DAVID SHULMAN

ON BEING HUMAN

IN T H E S A N S K R I T E P I C : OF NALA

THE RIDDLE

Mag auch die Spieglung im Teich oft uns verschwirmnaen: Wisse das Bild. Erst in dem Doppelbereich werden die Stimmen ewig und mild. 1 One night Kabir was dreaming His being seemed to break: Two people when he's sleeping But just one when awake. 2

All in all, one would probably prefer to have a self. Something minimally integrated and not wholly discontinuous, where memory, or its more powerful and personal multiform, forgetting, could reside. Something to hide and veil, if need be, in the interests of preserving ultimacy in some residual, individual form. Even a fictive self might do for however quixotic the investment in this nebulous entity, the anxiety attendant on denying its existence is, for most of us, surely worse. But there may be other possibilities, seemingly exotic conceptualizations of what lies at the core of any living, active subject. This is an essay about a story about a man who lost his "self" -- along with everything else that was his. For its own time and place, it is, in fact, a paradigmatic story, which touches on fundamental issues relating to the uses and limits of linguistic expressivity, for example, and also on notions of personal "fate" in relation to "chance." For this man speaks mainly in riddles, and he loves to play dice. His name is Nala -- the hero of many, if not most, first-year Sanskrit students in the West over the last 150 years -- and the story is by no means only about him but at least equally about his famous wife and savior, Damayanti, one of the great models of Hindu woman-

Journal o f Indian Philosophy 22: 1--29, ~994. 9 1994 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

DAVID SHULMAN

hood. We know this tale first from the classic version embedded in Book 3, the Forest Book, of the Mahdbhdrata; and it is both the explicit declaration of the storyteller there, within the narrative frame, and the commonplace conclusion of modern scholarship that the story illuminates from its own perspective certain of the central themes and events of the main epic narrative. One South Indian folk retelling of the story -- one of an astounding number of later versions of this most popular and generative of Indian tales -- boldly and simply describes itself as the sdra, the "essence" or "pith," of the Mahdbhdrata. 3 I propose to take this statement seriously, if not entirely literally, although its implications will not be systematically set out here. There is, indeed, a striking series of recapitulated motifs: both stories proceed through svayamvara -- the Indian royal bride's ritual choice of husband -- to a disastrous dice-game after which the hero or heroes, bereft of wealth and status, must depart for the wilderness; in both there is a crucial period of hiding and disguise; both speak of recognition and restoration in an agonistic mode (the holocaust of battle for the Epic as a whole; another, climactic dice-game for Nala). In fact, these surface similarities are, in my view, epiphenomena, expressions of a much more deeply rooted affinity in meaning and internal debate. And there are also important contrasts and apparent inversions in shared or similar narrative motifs. But for the present, having posited, with the text itself, a hypothetical relation of parallelism or, more profoundly, of encapsulation, we must limit ourselves to pursuing the inner logic of the shorter, embedded tale; perhaps at the end of this attempt to understand Nala in his own terms we will see a path opening up toward more distant goals. I start from the Sanskrit text of the Mahdbhdrata (from the vulgate, not the BORI "critical" edition). The Nalopg~khydna, as the story is known there, tells us all that we really need to know; this essay will not attempt to trace its development through the Indian literary tradition. Nevertheless, I have consulted, and will occasionally quote, a number of other versions, each of which sheds its own light on the central, shared themes. Let me list these versions briefly, in rough chronological sequence: (1) Nannaya's llth-century Telugu version, from the Telugu MBh; (2) the well-known Sanskrit courtly kdvya, Nais.adhiyacarita, by the medieval poet griharsa; 4 (3) the exquisite

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14th-century Nal.av@pd, by the Tamil poet Pukalentippulavar; (4) an 18th-century Kathakali script from Kerala, Nal.acarita, by Unnfiyi Vfiriy~r; (5) an undatable Tamil folk-version printed in chapbook form as the Nalaccakkiravartti katai. Each of these texts, like so many other reworkings of this story, merits individual attention and analysis; my attempt to draw from them synthetically, in the interests of probing basic issues invoked by the story throughout its narrative history, is not meant to substitute in any way for such individual studies. Now, after these opening remarks, let me tell you the story of Nala: There was once a king, a perfect man, named Nala, endowed with every virtue, expert in handling horses, fond of dice (or beloved of the dice -- aksapriya). And there was an equally perfect young woman, Damayang, born through the gift of a sage. They heard about one another and fell in love secretly, from afar. A golden goose became their love-messenger; through the mediation of this goose, they determined to wed. Damayanti's father announced her svayam, vara, and all the kings and princes of the earth came to take part. So did four gods, Indra, Agni, Varu.na, and Yama, who had also fallen in love with this loveliest of women. On the way they met Nala and made him their messenger, to plead their case with Damayant~; by their magic, he entered Damayanti's palace unseen and delivered the gods' message, but she indignantly rejected it and affirmed her love for him, Nala, which she was determined to fulfil at any cost. At the svayamvara, the four gods appeared in Nala's form, so that five identical images of Nala stood before Damayant~. Or nearly identical: discerning, by virtue of her faithfulness, that the four divine Nalas did not blink or sweat, that their garlands remained perfectly fresh, and that their feet did not quite touch the ground, she was able to choose the human Nala for her husband after all. They married, had twins, and lived happily for twelve years. But there was one more god, a fifth, who had fallen in love with Damayanti -- Kali, the spirit of strife and of our present moment of time, the Karl Age. (The Tamil folk-text replaces Kali with the inauspicious planet gani). Kali was late to the svayam, vara, and he continued to resent its outcome; he waited for the moment when he could revenge himself on Nala. One day that moment came: when

DAVID SHULMAN

Nala failed to wash his feet before prayer (according to the folk-text, only a tiny spot the size of the tip of a thorn remained dry on his ankle), Kali slipped into him; at the same time he incited Nala's brother, Puskara, to challenge Nala to a game of dice, while Dvfipara, the spirit of the previous era, loaded the dice against him. Nala lost, and kept on losing; crazy with the dice, oblivious of Damayanti's pleas to him to stop, he staked his whole kingdom, and lost that, too. Only when Puskara demanded that he stake Damayanti did Nala desist. Excommunicated by order of Puskara, the new king, Nala and Damayanti left for the forest. For three days they ate nothing. On the fourth day, Nala tried to throw his cloak -- his last possession -- over some birds, in the hope of trapping them for food; but they flew up with the cloak into the sky and announced from there that they were the dice (aksdh.) come to strip him naked, since so long as he retained even a single garment their joy was incomplete. The couple now wandered together, clothed in Damayanti's single cloth. Nala urged Damayanti to leave him, to return to her father's court, where the twins had already been sent. She refused; but when she fell asleep in an enclosure (sabhd) in the forest, Nala took a sword that was fortuitously lying there, used it to cut her dress in two, and, covered with that half a cloth, his heart divided but driven by Karl from within, abandoned her to her fate. Damayanti awoke to find herself alone in the forest; anguished and angry, she cursed the evil being who had caused her husband such sorrow. (The curse immediately began to burn Kali, embodied in her absent husband). A great serpent seized her, but she was saved by a passing hunter; when the latter tried to take her for himself, she killed him with a curse. Eventually arriving at the Cedi kingdom, still dishevelled, dirty, and clothed in only half a garment, she became a hairdresser (sairandhrf) to the queen. There she was recognized by a Brahmin sent by her father and brought back to his court at Vidarbha. Nala, meanwhile, wandered in the forest, where he saved the serpent Karkotaka from death in a fire. In recompense the serpent bit him: from this moment on, poison burnt Kali continuously within Nala, while the latter's form was changed to that of an ugly, short-armed dwarf. Karkotaka also gave Nala a pair of garments and promised to change him back to his original form whenever Nala desired this.

