Kamsa

Six Infants

Vasudeva puts himself between the blade and the bride. He calls Kamsa the pride of the Bhoja house, reminds him that death is written into every creature on the day it is born and that no sword held over a bride can move the hour, and says that this girl is helpless; let her live. “Her children are my death.” Then Vasudeva, who understands that argument has run its course, makes the offer almost no man alive would make: every child born of her, he will bring to Kamsa with his own hands. Kamsa goes still. He has known Vasudeva all his life, and in all that life the man has never once broken his word. “Agreed.” “Every child, into my hands.” The storm passes through him and is gone, and he drives the bridal chariot the rest of the way as though nothing on that road had ever happened. When the first son, Kirtiman, is born and Vasudeva carries him through the streets and sets him in Kamsa’s hands, the plain steadiness of the act stops the king where he stands. “Take the boy home,” he says. “It was never this one.” “My death comes from your eighth; the eighth is the one I will watch for.”

Then Narada arrives, unasked, and what he lays before Kamsa moves the ground under the throne: the cowherds of Vraja, the whole Vrishni clan, Devaki and the women of the Yadava house are gods walking in human skin, and out of Devaki’s own body Vishnu himself is coming, for Kamsa. Something old and buried rolls over at those words; in a life long finished Kamsa was the great demon Kalanemi, and it was Vishnu’s hand that cut him down then. The moment the sage departs he has Devaki and Vasudeva chained in a cell of his own palace, sends for the boy he spared and dashes him against the stone, throws his own father Ugrasena into prison, and rules the Shurasena country himself. Year after year the cell hears a birth, year after year Vasudeva keeps his terrible word, and one after another six infant sons die in Kamsa’s hands. He gathers demon allies around him, Pralamba and Baka, Chanura and Putana, Keshi and Dhenuka, with Jarasandha, the emperor of Magadha, whose two daughters he has married, standing surety over it all, and the Yadu clans scatter for their lives.

The Harivamsha begins the same story from a different place, and there is no voice from the sky in it; there is a guest. Narada comes down to the garden outside Mathura, Kamsa goes out and has a golden seat brought, and the guest repays the honor with the truth. “The child of the eighth conception of your youngest sister Devaki, who lives here in Mathura, will be your death.” To die at the hands of that god of gods, he adds, is a matter of glory for you. When Narada has gone, Kamsa laughs aloud. “Truly the gods make fun of Narada, and he knows nothing of how things are.” “Seated on my throne, asleep, mad or drunk, I cannot be frightened in the least by the gods, with Indra at their head.” He sends word to Keshi, Pralamba, Dhenuka, Arishta, Putana, and Kaliya to range the world and destroy whoever stands against him; and inside the palace his voice is no longer laughing. “Be always on your guard to destroy the children of Devaki.” The women of the harem are to count her months from the first day, and Vasudeva is to be kept in the inner apartment and told nothing. In the Harivamsha six infants are dashed on the stone the moment they are born, before the mother who carried them, and the same text tells who they were: the Shadgarbhas, sons of Kalanemi, cursed by Hiranyakashipu to be born in order from Devaki and killed by Kamsa.

The Eighth Night

In the Bhagavatam the seventh child is drawn across into Rohini’s womb and Mathura mourns a miscarriage, and then the eighth comes. Kamsa comes every morning to look at his sister, and every morning her face holds more of an unbearable brightness; Hari has entered her womb, he tells himself, the way a lion is inside a cave, and he circles the thought of killing the child at its birth, or Devaki now, morning after morning, and can never land on it. He doubles the guard and waits, a man watching his own death ripen. On the eighth night of the dark fortnight Devaki gives birth, the irons open, the Yamuna gives passage, and Vasudeva comes back from Gokul with Yashoda’s newborn daughter and closes the irons around his own ankles with his own hands. The girl cries, and Kamsa lurches up out of sleep; rain-soaked, hair loose, sword naked in his hand, he stands swaying in the door of the cell. Devaki presses the infant to her breast. “Brother, look at her.” “A girl.” “Leave me the last one.” There is no pity left in the room. He wrenches the child out of her hands, catches the small feet in one fist, and swings her down at the stone, and the girl leaves his grip in the middle of the swing. She rises, and above their heads a goddess stands on the air, eight-armed, and looks down at the man with the sword. “What would my death buy you, fool?” “The one who ends you is already born.” “Stop killing helpless children for nothing.”

