Bhagavatam · The Abduction of Rukmini

The Ganga’s water lay still that morning, as if it too had paused to listen. Parikshit looked at the sage. In the last katha Kamsa had fallen, the long dark over Mathura had lifted, and a new question had risen in the king’s mind.

“Bhagavan,” he said, “I have heard that Shri Hari carried off Bhishmaka’s daughter Rukmini by the rakshasa rite and made her his wife. Now I wish to hear it whole. How he overcame Jarasandha, Shalva, and the other kings, and bore Rukmini away.”

Shukadeva smiled, and his voice dropped, the way a hand comes to rest on something dear. “Rajan, hear now of a princess of Vidarbha. She had never once set eyes on Shri Hari. She had only heard him spoken of. And that hearing decided the whole course of her life.”

There lay the land of Vidarbha, its capital Kundinapura, and there reigned a great king, Bhishmaka.

He had five sons and one daughter of surpassing beauty. The eldest son was Rukmi, and the four who followed were Rukmaratha, Rukmabahu, Rukmakesha, and Rukmamali. Their sister was the virtuous Rukmini, and the shastras hold that she was a part-descent of Lakshmi herself, the goddess of fortune come to walk the earth. There was a stillness in her step that seemed older than her years, and whoever spoke with her even once could not forget the brightness of her mind.

When merchants down from Dwaraka struck their bargains in the bazaars of Kundinapura, one name kept surfacing in their talk. The rishis and wandering sages who passed through the kingdom and lodged as guests at the palace told his lilas too. Rukmini kept her ears open to all of it. His beauty, his valor, his virtues, his splendor: each account laid another stroke on a portrait forming inside her of a man her eyes had never met.

And one day a certainty settled in her and never again shifted. The one she was to walk through life beside was he.

Shri Hari, for his part, had heard of her too. He knew that Rukmini bore the loveliest of marks, that her intelligence was rare, that in generosity, beauty, character, and grace she stood without an equal. He resolved within himself that she alone was the wife suited to him.

Her own kinsmen wished the match with Shri Hari and no other. But her eldest brother Rukmi carried a deep hatred for him, and he set himself against it.

Rukmi had fixed on another man. Rukmini would marry Shishupala, the king of Chedi, and Shishupala alone. He talked his parents and his brothers off the course they had meant to take.

When Rukmini learned that her brother meant to hand her to Shishupala, a heaviness came over her. She thought it through for a long while, and then she did one thing. She sent for a Brahmana she could trust, and resolved to put into his hands a message addressed to Shri Hari.

Not one drop fell from her eyes. Something drew tight inside her, and inside that tightening a resolve took shape.

For Dwaraka, in Shri Hari’s name.

“O Shri Krishna,” she sent word, “beauty of all three worlds! Your virtues enter through the ears of those who hear them and quench every fever of the heart, and your form, for those granted the sight of it, fulfills all that eyes were ever made for. Hearing of those virtues, my mind has thrown off its shame and its hesitation and has entered into you alone, O Achyuta.”

“In lineage, in temperament, in beauty, in learning, in youth, in wealth and dominion, you have no peer; you are your own only measure. What high-born and steady-minded woman, when her hour came, would fail to choose you for her husband? So I have chosen, beloved. I have already given myself to you, and this body I have set apart for you. Come, and take me as your wife.”

“Let it never come to pass that a jackal makes off with the lion’s portion, that Shishupala lays a hand on me. If across birth after birth I have truly worshipped the Lord, with works of public good, with sacrifice and charity, with vows and fasts and reverence to the gods and the Brahmanas, then let Shri Hari come and take my hand, and let Shishupala, the son of Damaghosha, or any other man, never so much as touch me.”

“O Ajita, unconquered one, on the day before the wedding is set, come in secret into our city, and with the captains of your army crush the hosts of Shishupala and Jarasandha and carry me off by the rakshasa rite, winning me as the prize of your valor.”

“And should you object that a girl kept behind the walls of the inner palace cannot be taken without the killing of her kin, hear the way of it. On the eve of a wedding it is the custom of our house that the bride goes out from the city in a great procession to the shrine of Ambika, the goddess of our family, to look on the feet of Girija, the mountain’s daughter. In that hour, take me from there.”

“And if I should fail to win your grace, O lotus-eyed Lord, the dust of whose feet even Shankara seeks, to wash the dark from his own sight, then I will lay down this body, worn thin already with fasting. And I will take it up again, and lay it down again, through a hundred births if a hundred births are what it takes, until the grace is mine. There is no other road I mean to walk.”

She wrote it all out, set the letter in the trusted Brahmana’s hands, and said, “Go to Dwaraka. Give this into Shri Hari’s own hand, and bring me back his answer without a moment lost.”

The Brahmana crossed the long roads and the hard sea and came at last to Dwaraka. Ushered into the hall, he found Shri Hari seated on a throne of gold. Krishna, who honors the Brahmanas though all the worlds honor him, came down from his seat, sat his guest upon it, and tended him as the gods tend Krishna when he visits their heaven. He waited until the Brahmana had eaten and rested, pressed his feet gently with his own hand, and asked after his welfare and his king. Only then did the Brahmana lay the secret message before him, and say that whatever ought to be done in the matter should be done, and quickly.