T H E R I D D L E OF N A L A

Following the snake's advice, Nala took service, under the name of Bfihuka, as cook and charioteer to Rtupar.na, king of Ayodhyfi. Damayanti sent out Brahmins to scour the land for Nala, with a riddling verse with which to elicit his response: "Where are you, gambler that you are, still loved, who left a beloved and devoted woman asleep in the wilderness after cutting her dress in half? . . . . " One of the messengers, Parnfida, came to Ayodhyfi, sang the verse, and was addressed by the dwarf Bfihuka: "Even in the face of disaster, women of good family save themselves by themselves, thereby conquering heaven. Even if they are bereft of their husbands, they are never angry. . . . And if such a woman was deserted by her fool of a husband, fallen into trouble, she will not be angry at him, for he was seeking a way to survive, burning with anxiety, after losing his clothes to the birds." This was enough: when the speech was reported to Damayanff, she sent word to Ayodhyfi that a second svayam, vara was to be held for her on the next day. Rtuparna demanded that Nala take him there in time, despite the vast distance; superb horseman that he was, Nala accomplished this great feat. On the way, .Rtuparna demonstrated to Nala his skill at numbers by enumerating at a ~ance the leaves and fruits of an enormous vibhitaka tree. 5 Nala offered to teach the king the science of controlling horses in exchange for this skill in counting, which was the secret of the dice-game. No sooner was this exchange accomplished than Kali, vomiting snake-poison, issued forth from Nala's body. At Vidarbha, the charioteer continued to arouse Damayanffs suspicions that he was none other than Nala in disguise. She devised a series of tests: her servant observed his miraculous skill in cooking, and Damayanff recognized the flavor of his food; she sent their children to him and heard, through her servant, of his tearful reaction: "I, too, have twins, just like these two." Finally she confronted Bfihuka in the palace with another verse: "What man would abandon a wife who is guiltless, beloved, exhausted -- except Punyailoka-Nala?" Nala had to confess his identity; he resumed his old form, was reunited with his family, and returned to his kingdom to challenge his brother to one final throw of the dice. This time he staked Damayanff, too, on the throw; and this time Nala won and was reinstated on his throne. So -- a happy ending after all to this tale of separation, exile, and

DAVID SHULMAN

disguise. And we may as well remark at the outset that, genetically, the story is clearly a M/irchen, a fairy tale, in the analytic, crosscultural classification of the folklorists. All the major indicators -- the features of time and space (chronotopos, in the Bakhtinian usage) and the implicit claim on reality -- place the Nalopgtkhydna squarely in this slot. On the other hand, I will argue that our story is also a salient example of the limits of this kind of analytic definition -- for if this is a fairly tale, happy ending and all, it is surely a somewhat unusual, and wholly Indian, version of the genre. This is a fairly tale with a sting to it, a sting that twists back to poison its own body. Like its hero, the story wears a mask, an iconic disguise which all too readily deceives its listeners, lulling them into a dangerous complacency. Indeed, we can witness precisely this effect upon the prototypical listener to this particular story, within the narrative context of the Epic which contains it: Yudhisthira, the hero of the epic, who, as we have seen, is told of Nala's sufferings by the sage Brhadagva as a kind of didactic therapy, is indeed somewhat cheered by the story; he is consoled by the similarity in his and Nala's fate, and encouraged by Nala's eventual restoration. Yet how pointedly ironic is this consolation, how falsely constituted the analogy -- for Yudhisthira, too, will be restored to his kingdom, but only at the cost of a near-tmiversal destruction, in which his own children, along with the rest of his family, will be consumed. Actually, the Nala materials themselves point to this irony, to the problematic and unfinished quality of the fairy-tale resolution. There are versions of the story which tell us unambiguously that Nala's depression was not cured by his restoration, that, indeed, it deepened and became more threatening. Always some further movement is required -- a pilgrimage to the Tamil shrine of Tiruna~..fi_ru, for example -- before this hero can become "himself" again. THE RIDDLES Where, then, do we start? There is always the danger that, in cutting the story open, reaching in toward this strand or that, we shall simply disembowel it to no purpose: the story, after all, does speak for itself, certainly more clearly and wisely than we can. Our task is to listen to it, not to displace it. In the interests of furthering this act of listening, I

THE RIDDLE OF NALA

want to take us back into the story somewhat obliquely by referring to three more general, quasi-philosophical problems about which Nala might have something to say -- the boundaries of the self (and, within this arena, the problem of the locus of evil); the meaning of human agency and autonomy (the issue of fate); and the possibilities and implications of real self-knowledge. I begin with the later, which at first glance might seem to be the most optimistic theme aroused by our story. Nala, we may well assume, makes gains precisely in this area, indeed, only in this area. How else, indeed, are we to understand his dreadful trials? Could he undergo his experiences of loss and despair without emerging wiser and more whole? Surely he is wiser at the end -- has he not learned to master the dice, so that he can challenge and defeat his brother Puskara in one final, all-or-nothing throw? And observe how generously and compassionately he treats his defeated rival, who is sent away with honor and wealth. We instinctively rejoice in this new Nala, no longer victim of his own or others' passions. We admire his regained confidence and courage. We can rejoice, too, confirmed in our romantic hope that such suffering as his has meaning, at least in terms of knowledge gained, consolidated, enlarged. But perhaps a distinction is, after all, in order, between two different sorts of knowledge. There is, indeed, the secret "heart of the dice," a seemingly technical expertise that Nala acquires in a symmetrical exchange, soon put to use in the final moment of challenge. We will have more to say of this secret. But does this knowledge impinge upon his understanding of himself, his past, his "fate?" There is an easy way to probe this question -- by listening to Nala himself at the moment of his serf-revelation, the apparent anagnorisis when the layers of disguise are finally abandoned. This is what he says (in the presence of the tearful and still accusing Damayant~:
It was not my fault that my kingdom was lost; Kali perpetrated that, and also caused me to abandon you. Moreover, that wretch was afflicted by the curse you set upon him when in the forest, while, in your misery, you were sorrowing for me. Karl, hidden within my body, was burnt by your curse, like fire kindled in fire. He has been defeated by my determination and my ascetic practice - - this, then, must be the end of our suffering (24.17--20).

