The continued expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition for the past two millennia and the flexibility of its expression hinges on the fact that the Rāmāyaṇa—as A. K. Ramanujan reminds us—is “always already” (1991, p. 46). The trouble is not in locating its stories. The trouble comes with trying to negotiate all the different ways the stories coexist—all the ways in which they have “already” existed and will continue to “already” exist. Throughout the course of this study, I have tried to connect some of these stories to each other and to the contexts of their creation to demonstrate just how complex the inner workings of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition really are. We must not take for granted the stories we receive; they have been through a long history of change and it is in the social propulsions behind such change that we locate literature's deeper meanings and its effects on the people who create it, read it, pass it on, and bring it into new avenues of expression.

Since the beginning of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition, whenever that may have been, people have evoked the Rāmāyaṇa and the many morals, controversies, truths, and fabrications buried within its stories to bolster any number of social, religious, and political viewpoints. The focus here has been one story that has splintered into numerous modes of narration depending on the needs and intentions of its tellers. As Śambūka's death toll climbs, his narrative tradition gets broader, more complex, and more all-encompassing. Each new iteration carries with it a new message and a fresh perspective on the meaning behind his life and death. Śambūka has died over and over again in a near endless stream of stories, poems, paintings, speeches, dramas, dances, movies, and more. With his story uniquely situated at the intersection of artistic innovation, caste politics, religion, and violence, each expression of his death is poised to comment on a range of social issues and even on the nature of the Rāmāyaṇa itself.

The purpose underlying Śambūka's death has been evolving since the first time his story was penned in the Vālmīki Rāmāyaṇa. By showing some concern for Śambūka's afterlife, Kālidāsa used the story to demonstrate Rāma's graciousness and authority in alignment with the Gupta Empire's religious innovations and political ambitions.

After Brahminism gained a strong footing in post-Mauryan South Asia—a footing typified by the codification of varṇadharma—the next great South Asian empire, the Guptas, crafted their own schematic for an imperial religion. With the Guptas came an imperially sponsored Vaiṣṇavism marked by a burgeoning temple culture that involved elaborate structures and public spaces that provided the public with a new kind of access to religion (Willis, 2009). The Guptas’ presentation of Vaiṣṇavism opened Viṣṇu worship up to an unprecedented level of popularity, which extended to Viṣṇu's various incarnations (avatāras), including Rāma. Naturally, a text that frames Rāma as both divine figure and avatāra of Viṣṇu as well as a hero in his own right was bound to benefit from the momentum of the religious movement spearheaded by the Guptas. The story of the Rāmāyaṇa, then, saw a rejuvenated life in this new era of South Asian history.

The story of Rāma was, at this point, still largely defined by Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa. As interest in the story grew, critical perspectives on this quintessential Rāma text began to emerge. In the world of the VR, it is Rāma's responsibility as king to maintain the prevailing social order by which his kingdom is to be governed and mete out the necessary punishments when that order is violated. The text's Śambūka episode exemplifies both a violation by a member of Ayodhyā's society and the proper response to it, carried out by the king himself. Be that as it may, Rāma's unquestioningly swift action against Śambūka placed him in a role of enforcer that is at odds with the compassionate image of Rāma that pervades a great deal of the epic. The difficulty in reconciling these two seemingly conflicting images of Rāma created a troubling puzzle for later authors who lived in a world where Rāma's divinity and the idealism it represented were becoming increasingly accepted. How could they reframe Rāma's involvement in Śambūka's death to better suit the changing expectations of their audience without abandoning the issue of Rāma upholding Ayodhyā's social structures?

Adjustments to the Śambūka episode covered up to this point have largely been part of a calculated reframing of this controversial moment in theUttarakānḍa in order to protect Rāma's image. The intent had not been to empathize with Śambūka, but rather to elevate Rāma and update the circumstances of their interaction to match prevailing religious sentiments regarding Rāma and his divinity. Throughout the twentieth century, however, we see a new battleground for the details surrounding Śambūka's death. In this new context, Śambūka is the central figure, not Rāma; the protagonist, not the antagonist. One reason for the shift in focus is the fact that new contributors to the Śambūka tradition came from the same social position as Śambūka himself, and their primary purpose in calling on his narrative was to present powerful challenges to the caste system. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that the perspectives on Śambūka—or even on how to approach the problem of caste—within these groups have never been monolithic. Anticaste ideation has had many different expressions throughout history and figures in the twentieth century representing numerous activist groups sought to reframe the details of the Śambūka story to promulgate their specific anticaste messaging. In formulating such messaging, some made references to a generalized, skeletal Śambūka narrative in hopes of evoking the tragedy of his death to expose long-standing casteism in Indian society. Others created entirely new works on Śambūka, digging deep into the narrative and adjusting its nuances to suit the exact type of message they were promulgating. While the precise message varied, the narrative framework within which these authors were working was often the same: Śambūka was a charismatic leader and teacher of the oppressed classes of India and he died a martyr.

