Bhagavatam · Ila and Sudyumna

The Ganga ran slower than usual that morning, or so it seemed to the men on her bank. Parikshit turned toward the muni, and the question that had been circling in him for days he finally asked.

“Bhagavan, yesterday you spoke of the kings of the solar line. One name broke off just as it came, Sudyumna’s. I have heard that he was a man at some times and a woman at others. My days are counted now, and still I keep asking who this ‘I’ is, the one seated inside this body. What did that king manage to learn?”

Shukadeva kept his eyes on the Ganga a moment, then spoke.

“Rajan, at the root of the solar line stood a king, Vaivasvata Manu, whom people also call Shraddhadeva. He fathered ten sons, and the eldest of them all was Ikshvaku. But there was a season, long before any of those sons, when this same Manu had no child at all, and his own courtyard stood empty.”

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So the all-capable Vasishtha, preceptor of the solar race, had a yajna performed for him, a fire-rite in propitiation of the gods Mitra and Varuna, to win the childless king a son. Manu’s wife was named Shraddha. In those days she kept the payovrata, living on milk alone and nothing more. When the rite began she went up to the hota, the priest who invokes the gods and recites from the Rig Veda, bowed low, and quietly asked him for one thing: that the fruit of the fire come to her as a daughter, though the whole rite had been set in motion for a son. Only that, one mother’s small and secret longing.

Then, at the adhvaryu’s prompting, the brahmin serving as hota, his mind still resting on Shraddha’s words, uttered the vashatkara with a fully controlled mind and began pouring the oblations into the fire pit. Because the hota’s intent had turned this way, the fruit of the yajna came into the world as a daughter where a son had been asked for. They named her Ila.

Manu was not gladdened by the sight of her. He turned to his guru Vasishtha and said, You are a knower of Brahman, master of your senses, a man made sinless by tapas. How has the fruit of your resolve come out so completely reversed? For a Vedic rite to yield its opposite is like falsehood turning up among the gods, a thing that should never be. It grieves me deeply.

Vasishtha saw at once what had happened; he read the hota’s swayed mind, and he answered the king plainly. This reversal, he said, came from the hota’s own contrary intention. Yet by the power of my spiritual glory I will still grant you the good son you wished for. Holding to that resolve, he lifted his voice in praise of Purushottama Narayana, the most ancient Person, asking that by the force of his tapas the girl be made a fine son. The Lord was pleased. Sri Hari granted the boon exactly as it was asked, and the girl Ila became a young prince, Sudyumna, foremost among men.

One day the brave Sudyumna, mounted on a horse of the Saindhava breed from the Sindhu country, rode out to the forest to hunt, a few of his ministers riding with him.

Clad in armor, a charming bow in his hand and a quiver of truly wondrous arrows, he pressed on after the deer toward the north, farther, and farther still.

Chasing the game on and on, he pushed into a forest at the foot of Mount Meru. He did not know that in that very wood Bhagavan Shankara himself was at his pleasure with his beloved Parvati, whom the world also calls Uma.

The instant he crossed into that forest, the hero Sudyumna saw that he had become a woman.

He looked down. The hand that held the horse’s rein was not the hand he knew. And the horse he rode had become a mare.

He went to say something, but the voice that rose from his throat was not his. A soft, unfamiliar note trembled in the air and was gone. Hearing his own call, he drew back from it.

“This… is me?” Only that much, and hearing her own changed voice, she fell silent.

The body was no longer the same. Everything the senses could reach had been remade, the hands, the voice, the very shape that had carried his name since birth. And yet the one inside who kept asking whether this was really himself stood exactly where he had always stood, holding the same fear, the same memory of the king he had been at dawn. All that could be seen had changed. The witness to whom it was happening had not stirred a hair’s breadth.

Trembling, she turned and looked behind her. And what she saw made her breath catch harder.

Every one of her attendants had become a woman too. The ministers, the soldiers, all of them. No one could find a word for anyone else. They stood searching one another’s faces, and a heaviness settled over every heart.

Just then, at one edge of that wood, great rishis under strict vows came walking to take darshan of Bhagavan Shankara, their splendor so fierce it drove the shadows, and every lesser light with them, from all the quarters. In that hour Bhagavati Ambika lay uncovered in Bhagavan Shankara’s lap. Seeing the sages come upon her so suddenly, she was overcome with modesty, sprang up in haste, slipped from the lord’s lap, and gathered her clothes. The rishis, understanding that Gauri and Shankara were at their pleasure, turned back at once and made their way to the ashram of Bhagavan Nara-Narayana.

Shiva saw his beloved’s confusion, and to set that same beloved at ease he spoke a word that would hold for all time.

“Whatever man sets foot in this place from now on will become a woman.” That utterance of Shiva’s rang through the forest and settled into it.

From that day, no man walks into that grove. And Sudyumna, with her attendants who were women now, took to wandering from one forest into the next.

One day, in the precincts of Budha’s own hermitage, a beautiful woman ringed by many women was wandering, when the mighty Budha, son of the Moon, came that way. His gaze fell on her and held there. In his heart he wished this beauty for his own, and she in her turn wished the son of Soma for her husband. From their union Budha begot a son upon her, Pururava, who in the fullness of time became a great king.

So it was that King Sudyumna, Manu’s son now living as a woman, remembered his family preceptor, Vasishtha.

The moment she thought of him, the sage was drawn to her by his yoga and stood there in person. Seeing the state Sudyumna had come to, his heart filled with pity. To win back the king’s manhood, he settled into worship of Bhagavan Shankara.

Bhagavan Shankara was pleased with Vasishtha. But the word he had given for his beloved’s sake he was not willing to make false. So, keeping his own utterance true, he opened a middle path to grant the sage’s wish.

“Vasishtha, this yajamana of yours, born in the line of your proteges, will be a man for one month and a woman for the month that follows, turn by turn. On these terms let Sudyumna rule the earth as he pleases.”

So Ila became Sudyumna again, a man. Yet not for good. One month a man, one month a woman, by turns, for the whole of his life.

For his month as a man he ruled the earth and carried the business of the state. Then for his month as a woman he withdrew into the antahpura, the inner palace, and lived a hushed, near-silent life there.

The people never quite took to him. Because he kept himself out of sight in shame every second month, they gave him none of the easy honor a king is usually owed, even as he went on carrying the full weight of the kingdom.

In his months as a man, three sons were born to him, Utkala, Gaya, and Vimala, all of them devoted to dharma. In time these three became rulers of the Dakshinapatha, the southern country, and so his line spread across the land of the south.

Then old age came for him. Sudyumna, lord of the city of Pratishthana on the Ganga, handed his kingdom to his son Pururava and quietly took the forest road. Behind him he left the throne of the man’s month and the antahpura of the woman’s month. Ahead lay only that road, and walking it, the one whom no month had ever truly made a man, and none had ever truly made a woman.