The good news arrives in slippery and perhaps paradoxical form: Nala

DAVID

SHULMAN

was not the actor, not responsible for his deeds while possessed, although his determination and asceticism, tapas, are responsible for the final triumph. So when was Nala in command of himself and his actions? Surely Damayant~ may still have some questions, as well might we. Let us also note the image Nala has of his recent inner life -- 'Yire kindled in fire" -- even as we ask ourselves just how far we can accept his explanation. At the very least, we have a loaded and problematic statement of pecufiar disembodiment and dislocated consciousness. Moreover, as if to add to our doubts, Nala, at this awkward moment, attempting to defend his seemingly indefensible conduct, voices his own complaint:
H o w can a w o m a n cast off a devoted and true h u s b a n d and choose another, as y o u seem to be doing? (22)

This more or less extricates Nala from his embarrassment by transferring the more immediate guilt to Damayanti. She will now have to explain that the second svayam, vara was only a ruse (updya) to get Nala himself to return, and that she never intended to choose another husband -- although the person standing before her is still, at least externally, an "other" man, hardly the Nala she knew. In fact, Damayanffs great gift is precisely here, in refusing to regard as other (anya) the disguised person she seeks, 6 while Nala's hostile question rings, like so many of the things he says, a little hollow, on the surface level, and, as we go deeper into it, more than a little ironic and intriguing. How can a wife reject her loving husband and choose "an other" (varayed anyam)? -- here, at the end of the story, Nala, hoping to save himself and whatever might be left of his good name, stumbles over a stubborn thematic figment that has been lying in wait for him almost from the beginning. I do not mean to mystify, or to be overly literal with the text, or to overload innocent statements with dubious meanings; and there is also no need to follow any of these futile courses. The little exchange just quoted simply resumes a critical discourse that informs the entire episode of Nala's disguise and unveiling, and that reaches farther back to the earlier, romantic opening of the tale. Damayanti, after all, has searched for her lost husband by means of a question, which I see as a kind of riddle, asked repeatedly in the various courts and households

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OF NALA

of India until one day it elicits a response, an obscure and strangely oblique solution. Here is Damayanti's insistent question:
Where are you, gambler that you are, still loved, who left a beloved and devoted woman asleep in the wilderness after cutting her dress in half? She is waiting for you as commanded, on fire, covered only by haft a dress. Have mercy on her as she weeps in that grief: give her a response! (17.37--39).

This is the message that the Brahmins carry from court to court. Like Nala's statement, this one, too, has its fiery image; here it is Damayanti who is "on fire," as she waits, half-clothed, unwashed, continually weeping, for Nala to reappear. And it is this same message, slightly expanded, that Damayanti utters herself at the moment of d6noument, before the still disguised and altered Nala, as the final test of his identity:
Bfihuka, have you ever seen a man who knew dharma forsake a sleeping woman in the wilderness? What man would abandon a wife who is guiltless, beloved, exhausted - - except Pun yagloka-Nala? (24.10--11).

She is taunting him with a question that has only one answer, although enfolded within this answer is the other, perhaps unanswerable question: "why?" Only Nala would act as he has acted - on that level the identification is utterly secure -- but, she wonders, does the fatal moment of his abandonment have any meaning? Did she offend against him in any way (12)? How could that one man whom she chose after rejecting the gods have deserted her, the mother of his children, the woman who loved and desired him (13)? What happened to the vow that he took before the fire, the vow to be there, with her or for her -- or, perhaps, simply to be (bhavisydmfti satyam tu prati~rutya kva tad gatam, 14)? These are the questions which elicit Nala's defensive confession, which we have quoted, with its attempt to transfer the blame to Kali while still claiming credit for the virtues of perseverance and ascetic practice. It is difficult not to see the answer as slightly askew, although it does, at least implicitly, carry an assertion of the speaker's self: I am Nala, it is true; you have discovered me at last; but I am not the one who left you -- Kali did that; I did, however, subdue Kali, largely by my own efforts. (Note that here Nala is distorting a little; Kali's defeat

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DAVID SHULMAN

was, after all, a collective effort, with Damayanff's curse, Karkotaka's bite, and Nala's knowledge of horses all playing their part in persuading Kali to depart. He acknowledges the first of these factors but still claims the major share of credit for himself.) And, anyway, you, Damayanti, should hardly accuse me, since you are about to choose another husband -- how can you speak of fidelity in this high-handed manner? I, too, am aggrieved ... and so on. Always, it appears, in Nala's eyes the emphasis and the onus are on her actions or awareness. Similarly in the case of his earlier answer to Damayanti's riddle, an answer which, like the riddle, perfectly prefigures the eventual dialogue in the court:
Even in the face of disaster (vais.amyam), women of good family save themselves by themselves, thereby conquering heaven. Even if they are bereft of their husbands, they are never angry; they hold on to life, guarded by their proper conduct. And if such a woman was deserted by her fool of a husband, fallen into trouble, she will not be angry at him, for he was seeking a way to survive (prSnaydtrdm.pariprepsu), burning with anxiety, after losing his clothes to the birds ... (18.8--12).

There is clearly enough here for Damayanti to make a tentative identification -- even the mere fact of a response might have been enough -- but again the answer itself evades the question. "Where are you, beloved gambler?" -- such was the riddle; to which Nala answers, "A good woman should not be angry at her husband, even if he has left her." The same obliquity obtains that we noted above. This couple speaks to one another in a strangely disconnected way (and not only at this stage of her life -- is not their courtship equally oblique and indirect?). Damayanti has the more powerful and more explicit queries -- Where are you? Who would do such a thing? Who, that is, but Nala -- and, perhaps (the underlying issue), who is he? Nala speaks in shifty tones, worried always about her response: It wasn't I; he, whoever he may be, was just trying to find his way; there is a fire blazing inside me; and, perhaps (the underlying implication), I am not wholly myself. It is important for us to see that this basic disjunction in the couple's discourse is not healed by the removal of Nala's mask. Damayanti's positive identification of her husband, after a series of intelligently conceived and poignant trials, only confirms and externalizes the gap

THE RIDDLE OF NALA

11

in their communication. She will, of course, dutiful Indian wife that she is, bow at his feet; she will even shed tears of joy -- or are they of joy? 7 -- at his recovery, at her recovery of him, at the victory over Karl. But her question, replete as it is with an existential challenge, goes unanswered or, at best, half-answered. Verbally, at least -- and, I believe, not only verbally -- there is a space between them that is never crossed. In this sense the riddling-speech of the period of searching and disguise is the proper paradigm for their communication. The riddle also embodies just such an open space, a "nowhere" that should somehow be bridged by the answer, even if the answer has the paradoxical effect of veiling or disguising again even as it brings the hidden solution to the fore. Couched in code, the riddle rings true: Damayanffs question is the right one for Nala, not merely in the literal way in which it is conceived but in the much more pervasive sense that the story as a whole seems to suggest. It is the answer that is the locus of difficulty, for everyone -- riddler, respondent, the eavesdropping audience outside. "Where are you, beloved gambler?" The simple answer should be: "Here." Or, rather, "I am here." or, better still (this is the oath Nala swore, as Damayanti reminds him): "I
alYl."

All the more striking, then, that Nala shirks these answers, that he resorts to oblique responses until the very end, when he says, in effect, "Not I" -- the antithesis of everything the context leads us to expect. Given this response, what remains of the riddle is then primarily its inner core, the now unbridgable gap. Nala would appear to have failed the test, as he fails so many others in the course of his story. But it is perhaps time for us to move beyond this somewhat hostile attitude to our hero, to stop badgering him (as Damayanti does) and complaining of his inadequate responses, and, instead, to ask ourselves if, unexpectedly, Nala might not be speaking the uncomfortable truth. "Not I" -- this is, perhaps, a stronger statement than we might think. It may even explain why Damayanff can love this person as she does, for all her resentment at his deeds. And it is not a casual answer offered callously, in extremis, but seems rather to express something of Nala's ongoing experience of himself. He has had excellent reason to wonder about himself during the three years of his disguise. Reason,

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DAVID SHULMAN

too, to accuse himself repeatedly, in the midst of his lonely exile. Listen to the question he asks -- not himself, but the void -- each night of his separation:
Where is she lying, tortured by hunger and thirst, exhausted, still remembering that fool? Whom, now, does she serve?

