Paushya Parva

The Paushya Parva is the third sub-book of the Adi Parva, a comparatively short prose narrative that continues the frame story begun in the Anukramanika and Parvasangraha sub-books while also reaching back to explain why Janamejaya, whose snake sacrifice provides the outer occasion for the epic's recitation, came to hold such fierce enmity toward the serpent race in the first place. It stands just before the Pauloma and Astika sub-books, which will carry the snake sacrifice and its associated genealogies forward at much greater length, and its function is to supply the immediate, personal grievance that sets that larger sacrificial drama in motion.

The sub-book opens with an incident involving Janamejaya himself, during a long sacrificial session he is conducting with his brothers. The divine bitch Sarama, mother of the gods' hounds, comes to the sacrificial ground with her offspring, and when the young dog is beaten and driven off by Janamejaya's brothers without cause, Sarama curses Janamejaya, warning that an unseen calamity will strike him precisely because he permitted an innocent creature to be struck for no offense. Alarmed by this curse and unable to identify a priest capable of expiating it, Janamejaya searches for one, and this search becomes the occasion for the sub-book's central tales, stories that his eventual purohita is drawn from.

The narrative then turns to a sequence of teacher-and-pupil tales centered on the sage Ayoda Dhaumya and his three students, Upamanyu, Aruni, and Veda. Aruni is tested by his teacher's command to block a breach in a rice-field dyke, which he accomplishes by lying down in the gap himself until his guru comes to find and praise him, a story often cited afterward for its portrait of unquestioning discipline. Upamanyu, set to guard cattle, is tested through hunger and blindness inflicted by his teacher as trials of endurance and is eventually restored and taught by the Ashvins after praising them correctly. Veda endures years of hard labor as a herdsman and water-carrier before being released with his teacher's blessing to found his own school.

It is Veda's own pupil, Uttanka, whose story then takes over the sub-book and carries most of its weight. Serving his guru with full devotion, Uttanka is at length permitted to leave, and as a parting service his guru's wife asks him to bring the earrings worn by the queen of King Paushya. Uttanka travels to Paushya's kingdom, receives the earrings from the queen, but loses them on the road when the serpent king Takshaka, in the form of a mendicant, steals them and vanishes into a hole leading to the netherworld of the nagas. Uttanka pursues him underground, and with divine aid, including the intervention of Indra in the guise of a horse, he makes his way into the serpent realm, propitiates its inhabitants, and eventually recovers the earrings, delivering them to his guru's wife in time for an auspicious moment.

Returning from this ordeal humiliated and enraged at Takshaka's theft and trickery, Uttanka nurses a lasting anger against the serpent race. When he later encounters King Janamejaya, he learns of the still-unavenged death of the king's father Parikshit, who was killed by Takshaka's bite, and Uttanka urges Janamejaya to hold a great sacrifice expressly designed to destroy the serpents and Takshaka above all. This urging becomes the direct impetus for the snake sacrifice around which the entire outer frame of the epic's telling revolves, tying Uttanka's private grievance to the fate of an entire race of beings.

Within the larger architecture of the epic, the Paushya Parva therefore performs a hinge function. It is not concerned with the Kuru and Pandava story that will occupy nearly all the parvas to come; instead it supplies the motive force behind the frame narrative itself, explaining in human and personal terms why Janamejaya undertakes the sacrifice at which Vaishampayana will recite the whole of the Mahabharata to him. Its tales of discipleship also establish, early in the epic, a recurring pattern of guru and pupil relationships, obedience tested through hardship, and rewards earned through patience, that will echo later in the stories of Drona's pupils and other teacher figures.

The themes a reader should carry forward from this sub-book are those of obligation and consequence. Small acts, a dog struck without cause, a pair of earrings borrowed on trust, ripple outward into curses, quests, and eventually into a sacrifice meant to annihilate an entire species. The Paushya Parva, brief and almost folkloric in texture compared to what follows, reminds an audience early in the epic that the Mahabharata's world is one in which debts, insults, and vows are never forgotten, and that the great sacrificial and martial events of the poem often trace back to grievances as intimate as a guru's request or a curse spoken over a beaten dog.