Shri Hari heard it out. Then he laughed, and took the Brahmana’s hand in his own.

“As the princess of Vidarbha longs for me,” he said, “so I long for her. My mind rests on her, and sleep does not come to me at night. I know Rukmi has blocked this marriage out of spite. But I will rout those disgraces to the kshatriya line and lift that flawless princess out of their midst, the way a man draws a flame out of the firewood.”

That same hour he ordered his charioteer Daruka to make the chariot ready. Daruka yoked the four horses named Shaibya, Sugriva, Meghapushpa, and Balahaka, and stood before him with folded hands. Shri Hari handed the Brahmana up first, then mounted himself, and on the strength of those swift horses crossed from the Anarta country into Vidarbha in the space of a single night.

Meanwhile Bhishmaka, bending to his son Rukmi against the pull of his own heart, had the wedding rites set in motion. Priests worshipped the ancestors and the gods, fed the Brahmanas, and chanted their blessings over the bride; Rukmini was bathed and bound with the auspicious thread and dressed in fresh silk, and the family priest, learned in the Atharva-Veda, poured oblations into the fire to quiet any unlucky star. The city itself was made ready. Its royal roads and its narrow lanes were swept clean and sprinkled with water, its people moved through it in spotless white, garlanded and jeweled, its great houses breathed aloe smoke, and flags of every color went up over festive arches tied across the streets.

Damaghosha of Chedi, having had every auspicious rite performed for his son Shishupala, marched up to Kundinapura with elephants streaming rut, gold-hung chariots, and a crush of foot and horse; and Bhishmaka went out to welcome him and lodged him with honor. Shalva, Jarasandha, Dantavakra, Viduratha, Paundraka, and thousands of Shishupala’s other allied kings arrived as well. Every one of them hated Shri Hari and Balarama, and every one had come with the same thought in mind: that Krishna might come for the girl, and that if he did, they would stand against him as one and hold her.

Word of it reached Dwaraka, of the army the rival kings had massed and of Krishna riding out alone to take the bride. Balarama read the danger in it. Bound to his younger brother by a love that would not let him hang back, he set out at once for Kundinapura behind him, at the head of a great host of elephants, horse, chariots, and foot.

Rukmini, inside the palace, waited for the sound of Shri Hari’s coming. When the Brahmana did not return, dread crept into her. “One night, only one night, stands between me and this wedding, and my beloved has not come. The man who carried my message has not come back either. Has the Lord found something wanting in me, and turned away? Are Brahma and Shankara set against me? Is even the mountain’s daughter, Bhavani, unwilling to be kind?” Her eyes filled, and she held the tears back, for it is an ill omen to weep on such a day.

Then her left thigh throbbed, and her left arm, and her left eye, the old welcome signs that a beloved is near. In that same moment the Brahmana came through the door, his face bright, and told her that Shri Hari had arrived, and had given his solemn word to carry her away. She had no gift worthy of such news; she bowed her head to him, and that was Lakshmi herself bowing.

At dawn the next day Rukmini set out on foot for the temple, ringed by her mothers and her girl-companions, her mind fixed on Shri Hari’s lotus feet, her speech held in a vow of silence. Armored soldiers of the king’s own guard walked around her with weapons raised, and dancing women and Brahmana wives and singers and bards moved with her, while the mridanga, the conch, the drum, the trumpet, and the kettledrum sounded her out of the city.

At the shrine she washed her hands and feet, sipped the water of achamana, and went in, purified and quiet of mind, before the goddess. The elder Brahmana women helped her praise Bhavani and Shankara and their sons, Ganesha and Kartikeya, and she made her one petition again and again: “Mother Ambika, grant me this, that Shri Hari and no other be my husband.” She worshipped the goddess and her whole household with all the rites, and the women gave her back a portion of the offering and their own blessings.

Her worship done, her vow of silence broken, she came out of Girija’s temple holding tightly to a companion’s hand, her eyes already moving through the crowd, searching.

Then she saw him. A chariot stood at the edge of the throng, and on it, wrapped in yellow silk, stood the one whose form she had carried by hearsay alone for years.

Shri Hari.

The assembled kings, the famous and the mighty, had gone slack at the sight of her, weapons slipping from their hands, some sliding half-senseless from their mounts. She was moving toward her chariot, her eyes still hunting the crowd, when they found his. In that instant Shri Hari, in full view of every enemy he had, reached into their midst and lifted her out of it, and, as though he had set his foot on the heads of those hundreds of kings, seated her on his own chariot, the one whose banner carried the emblem of Garuda.

As a lion carries his kill out from among the jackals, so Shri Hari bore Rukmini away, and Balarama and the other Yadavas closed around them and went.

The courtyard broke open. “Someone has carried off Rukmini!” went from mouth to mouth. The proud kings in Jarasandha’s train could not swallow the insult, the plain ruin of their name and fame. “Shame on us,” they cried together. “We stood here with our bows in our hands, lions every one, and this cowherd has walked off with our glory the way a deer might walk off with a lion’s share.”