This is Nala's riddle, the precise equivalent of DamayantFs, 8 and, like hers, never really answered. Yet, in keeping with what we know of Nala, here, too, we find an indirection. The verse is entirely in the third person -- while she asks, "Where are you?", Nala's question is "Where is she ...?" -- and, most strikingly, the speaker himself is distanced, again an other, tasya mandasya, that fool. Even when Nala's companion Jivala, who hears this verse night after night, finally brings himself to ask Nala for whom he is mourning in this way (kdm imdm gocase nityam) -- an intimately direct query in the second person -- Nala can only respond at one remove: "Some fool had a wife, and his word, too, was inconstant; and, for some reason or other, that fool became separated from her. Now he wanders around miserably, burning with grief day and night; and as he remembers her each night, he sings this one verse. (15.13--15)" One verse, an unanswered riddle, sung by the unhappy man it describes, whom his companion obviously recognizes as such, who yet insists on speaking of himself as an anonymous other acting in indeterminate, seemingly inexplicable ways. Not even the exigencies of his disguise can explain this persistent alienation, which, moreover, as we saw, sustains itself past the moment of Nala's selfdisclosure. It is this theme of the alien self that we must pursue if we are to understand Nala's experience. One might, of course, try to limit its scope to that part of the story in which we are explicitly told that Nala is inhabited by another being, the vindictive Kali. This is the aspect that Nala himself eventually highlights, that he will use in attempting to explain his past. But here the text is far less constrained than its hero. If anything, it seems to regard the state of alien possession and diffuse identity as an intensification of a much more basic and enduring condition, which afflicts Nala -- and not only Nala -- from early in the narrative. One might be excused for regarding the story not as a fairy-tale with a happy ending but as an intimate, schizoid nightmare.

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13

Notice, for example, the consistent way in which major elements of the text are repeated. There are two dice-games, two svayarn, varas, two riddles (and two riddling moments), two snakes in the forest, two charioteers, two sabhds; Nala and Damayanti naturally have twins; according to the Tamil folk version, infected by this mania for replication, Damayant~ is herself a twin; 9 there are two critical appearances of the hamsa-birds (first as love-messengers, then as the dice); Nala plays not against an outsider but against his own brother, Puskara, and the latter is aided by Dvftpara, "the Second (throw)"; Karkotaka gives Nala a pair of matched garments; even on the level of naming, as Biardeau has recognized, a~ the story seems to play at doubling (Par1).fida and Rtuparn. a). Almost nothing that the text mentions manages to remain intact, unsplit, or singular, although thematically there is also a countervailing drive toward unity -- this is, after all, in the most general sense, a love story about two people uniting as one. Perhaps the most trenchant symbolic expression of this problem is the almost obsessive focus on the single garment (ekavastra) -- the garment used to clothe both Nala and Damayanti after the geese make off with Nala's own single cloth, and which Nala cuts in two as he abandons Damayanti in the forest. Here is how the Tamil poet Pukalenti describes this decisive moment:
Taking hold of that single garment, he cut it in two, so that one spirit split in two and his love was cut at the root. 11

They have been wandering together, body against body, under the same cloth (ekavastrasarnvftau, 10.4), and Damayanti at least finds nothing terrible in this: in the Tamil folk text, she rebukes Nala for mourning the loss of his own clothes: "After losing your entire kingdom, you feel sorry about a single garment? ''12 But the single garment is not an innocent loss; this is the ultimate stage in the process of Nala's reduction from king to begger, to a state of insupportable nakedness and not only in an external, visible sense. He has no ctothes (vivastra, 10.5) when Damayanti lies down to sleep, and he has to divide their remaining cover before he can leave her. Clearly, this act
-

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DAVID SHULMAN

of division goes deeper, as the Tamil poet hints; Nala is making a single being into two, and at the same time destroying his love. Half a garment will now cover each of two beings who are, at best, but half themselves. A single existence has broken open into two isolated and unhappy parts. But in Nala's case the process of bifurcation continues unabated: he can hardly bring himself to leave, his heart is torn into two parts (dvidheva hrdayam tasya duh.khitasydbhavat tadd, 10.27), he swings back and forth until Kali, from within, drags him away (doleva

muhur 6ydti ydti caiva sabhdm prati/avakrst.as tu kalind mohitah prddravan nalah., 10.27--28). Leaving Damayanti -- in the most
psychologically devastating moment of their joint life -- Nala appears to us as a sundered, fissile, self-fragmenting being, stripped to the thinnest of coverings, not even aware, yet, of the alien presence that has taken over part of his inner existence. He is mad: nastdtmd, gatacetana (10.29, 19). He has just told her he would sooner abandon himself than her (tyafeyam aham dtrndnam na caivarn tvdm, 9.30) -- and perhaps this is what has really happened. His self, such as it is, has hardly survived intact from the rupture. This statement is not meant to be ironic: who could vouch for the wholeness of Nala's self up to this point? This is not the first time he has experienced a far-reaching fracture. Rather, the scene in the forest, which splits him internally, as the prelude to a still more extreme transformation of identity, is, in a sense, no more than the internalization of a process previously encountered on the outside. This is a man who has seen himself reproduced in quadruplicate, who has stood beside four palpable mirror-images of himself, whose identity boundaries have been subjected to one shock after another -- not only at the time of the svayamvara, when his humanity surprisingly saves him, but also in the course of the negotiations leading up to this event. The fissiparous, despairing hero of the forest who severs the last embodiment of wholeness in his life is living out an inescapable and persistently divisive process initiated, we may well feel, at the moment he first heard of the lovely Damayanti, and fell in love. Nala's primary experience, enacted in varying manners at different points in his career, is that of watching reality -- his reality, inner and outer -- splinter and reproduce itself. His recurrent complaint, the word most often associated with his reduced or transfigured state, is

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15

vaisamya -- literally "unevenness," non-sameness, the asymmetrical division and replication of the shattered whole. 13 Initially the most "even" and "same" of men, a veritable paragon of static symmetry and perfection, unenlivened by even the least individual failing or flaw, Nala is driven into a series of utterly alien dislocations, of disjointed vaisamya states. This series, surely, lies at the heart of the story and its fascination; it is this that the Epic narrator, B.rhadaiva, seeks to communicate to Yudhisthira by way of comforting him in his own alltoo-similar course. Here is the sequence: Nala is whole, a properly composed accumulation of all virtues (upapanno gun.air istaih, 1.1); he falls in love -- the first intrusion of the other and the unbalanced into his inner world, which begins slowly to disaggregate; he is co-opted by the gods into speaking on their behalf, against his own voice -- the first, only seemingly abortive movement of alienation, soon to be resumed; he stands beside his replicated self at the svayamvara, and is recognized and thus temporarily saved from inner dissolution by Damayanti; because of a ritual error, he becomes possessed by Karl and is soon divested of all he owns; now the process of inner fissure accelerates, he splits the remaining token of unity and, unable to hold his proliferating selves together, departs in the direction of utterly alien disguise. However exotic the setting of this story, the underly~mg experience is, perhaps, not so remote from us as we might wish:
Imagine now a man who is deprived of everyone he loves, and at the same time of iris house, his habits, his clothes, in short, of everything he possesses: he will be a hollow man, reduced to suffering and needs, forgetful of dignity and restraint, for he who loses all often easily loses himselfJ 4

