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Dushyanta, founder of the line of Puru: a kingdom with no thieves and no plows, women raining flowers from the rooftops, and the day a whole forest was emptied of lions
Janamejaya had heard the roll of the incarnations to the end, every god and Danava, every Rakshasa, Gandharva and Apsara, and which portion of each had walked the earth in which body. Now he asked for something more intimate. He wanted the line of the Kurus from its very beginning, told in the hearing of all the sages seated around the altar, and Vaishampayana began where the text of his master begins that history: with a king named Dushyanta. The founder of the Paurava line, he said, was a man of enormous energy, the protector of an earth bounded by the four seas. His authority ran over all four quarters of the world and over the island regions that lie out in the ocean, and this crusher of enemies held sway even over the countries of the Mlechchhas, the peoples beyond the pale of the Vedic order.
Vaishampayana described that reign as a kind of stillness. Under Dushyanta there were no men of mixed caste. There were no tillers of the soil, because the land yielded its produce of itself, and no miners, because the surface of the earth gave up its wealth without being dug. There were no sinners. Everyone was virtuous, and did what he did from virtuous motives. Nobody feared thieves, nobody feared famine, nobody feared disease. The four orders took pleasure in their own duties and performed no rite for the sake of a reward. The subjects who depended on this king never felt a moment’s fear. Parjanya, who is Indra as the rain, sent showers at the proper season, and what the fields produced was always full of juice. The earth was rich in every kind of wealth and every kind of animal, and the Brahmanas kept to their duties and spoke the truth. As for the young king himself, his prowess was a wonder and his body was as hard as the thunderbolt, so hard that he could have lifted Mount Mandara, forests and thickets and all, and held it on his arms. He was a master of the four kinds of fighting with the mace, hurling it at a distant enemy, striking one who stood near, whirling it in the middle of many, and driving the enemy before him. He was skilled in every other weapon and in the riding of elephants and horses. In strength he was like Vishnu, in splendor like the sun, in gravity like the ocean, in patience like the earth. His people loved him, and he ruled a contented people righteously.
Janamejaya pressed for the story he really wanted: the birth and life of the high-souled Bharata, the origin of Shakuntala, and how Dushyanta, that lion among men, came to win her. Vaishampayana told it from the beginning of a single day. Once, the strong-armed king went out to the forest with a large force, hundreds of horses and elephants with him, an army of four kinds, foot soldiers and chariot warriors, cavalry and elephant riders, heroes armed with swords and darts, maces and heavy clubs in their hands. Hundreds of men with lances and spears rode around him as he set out. The lion roars of the warriors, the notes of conchs and the beat of drums, the rattle of chariot wheels and the shrieks of huge elephants, all of it mingled with the neighing of horses and the clash of the weapons of attendants in every kind of dress, and a deafening tumult rose over the king’s march. From the terraces of fine mansions, women of great beauty watched the hero go by, the man who had made his own fame. He looked to them like Shakra, the slayer of his enemies, able to throw back the elephants of a foe, and they believed for a moment that the wielder of the thunderbolt himself had come down the road. Here is the tiger among men, they said to one another, who in battle stands equal to the Vasus, and because of whose arms no enemy is left standing. Then, out of affection, they showered flowers onto his head. The foremost Brahmanas walked ahead of him, uttering blessings the whole way, and the king went toward the forest with a glad heart, eager to hunt deer. Brahmanas, Kshatriyas, Vaishyas and Shudras followed him, the king like the lord of the celestials on the back of a proud elephant. The citizens and the other classes went with him some distance and then, at his command, turned back.
The king mounted a chariot of winged speed and filled the earth and the very sky with the roar of its wheels. As he drove he saw a forest around him that resembled Nandana, the garden of the gods, full of bilva and arka, of khadira, of the wood apple and the dhava tree. But the ground was uneven and littered with blocks of stone that had broken loose from the cliffs nearby. There was no water in it and there were no human beings, and it stretched for many yojanas on every side, full of deer and lions and other terrible beasts of prey. Dushyanta, tiger among men, with his followers and the warriors of his train, threw that forest into turmoil and killed animals without number. Every tiger within bowshot he pierced with arrows and brought down. Those too far off he wounded, those too near he killed with his heavy sword. This foremost of dart throwers killed many by hurling darts, and, a master in the whirling of the mace, he wandered the forest without fear, killing its inhabitants now with the sword, now with fast-falling blows of mace and club. Under that assault by a king of wonderful energy and by soldiers who delighted in the sports of war, the lions began to leave the forest in numbers. Herds of animals that had lost their leaders cried out in fear and fled in every direction, and, exhausted by running, reached the beds of rivers that had gone completely dry and fell down on all sides, unable to slake their thirst. Many of the fallen were eaten by the hungry soldiers where they lay; others were properly quartered and roasted over fires the men lit. Strong elephants, maddened by their wounds and frightened beyond measure, fled with their trunks raised high, showing every sign of panic, voiding urine and dung and vomiting blood in quantities, and as they ran they trampled many warriors to death. And the forest that had been full of animals was, by the king with his bands of followers and their sharp weapons, quickly stripped of lions and tigers and all the other monarchs of the wilderness.
A key to reading this (why the hunt is here): Janamejaya has just heard the roll of the partial incarnations, which god or Asura was born as which king. Now he asks for his own family’s history from the start, and Vaishampayana lifts it from Dushyanta, whom this text names as the founder of the Paurava line. The hunt is more than ornament. This is the road that will bring the king to Kanva’s hermitage, to Shakuntala, and to the son Bharata whose name the land carries. The text’s picture of Dushyanta’s kingdom, with no plows and no mines, is a description of a golden age, and the slaughter in the forest sits beside it without comment.
The gist: At Janamejaya’s request Vaishampayana begins the Kuru line with Dushyanta, founder of the Pauravas, whose reign knew no thieves, famine, disease or plowing, whose rains came on time, and who could have lifted Mount Mandara on his arms. One day he rode out to hunt with a fourfold army; women showered flowers from the rooftops, the citizens turned back at his command, and in a waterless forest like the garden of the gods the king and his men killed so many animals that the lions and tigers abandoned it.