Blazing, they buckled on their armor, climbed to their mounts, and tore after him. The Yadava generals wheeled and stood to meet them, bows singing. Arrows fell like the monsoon falling on mountains, and when Rukmini saw her husband’s men vanish under that downpour, she turned to him, ashamed of her own fear. Shri Hari laughed. “Do not be afraid, bright eyes. Your army is about to make an end of theirs.”

Gada and Sankarshana and the rest of the Yadava heroes would take no more of it. Their arrows tore the enemy’s elephants and horses and chariots to pieces; heads and arms and thighs fell by the tens of thousands, and Jarasandha and all the kings under him turned their backs on the fight and ran.

They found Shishupala hollow-eyed, like a man robbed of a bride already his. Jarasandha drew close to steady him. “Joy and sorrow keep no fixed seat in a body, tiger among men. A creature dances as the Maker pulls the strings, and reaps the pleasure and the pain of it. Krishna has thrown me down seventeen times over, and I neither grieve for it nor gloat when I win. Time favored the Yadus today. It will favor us in its turn.” So counseled, Shishupala gathered his survivors and went home to Chedi, and the other kings scattered, each to his own country.

But Rukmi could not endure his sister’s carrying off. He burned with it. Before the last of the kings had dispersed, he strapped on his armor, took up his bow, and swore aloud where all could hear that he would not walk back into Kundinapura until he had killed Krishna and brought Rukmini home. With one akshauhini of troops at his back, he raced after the chariot alone.

“Halt the chariot! I will not let this cowherd go today!” he kept bellowing.

Rukmi caught up, circled the chariot, and loosed three arrows into Shri Hari. Shri Hari only smiled, and cut the bow from his hands. Rukmi snatched up another and another, and Krishna sheared each one away; then his iron club, his spear, his shield and his sword, every weapon he lifted, all of it cut to pieces. At last Rukmi sprang down with a bare sword and rushed him like a moth going into a flame, and Krishna split that sword and shield to slivers too, and raised his own keen blade to end him.

Rukmini saw it and terror took her. She came down from the chariot and fell at Shri Hari’s feet, her limbs shaking and her throat closed, and begged him in a broken voice: “Master of yoga, lord whom the gods themselves worship, you who are grace itself! My lord, the killing of my brother is no work worthy of you.”

Shri Hari’s hand stopped. Yet he would not let Rukmi’s malice pass unmarked. He bound him with his own upper cloth, and with the edge of his sword shaved away his head-hair and his beard and his moustache in ragged patches, and left him there disfigured.

By now the Yadava heroes had trampled the enemy’s army flat, the way elephants trample a bed of lotus. They came back to find Rukmi bound and half dead of shame. Pity moved Balarama, and he loosed the cords himself.

“Krishna, this was ill done,” Balarama said. “To shave a kinsman’s hair and beard and mar his face is a kind of killing.” Then he turned to Rukmini. “Do not hold it against us, good lady, that your brother’s face is spoiled. No one else hands a creature its joys and its sorrows; each of us eats the fruit of what our own hands have done. A kinsman is not to be killed by a kinsman even when the offense would carry a death sentence; a man already undone by his own act need not be undone twice.” And he softened, and spoke to his brother’s bride again. “The lines you draw between friend and enemy and stranger are the mind’s own drawing. One self runs through every living thing, the way one sun stands mirrored in a thousand pots of water. Let the grief go.”

Comforted by Balarama’s words, Rukmini steadied herself and let the fear settle out of her.

Rukmi sat down among his shorn hair, and his head went down with it. He had sworn not to return without Krishna’s death, and the oath lay unkept; and disfigured as he was, he could not walk back into the middle of his sister’s wedding party either. He did not go to Kundinapura at all. On that very ground he raised a great city and called it Bhojakata, and there, nursing his broken oath and his anger, he stayed.

Rukmini and Shri Hari came to Dwaraka, and there he married her by the full rites, as the shastras lay them down.

All Dwaraka put on its festival face. House after house filled with celebration. Conches and kettledrums sounded, and men and women in their jeweled earrings brimmed over with joy. Rukmini became Shri Hari’s chief queen.

And Rukmini spent the rest of her life beside Shri Hari in Dwaraka, in the same love that had reached her once through the ear alone, years before the eye ever found its object.

Shukadeva stopped here. On the Ganga a bird touched the water and rose again.

Parikshit sat silent a while, then said, “Bhagavan, she had never even seen him. Yet in that courtyard, among all those kings, her feet did not tremble once. Where did that certainty inside her come from?”

“From hearing, Rajan,” said Shukadeva. “When someone hears Shri Hari’s virtues with a true heart, those virtues make their home within. After that, the seeing of the eye only confirms what the ears already knew.”

Parikshit nodded slowly. “Then what I have been hearing from you these days…”

Shukadeva did not let the sentence finish. “It is doing the same single work, Rajan. Whether Takshaka comes or does not come, a recognition is already settling inside you too.” The Ganga flowed on, and one more day was spent.