Thus the late Primo Levi, referring to a different catastrophe. The difference lies in the fact that for the Nalopdkhydna, such losses are less a singular, aberrant horror than a kind of norm, and in the perception that Nala's erosion of self actually begins considerably before the chain of his external losses.
INSIDE THE MIRROR

You may object that all this is, after all, rather speculative; that the text never explicitly connects the svayam,vara nightmare to Nala's later

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SHULMAN

inner divisions and disguise; above all, that I am ignoring the principal explanation that the text itself offers for Nala's bizarre behavior, i.e. his take-over by Kali. And, you might say, this, too, has a simple, external, technical explanation, the ritual mistake Nala made which left a tiny point of his ankle dry when he washed. 15 So -- had it not been for this inadvertent error, Nala's perfect existence could have continued forever; the story documents a needless interruption in an ongoing realization of the human ideal. This is a little like reading the Iliad as an unexpected by-product of the unfortunate fact that Achilles' mother, Thetis, had to hold on to him somewhere while dipping him in the Styx. I will nevertheless have something to say about Kali in a few moments. You may, of course, still be right -- perhaps this is a story about possession and how to avoid it, or, at the least, what attitude to adopt if it comes over you despite your best efforts (Yudhisthira's recommended position); or, taking a somewhat wider perspective, above the determinism of fate, which overpowered even so perfect a person as Nala, but which also balanced itself in the end by restoring him, willy-nilly, to his former estate (the perspective, perhaps, of the frame-story of the Book of Job). But I doubt it, and I am not quite alone in doubting it. Much of the Indian literary tradition, which has been so taken up with this story over so many centuries, also focuses on Nala's peculiar problems of identity, of knowing or recognizing himself. Take, for example, griharsa's famous kdvya, the Naisadhiyacarita, which is interested only in the early part of the story (it breaks off before the dice-game). When Nala enters the assembly at the time of the svayarn,vara and encounters the four gods dissembling themselves in his own form, this is what he says:
nobhav ildbhtih kim u darpakag' ca/ bhavanti ndsatyayutau bhavantah
Just who are you - - Purfiravas and Kfima together with the two Agvins?

(lo.45). Staring at his own image, he sees only the traditional exemplars of male beauty -- and, characteristically in my view, fails to recognize himself. The svayam, vara itself will correct this mistake (in devious

THE RIDDLE OF NALA

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ways, appropriate to kdvya) and, at the same time, set the stage for the far more severe identity-crisis still to come. I would like to highlight two aspects of ahis early, preparatory stage of the story insofar as it relates to the question of Nala's self-perception and the articulation of his identity. First is the fact that here, as later, this identity depends, in moments of doubt, upon the outside voice of Damayant~. From the onset of their love, Nala is oriented, for purposes of his own self-recognition, toward her. It is Damayant~ who must pick him out from the series of five identical images; Nala can make no move to help her. This dependence wilt be reenacted at the end of his period in disguise, as we know. She puts him through the various trials of anagnorisis, and she will be the one to force an ultimate confession of identity. This, apparently, is how things should be. It is as if Nala spends his life not in the mode of the Socratic imperative -- gndthi s'auton -- but in epistemological hunger for the woman outside him, to whom he cries: "Please know me!" This dependence is more than a little meaningful in the context of the identity-confusion which is Nala's constant affliction. Secondly, the notion of mirroring is relevant here in a specific way. The early chapters of the text, up to the svayamvara, show us the heroes in love from afar, a love mediated by the geese-messengers. The world is still perfect and utterly symmetrical; one paragon falls in love by hearsay with another. So patterned and conventional is this sequence, and so closely related to the alleged perfection of each of the two lovers, that one would be tempted to say that, at this stage, each has fallen in love primarily with an image of his or her own self. The two passions mirror one another to perfection. But Nala already suffers from the specific deficiency of the mirror-image -- not merely a generalized lack of autonomy, but the more individualized and critical inability to speak for oneself. He speaks to Damayantg, at their first meeting, with the words of the gods. However honorable, his behavior expresses an inner falseness, which Damayanti characteristically perceives and immediately rejects. Nala has not yet learned to speak when the crucial day of the svayam, vara arrives, a day wholly given over to mirrors and reflections -- indeed, the last such moment in the story, since at this point Nala, the mute image, confronted with his own unsettling reflections, begins his fall through the cognitively

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crippling and disorienting mirror into a broken, disintegrating world. Nala enters into the looking-glass before falling from his throne. It takes time, of course: in the meantime love-in-unity will flourish, the twins will be born; Kali, as we know, is lurking restlessly in the wings. It would be quite wrong for us to trivialize the romance of these two lovers, even to corrode it with skepticism. But neither should we assume that all is entirely as it should be with our protagonist. The story documents a process, and has a teleology. It revolves around a double mystery, the mystery of two beings become one, and of a supposedly single person splitting into two. The same mystery informs the riddle, with its essential two tiers, its imagistic unifying of normally separate realms, which then diverge again in the solution. 16 The story seems to pose Nala as the question, Damayanti as the answer (this is Nala's own demand): "Who am I?" "You are (the person, the human being) Nala." Through all her travails, she remains lucid, and conspicuously undisguised (although she is reduced to the soiled, dishevelled state of the woman/goddess in exile, so reminiscent of Draupad~, in poignant contrast to her husband. She embodies faith and continuity, while he seems an exercise in discontinuous evolution, on all levels -- externally, in terms of the inner moulding of his identity, and on the level of his self-experience and awareness. The only aspect of his existence that is never in doubt is his humanity, i.e. that aspect which guided Damayanti's choice. In this respect the story stands out as an antithesis to the pervasive Indian pattern of upward marital mobility, with a god or goddess as preferred spouse or lover (however problematic such marriages may turn out to be). 17 Nala is chosen as a man, and appears to exemplify a certain understanding of what it means to be a manJ s But if this is the case, if Nala shows us man as a riddle, as a conundrum of fractured, multiple identities, then we may well wonder about the adequacy of Damayanti's "solution." The doubt articulated by the story goes beyond the mystery of the lovers' union; the text articulates not only the obvious and difficult question of whether two can ever be one (as the riddle falsely suggests), but also the even more troubling and rooted problem of whether o n e can ever be one. The aspect of the riddle that is most saliently made present by this story is not that of coding and decoding, of concealing and revealing -- though Nala's cycle of iconic paragon to naked