Across a plain where not one blade of grass grew, a forest in which no tree stood without fruit: the asylum of Kanva of Kashyapa’s line on the bank of the Malini, and a fourfold army halted at the edge of the woods
Thousands of animals lay dead behind him, and the king was still not done. He took his men into a second forest to go on hunting, and the forest took them apart the way distance always takes a hunting party apart. One rider fell behind at a thicket, another turned aside at a stream, and by the time Dushyanta noticed, he had exactly one attendant left at his shoulder. Hunger had set in some hours earlier. Thirst had arrived after it and was now the louder of the two. At the frontier of the woods the trees gave out altogether and he came to the edge of a great open plain, and on that plain there was not one blade of grass. He crossed it in the full weight of the afternoon. What lay on the far side belonged to a different world from the one he had been killing in all morning. The breezes came cool and pleasant off it. Retreats of ascetics stood among its trees. It was a forest beautiful to look at and easy on the heart, covered for miles in the softest and greenest grass, its trees loaded with blossom, and it rang from every direction with the sweet calling of birds, with the note of the male kokila and the shrill sawing of the cicada. Great trees held their branches out over him until the shade closed into a roof. Bees worked the flowering creepers on all sides. There were bowers in every open place. And in that whole forest there was no tree without fruit, none that carried prickles, and none that did not have bees swarming around it. Flowers of every season were open there at once, and the shade under the blossoming trees took the exhaustion out of a man as he walked.
That was the forest the great bowman had walked into, and it began at once to make a ceremony of his arrival. Branches heavy with clusters swayed in the soft wind and rained their flowers down over his head. The trees stood in rows, dressed in blossom of every color, sweet-throated birds perched in them, their crowns going up until they seemed to touch the sky itself. Around the branches that hung low with the weight of flowers, bees drawn by the honey hummed in one chorus. Everywhere he looked there were bowers of creepers decked with flower clusters, more than he could count, and the sight of them filled the king with a gladness out of all proportion to anything he had planned for that day. Flowering branches twisted through one another overhead, so many colors crowded together that the forest looked hung with rainbows. This was the haunt of bands of Siddhas and Charanas, of tribes of Gandharvas and Apsaras, of monkeys and of Kinnaras drunk with their own delight. Cool fragrant air carried the smell of fresh flowers in every direction, moving through the branches as though the wind had come there for no other purpose than to play with the trees. The king saw all of it. The forest stood on the land between two arms of a river, and the tall trees standing close together in the middle of it gave the place the look, from a distance, of a great decorated pole raised in Indra’s honor.
In that forest of perpetually cheerful birds the king caught sight of a hermitage, and it stopped him where he stood. Trees stood thick around it and the sacred fire was burning inside. He made his obeisance to that matchless retreat before he went a step nearer. Seated within it he saw Yatis in numbers, and Valakhilyas no larger than a thumb, and many other Munis besides. Chamber after chamber held its sacrificial fire. The flowers dropping steadily from the branches had laid a thick carpet over the whole ground, and the tall trees with their heavy trunks made the place beautiful past describing. And beside it, O king, ran the sacred and transparent Malini, with every species of water bird playing on her surface. The ascetics who came down to her for their ablutions went back up the bank gladder than they had come. Along her edges Dushyanta saw innocent animals of the deer kind standing unafraid, and the sight of all this went through him like water after the plain.
Then the king whose chariot no enemy had ever managed to check went into that asylum, which was beautiful all over, like a piece of the region of the celestials set down on the earth. He saw that it stood on the very margin of the sacred stream, and that the stream was a mother to every living thing that had settled near her. Chakravakas sported on the bank and the waves ran white as milk with foam. There were dwellings of Kinnaras there. Monkeys and bears played in numbers. Holy ascetics lived there, given to study and to meditation, and elephants and tigers and snakes could be seen as well, all of them going about their business without alarm. On the banks of that stream stood the excellent asylum of the illustrious Kashyapa, which gave a home to Rishis of great ascetic merit. Looking at the river studded with its many islands, and at the asylum washed by that river and set among banks of such beauty, a place like the asylum of Nara and Narayana laved by the water of the Ganga, the king made up his mind to go in. He wanted to see the great Rishi of ascetic wealth, the illustrious Kanva of the race of Kashyapa, a man who possessed every virtue and whose splendor made him hard to look at directly. So he came up to that forest, which was loud with the cries of maddened peacocks and resembled the gardens of the great Gandharva Chitraratha. At the entrance he halted his army, the flags and the cavalry and the infantry and the elephants, and gave his order. We go to see the mighty ascetic of Kashyapa’s race, he said, in whom there is no darkness at all. Wait here until we return.
Once inside that forest, which was like Indra’s own garden, the king forgot his hunger and his thirst together, and his pleasure went past any measure he had for it. He put off every sign of royalty, one after another, and went into that excellent asylum with his minister and his priest and nobody else, wanting to stand in front of the Rishi who was an indestructible mass of ascetic merit. What he walked into looked to him like the region of Brahman. Here bees hummed sweetly and there winged singers of every kind poured out their melodies. In one place he heard first-rate Brahmanas chanting the hymns of the Rik according to the just rules of intonation. In another sat Brahmanas versed in the ordinances of sacrifice, in the Angas, and in the hymns of the Yajurveda. In another the harmonious strains of Saman hymns rose from Rishis who kept their vows. In another were Brahmanas learned in the Atharvan Veda, and in another those who knew the Atharvan and could also chant the sacrificial hymns of the Saman, reciting the Samhitas by the just rules of voice. Elsewhere Brahmanas skilled in the science of orthoepy were reciting mantras of other kinds. A retreat sounding with all of this at once was a second region of Brahman standing on the earth. There were many there skilled in the art of raising sacrificial platforms and in the rules of Krama in the sacrifices, versed in logic and in the mental sciences, holding the whole of the Vedas in their memory. Some knew the meanings of every kind of expression. Some were conversant with all the special rites. Some followed the Moksha-Dharma. Some were practiced in establishing a proposition, in throwing out the causes that did no work, and in drawing the conclusion that followed. Some had the science of words, of prosody, of Nirukta; others knew astrology, the properties of matter, the fruits that sacrificial rites bear, the way causes hold to their effects; some could understand the cries of birds and monkeys; some had read through the great treatises and were skilled in many sciences at once. The king heard their voices as he walked deeper in, and the retreat was full of voices able to charm the hearts of men. That slayer of hostile heroes saw all around him Brahmanas of rigid vows at their Japa and their Homa. He was astonished at the beautiful carpets those Brahmanas laid respectfully in front of him, and at the sight of the rites with which they worshipped the gods and the great Rishis he said to himself that he had come into the region of Brahman. The longer he looked at the auspicious and sacred asylum of Kashyapa, guarded by that Rishi’s ascetic virtue and holding every requisite of a holy retreat, the more he wanted to see of it, and a short survey left him unsatisfied. And so at last, with his minister and his priest beside him, he entered that charming and sacred retreat of Kashyapa, lived in on every side by Rishis of ascetic wealth and exalted vows.