In this chapter, I detail the sociopolitical background that allowed for activists to mobilize the Śambūka narrative against the caste system and I provide several examples of how such mobilization manifested. The anticaste activism covered here operated largely in the realm of literature, which featured new ruminations on the Śambūka story coming from India's socially oppressed communities. However, given that this body of literature advocated for the abolition of caste and typically—though not always—depicted Rāma in an unfavorable light, it often encountered robust challenges from more dominant segments of India's religious and political society.

Near the end of the Rāmāyaṇa, Rāma returns to Ayodhyā to be installed as king after fourteen years of exile to the forest. His reign brings with it a long-awaited era of peace and prosperity. However, that peace is eventually disturbed when a Brahmin father brings the body of his dead son to the palace gates. The Brahmin questions how such a thing can happen, going so far as to accuse Rāma of failing to live up to his kingly responsibilities. Rāma becomes distressed and calls a meeting of his closest advisors. One among them, Nārada, explains to Rāma that when society loses sight of dharma as the ages progress, the birth-based system of societal segregation—the cāturvarṇya or system of four varṇas—begins to break down. By the time of the final age, known as the Kali Yuga, the lowest of these varṇas, the Śūdras, will begin to do the work of Brahmins, the highest of the varṇas. Nārada specifies that only in the Kali Yuga will a Śūdra be able to practice very intense austerities (tapas). Before that time, practicing of tapas is a crime for a Śūdra. Indeed, Nārada identifies the cause of the Brahmin boy's death as being a Śūdra engaged in tapas on the outskirts of Rāma's kingdom. He tells Rāma to survey his kingdom and rid it of all wrongdoing, including this errant Śūdra. Rāma obliges and, after traveling throughout his kingdom, finds an ascetic hanging upside down from a tree on a mountainside in the southern reaches of the Ayodhyā kingdom

This chapter analyzes Bhavabhūti's eighth-century Uttararāmacarita (The Later Deeds of Rāma, henceforth URC ),1 a text that dives deeper into Śambūka's death than any considered so far. Aside from it being a beautifully crafted piece of literature, I choose to focus on Bhavabhūti's play because it ties into developments related to Śambūka's depiction in Kālidāsa's RaV. In creating the URC, though, Bhavabhūti was not beholden to political oversight in the way Kālidāsa was, nor was he involved in a large-scale revisionist project like Vimalasūri. He did, however, have a framework within which to work as he redesigned not only how we are to understand Śambūka, but how we are to understand the entire Uttaraka ̄ṇḍa.

The URC is a Sanskrit drama, a genre with its own conventions. Characters, plot, and structure all follow elaborate formulae most clearly laid out in the Nātyasāśtra, a dramaturgical text compiled around the time of Kālidāsa (Gerow, 1984). The aesthetic effect of a Sanskrit drama relies on an intricate system of poetics centered around the theory of rasa, which Edwin Gerow summarizes in the dramatic context as being “a resolution of sentiments sufficiently general to abolish the mundane distinctions between audience, actor, and author” (ibid., p. 43). In blurring these boundaries between a work of art, the artist, and the audience, rasa is a poetic tool that underpins the enjoyment and appreciation of art.

Briefly, rasas—of which there are eight or nine, depending on the theoretician—are the various emotional catalysts in a work of art that exist as a product of the play's composition and the actors’ portrayal as well as their ability to resonate with a person's inherent experiences and emotions. The universally acknowledged eight rasas are śrṅgāra (erotic), hāsya (comic), karuṇa (piteous), raudra (furious), vīra (heroic), bhayānaka (terrifying), bībhatsā (disgusting), and adbhūta (wondrous); the debated ninth rasa is śānta (peaceful). While a drama may utilize any number of these rasas as the context warrants, it will have a single dominant rasa that best relates to the overarching plot.