THE RIDDLE OF NALA

19

begger to disguised dwarf to paragon again does embody this aspect as well -- but rather that of alienation and identity, the integrating or dis-integrating potential of the individual, self-questioning being. All of this may make Nala's seemingly evasive answer to Damayanti -- "not I," or "not only I" -- more intelligible. He has, after all, learned something from his experience. But here we must be cautious to avoid an overly romantic view of his inner evolution. I have spoken of a certain teleology implicit in the unfolding of Nala's career. It seems clear to me that the romantic prelude, up to and including the svayamvara, is highly relevant to all the subsequent events of the story, seen in terms of Nala's innerness and self-awareness. But it would be too simple to regard the disguised Bfihuka's consciousness as more "true," more essentially aware, than that of the noble king before his intoxication and fall. Nala in disguise is no more himself than Nala on his throne. 19 It is not merely a question of expanding identity to incorporate some initially excluded aspect or aspects, although such a development does take place in this, as in so many stories from the Epic. The more basic theme has to do with the nature of human identity as such, with the meaning of having a self. This is the teleological thrust of which I have spoken. To understand it, we have to look, at last, at the role of Kali and of fate. DAIVA, DEVANA, AND THE SACRIFICE
tasya daivdt prasa~igo 'bhftd atimdtram sma devane

~ of fate, he became excessively attached to the dice." (Damayanti to the Cedi Queen-Mother, 13.57) Nala is presented to us, and presents himself to others, as having been possessed by the evil Kali, i.e. the present degenerate period of time; the possession transpires because of a ritual oversight but is immediately directed toward the dice-match that will determine Nala's experience; Nala is dispossessed only after acquiring the secret knowledge called aks.ahr.daya, "heart of the dice." We must ask ourselves

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what this knowledge really is, and how it differentiates the results of, and no doubt also the process of playing, the two dice-games. And there are other questions: what is the relation between dicing and possession? Between dicing (devana) and fate (daiva), frequently juxtaposed by our text, indeed by the epic as a whole? 2~ Just what does possession mean? Are there identity-boundaries that survive Kali's invasion of Nala's body and mind? The answer to the last question is clearly, yes -- Nala is certainly aware of himself, at various points, as distinct from the dark forces within him. Not, perhaps, during the first dice-game, when he is described as wholly mad; perhaps not even in the forest, when Kali manages to drag him away from Damayanti, though only after a furious inner struggle; but definitely later, during his exilic period, for example when he sings, night after night, the single verse of mourning that contains the essence of his loss. It is not Kali who mourns in this way. Nala is also said to experience his inner world as on fire -- a double flame, with Kali burning him even as Karkotaka's poison and Damayanti's curse burn Kali. This awareness surely places Nala beyond any simple identification with his possessing demon, as does the fact of his ongoing inner conflict over the course he follows. That said, we can return to our earlier intuition that would counter any reading of this story as the account of a good man's temporary defeat by purely external forces (Kali, time, fate). Nala is overpowered and driven, but not from outside; and even internally, there are parts of him that escape Kali's tyrannical grip. The Kathakali version of the story even has Karl himself say something to this effect, at the critical moment when he, Kali, is forced out of Nala's body: "You humiliated Indra and the gods by marrying Damayanti, and you have paid the price -- losing the dice-game, suffering in the forest, forgetting Damayanti, bodily disfigurement, loss of reputation, servitude to another. You blame me for all this -- what can I say to someone like you, who always tries to blame another? ''2a Nala rightly objects to this speech as disingenuous, but its very presence in the story, at this iuncture, suggests that it is not without a certain force. Equipped with his new knowledge, Nala can bully Kali into submission; Kali's parting argument hangs, unanswered, in the air. We are faced again with the central problem of Nala's responsibility as refracted through the

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21

broken prism of his identity. Who has acted here? How much of Nala has been present all along? How much remains of him in the end? We should notice that this series of issues, together with the dominant narrative focus on the theme of possession out of which they emerge, constitutes a separate axis from the series relating to Nala's love for Damayanti and its recurrent trials. The latter series revolves around the hero's horizontal bonding with a cleary distinguished "other," however we may understand this other person's selfdefinition and assumed roles. I will refer to this set as the "axis of otherness," noting that such an axis need not be entirely limited to the love-attachment but may extend also to relationships such as that between the rival brothers. Nala's transformation through possession follows a rather different logic rand direction, which I shall call the "axis of innerness," since it transpires entirely within Nala's own self or selves in what we might imagine, if we need a graphic image, as a "vertical" mode. As is the case with the horizontal axis, the axis of innerness never shows us a single, perfectly integrated "fit," or a clear progression from one lucidly articulated state to another. It is more of an evolving series of partially overlapping self-images. The two axes obviously share certain features. As we shall see, they are also capable of intersecting. They may also make use of the same symbolic means: thus the Nalaccakkiravartti katai explicitly asserts that the golden birds, whom we first meet as messengers of love responsible for motivating the heroes' action and feeling along the axis of otherness, reappear in the story -- another conspicuous instance of the drive toward doubling -- in a remarkable transformation, as the aks.as, the dice, come to complete the process of despoiling the erstwhile king by removing his own remaining garment. 22 This time they are messengers of Kali/gani, by now comfortably ensconced inside Nala, and thus they emerge from and move along the inner, vertical axis. It is perhaps significant that in this case the emblem of connection (the golden hamsa as matchmaker) is also the harbinger of separation and destruction. If we wish to understand the dynamics that rule the axis of innerness, and, in particular, to explore the transition that takes place within Nala with the acquisition of the aksahrdaya, we have to understand something of the ancient Indian game of dice. Our knowledge of the game, as it was originally played, is unfortunately incomplete. Never-

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theless, several major aspects are clear enoughY In all likelihood, Nala's dice-game, as distinct from the earlier, Vedic types, was akin to the game known today as chaupar in North India (the source of our game of pacheesi or parcheesi). Here the board is constituted by two intersecting axes, divided into squares; each player is represented by several pieces, the object being to move these pieces -- in accordance with the fall of the dice, and the player's tactical considerations -- into the empty space where the two axes meet. That player wins who first brings all his pieces into this empty center. It is undoubtedly wrong to imagine that this game is either one of pure chance or entirely an artful exercise of skill; rather, what comes into play is some combination of knowledge, of a specialized kind, and the externalization of those powerful and structured forces operating within the player and affecting his every move. (It is in this sense that the dice game is dependably related to divination.) Chance, in the modern sense, probably does not exist at all within this sphere (or, indeed, within the Epic universe that contains and highlights the game) -- but neither is the dice-game wholly determined; quite the contrary is the case. Much uncertainty attends the working out of the player's inner states, especially insofar as they are characterized by the drives toward fragmentation, confusion, self-alienation, and, above all, madness. 24 The dice allow these forces to operate within the structured, modular cosmos estabfished by the frame and rules of play. The striking point, for our purposes, is that this cosmos is constructed around certain primary, generative tensions. We might think of the pieces moving through the model/board as embodying the aspect of fragmentation and discontinuity always consequent upon the entry into play. Like the sacrifice, the dice-game takes the world apart before allowing for its reconstitution. On the other hand, the dice themselves, with their numbered "eyes," are a condensed form of connectivity: knowing the combinations, the coincidences and resonances between any given "throw" and the numbered and hierarchically ordered elements in the cosmos (the cardinal directions, the arrangement of syllables in metres and mantras, the aeons which mark the unrolling of time, and so on) is a way of re-composing a disarticulated universe, thereby also bringing under some semblance of control the processes of dispersal and category confusion, inside and out. 25 To

