicle by which Dharma can bring his message to earth, demonstrate his might, and propagate his own worship. Rañjāvatī’s attachment to the god Dharma allows Rūparāma to extol the deity’s virtues and demonstrate what comes to those who worship him, as well as what befalls those who do not. In his version of the tale, Rūparāma includes the Vedic sacrificial practice, layers in Buddhist notions of generosity, and intertwines them to generate a model of unflinching devotion to the god Dharma. Taken in context with similar tales, particularly those then current in Bengal, Rūparāma provides an index of changing religious praxis in the region. The chapter ends. As the next chapter opens, Rañjāvatī again announces that she must perform śāle bhara. She gathers all the equipment and substances she will need for the ritual and proceeds to the bank of the Cāmpāi River and commences to worship. And after throwing herself on the bed of spikes, just as Karṇasena had feared, she dies. Her single-minded bravery succeeds in attracting Dharma’s attention, and he takes pity on her. He appears before her, restores her life, and grants her wish for a son. Her story is on the one hand yet another tale of an Indian royal couple seeking to ensure the continuity of their lineage. But Lāusena, their child, who becomes the hero of the epic, is predestined to establish the cult of Dharma on earth. This tale connects him intimately with the god and consecrates him for his life’s mission. The success of that mission in turn hinges on his performance of an impossible task: he must make the sun rise in the west, and doing so will launch the worship of Dharma into the world. He will himself become a great devotee of the lord Dharma, and will sacrifice his own body to expiate the Gauḍeśvara’s sins and ensure final victory in battle with Ichaī Ghoṣa and the forces of the Goddess and the ultimate supremacy of the Lord Dharma. Like many others who die in the epic, Lāusena is brought back to life to enjoy that victory and preach the worship of Dharma Ṭhākura. Footnotes 1 For more on contemporary rituals for Dharma Ṭhākura, see Nicholas (2008). 2 The epic as a whole is far more complex, rich in its character and plot development and descriptions of flora, fauna, and other realia encountered in the course of the various characters’ adventures. For plot summaries, see Bhattacharya (2000) or Sen (1975). 3 Saiyad Sultān’s Nabīvaṃśa ignores the sacrifice of Isaac/Ishmael. Personal correspondence with Ayesha Irani, 25 November 2017. 4 A name for the god Viṣṇu. Many of the DhM texts, including Rūparāma’s, are Vaiṣṇava in that they assert, largely through the use of epithets, that Dharma is Viṣṇu. 5 This particular maṅgalakāvya is also full of resurrections, something I save for a future paper. References Bhaṭṭācārya A. 1964 . Bāṅglā Maṅgalakāvyera Itihāsa . Calcutta . Bhattacharya B. 1971 . ‘ A note on Vaisakhi Dharma Gajan of Bengal ’. Folklore , 12 , 240 – 8 . Bhattacharya F. 2000 . ‘ Rūparām’s Dharma maṅgal: an epic of the low castes? ’. Archiv Orienta’lni’: Journal of the Czechoslovak Oriental Institute , 68 , 359 – 86 . Dasgupta S. 1976 (1946). Obscure religious cults . Calcutta : Firma KLM . Guest K. (ed.) 2001 . Eating their words: cannibalism and the boundaries of cultural identity . Albany : State University of New York Press . Kayāla A. ed. and trans. 1986 . Dharmamaṅgala . Calcutta : Bhāravi . Keith A. B. 1981 (1920) . Rigveda Brahmanas: the Aitareya and Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇas of the Rigveda . Delhi : Motilal Banarsidass . Kilgour M. 1990 . From communion to cannibalism: an anatomy of metaphors of incorporation . Princeton : Princeton University Press . Levenson J. D. 1993 . The death and resurrection of the beloved son: the transformation of child sacrifice in Judaism and Christianity . New Haven : Yale University Press . Nicholas R. 2008 . Rites of spring: gajan in village Bengal . New Delhi : Chronicle Books . Roy A. 1983 . The Islamic syncretistic tradition in Bengal . Princeton : Princeton University Press . Śāstrī H. 1894 . ‘ Sri-dharma mangal: a distant echo of Lalita-vistara ’. Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal , 54 , 135 – 8 . Sen S. 1975 (1940). Bāṅglā Sāhityera Itihāsa , Vol. 2 . Calcutta : Ānanda . Sen S. , Maṇḍala P. (eds) 1956 (1945) . Rūparāmera Dharmamaṅgala, Part I . Calcutta : Calcutta University . Shulman D. 1993 . The Hungry God: Hindu tales of filicide and devotion . Chicago : University of Chicago Press . © The Author(s) 2018. 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TI - Child Sacrifice in Rūparāma’s Dharmamaṅgala
JO - The Journal of Hindu Studies
DO - 10.1093/jhs/hiy003
DA - 2018-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/child-sacrifice-in-r-par-ma-s-dharmama-gala-ekH8DsOP2u
SP - 187
VL - 11
IS - 3
DP - DeepDyve
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