Each year, many residents of the small town of Ramtek, Maharashtra gather at a modest temple (Figures 6.1 and 6.2) about halfway up the large, steep hill at the center of town to celebrate Maha Shivaratri—“The Great Night of Śiva.” For this annual festival of devotion to Śiva, the image inside this temple—a śivalinġ a known by the name Dhūmreśvara (Figure 6.3)—becomes the focus of attention despite there being several other similar images scattered about town. Śambūka and Dhūmresv́ ara are, in fact, one and the same. Though worshipped by a different name, Śambūka's identity as Dhūmreśvara is on full display on signs and posters and in pamphlets and inscriptions, leaving visitors to the temple fully aware that when they approach the śiva-linġ a, they are approaching Śambūka. I will outline in this chapter how Śambūka came to be known by this name and how, of all places, Ramtek Hill came to house the world's only temple to Śambūka. To do so, I focus on four historical periods of development in the area: the Vākāṭaka period, the Yādava period, the Marāṭhā period, and, finally, Ramtek today. Literature and structures from these periods provide us with an amalgamation of historical layers on Ramtek Hill spanning over one thousand years. In following this pathway through the area's history, we see how the early literary and material foundations associated with the town's central hill primed the area to welcome Śambūka as a permanent fixture of local Hindu religious life.

Ramtek and the Vākātakas

Kālidāsa has already proven himself crucial to our unfolding narrative about the evolution of the Śambūka story through his innovations to the episode as it appears in his Raghuvaṃsá (RaV). Chapter 3 outlined a changing and increasingly institutionalized Vaiṣṇavism emerging in the Gupta Empire and Kālidāsa's contribution to this. In his RaV, Kālidāsa reimagined Śambūka's path after death through a paradigm of redemption, a striking departure from Śambūka's fate in the VR.

I commend Aaron Sherraden's Śambūka and the Rāmāyaṇa Tradition to you. This monograph takes as its starting point a terse account of Śambūka's decapitation, found in the earliest, extant, full literary telling of the life and deeds of Rāma in the ancient Sanskrit Rāmāyaṇa attributed to Sage Vālmīki. One of Hinduism's two preeminent ancient epic narratives, Vālmīki's Rāmāyaṇa and its subsequent retellings have played key roles in later devotional practices to Viṣṇu and his avatāras. Textual historians generally date the text (which first circulated orally in several recensions) as taking its fixed form starting approximately the mid-sixth century BCE and ending no later than the second or third century CE. Śambūka's story appears in the final of the seven books of the Rāmāyaṇa attributed to Vālmīki, which many philologists consider a later interpolation.

Over time, however, Śambūka's story has grown into a narrative tradition of its own. During the last two thousand years, its events have appeared in multiple literary retellings characterized by literary strategies such as elaboration, concision, major reinterpretation, and alternate endings. These retellings depict Śambūka variously as a miscreant and enemy of the social and moral orders, a victim of upper-caste prejudice and violence, a pioneer who engaged in ascetic practices previously monopolized by upper castes, a recipient of Rāma's divine grace, one who has achieved release from the cycle of death and rebirth, a social and political revolutionary, a wise teacher and moral exemplar, and a venerated martyr in the cause of Dalit liberation. Accounts of Śambūka's rigorous asceticism have appeared in both cosmopolitan languages (e.g., Sanskrit and Prakrit) and regional literary ones (e.g., Tamil, Awadhi, Malayalam) across India from ancient times to the present. Moreover, in addition to Hindu texts, his story also appears in a lineage of texts composed by Jain authors in which Rāma does not kill Śambūka. Sherraden reveals how Śambūka's story continues to perform its cultural work in the twenty-first century, serving as the basis for ritual devotion, modern poetry, and even cover art for publications envisioned through a range of religious and social lenses.

A ravenous jackal emerges from his den at the edge of a cremation ground and observes a vulture speaking to a grieving family as they prepare to leave the corpse of a young boy to be cremated. As the sun sets, the vulture rushes the family along lest he be forced to resign the boy's body to the nocturnal creatures of the cremation ground, including the jackals. Reminding the family of the inevitability of death, the vulture tells them, “You’ve stayed long enough in this dreadful cremation ground, teeming with vultures and jackals and filled with skeletons—a terror for all beings. Nobody who has been subjected to the rule of Death has come back to life, be they friend or foe. This is the way of all beings” (MBh 12.149.8–9). With their hopes dashed, the family leaves the boy's body to the delight of the famished vulture.

