Nala and Damayanti

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Nala and Damayanti" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (April 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Nala and Damayanti (Sanskrit title: नलोपाख्यान Nalopākhyāna, i.e. "Episode of Nala") is an episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata. It is about King Nala (नल Nala) and his wife Damayanti (दमयन्ती Damayantī): Nala loses his kingdom in a game of dice and has to go into exile with his faithful wife Damayanti in the forest, where he leaves her. Separated from each other, the two have many adventures before they are finally reunited and Nala regains his kingdom.

Nala and Damayanti is one of the best known and most popular episodes of the Mahabharata. It has found a wide reception in India and is also regarded in the West as one of the most valuable works of Indian literature.

The Mahabharata, a huge work of over 100,000 double verses, contains a large number of side episodes, some of which are nested within one another, in addition to the main story, which tells of the battle between the Pandavas and Kauravas, two related princely families. Alongside the religious-philosophical didactic poem Bhagavad Gita and the Savitri legend, Nala and Damayanti is one of the best known of these episodes. It occurs in Aranyakaparvan, the third of 18 books of the epic^[1] and comprises around 1100 double verses (shlokas) in 26 chapters.

In the main narrative, Yudhishthira, the eldest of the five Pandava brothers, has just lost his kingdom to the Kauravas in a game of dice and had to go into exile with his brothers for twelve years. There, Yudhishtira meets the seer Brihadashva and asks him if there has ever been a more unfortunate man than himself, whereupon Brihadashva tells him the story of Nala, who also lost his kingdom in the dice game, but eventually regained it.

Nala, the heroic son of Virasena, is king of Nishadha. At the same time, the beautiful Damayanti lives in Vidarbha at the court of her father, King Bhima. Nala and Damayanti hear of each other and fall in love without having seen each other. A wild goose sends Damayanti a message of love from Nala, whereupon she falls ill with longing. King Bhima realizes that the time has come for his daughter to get married. All the kings are summoned to the Svayamvara ceremony, at which Damayanti is to choose her husband herself. Even the gods Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama set off for Vidarbha. On the way, they meet Nala and ask him to serve them as a messenger. Reluctantly, the king of Nishadha has to court the gods with Damayanti, whom he desires, but she confesses her love for Nala and vows to choose him as her husband. At the self-choice ceremony, Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama try to outwit Bhima's daughter by assuming Nala's form, but she so fervently implores her love for the Nishadha king that the gods relent and reveal themselves. Damayanti chooses Nala, whereupon their wedding is celebrated. The two move into Vidarbha, where Nala reigns as a righteous king and Damayanti bears him two children. The gods return to heaven and meet Dvapara and Kali, two demons of the game of dice, who are also on their way to Damayanti's self-election. When Kali learns that he is too late and that Damayanti has already chosen Nala, he swears revenge in a rage. He waits twelve years for his opportunity before he succeeds in taking possession of Nala. Possessed by the demon, the king enters into a game of dice with his brother Pushkara. Nala is not dissuaded by anyone's warnings and gambles away his kingdom and all his other possessions to his brother in a frenzy of dice. When Pushkara finally demands Damayanti as a stake, Nala gives up and moves into the forest penniless. His faithful wife follows him. The curse of the dice continues to haunt the king in the form of two birds that steal his robe. Tempted by the demon Kali, who still lives inside him, Nala leaves his wife secretly at night with a heavy heart.

Abandoned by her husband, Damayanti wanders alone through the terrible forest in search of Nala. A hunter rescues her from a snake that threatens her life, but he in turn chases after her. After surviving many dangers and wailing through the forest, Damayanti joins a caravan and, after further adventures, reaches the land of Chedi, where she is taken in unrecognized by the Queen Mother at court. Meanwhile, in the forest, Nala has saved the Naga king Karkotaka from a forest fire. In return, he gives Nala a new form and advises him to go to King Rituparna in Ayodhya. Nala pretends to be the charioteer Vahuka and enters the service of Rituparna. He instructs the king in the art of horse driving and in return learns the secret of the dice from the king, so that the curse of the demon Kali is lifted from Nala.

Damayanti's father Bhima sends Brahmins to search for Nala and his daughter. After the Brahmin Sudeva discovers Damayanti in Chedi, she returns to her father's house in Vidarbha. After three years of separation, Damayanti learns about Vahuka from a messenger who was searching for Nala in Ayodhya and suspects that he might be her husband. Damayanti conceives a trick and tells Rituparna that she will organize a new self-election. So the king sets off for Vidarbha and with him Nala as his charioteer. Because Nala believes that Damayanti has rejected him and wants to marry a new man, he does not reveal himself. Damayanti is confused by the strange form of Vahuka that Nala has assumed and asks to see the charioteer. Once she has ascertained that it is Nala, she calls him to her and convinces him of her noble motives. Nala returns to his true form and is now reunited with Damayanti.