Kamsa stands a long time without moving, and then something at the center of him gives way. He strikes the fetters from Devaki and Vasudeva with his own hands, and the king of Mathura goes down at their feet with his face wet. “Sister.” “Brother.” “I have been devouring my own family the way an ogre eats its young.” “Even the gods speak falsehood, it seems; I trusted a voice out of the sky, and on the word of heaven I murdered my sister’s children.” Devaki looks at the man who killed six of her children and forgives him, and Vasudeva tells him gently that the trouble begins with a single belief, the belief that I am this body. Kamsa walks back through his own palace like a stranger in it. The night passes, and the morning knows nothing of repentance. He summons his counselors, demons of the old enmity against the gods, and their answer is simple and has no bottom: in every town, every village, every herders’ camp, kill every child on either side of its tenth day, and kill the priests and the cows as well, since Vishnu stands wherever dharma is practiced. Kamsa gives the order. In the next story he calls for Putana. “Towns, villages, the camps of the cowherds, search them all.”

In the Harivamsha the night runs a little differently. Devaki and Yashoda give birth at the same hour, Vasudeva exchanges the children and goes himself to tell Kamsa that a daughter has been born, and Kamsa comes fast to Vasudeva’s door and orders the newborn handed over. Devaki says that he has already killed her seven sons, that she counts this daughter as slain already, and that he may do what he thinks proper. “A daughter born is a daughter already killed.” He takes the girl up by the legs, whirls her, and dashes her against a stone, and the stone does not break her; four-armed, ringed by ghosts, she dances and laughs in that black night as she rises. “Kamsa, for your own destruction you have whirled me and dashed me against a rock.” “So at the hour of your death, when your enemy comes at you, I will tear your body open with my hands and drink your hot blood.” Here too a moment of shame comes over him; he goes to his sister in private, his head low. “It is Time that is the enemy of all and brings on their destruction; it is Time that moves everything, and people like me are only its instruments.” Devaki tells him to rise, and forgives him; and he walks back into his own house with his heart burning, his purpose baffled. The Vishnu Purana tells the same night in chapter 3 of its fifth book, where the Yamuna keeps herself to the depth of Vasudeva’s knees and the girl dashed on the slab stands in the sky in a form with eight arms. “Kamsa, what have you gained by dashing me?” “The one who will kill you has already been born.” Kamsa, king of the Bhojas, stands on the ground below and watches her go until there is nothing left to see.

The Bow Sacrifice

In the Bhagavatam every killer he has sent is dead, Putana, Shakatasura, Trinavarta, Bakasura, Aghasura, and he knows that Krishna and Balarama are growing up in Nanda’s house in Gokul. So he lays out his final move: a dhanur-yajna, a great rite of the bow, and under that pretext the two brothers brought to Mathura to die in his own arena before his own eyes. For the errand he summons the man in his court whose mind rests on Shri Hari, Akrura. “Akrura, go to Gokul.” “Carry the invitation to the dhanur-yajna and bring Krishna and Balarama to Mathura, and Nanda with his cowherds behind them, with the yield of their herds for tribute.” “Say nothing of the rest.” “The rest we will handle.” In Gokul Akrura tells Krishna everything, the old enmity, the arena waiting behind the invitation, and what Narada has carried to the king, that the girl who slipped from his hands that midnight was Yashoda’s daughter; and hearing the whole plot laid out, their own deaths included, the two brothers laugh.

The Harivamsha sets a whole night behind that plan. Every report from Vraja is worse than the one before, and the king of Mathura has come to think of himself as a man already in Death’s hands, so numb in his senses that he looks like a corpse. In the soundless dead of night he calls his father and his kinsmen to his hall. “Why, then, are you ignoring this calamity rising against me?” “When he stands before me for battle, I will know him for my death.” Narada met him again in the Khatvanga forest, he tells them, and told him that the children were exchanged that night. Then he turns on old Vasudeva before the whole assembly and empties years of poison over him. “What use is your old age?” “You thought that when Kamsa died your son would rule Mathura.” Vasudeva stands unmoving as the ocean and gives no answer, the leading Yadavas cover their ears and count Kamsa a man whose lease of life has run out, and Andhaka, the first of speakers, answers him in that assembly in words gentle and hard at once. “You may wear matted hair, or shave your head, or call yourself Bhoja, or Yadava, or Kamsa; your head will stay in its natural shape.” “You are the enemy of our house; from today we withdraw our love from you.” Kamsa’s eyes go red with rage, and without a single word he goes into his own house; and before Akrura has even set out, he sends a messenger to Keshi to have Krishna killed.