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pursue the sacrificial analogy: the ritual should end, in both cases, with the universe in place, each plane of existence in perfect alignment, the relations between levels crisply articulated, all limits and boundaries lucidly defined. The spring of existence, which normally unwinds in an unavoidable entropic spiral, is rewound to its initial position of pure potential and perfect form. Dispersal, the empirical state of our being, is countered by a gathering and a reconstruction. Let me put this a little more concretely. One of the major elements of this process in the Brahminical sacrificial system is the knowledge of the bandhus, the hidden interconnections of disparate orders or levels of existence. "The sacrificial stake is the sun." These bandhus assert not a literal claim for identity but a ranked relationship, normally obscured, which the sacrifice articulates and stabilizes in place the process being one of dividing and separating no less than of connecting. 26 Planes of existence are brought into alignment so that the possibility of communication between them can exist. Moreover, each plane seems to replicate the higher (or subtler, or more inner) one beyond it; we can imagine a concentric superimposition around a central point shared by all levels. In the dice-game, the role of the bandhus seems to be taken over by the counting-wisdom of the successful player, the conqueror of time. This wisdom also has immediate practical uses in terms of the calculations the skilled player needs to make in order to achieve his goal of reassembling the scattered parts of himself in the empty center square. Here the nature of the model points inescapably to the latent vision of both cosmos and self. There is, no doubt, a sense in which Nala's new-found expertise -- the knowledge of numbers that must comprise the "heart of the dice" -- is understood as a form of yoking or control, somehow equivalent to the equine skill that .Rtuparna is given in exchange. And yet these images of yoking, counting, winning mastery, ordering, are, for all their centrality, only part of the story. They have a price, or an inner logic, which Nala exemplifies perhaps more clearly than any other classical hero. For the violence, the destructive energy necessarily implied by the rituals -- by both sacrifice and dicing -inhabit the Nala story, indeed Nala himself, in persistent and graphic form. We sometimes speak of the evolution of Brahininical sacrifice as entailing a process of internalization, the sacrificer becoming, in
-

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himself, a self-sufficient locus for the entire ritual. Nala shows us something of what this might mean. "Divine coals cast upon the dicing-board, they (the dice), though cold, burn up the heart" -- thus the .Rgvedic gambler (10.34.9), but it could just as well be Nala speaking, even, or especially, after he has acquired the gambler's wisdom. Here destruction, initially evident in the madness of the game, actually enters into the player; put somewhat differently, the inner experience of that person who can successfully re-calculate the entire world, who is no longer victimized by the madness of the game but is rather its master and controller, who has brought himself into perfect alignment with a perfectly ordered universe -- that experience is a kenosis transpiring within a self-consuming nowhere-space. 27 This is the point where the two axes of which we have spoken, of innerness and otherness, intersect; the point where innerness is itself a kind of otherness, and vice versa. Nala has learned what he needs to know if he is to reverse the downward spiralling course of his life; he knows the correspondences, can count, estimate, divide; he can rearrange reality, in a small, modular fragment of itself, without remainder or further impurity, and can thus rid his inner space of Time; but he also continues to say, at the moments that matter, no doubt as part of this same experiential knowledge that is uniquely his, "not I," or "not wholly I," or "I am, or have been, other than myself." Like the riddle itself, still unresolved, that formulates the search for his identity, Nala acts from within a structure that embodies an empty, motivating gap. 2s
O U T OF T H E L O O K I N G - G L A S S , T H R O U G H F A T E A N D T I M E

Let us recapitulate by looking again at the entire course of Nala's development. When we first meet Nala and Damayanti, they are mirror-images of perfection -- surface images at that, untested, without foreground or depth. They fall in love. Nala speaks not for himself, but for the gods; Damayanti reveals, already at this early point, her steadfastness and gift for recognition. This will remain her necessary role; Nala will be, or rather become, himself only through her. At the svayam, vara, the mirror cracks open; thanks to Damayanti's persistence

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and clarity of purpose, Nala is saved by his very humanity and mortality, the determining elements of Damayanti's choice. This choice has the paradoxical effect of forcing his humanity truly to take effect -- or, we might say, of forcing Nala into time (although the text characteristically expresses this the other way round, as Time entering into him). Like Odysseus on Kalypso's island, Damayanti opts for a mortal and imperfect spouse, and gets precisely this: Nala stumbles, is possessed, goes mad, careens wildly and foofishly from one terrible mistake to the next. From the timelessness of his earlier mirror-existence, the Zwischenriiume der Zeit, as Rilke says of mirrors, 29 Nala has moved into a new, more properly human sphere, Now, as the Telugu version of the story has it, "flaws accumulate inside him. ''3~ It is an internal process, characterized by conscious alienation, the perceived presence of alien being within. But this process is also the condition of Nala's eventual recovery. Having graduated, as it were, from the shadowy mirror-state to a kind of personhood, Nala will eventually find his way back out of time, or toward controlling time -- but only by virtue of having time alive within him. This process is also the working of fate, daiva, as the text tells us repeatedly, in various ways. Damayanti says it, perhaps, most simply and eloquently: "Nothing human beings do in this world is devoid of daiva (na hy adaivam krtam kim cin nardndm iha vidyate, 13.40). Or, as her maidservant reports on the eve of Nala's anagnorisis: "This is the truth (paramdrthama): one can speak of him only as daiva (dtanini daivam ana valay~, Nannaya 194)." Or, in Nala's final summation to his ministers, after his restoration: "gani was angry at me and tricked me, without my knowing it; we have lived out our own action (karma); each of us must experience what Brahmfi has determined for us. ''31 Note the triple causality evident in this last statement, from the folk source, and how it all works together to underline the necessity of the process Nala has undergone. It is an inner process, the inevitable concomitant of being human; as such, it is difficult to see it as something imposed from without, or, indeed, as wholly determined from the start. On the contrary: daiva retains something of the inherent yet non-random uncertainff of devana, the game of dice. This is a process of internal unfolding, with

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major epistemological implications for the suffering subject whose notions of self expand uncomfortably in its course. Nala comes to know himself as other, perhaps as a confusing series of others who influence his actions and help explain their incoherence, their apparent cruelty, their taintedness with evil. This, too, is part of being human. Evil, which, like time, is initially outside the hero, an alien remnant, is here internalized, assimilated, absorbed. From now on, its locus is somewhere in the shifting configuration of Nala's selves. But the process ends by the apparent exclusion or defeat of evil in the context of Nala's new knowledge. This, too, makes sense in the fight of our understanding of the dice-game: having rearranged the universe, including the component of degenerative time, around the central axis of innerness, Nala consumes the evil of Karl in his own inner space. His world is aligned with all other worlds, with the burning space of ultimate otherness successfully internalized as well; evil, too, is swallowed up in this dark hole, indeed cannot survive its identification with this point that is, perhaps, the true aks..ahrdaya,the heart of the dice. But the "heart of the dice" is also, it seems, the final locus of the self. Nala's earliest discoveries are of those elements of selthood which are elsewhere, alien, and beyond (and, as such, outside the timeless mirror-existence from which he departs); but the completion of this process of internal unfolding and recognition takes him beyond even this perception, toward an experience of the self as rich in being but ultimately empty of identity. Only such an existence can transcend evil and time. The self, as Nala knows it, is a point of conflagration. Man, at his best, most knowledgable, is a self-consuming, hence selftranscending being. In this system, the words "not I" are the strongest possible affirmation. 32 Of Nala it is probably correct to say that in an important sense he is not really there, and that his not being there is fundamental to the story's vision. We might define his drama more generally as that of the composition and decomposition of the fragmented self; and it is this theme, especially in relation to the destructive aspect of the process, that Nala epitomizes for the Epic as a whole. In this sense, the NalopdkhySna might indeed be seen as a kind of symbolic prtcis of the larger work, which is so fascinated with the notion of a serfconsuming fire burning at the center of existence. Other paths also