A key to reading this (whose asylum it is, and which Kanva): The hermitage belongs to Kanva, and the text keeps calling it the asylum of Kashyapa because Kanva was born in Kashyapa’s line and a hermitage takes the name of the family. This is the Kanva of the Malini, whose foster daughter the king is about to meet. The Kanva who tells the story of Matali in the Kuru court in the Udyoga Parva is a different man. The Valakhilyas are the sages the size of a thumb whose austerities lie behind the birth of Garuda, told in chapter 1. The long roll of what the Brahmanas of this asylum knew, from the four Vedas down to astrology and the cries of birds, is the text’s own way of saying what kind of place the king has walked into.
The gist: Still hunting, Dushyanta pushes into a second forest, loses his escort down to a single man, and crosses a wide plain where no grass grows. Beyond it he finds a forest in which no tree lacks fruit, none carries thorns, and the flowers of every season are open at once. On the land between two arms of a river, on the bank of the Malini, stands the asylum of Kanva of Kashyapa’s line, with Yatis and thumb-sized Valakhilyas seated in it and sacrificial fires burning. The king halts his fourfold army at the edge of the woods, lays aside every mark of royalty, and goes in with only his minister and his priest, through a hermitage sounding on all sides with the chanting of the four Vedas.
A girl’s voice answers in Kanva’s empty hermitage: Dushyanta asks how a sage who has renounced everything can have a daughter, and Shakuntala tells him why Indra sent Menaka to Vishvamitra
Dushyanta left what remained of his escort at the gate and went in alone. He was looking for Kanva, the sage of iron vows, and he did not find him. The hermitage stood open and silent, the fires banked, the courtyard swept, nobody in sight. The king raised his voice and called out, asking who was there, and the only answer was his own voice coming back to him off the trees. Then someone did come out of the sage’s dwelling: a girl as lovely as the goddess of fortune herself, dark eyed, dressed in the plain garments of an ascetic’s daughter, and nothing in the empty hermitage had prepared him for her. She saw the king, spoke a welcome, and received him exactly as a guest should be received, with a seat, with water for his feet, with the offering of honor, and with questions about his health and his peace. When all of it had been done properly she bowed and said that she was waiting for his command and asked what he wished. The king, who had just been served by a girl with faultless features and a voice that was sweet to hear, said that he had come to pay homage to the blessed sage Kanva, and asked her, gently, where the illustrious man had gone. Shakuntala answered that her father had left the hermitage to gather fruit, and that if the king would wait only a moment he would see him when he returned.
So the king waited, and while he waited he looked at her. He saw that she was extraordinarily beautiful and that every line of her was in proportion. He saw that her smile was sweet. He saw that she was adorned by three things at once, the perfection of her features, the discipline of her austerities, and her humility, and that she was in the first bloom of youth. He asked her who she was, and whose daughter, and why she had come into the forest, and where a girl of such beauty and such virtue had come from. He told her that at the very first glance she had stolen his heart, and that he wanted to know everything about her. She smiled at that and answered in the same sweet voice that she was the daughter of Kanva, the virtuous, wise, high-souled and famous ascetic. Dushyanta heard this and frowned. The sage the whole world worshiped, he said, was a man who had drawn his seed upward. Dharma himself might slip from his course, but an ascetic of rigid vows never fell. How, then, could a girl of her fair complexion have been born as his daughter? This was a real doubt, and he asked her to dispel it.
Shakuntala asked him to listen to what she herself had learned about her beginnings, and how she came to be the sage’s daughter. Once, she said, a rishi had come to this hermitage and asked about her birth, and everything Kanva told him she would now tell the king. Her father had said that long ago Vishvamitra undertook austerities so severe that Indra, chief of the gods, grew afraid, convinced that the blazing ascetic would use the power of his penance to hurl him down from his high seat in heaven. Indra sent for Menaka. He told her that she was the first of the celestial Apsaras and asked her to do him a service. Vishvamitra, he said, was like the sun in splendor and was engaged in the harshest penance there is, and his own heart was trembling with fear. This, he told the slender-waisted Menaka, was her business. She must go to the sage whose soul was rapt in contemplation and who might yet throw him from his throne, tempt him, break his continued austerities, and so do Indra good. He asked her to win him away from his penance with her beauty, her youth, her charm, her arts, her smiles and her speech.
Menaka did not simply agree. She told Indra that Vishvamitra was a man of great energy and a mighty ascetic, and that he was also, as Indra knew perfectly well, very short-tempered. The energy and penance and anger of this one man had made even the king of the gods anxious, so why should she not be anxious too? She counted his deeds. This was the man who had made the illustrious Vasishtha suffer the sight of his own children dying before their time. This was the man who had been born a Kshatriya and by the force of his austerities had become a Brahmana. This was the man who, wanting water for his ablutions, had created a river so deep it could hardly be forded, the sacred stream called the Kaushiki. It was Vishvamitra whose wife, in a season of distress, had been maintained by the royal sage Matanga, who is Trishanku, at that time living under a father’s curse as a hunter. It was Vishvamitra who, coming back when the famine was over, changed the name of the stream beside his hermitage from Kaushiki to Para. It was Vishvamitra who, in return for Matanga’s kindness, became Matanga’s own priest for a sacrifice, a sacrifice at which the lord of the gods himself came out of fear to drink the Soma. It was Vishvamitra who in his anger created a second world and a whole set of stars beginning with Shravana. It was he who gave protection to Trishanku while the curse of a superior burned him. She was frightened, she said, to go near a man of such deeds, and she asked Indra to tell her the means by which she would not be burned by his anger. He could burn the three worlds with his radiance. With a single stamp of his foot he could make the earth shake. He could tear the great Meru loose from the earth and throw it wherever he liked. He could circle the ten directions in a moment. How could a woman like her so much as touch a man so full of ascetic power, a man like a blazing fire, whose passions were wholly under his own command? His mouth was a fire, the pupils of his eyes were the sun and the moon, his tongue was Yama himself. At the mere thought of his strength, Yama, Soma, the great rishis, the Sadhyas, the Vishvas and the Valakhilyas were terrified. How was she to look at him without alarm?
And yet, she said, because the king of the gods commanded it, she would somehow approach that rishi. But Indra must devise a plan by which she could move about him under his protection. She had a suggestion. When she began to play before the sage, Marut, the god of wind, should be there to rob her of her dress, and Manmatha, the god of love, should also, at Indra’s command, be there to help her. And Marut, at that same moment, should carry the fragrance of the forest to the rishi to tempt him. She said this, saw that everything she had asked for had been arranged, and set out for the retreat of the great Kaushika.