After a month, Nala moves to Nishadha, where he once again competes against Pushkara in the dice game and regains his kingdom. Nala magnanimously forgives his brother. He brings Damayanti home and lives happily with her as the ruler of Nishadha.

Nala and Damayanti comprises 26 chapters, which display an artistic and deliberate composition: Through the introduction (chapters 1–5), which tells of Nala and Damayanti's love and marriage, the plot builds up to the three main parts: The loss of the kingdom in the dice game and Nala's banishment (chapters 6–10), Damayanti's adventures in the forest (chapters 11–13) and the events leading up to the reunion of the spouses (chapters 14–21). Finally, the story culminates in the happy union of Nala and Damayanti in the closing chapters (chapters 22–26).^[2]

A turning point in the narrative is reached at the point where Nala secretly abandons the sleeping Damayanti. By abandoning his wife, who is entitled to care and protection, the king violates the commandment of "law and custom" (dharma) - a concept that plays a central role in Indian thought. Damayanti rightly complains: "Don't you know what law and custom dictate? How could you leave me in my sleep and go away after you solemnly promised me (you would not leave me)?"^[3] Nala's violation of dharma, however, allows the poet to portray Damayanti as the embodiment of the blameless wife who remains faithful to her husband even when he treats her unjustly.^[4] A very similar constellation can be found in the second great Indian epic, the Ramayana: here Sita, the wife of the hero Rama, is the epitome of the faithful wife. The motif of love in separation is very popular in Indian poetry. Alongside Nala and Damayanti and the Ramayana, it is also the subject of the most famous Indian drama, Kalidasa's Shakuntala.

The second main motif - the loss of possessions in a game of dice - also appears several times in Indian literature: in addition to the story of Nala, it also occurs in the main plot of the Mahabharata (with which the Nala episode is set in analogy) and is also found in the "Song of Dice"^[5] in the Rigveda, the oldest work of Indian literature.

The Mahabharata combines many different elements of different origins and ages. The Nala episode clearly proves to be a deliberate form of interpolation due to the way it is embedded - the story of Nala is told to a protagonist of the main plot. The uniformity of content and structure shows Nala and Damayanti to be originally independent heroic poetry and remnants of an old bardic tradition. Only the monologue of the Brahmin Sudeva in the 16th chapter is a later insertion and comes from the Ramayana.^[6]

The question of the age of the Nala and Damayanti episode cannot be answered with any more certainty than the age of the Mahabharata. The epic was compiled between 400 BC and 400 AD, but the material used may be much older and partly depicts circumstances of the Vedic period (ca. 1400-600 BC). Within the Mahabharata, the Nala episode is probably "one of the older, though not one of the oldest, parts".^[7] Thus, only gods of the Vedic pantheon such as Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama appear in the story, but not younger gods such as Vishnu and Shiva.

The Nala theme first appears in Indian literature in this episode of the Mahabharata. A "King Nada from Nishidha" (Naḍa Naiṣidha), who is certainly identical to "Nala from Nishadha", already appears in the Shatapatha Brahmana.^[8] Nada is said to "carry the (god of death) Yama to the south day after day". According to this, he could have been a king who lived at that time and undertook war campaigns to the south, which in turn points to the great age of the Nala legend.^[9]

Nala and Damayanti has been widely received in India. Indian Kavya art poetry, which experienced a golden age in the 1st millennium AD., made use of well-known mythological material to embellish it artistically. The episode of Nala and Damayanti was also very popular. The most important adaptations of the material in chronological order are:^[10]