The Arena

In the Bhagavatam the two brothers walk into Mathura, the washerman falls, Kubja stands straight, and in the hall of the bow rite Krishna lifts in his left hand the bow no man has ever moved and breaks it in half. “In the palace, Kamsa heard it, and the sound entered his chest like a driven nail.” “Kamsa spent the same night awake.” “Death had marked the house.” In the morning he posts the war elephant Kuvalayapida at the gate of the arena with one order to its driver, to crush the two of them at the threshold, and the elephant’s tusks come into the arena on the shoulders of Krishna and Balarama. Chanura, Mushtika, Kuta, Shala, and Toshala go down one after another in the dust of their own ring. Now Kamsa sits alone on the high dais with his champions dead below him and his festival in ruins around him. “His face had gone to ash.” He reaches for the one instrument left to a king and shouts his orders across the sand, drive the two out, chain Nanda, kill Vasudeva, kill Ugrasena, and the orders find nothing left to obey them. Krishna takes the dais in a single leap. Kamsa comes off the throne with sword drawn and shield up, and Shri Hari closes one hand on him the way Garuda takes a serpent, and at that grip “the royal diadem slipped from Kamsa’s head and rolled away across the boards.” Krishna winds his fingers into the tyrant’s hair, drags him off the edge of the platform into the arena, and leaps upon his chest, and the life goes out of Kamsa in that instant. The Bhagavatam adds its own reading of that end: for years Kamsa had seen Krishna everywhere, drinking, speaking, lying in his bed, until dread accomplished what devotion labors toward and fixed the Lord in his mind past all dislodging, so that at death he rose into sarupya, a form like the Lord’s own. “Enmity, grown dense enough to crowd out everything else, had turned into a door.”

In the Harivamsha there is a night before that end in which Kamsa, alone in his own room, sends for Chanura and Mushtika and asks them to throw the two cowherd boys to the earth. “Be perfectly careful in killing them.” “Do not disregard them as boys of fickle nature.” The same night he tells his elephant keeper the story Narada told him, that he is a kshetraja son of Ugrasena, begotten on the king’s wife by another, and that if his parents and his kinsmen all forsake him he will hold the throne by his own power. In the morning he takes his seat in two white garments and a white turban, and when Krishna drinks Chanura’s strength away the earth trembles, the pavilions rock, and the great jewel slips from Kamsa’s crown. His painted brow runs with sweat, his lips shake, and he issues his mandate. “Turn these two sinful, grim-faced, forest-ranging young cowherds out of the arena.” “I do not wish to see them.” Chain Nanda, he says, punish Vasudeva this very day, take the cowherds’ cattle. Krishna goes for the pavilion with the speed of a lion, takes him by the hair, and drags him across the sand until the body of the king of the Bhojas plows a ditch behind it, and somewhere in that dragging Kamsa breathes his last. “He had died in no battle, and no arrow had touched him.” Dragged to his death by the hair, he is driven off the path of heroes. His wives circle the body like planets losing their light; his mother takes his head into her lap and sends old Ugrasena to ask Krishna for the funeral rites. “Enmity ends with death; it is over the moment the enemy dies.” “What offense has a dead body committed?” Krishna, who is censuring himself before the whole assembly for making widows of a thousand women, answers Ugrasena that Kamsa, dead, will have the funeral honors of a king, and that he himself did not slay Kamsa for a territory. When the sun rises they carry the body to the northern bank of the Yamuna and set fire to the pyre, and perform the rites for his brother Sunama as well.

His Path

Putana · An order to a rakshasi, a poisoned breast, and the first death he sent that turned to ash in Gokul.

Krishna’s Birth: Across the Yamuna at Night · A river kept to the depth of a man’s knees, a girl who rose from the slab and stood in the sky, and a king of the Bhojas who watched her go.

The Harivamsha’s Slaying of Kamsa · A jewel slipping from a crown, a ditch plowed in the sand, and a mother with her son’s head in her lap asking for his rites.

The Man Who Watched His Death Ripen

Both texts begin Kamsa with one voice, and in both he believes it and refuses it at once. In the Bhagavatam the sky calls him a fool and he draws a sword; in the Harivamsha a guest tells him that his death will be a matter of glory and he laughs, and then goes inside and has the months counted. Every move after that is the same fear moving. Both texts let him bend for one moment, at his sister’s feet in the one and with his head low in private in the other, and in both he is the same man the next morning. The Bhagavatam sets its own reading on his end, that the man who never for one instant forgot Shri Hari, even as an enemy, was carried by that unbroken remembrance into the Lord’s own likeness; the Harivamsha sets a different thing there, that no arrow touched him, that he was dragged to his death by the hair, and that his mother, his wives, his father, and Krishna himself then said over him everything that is said over a dead king. One text calls his fear a door, the other gives his body a king’s pyre, and in both he is the man who came every morning to watch his death ripen in his sister’s face and answered it, every morning, with one more lock.