A key to reading this (a story inside a story): Shakuntala is repeating to the king what her father Kanva once told a visiting rishi, and inside that account sits the conversation between Indra and Menaka. The catalogue of Vishvamitra’s deeds that Menaka recites (the death of Vasishtha’s sons, the rivers Kaushiki and Para, the shelter given to Trishanku, the second set of stars) is only a list here; the epic tells those stories elsewhere. The list is the measure of the fear Menaka is carrying with her when she goes.
The gist: Dushyanta enters the empty hermitage alone, calls out, and is received with full courtesy by Kanva’s daughter Shakuntala. Struck by her beauty, he asks who she is, and then doubts her answer: a sage who has renounced everything cannot have a daughter. She tells him her birth as Kanva once told it to a rishi. Vishvamitra’s austerities frightened Indra, who sent Menaka to seduce him; Menaka listed the sage’s terrible deeds and her own fear, asked for the help of the wind god and the god of love, and set out for Kaushika’s retreat.
The wind takes a garment white as the moon: the long season with Menaka that passed for Vishvamitra like a single day, the newborn left on the bank of the Malini, and the vultures that sat in a ring around her until Kanva came down to bathe
Kanva went on with the story, Shakuntala said, and this is how he told it. Indra, having heard what Menaka asked for, gave his order to the god who can enter any place there is, and the wind was told to be present with her at the hour she stood before the sage. So she went in. She was frightened, and she was beautiful, and she walked into that retreat and saw Vishvamitra there, a man who had burned every sin he ever carried to ash with his austerities and was sitting in the middle of more of them. She saluted him, because that is what one does, and then she began to play in front of him. The word covers a great deal. She was an apsara sent on an errand by the king of the gods, she had been given her instruments in advance, and she used them with the deliberateness of a woman who knows the whole of heaven is watching to see whether she can do it. Somewhere behind her, out of sight, the wind was waiting for its moment.
The moment came, and Marut took her clothes. The garments were white as the moon and they went off her in one movement, and what she did then is the hinge of this entire chapter. She ran. She ran as though she were overcome with embarrassment, snatching after her own attire, and she made a show of being furious with the wind for having done it to her, and she performed all of that directly in front of the eyes of a man whose energy burned like fire. Vishvamitra watched her in that attitude. He saw her stripped, and he saw that her form carried no flaw anywhere on it. That best of sages looked at her and saw a woman of extraordinary beauty with no mark of age anywhere on her body, and looking at her beauty and her accomplishments, this bull among rishis was taken by desire. He made a sign that he wanted her company. He put the invitation to her, and Menaka of the faultless limbs said yes to it. After that the two of them stayed there together for a long while.
They took their pleasure in each other exactly as they liked, and the long while went past them like one day. That is the sentence the text uses, and it should be read slowly, because a man had gone into that forest to conquer time and came out of the episode having lost track of it entirely. The rishi begot a daughter on Menaka, and the daughter is Shakuntala. As the pregnancy advanced Menaka left the retreat and went up into the charming mountains of Himavat, to a valley where the river Malini runs, and there on the bank of that river she gave birth. Then she put the newborn down on the bank and walked away. Her errand was finished. The gods had wanted the austerities interrupted and the austerities had been interrupted, and nothing in the arrangement had ever mentioned a child.
What she left the infant in was a forest with no human being anywhere in it and a great many lions and tigers moving through it. A number of vultures came and sat down in a ring around the child to keep her from harm. Consider what that required of them, since these are carrion birds, and an infant left alone on a riverbank is precisely the kind of thing they are built to find. What they did instead was form a perimeter. No rakshasa took her life. No meat-eating animal took her life. Those birds guarded the daughter of Menaka on the open ground where her mother had set her down, through however many nights it took, and they were still there when Kanva came to that stretch of river to perform his ablutions and found an infant lying in the solitude of the wilderness inside a circle of vultures. He carried her home and made her his daughter. The scriptures name three men as father, Kanva said, each in his own order: the one who makes the body, the one who protects the life, and the one who gives the food. It is a careful thing for a hermit to say about a foundling. The man who made her body was a sage on a mountain who never came looking, and the ones who protected her life for those first days sat around her on their haunches with their wings folded. Kanva took the third office and, by taking it, the whole title. And because she had been ringed in that wilderness by shakuntas, which is to say by birds, he gave her the name Shakuntala, the bird-protected. Learn from this, brahmana, that this is how Shakuntala became my daughter. And the faultless girl regards me as her father in return.
That is what my father said to the rishi who asked him, Shakuntala told the king. So you may take it, best of men, that I am the daughter of Kanva. I do not know my real father, and I hold Kanva to be my father, and I have now told you everything I have ever heard concerning my own birth. She stopped speaking. The silence of the forest came back down over the hermitage, the same silence in which the king’s own call had gone out a short while earlier and come back unanswered. There were two people standing in it now. One of them had just handed over the whole account of herself, including the parts that do her no credit in any court in the world, and the other had already decided what he was going to say next.
A key to reading this (three voices and a name): The passage is three layers deep and it pays to keep them apart. Vaishampayana is telling Janamejaya about Dushyanta; Dushyanta is being told by Shakuntala; and Shakuntala is repeating word for word what Kanva once said to a visiting rishi who asked the same question the king has just asked. The name is explained inside the story rather than by a commentator: shakunta means bird, she was found inside a ring of them, so Shakuntala. Kanva’s three definitions of a father are his own defense of the claim, and he rests it on two of the three. Notice also what this telling does without. Menaka is never punished for the errand, Vishvamitra never repents of the season, and no curse and no lost ring appear anywhere in it. Those belong to a much later retelling that most readers meet first.
The gist: Indra sends the wind god along with Menaka. She enters Vishvamitra’s retreat and begins to play before him, the wind strips off her moon-white garments, and she performs shame and annoyance in full view of a sage whose energy burns like fire. He is taken by desire, invites her, and she accepts, and the long season they spend together passes for them like a single day. A daughter is conceived. Menaka carries the pregnancy to a valley of Himavat where the Malini runs, gives birth on the bank, leaves the infant there and goes. Vultures ring the child and keep every predator off her until Kanva, coming down to bathe, finds her and takes her home as his own, naming her Shakuntala after the birds that guarded her. Shakuntala finishes the account and tells Dushyanta plainly that she does not know her real father and calls Kanva hers.