• The collective work Kathakosha ("Treasury of Tales"), a work of Jaina literature by an unknown author, contains numerous other tales and legends as well as a Jain adaptation of the Nala and Damayanti story.
• The art epic Nalodaya ("Success of Nala") also deals with the Nala episode. It has been handed down in four chants and was composed in the first half of the 9th century. The author is probably Ravideva, possibly Vasudeva. In the past, it was wrongly attributed to the famous poet Kalidasa.
• The Nalachampu ("Champu of Nala") belongs to the Champu genre, a mixture of artistic prose and metrical poetry. The work is also known under the title Damayantikatha ("Story of Damayanti") and was written by Trivikramabhatta (around 900).
• The Raghavanaishadhiya ("[story] of the descendant of Raghu and the king of Nishadha") by Haradatta Suri represents the genre of so-called "crooked speech" (vakrokti). Using the possibilities of double meaning available in Sanskrit, the work tells the story of Rama and Nala simultaneously in an almost linguistic acrobatic manner.
• The collection of fairy tales Kathasaritsagara ("Sea of Tales"), which was written by Somadeva between 1063 and 1081, also tells a version of the Nala story.
• The best-known adaptation is the Naishadhacharita ("Deeds of the Nishadha King"). This artistic epic describes the events leading up to Damayanti's self-election in 22 songs in an extremely artificial style. It was composed in the second half of the 12th century by Shriharsha in Kannauj.
• The 15-chant epic poem Sahridayananda also deals with the Nala and Damayanti subject matter. It was probably written in the 13th century by Krishnananda, who also wrote a commentary on the Naishadhacharita.
• Another adaptation of the story is the Nalabhyudaya, written by Vamanabhattabana in the 15th century.
• There are two adaptations of the Nala story in Tamil literature: the Nalavenba by the author Pugalendi from the 13th/14th century and the Naidadam by Adivirarama Pandiyan from the second half of the 16th century.^[11]
• The poet Faizi (1547–1595) made a Persian adaptation of the Nala story at the request of Emperor Akbar I^[12]
• The story was made into numerous films in all major Indian languages under the title Nala Damayanti, first in 1920 with a silent film by the film company Madan Theatres directed by the Italian Eugenio de Liguoro with Patience Cooper as "Damayanti".
• Nal'i Damajanti op. 47, opera in three acts by Anton Arensky, libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky (Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's brother), the Mahabharata in Vasily Zhukovsky's translation into Russian, premiere January 9 / January 22, 1904 in Moscow.

In the West, Nala and Damayanti is held in high esteem as "one of the most charming creations of Indian poetry".^[13] The German writer and Indologist August Wilhelm Schlegel commented on the work as follows:

"Here I will say only this much, that in my feeling this poem can hardly be surpassed in pathos and ethos, in ravishing force and tenderness of feeling. It is quite made to appeal to old and young, noble and base, the connoisseurs of art and those who merely abandon themselves to their natural senses. The tale is also infinitely popular in India, ... there the heroic loyalty and devotion of Damayantī is as famous as that of Penelope among us; and in Europe, the gathering-place of the products of all parts and ages of the world, it deserves to be so too."^[14]

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who showed great interest in Indian literature, was also interested in Nala and Damayanti and wrote about them in his daily and annual journals in 1821:

"I also studied Nala with admiration and only regretted that our sensibilities, customs and way of thinking had developed so differently from those of that Eastern nation that such an important work would only attract a few among us, perhaps only specialist readers."^[15]

Nala and Damayanti was one of the first works to be discovered by the emerging field of Indology in the early 19th century. In 1819, Franz Bopp published the first edition in London together with a Latin translation under the title Nalus, carmen sanscritum e Mahābhārato, edidit, latine vertit et adnotationibus illustravit Franciscus Bopp. Since then, it has been translated into German and rewritten several times: The first metrical translation into German by Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten appeared as early as 1820. Further German translations were made by Friedrich Rückert (1828), Ernst Heinrich Meier (1847), Hermann Camillo Kellner (1886) and others.

Nala and Damayanti has been translated into at least ten European languages (German, English, French, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Modern Greek and Hungarian).^[16] The Italian poet and Orientalist Angelo De Gubernatis created a stage adaptation of the material (Il re Nala, 1869).

To this day, Nala and Damayanti is traditionally the preferred beginning reading for students of Sanskrit at Western universities because of its beauty and the simplicity of the language.

In the second half of the 20th century, historians of mathematics began to look at references to stochastic ideas in ancient India, especially the game of dice, which appears in many stories. The story of Nala and Damayanti is special because it mentions two other stochastic themes in addition to dice games: firstly, the art of rapid counting, a kind of inference from a sample to the whole^[17] and a connection between dice games and this inference that is unknown to us today.^[18] It tells of two dice games that Nala plays against his brother Pushkara. In the first, he loses his kingdom and has to flee; in the second, he wins it back. In the first dice game, Nala is portrayed as being obsessed with gambling. According to the story, the reason he wins back his lost kingdom in the second dice game is that he was able to successfully apply the knowledge he learned from King Rituparna.

Wadley, Susan S., ed. (2011). Damayanti and Nala. The Many Lives of a Story. New Delhi / Bangalore: Chronicle Books.

Nala and Damayanti, and other Poems. Translated from the Sanscrit into English Verse, with Mythological and Critical Notes by Henry Hart Milman. Talboys, Oxford 1835 (digitized by Google Books)

Monier Monier-Williams: Nalopakhyanam. Story of Nala, an Episode of the Maha-Bharata: the Sanskrit Text, - with a Copious Vocabulary, Grammatical Analysis, and Introduction. University Press, Oxford 1860 (digitized version in the Internet Archive)

Charles Rockwell Lanman: A Sanskrit Reader: with vocabulary and notes. Boston 1888 (digitized version in the Internet Archive; reprint: Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1963)

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Nala-Damayanti.

• Original text in Devanagari script on sanskritweb.net (PDF)
• Original text in transliteration on sanskritweb.net (PDF)