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open up at this point. We can see the striking difference from our Western notions of personhood: our instincts, certainly those of the psychoanalytic tradition, aim at reclamation, at recovering those parts of the self which are felt to be less accessible to consciousness, atrophied, or "lost." To reclaim is to achieve greater wholeness, greater unity and cohesion, a more pervasive and balanced integration. For Nala, or for the poets who sang his story, the self itseff is other; possession by Kali is not a moment to be reclaimed or integrated but an awakening, through intoxication and madness, to this fragmented alienness within us and to the process of self-consummation, in a double sense, that is felt to be constitutive of human experience. Fate, for these poets, allows this process to take place and offers the hope of transcendence; no wonder it is linked by etymology with a sense of the divine (daiva, from deva, god). For them, "not F' rings truer than "I, driven by an unknown impulse that is yet wholly mine." We may also think of the primordial, lonely Purusa-Person of the Upanisad, 33 who, in the beginning, looked about him but saw nothing other than himself (so 'nviksya ndnyad dtmano 'pa@at), and who then uttered the first of all sentences couched in language: "I am" (so 'ham asmi). Nala, too, we should recall, uttered just such a statement, as the promise to Damayanti that he pointedly fails to keep. For him, at the end of his evolution, to say "I am" must ultimately proceed from the opposite pole, perhaps from a statement such as "not I am" -- still a strong assertion. And where the Purusa saw in the vastness of the universe, still uncreated, nothing other than the self, Nala learns to see the self in the created world as only other. Only in their relation to the existence of evil, and to the inner reality of fire, do these two figures converge:
sa yat p~trvo 'smdt sarvasmdt sarvdn pdpmana ausat, tasmdt purusah.
"Being prior to all this, he burnt up all evils; that is what makes him Purusa -- a person."

NOTES Rilke, Orpheus, 1.9. 2 Kabir 15.47, trans. D. Gold, in Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Textual Sources for the Study of Hinduism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988).

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3 Nalaccakkiravartti katai, p. 3. 4 On the pertinence of the Naisadh~yacarita for issues of direct concern to us here -especially the metaphysical implications of the composition of the self -- see P. E. Granoff, Philosophy and Argument in Late Veddnta: ~ri Harsa's Khan. d.anakhan, d.akhddya (Dordreeht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978), pp. 252--54. 5 It is of some importance that in ancient India, the dice were made from the nuts of the vibhitaka tree. 6 See Nannaya, Nalopdkhydnamu (Madras: Vav~a RfimasvSmi gfistrulu, 1967), 204. 7 Nal.av~npd (Adyar: U. Ve. C~ninfttaiyar Nfil Nilalyam, 1960) 386 makes us wonder: at the moment of Nala's transformation, Damayanff's "poison-like eyes" hide from her, by their tears, the man "who cut her dress and abandoned her in that other place." 8 The opening query is identical: kva nu t v a m . . . ," kva nu sd . . . . 9 Nalaccakkiravartti katai (Madras: Ar. Ji. Pati Kamp~_ni, 1973), p. 18. 10 M. Biardean, "Nala et Damayanti, heros 6piques," Indo-lranian Journal 27 (1984): 268. 11 NalavOn.pd, 270. 12 Nalaccakkiravartti katai, 80. 13 See, e.g., 8.13, 9.20, 10.1. 14 Primo Levi, If This is a Man (New York: Summit Books, 1986), p. 16. 15 Thus Nalaccakkiravartti katai, 65. 16 Very often, as Peter Claus remarks in an unpublished paper, there is an erotic level which becomes present in the posing of the fiddle and is obscured by its solution. 17 E.g., the Purfirvas model. Nala is not alone in the counter-tradition (of choosing the mortal spouse over an available immortal one): there are cases such as that of Cyavana (whom Sukanyfi prefers to the Agvins: ~atapatha Brdhmana 4.1.5.1--13; Jaiminiya Brdhmana 3.120--128; MBh 3.122--123) and, in the Telugu tradition, the Manucaritramu of P~ddana. 18 Here we may cite Biardean's persuasive argument that Nala's name is associatively connected with Nara, "Man": op. cit., 251. 19 A temptation of this sort is particularly appealing in dealing with the Pfindava heroes in the period of their disguise, at Vir~ta's court (MBh, Book 4). 20 Cf. Dhrtarfistra to Vidura, 2.51.25. 2~ Unnfiyi Vfiriy~r, Nalacaritam Attakatha (Trivandrum: Valsa Printers, 1981) 3.13, p. 101. 22 Nalaccakkiravartti katai, 76--78. This identification is also perhaps implied by the Sanskrit original, which speaks of the birds' golden plumage (9.12). 23 See H. Liiders, "Das Wiirfelspiel im alten Indien," Abhandlungen der kd'niglichen Gesellschafi der Wissenschafien zu Gdttigen, Philologisch-historische Masse, neue folge, Band IX, 2 (Berlin, 1907); J. C. Heesterman, The Ancient Indian Royal Consecration (The Hague: Mouton, 1957), 151ft.; G. J. Held, The Mahdbhdrata, an Ethnological Study (Amsterdam: Uitgeversmaatsehappij Holland, 1935), 256--79; J. A. B. van Buitenen, The Mahdbhgzrata, Vol. II (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 27--30. A more recent study by Harry Falk clearly goes beyond the early scholarly conceptualizations of the game: Bruderschafi and Wiirfelspiel (Frieburg: Hedwig Falk, 1986); and see David White, "Dog's Die," History of Religion 28 (1989), pp. 283--

THE RIDDLE

OF NALA

29

303. Together with Don Handelman, I am preparing a volume of essays focused on the dice-game that giva plays with his wife Pfirvaff. 24 Already in R.gVeda 10.34.11, the dice drive the gambler mad (mddayanti). 25 This formulation follows upon an insight of Don Handelman's. 26 See Brian Smith, "Gods and Men in Vedic ritualism: Toward a Hierarchy of Resemblance," History of Religions 24 (1985): 291--307. 27 The Tamil chapbook has its own suitably transformed symbol for the dice-game model: here Rtuparna shoots a single arrow at the immense tdn_ri tree ( ~ Skt. vibhitaka), grown "as big as the universe" (piramdnt.arnat.t.um valarntu) the arrow pierces each one of the tree's vast number of leaves. The knowledge the king gives Nala is now described as a form of archery (pdnappirayokam pan.n.ukifa vittai, 130); but the underlying concept of a model of the cosmos, with an empty hole at the center, survives in the image of the cosmic tree pierced in every leaf. 28 In this sense Nala is not unlike Oedipus, who, as Vernant has so perceptively shown, is himself the answer to the riddle asked of him: see J.-P. Vernant, "From Oedipus to Periander: Lameness, Tyranny, Incest in Legend and History," Arethusa 15 (1982), pp. 19--38. 29 Orpheus 2:3. 30 Nannaya, 158. 31 Nalaccakkiravartti katai, 149. 32 We may recall that in the gfifikara Advaita the denial of the self (dtman) is considered trenchant proof of its existence -- for who is the denying subject? 33 Br.haddranyaka Upanis.ad, 1.4.1.