A marriage in the forest with no fire, no mantras and no witness, the one condition Shakuntala set before she agreed to it, and the six-year-old who tied lions to the trees
She finished the account of her birth and the hermitage went quiet, and in that quiet Dushyanta heard the Malini running below the bank and understood that he had been given an opening. Well spoken, princess, he said. Be my wife. Tell me what I can do for you. Then he began to list what he had, the way a man lists his holdings when he is uncertain whether the thing he wants can be bought. Golden garlands. Robes. Earrings worked in gold. White pearls brought in from countries she had never heard named. Coins by the sack. Carpets so deep the foot went into them and stayed. Let my whole kingdom be yours today, he said, and then he came to the sentence he had been walking toward the entire time. Come to me. Marry me by the Gandharva form. Of all the forms of marriage, that one is held to be the first.
Shakuntala did the ordinary thing, which in that moment was also the difficult thing. My father has gone out of the hermitage to gather fruit, she said. Wait a little. He will give me to you himself. The king had no intention of waiting. You are faultless, he said, and I want you as the companion of my life. Understand that I exist for you and that my heart is inside you. A person is his own friend. A person may depend upon his own self. By the ordinance, therefore, you are able to give yourself away, and no one else is needed for it. Then he recited the list he had been raised on, the eight forms of marriage in their order: Brahma, Daiva, Arsha, Prajapatya, Asura, Gandharva, Rakshasa, and the eighth, Paishacha. Manu, son of the self-created, spoke of the fitness of each in turn. The first four suit Brahmanas. The first six suit Kshatriyas. For kings even the Rakshasa form is allowed. The Asura form is left to Vaishyas and Shudras. Among the first five, three are proper and two improper, and the Paishacha and the Asura forms should never be practiced at all. The Gandharva form and the Rakshasa form agree with the conduct of Kshatriyas, he told her. You have nothing at all to fear.
What she said next was the heaviest sentence spoken in that hermitage that day, and she said it calmly. If this is the course religion sanctions, and if I am truly my own disposer, then hear my terms, foremost one of Puru’s race. Promise truly to give me what I ask. The son begotten on me shall become your heir apparent. That is my fixed resolve. Grant it, and our union may take place. The king did not take a moment to consider. Let it be so, he said. I will take you with me to my capital, and I tell you truly that you deserve all of it. And there in the woods, with no fire lit, no mantras spoken and nobody at all to see it, he married her and knew her as a husband. When he left he kept turning back with the same assurance, that he would send his troops of four kinds to escort her, that this was how he would bring her to his capital. He walked his horses home with a splinter working in him. He kept thinking of the ascetic of Kashyapa’s line and asking himself the same question over and over. What will the illustrious one say when he knows all of it. He was still asking it when he rode through his own gates.
Kanva came back the moment the king was gone. Shakuntala was too ashamed to go out and meet her father, and so she stayed where she was, and it made no difference at all, because the old man had spiritual sight and used it before he had put his load down. What he saw pleased him. Amiable one, he said, what you have done today in secret, without waiting for me, union with a man, has not destroyed your virtue. When a woman who wishes it and a man in whom desire has risen come together in the Gandharva form, with no mantras of any kind, that is said to be the best marriage for Kshatriyas. And Dushyanta is high souled and virtuous, the first of men. You have accepted him as your husband. The son born of you will be mighty in this world and famous in it. His rule will run to the sea, and when that king of kings marches against his enemies his forces will be impossible to stop. She came and washed her tired father’s feet, lifted the load off his shoulders, set the fruit out in its proper order, and asked him for the one thing she wanted. Give your grace to this Dushyanta whom I have accepted as my husband, and to his ministers. For your sake, Kanva said, my mind is already inclined to bless him. But take a boon from me as well, whatever you desire. She asked nothing for herself. She asked that the kings of the Paurava line should always be virtuous and should never be deprived of their thrones.
The boy she bore had energy in him that could not be measured. At three he had the look of a fire that has caught properly, and Kanva saw to it that every rite of religion was performed for him as he thickened and brightened day by day. His teeth came in like pearls. His hair shone. Every auspicious mark was on his palm, his forehead was broad, and even at that age he had the build of a child who could kill a lion. By six he was doing exactly that, in his own fashion. He would catch whatever came near the hermitage, lions, tigers, bears, buffaloes, elephants, and tie them to the trees that stood around the grounds. Some of them he rode. Others he chased for the pleasure of chasing them. The people of the hermitage watched this and gave him the only name that fit. Because he seizes and restrains any animal however strong, let him be called Sarvadamana, the subduer of all. Kanva watched the same thing and drew a different conclusion. He told Shakuntala that the time had come for the boy’s installation as heir apparent, and he gave his disciples their orders. Take this Shakuntala with her son from this place to her husband’s house without delay, he said, for she is blessed with every auspicious sign. Women should not live long in the houses of their paternal or maternal relations. Such residence destroys their reputation, their conduct and their virtue. Do not be slow about it. The disciples said so be it, and set out for the city named after an elephant with the mother and the child walking ahead of them. She left the woods where Dushyanta had first known her, carrying a boy whose eyes were shaped like lotus petals and who came into the hall with the brightness of a sun just up. The disciples presented her and went back to the hermitage. Shakuntala worshipped the king in the proper form and then spoke. This is your son, king. Let him be installed as your heir apparent. This child, who is like a god, was begotten by you upon me. Best of men, fulfill now the promise you gave me. Great and fortunate one, call to mind the agreement you made on the occasion of our union in Kanva’s hermitage.
A key to reading this (the eight forms, and one name): The eight forms of marriage Dushyanta recites are, in short: Brahma, where the daughter is adorned and given to a worthy man; Daiva, where she is given to the priest who officiates at a sacrifice; Arsha, where the father accepts a pair of cattle from the groom; Prajapatya, where the two are given to each other on a promise to practice dharma together; Asura, where she is bought; Gandharva, where the man and the woman accept each other by themselves; Rakshasa, where she is carried off by force; and Paishacha, where a sleeping or unguarded girl is deceived, which every authority condemns. One name is worth watching as well. The ascetic Dushyanta frets about on the road home is called Kashyapa in this passage, and he is Kanva, who belonged to Kashyapa’s line. And note what this text does not contain. There is no ring here and no curse. Nothing has been done to the king’s memory, so whatever he does next in the hall belongs to him.