The jackal, hoping to stall the family until darkness falls over the cremation ground so that he can claim his next meal, challenges the family's affection for the boy, and questions how they could give up hope so quickly. The vulture and the jackal go back and forth, commanding and manipulating the emotions of the lamenting family as they each seek to dine on the boy's flesh. The jackal urges them to wait a bit longer—anything can happen. Perhaps the boy is alive, or perhaps he could even be revived. In an attempt to instill hope in the family, the jackal tells them that he knows of a time when a deceased boy did, in fact, come back to life.

“There is nothing to stop you in your affection or your weeping lament,” the jackal explains, “but you will constantly ache from abandoning this dead boy. It has been heard that the child of a Brahmin was revived because Rāma, courageous and true, upheld righteousness and killed the Śūdra Śambūka” (MBh 12.149.61–62). The jackal and the vulture debate at length about the fate of the boy as the family wavers between surrendering their child to the cremation grounds and turning back to wait for any sign of life. As the arguments rage on, Śaṅkara, the god Śiva, appears before them all, prepared to grant everyone present a boon. For the grieving family, he restores the boy back to life, and he eliminates the hunger afflicting the two flesh-eating scavengers.

Kālidāsa and Vimalasūri mark some of the earliest and most consequential landmarks in the expansion of the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. I might argue that these two poets were the first to widen the boundaries of Rāmāyaṇa tradition as we know it today—boundaries that encompass an extensive amount of variability and adaptability as the epic enters new contexts. Through their poems, each demonstrated techniques on how to receive a narrative, push the limits of its messaging, and introduce a new take on an old story. Their respective presentations of the Śambūka episode are prime examples of such poetic dynamism. These two pioneering poets helped imbue the Rāma narrative with a flexibility by which others could cater the Rāmāyaṇa to their own audiences.

In the centuries leading up to and immediately following the turn of the first millennium CE, poets wrote several new Rāmāyaṇas. The current chapter focuses on this late classical and early medieval period of development in the Rāmāyaṇa tradition. With the various ways of handling the Śambūka episode acting as our gauge, it becomes clear that the Rāmāyaṇa tradition has many vectors of influence that are deeply intertwined with prevailing socioreligious trends, geography, and language. The pathways of that influence, however, are not always what one might expect. A dogmatic adherence to a specific way of telling the Rāmāyaṇa based on religious affiliation, for instance, does not seem to reflect the reality of how the Rāmāyaṇa traveled across India. By way of example, narratives originating in the Jain tradition went on to find their place in the Hindu tradition and it becomes increasingly clear that we should take geographic proximity and the influence of literary communities therein just as seriously as poets’ potential desire to stick close to a narrative produced in their own religious community.

Here, I will chart a course through the various modes of telling the Śambūka story moving into medieval India. Some older modes of presenting the episode have survived deep into this period, though almost always with some sort of modification to better reflect the sentiments of the intended audience. There are also some new ways of dealing with the issue of Śambūka that originate in this period.

One of the most polarizing moments in India's recent history came with the central government's attempts to implement the recommendations of the Backward Classes Commission, also known as the Mandal Commission. The Commission was set up in 1979 headed by B.P. Mandal and, a year later, it issued its recommendation that just under 50% of available seats in educational institutions and government jobs be allocated to India's OBC, SC, and ST populations—Articles 15(4) and 16(4) of the Constitution prevent the totality of reserved spots from exceeding 50%. Acknowledging that the recommendations will cause some pain to those who fall outside the reservation schematic proposed by the Commission, the report's authors question whether it is appropriate that “the mere fact of this heart burning be allowed to operate as a moral veto against social reform” (1980, V.1, p. 58). Speaking in the context of OBC reservations, the Mandal Commission attempts to argue that a top-heavy practice of reservation that favors the higher castes has always been in practice in India. In the process, the Commission even refers to Ekalavya and Śambūka, two oft-cited examples of caste-based violence in situations where one wishes to illustrate the injustices of the caste system. The document reads:

The Mandal Commission's recommendations remained dormant for nearly a decade before Prime Minister V.P. Singh attempted to implement them in 1989. The shift from a purely merit-based (and upper-caste dominated) system of admissions to this legally ordained positive discrimination ignited a controversy that engulfed India's urban centers, Delhi in particular. In addition to widespread riots, the Mandal Commission protests were famously characterized by multiple cases of self-immolation.