The gist: Dushyanta proposes, offers Shakuntala the contents of his treasury, and argues for the Gandharva form by reciting all eight forms of marriage and who may use each. She asks him to wait for her father, then names her own terms instead: the son born of her must be made heir apparent. He agrees on the spot, marries her in the forest with no fire and no witness, and rides home promising an escort of troops, worrying the whole way about what the ascetic will say. Kanva returns, sees everything with his spiritual eye, approves the marriage, and foretells a son whose rule will reach the sea; Shakuntala spends her boon on the dynasty rather than herself. The boy is born, and by six he is tying lions and elephants to the trees and is named Sarvadamana. Kanva sends mother and son to Hastinapura, where Shakuntala presents the child in open court and asks the king to keep his word.
The king says he has never seen her before: a denial made in open court, the fourteen witnesses of every human act, and the child standing there waiting to climb his knees
The king heard her out. He remembered everything, every word of it, the asylum and the promise and the terms she had set before she would have him. Then he said that he remembered nothing. Who are you, he asked her, wicked woman in the dress of an ascetic? I recall no connection with you in virtue, in profit or in pleasure. Go, or stay, or do whatever you please. The words landed in a hall full of people. Shakuntala’s face went down with shame, and then grief took her senses away and she stood where she was like a post driven into the ground, not moving, not speaking. What came back into her first was the color. Her eyes went the red of beaten copper and her lips began to shake, and the looks she threw at the king in that silence had heat enough in them to scorch. She had the power to use that heat. She had been raised in a hermitage and the fire of her austerities stood behind her anger, ready. She put it out inside herself, by an effort nobody in that hall could see, and gathered her thoughts, and answered her husband with sorrow and rage sitting together in her chest.
You know all of it, she said, and you speak like a small man, saying that you know nothing. Your own heart is the witness to whether this is true or false. Speak truly then, and do not degrade yourself in doing it. A man who is one thing and presents himself to others as another is a thief who robs his own self, and there is no sin such a man is incapable of. You think the deed is known to you alone. Do you not know that the Ancient One, who sees everything, lives inside your heart? He knows every sin you carry, and you are sinning in His presence. A man who sins imagines that no one is watching him, and he is watched by the gods and by the one who sits in every heart. The Sun is a witness of what men do, and so are the Moon, the Wind, Fire, Earth, Sky, Water, a man’s own heart, Yama, the day, the night, the two twilights, and Dharma. Yama, the son of Surya, keeps no ledger of the sins of a man with whom Narayana, the witness of all acts, is pleased; a man with whom Narayana is displeased is handed over to Yama to be punished. The gods never bless the man who lowers himself by misrepresenting himself, and his own soul withholds its blessing too. I am a wife devoted to her husband. I came here on my own feet, which is true, and that is no reason to treat me with contempt. I am your wife and deserve to be treated as one. Will you refuse me respect merely because I came without being sent for? In front of all these people, why do you handle me like some woman off the road? I am not weeping in an empty forest. Can you not hear me? Refuse me the thing I am asking for, Dushyanta, and your head will burst this moment into a hundred pieces.
Then she set out her case the way a lawyer sets out a brief, and the ground of it was that a son is the father returning. The husband enters his wife’s womb and comes out of it as his own son, she said, and that is why those who know the Vedas call a wife Jaya, the one from whom a man is born. A son born to men who know the sacred verses rescues the spirits of the dead; he lifts the ancestors out of the hell called Put, and for that reason the Self-created gave him the name Puttra, the one who rescues from Put. By a son a man wins the three worlds. By a son’s son he enjoys eternity. By a grandson’s son his great-grandfathers are happy without end. A true wife is skilled in the running of a house, a true wife has borne a son, a true wife keeps her heart fixed on her lord, and a true wife knows no other man. A wife is a man’s half, the first of his friends, the root of religion and of profit and of desire, and the root of salvation as well. Men who have wives can perform the rites. They can keep households. They have the means to be cheerful. They can come into good fortune. A sweet-spoken wife is a friend on days of rejoicing, a father on days of religious duty, a mother in sickness and sorrow, and to a man far out in the woods she is his rest and his comfort. A man with a wife is trusted by everyone, and so a wife is the most valuable thing a man owns. When the husband leaves this world for the region of Yama, the devoted wife goes with him; if she goes first she waits there for him, and if he goes first she follows close behind. This is what marriage is for, she said. The learned say that a man is born again as his own son, and so a man whose wife has borne him a son should look on her as his mother. Seeing the face of his son, which is his own face given back to him as if out of a mirror, he is as happy as a virtuous man who has reached heaven. Men burned by grief or racked by pain cool in the company of their wives the way a man running with sweat cools in cold water. No man, even in anger, should do the thing that hurts his wife, because happiness, joy and virtue all rest on her. A wife is the sacred field in which the husband is himself sown, and even rishis cannot make children without women.
Then she brought the child into it. What joy is greater, she asked him, than a father’s when his son runs to him with his body all over dust and grabs him around the legs? Why do you look past a son who has come to you himself and who keeps glancing up at you, wanting to climb onto your knees? Ants carry their own eggs and do not crush them. Why will you, a virtuous man, refuse to carry your own child? The touch of sandal paste, the touch of women, the touch of cool water, none of them is as good as the touch of your own infant son held against you. As a Brahmana is first among two-footed creatures, a cow first among four-footed ones, a protector first among superiors, so is a son first among all things that are good to touch. Let this handsome child come and touch you. There is nothing in the world so good as the embrace of one’s own son. I carried him a full three years in my womb before I brought him out, she said, and he can lift every sorrow you have. When I lay in the birth chamber a voice came out of the sky and said that this boy would perform a hundred horse sacrifices. Men traveling far from home pick up other people’s children, set them on their laps and smell their heads and are made happy by it. You know the verses the Brahmanas say over an infant at his birth rites: you are born of my body, you are sprung from my heart, you are myself in the shape of a son, live a hundred years, my life rests on you and the continuance of my line rests on you. This child came out of your own body, a second being out of you. Look at yourself in your son the way you look at your reflection in a still lake. As the sacrificial fire is lit from the household fire, so was he lit from you. Being one, you have divided yourself in two. You came to me while you were hunting deer, and I was a girl in my father’s hermitage then. There are six Apsaras above all the rest, Urvashi, Purvachitti, Sahajanya, Menaka, Vishvachi and Ghritachi, and of those six Menaka, born of Brahma, is the first. She came down from heaven, and after her time with Vishvamitra she gave birth to me in a valley of Himavat, and then went away without affection and left me lying there as though I were some other woman’s child. What did I do in an earlier life, she asked, that my parents threw me away in infancy and now you throw me away? Cast off by you, I will go back to my father. Cast off this boy you must not; he is your own.
A key to reading this (Jaya, Puttra, and one sentence that opens the whole scene): The heaviest fact in this episode is planted in its first line. The source says the king heard her words and remembered everything, and then said he remembered nothing. No forgetting is involved anywhere in this telling, and every argument Shakuntala makes rests on that: the heart knows, so the heart is a witness. She also opens two words as she goes. A wife is called Jaya because the husband is born again from her as his son. A son is called Puttra because he pulls his ancestors out of the hell named Put. One more thing is worth holding on to. The hundred pieces she promises his head is a curse she was entitled to pronounce, and she never uses it; the fire behind it is the fire she had already put out inside herself before she opened her mouth.
The gist: Remembering everything, Dushyanta refuses in open court to recognize Shakuntala and calls her a wicked woman in the dress of an ascetic. She stands frozen, then swallows her rising anger and the fire of her austerities and answers him: his own heart is the witness, Narayana lives inside it, and fourteen witnesses from the Sun to Dharma watch every human act. She names the power to burst his head into a hundred pieces and never uses it. Then she lays out the whole worth of a wife and a son, opens the words Jaya and Puttra, points to ants that carry their own eggs, reminds him of the three years she carried the boy and of the voice from the sky that promised a hundred horse sacrifices, repeats the verses said over an infant at his birth rites, and names her parents, Menaka and Vishvamitra, asking what she did in an earlier life to be thrown away twice.
The king answers a second time and harder, insulting both her parents, and Shakuntala replies with a mustard seed and a bilva fruit, ending with truth outweighing a hundred horse sacrifices
Dushyanta answered her a second time, and he was harder. I do not know that I begot this son on you, he said. Women in general speak untruths. Who is going to believe you? Your mother is the wanton Menaka, a woman with no affection in her, who dropped you on the back of Himavat the way a man throws out flowers when the worship is finished. Your father is the lustful Vishvamitra of the Kshatriya race, who went after the rank of a Brahmana, and he has no affection in him either. Menaka is first among the Apsaras and your father is first among the rishis, and being their daughter, why do you speak like a loose woman? Your words are worth no credit. Are you not ashamed to say them, and to say them in front of me? Go, wicked woman in the dress of an ascetic. Where is that first of the great rishis, where is that Apsara Menaka, and where are you, low as you are, got up as a woman of penance? Your child is grown besides. You call him a boy and he is very strong. How has he shot up like a sala sapling so fast? Your birth is low. You talk like a loose woman. Menaka bore you out of lust. Everything you are saying is unknown to me. I do not know you. Go wherever you like.
She answered him with a proverb about a mustard seed. You see the fault of another though it be as small as a mustard seed, she said, and you look straight at your own though it be as big as a bilva fruit, and you do not see it. Menaka is a celestial, and she is reckoned the first of the celestials, and so my birth stands far above yours. You walk on the earth; I travel in the sky. The distance between us is the distance between Meru and a mustard seed. Look at what I can do. I can go to the houses of Indra, of Kuvera, of Yama and of Varuna. There is a true saying I will repeat to you, and I repeat it only as an illustration and from no evil motive, so hear it and then forgive me. An ugly man thinks himself handsomer than everyone else until he sees his own face in a mirror, and when he sees it he understands at last what the difference is. A man who is genuinely handsome never taunts anybody. A man who is always speaking evil earns the name of reviler. Swine hunt for filth in the middle of a flower garden, and the wicked pick the evil out of everything that is said to them, good and bad together; the wise take only what is good, the way geese draw off the milk and leave the water. The honest are pained at speaking ill of others and the wicked delight in it. The honest take pleasure in showing regard for the old and the wicked take pleasure in throwing dirt on the good. The honest are happy when they are looking for no faults, and the wicked are happy when they are finding them. The wicked speak ill of the honest always, and the honest do the wicked no injury even after being injured. What is more absurd in this world than men who are wicked themselves calling the truly honest wicked? When even atheists are disgusted by those who have fallen away from truth and virtue, who are like angry snakes full of poison, what am I, raised in faith, to say?
Then she came back to the son, and then to truth. A man who begets a son in his own image and then disregards him never reaches the worlds he wants, and the gods pull down his fortune and his possessions. The Pitris have said that a son carries the race and the line forward and is therefore the best of all religious acts, and that no man should abandon one. Manu counted five kinds of sons: the son a man begets on his own wife, the son received from others as a gift, the son bought for a price, the son raised out of affection, and the son begotten on a woman who is not a wedded wife. Sons hold up the religion and the achievements of men, they enlarge their joys, and they pull dead ancestors out of hell. Do not abandon a son like this one, tiger among kings. Take care of your own self, of truth and of virtue by taking care of your son. Do not keep up this deceit, lion among monarchs. Digging one tank is worth more than digging a hundred wells. A sacrifice is worth more than a tank. A son is worth more than a sacrifice. Truth is worth more than a hundred sons. A hundred horse sacrifices were once put on a balance against Truth, and Truth came down the heavier of the two. Truth, as I understand it, is equal to the study of the whole of the Vedas and to bathing in every holy place there is. There is no virtue equal to Truth and there is nothing above it. Truth is God himself. Truth is the highest vow a man can take. So do not break your pledge, king. Let Truth and you be one thing. If you put no credit in my words I will go from here of my own accord, and your company is worth avoiding. But know this, Dushyanta: when you are gone, this son of mine will rule the whole earth, ringed by its four seas and crowned by the king of mountains. Having said it, she turned and walked out of his presence.
A key to reading this (a mustard seed, five kinds of sons, and a balance): A mustard seed is proverbially the smallest of seeds and the bilva fruit is heavy and large, which is the whole force of her first image: another man’s fault seen at mustard size, one’s own overlooked at bilva size. Manu’s five kinds of sons do a specific job in her argument. If a son taken as a gift, a son bought, and a son merely raised out of affection are all beyond abandoning, then a son out of a man’s own body leaves him no ground to stand on at all. The scale at the end is the source’s own: a tank outweighs a hundred wells, a sacrifice outweighs a tank, a son outweighs a sacrifice, truth outweighs a hundred sons, and truth once went onto a balance against a hundred horse sacrifices and came down the heavier side. Note also what she does not do. She asks for no boon and lays down no curse. She reminds him that a man who breaks a pledge breaks his own truth, and then she leaves.
The gist: Dushyanta answers a second time and more cruelly: women lie, Menaka threw her away like spent flowers after worship, Vishvamitra was lustful, her birth is low, and the child has shot up like a sala sapling and cannot be the infant she claims. Shakuntala replies with the mustard seed and the bilva fruit, sets the distance between them at Meru against a mustard seed, gives the image of the ugly man who has never seen a mirror, separates the wicked from the wise with swine that hunt filth in a flower garden and geese that draw milk out of water, recites Manu’s five kinds of sons, and closes on a scale that runs from wells to tanks to sacrifice to sons to truth, which once outweighed a hundred horse sacrifices. Telling him that this boy will rule the earth to its four seas after he is gone, she walks out of the court.
The verdict that came out of an empty sky: Shakuntala walks out of the hall, a voice with no body in it names the boy Bharata, and a chariot whose wheels are heard across the whole earth
She did not wait to be dismissed. Having said everything she had come to say, Shakuntala turned, took the boy by the hand, and walked the length of that hall and out of it, past the ministers who had studied the floor while she spoke and the priests who had studied the ministers. Behind her the court was exactly as it had been an hour before. The seats were filled. The household priests sat in their places and the priests brought in for the occasion sat in theirs, with the preceptors and the counselors ranged around them, and on the throne in the middle sat a king who had just told a crowded room that he had never seen this woman in his life. For a while nobody found anything to say. Into that silence, from somewhere above the roof beams, with no shape anywhere that anyone could point to, a voice began to speak. It was not coming from any one direction in the hall, and it reached every corner of it, and it addressed itself to Dushyanta alone, as though every other person present had been seated there for the single purpose of hearing it happen.
The mother, the voice said, is the sheath of flesh only. The son sprung from the father is the father himself. Cherish your son, Dushyanta, and offer Shakuntala no more insult. A son is the shape of a man’s own seed, and it is the son who lifts the ancestors out of the country of Yama. You are the one who begot this boy. Shakuntala has told the truth. A husband splits his body in two and is born again out of his wife in the form of a son. Cherish, then, this high souled boy that Shakuntala bore you. To go on living while a living son of yours is cast off is a calamity of the first order. Cherish him, descendant of Puru. And because you will cherish him at our word, this son of yours shall carry the name Bharata, the cherished one. The voice stopped as abruptly as it had begun, and the hall let out the breath it had been holding.
The king’s face opened. He turned to his priests and his counselors and said, loudly enough that the whole room would carry it out into the city, You heard what the messenger of the gods has said? I knew this boy for my own son myself. If I had accepted him on Shakuntala’s word alone, my people would have kept their suspicions, and my son would have gone through his life with a question hanging over his birth. It is the hardest sentence in the episode and also the most honest one, because in it the king states plainly that he knew what he was doing when he did it. Refusing his wife in open court had been an act of policy, calculated and cold, and now that the sky had supplied the one witness no human being could supply, the policy had done its work.
Then he came down and took the boy up in his arms. Every rite a father owes a son he had performed for him that same day, with the Brahmanas reciting and the bards beginning their praise. He smelled his child’s head and held him against his chest and would not put him down, and the court watched a man discover, rather late, what the touch of one’s own son feels like. After that he turned to Shakuntala and received her with honor before them all. Goddess, he said to her, our union took place in private, and there was no one there to witness it. That is the only reason I have spent this hour working out how your purity could be established in front of everyone. My people were free to call that meeting in the forest an appetite and to deny it the name of marriage, and in that case this son of mine, whom I intend to install as heir apparent, would have been counted a child of impure birth for the rest of his days. And every hard word you threw at me in your anger, wide eyed one, I have already forgiven. There is nobody dearer to me than you. He had perfumes brought, and food, and drink, and honored her with them; and the woman who had walked out of that hall insulted an hour earlier now stood in it as its queen.
That same day the king gave the child the name Bharata and installed him formally as heir apparent, and the rest of the boy’s life ran as loudly as his beginning. The wheels of Bharata’s chariot became proverbial, invincible and bright, spoken of in the same breath as the wheels of the chariots the gods ride; they went into every region of the world, and the noise of them filled the earth. Dushyanta’s son brought every king on it under his authority, governed by the law, and earned an enormous name, so that two more titles attached themselves to him, Chakravarti, the wheel turner, and Sarvabhauma, lord of all the earth. He sacrificed as lavishly as Indra, lord of the Maruts, and the priest who presided over those sacrifices was Kanva, the same Kanva in whose hermitage his mother had been raised and whose disciples had walked her to the gate of this court. The fees given to Brahmanas at those rites were immense. Bharata performed the cow sacrifice and the horse sacrifice both, and he gave Kanva a thousand gold coins as his priestly fee. From that Bharata came the long line of achievements that people still count up, and from him the dynasty took the name it carries, the Bharata race, in which kings as radiant as Brahma himself were born in numbers past counting. Of those many, best of the Bharatas, the principal ones will be named now, the ones whose fortune ran like the fortune of gods and who never moved from truth and plain dealing.
A key to reading this (where the name Bharata comes from, and the ring that is missing from this book): The name is the voice’s own pun. In Sanskrit bharana means to support, to maintain, to take upon oneself; the sky tells Dushyanta that he must cherish this child at its word, and so the child becomes Bharata, the cherished one. The second point matters for readers who know this story from Kalidasa’s play. In the play a sage’s curse wipes Shakuntala out of the king’s memory, and a lost ring recovered from a fish restores it. The Mahabharata has no curse and no ring. Its king does not forget. He denies her deliberately, and then tells his own ministers that he did it so his people would have nothing to whisper about. The epic passes no judgment on that choice. It sets it down and moves on to the genealogy.
The gist: Shakuntala walks out of the court, and a voice with no visible source tells Dushyanta that a son is the father’s own form, that Shakuntala has spoken the truth, and that he must cherish the boy; from that word the child is named Bharata, the cherished one. The king tells his ministers he had known the boy was his all along and denied him only so that no doubt would cling to his birth. He performs the rites for his son, asks Shakuntala’s pardon and receives her as queen with perfume, food and drink, and installs Bharata as heir apparent. Bharata grows into the emperor called Chakravarti and Sarvabhauma, sacrifices with Kanva as his chief priest, pays him a thousand gold coins, and gives his name to the dynasty whose roll call comes next.
Source: the Mahabharata of Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa, Adi Parva (Adivansavatarana and Sambhava sub-books). This chapter follows K. M. Ganguli, sections LIX-XCV (59-95); the Gita Press Hindi edition numbers these chapters differently. Names, order, and events were checked against Ganguli’s complete translation. Dialogue and commentary are adapted, not a verbatim translation. About the sources.
Based on: The Mahabharata, Vyasa (Gita Press, Gorakhpur)