The Antiquities of Orissa v2.c16.83

Language: English

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The sequel of the story is doubtful. Immediately after the abduction, it is but natural that the lady should appear in great grief, in a desponding mood, as in the Gaṇeśa tableau, spurning the advances of her ravisher, or in despair turning her attention to the solace of religion, and devoting herself, as befits a Buddhist maiden, to the adoration of the of the *caitya* as in the Queen’s Palace. If a married lady, her constancy and faith are best indicated by the Aśoka tree and the Brāhmaṇī goose, which are most appropriately introduced. But, if so, what is the meaning of the last scene in which a man and a women are engaged in amorous dalliance? Dose it indicate that, according to the Rāṇī Naur version of the story, the Orissan Helen, like her archetype of Greece, took kindly to her abductor and lived happily with him? If so, the emblems of constancy and faith, the Aśoka tree and the Brāhmaṇi goose, would be quite out of place and the morality of the representation would be such as not to render it worthy of record in a Buddhist monastery. This may be explained away by taking the last tableau to be a representation of the restoration of the abducted fair one to her liege lord; and it is a Buddhist version of the heroine of the Rāmāyaṇa, and not of the epœa of Homer, that we have before us. I am not aware of any Buddhist legend to serve as the prototype of this representation. Part of the story may be taken for the abduction of Sītā by the mighty giant of Ceylon and.

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her subsequent confinement in an Aśoka grove, but the details are entirely against such an identification. The Sītā of the Buddhist legend in the *Daśaratha Jātaka*, was never abducted from her brother and husband Rāma,¹⁴ and so the picture cannot be intended for her. Nor can we for a moment suppose any relation between the story of the frieze and the mistress of Paris. All that may be safely concluded is, that the frieze records the abduction of a married woman, her constancy and faith, and probably also her final restoration to her husband. Such a story would be a most appropriate one for representation in a Buddhist monastery, and its counterpart will most probably be met with in one of the Jātakas or Avadānas, of which so many hundreds are extant, and so few have as yet been examined. The second theory of the lady being a maiden, to which I am disposed to give greater credence, would obviate all difficulties. She is carried away by force, and is for a time in a desponding mood, and driven to seek solace in religion, notwithstanding various attempts to divert her, but ultimately she yields to her ravisher and is united to him. Marriage, under such circumstances, is admitted to be right and proper: there is no immorality, at least in Indian estimation, in a marriage of this kind, and Buddhist monks may well represent it on the walls of a monastery without any compunctious visitings of conscience.

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For an abducted maiden who marries and remains faithful to his abductor, the emblems of constancy would not be inappropriate. Further, we may well believe that the representation was caused to be made by the prince, who had the caves bored, and the monks came in without any thought as to the propriety or otherwise of the representation. Of course there is nothing against the presumption that it was intended to depict an historical fact, but what it was it is impossible now to determine. A story is told of an abduction by Puruṣottama Deo of Orissa of a princess from Kaliṅga. He invaded Conjeverem and brought away Padmāvatī, the beauteous and accomplished daughter of the king of that place, and made her over, in fulfilment of a vow, to his chief minister, in order to wed her to a sweeper. "Both the minister, however, and all the people of Puri, commiserated her misfortune, and at the next Rath Jātra, when the Mahārājā [13] began to perform his office of Chandāl (sweeper) the individual entrusted with the charge of the lady, brought her forth and presented her to him, saying, 'You ordered me to give the Princess to a sweeper: you are the sweeper upon whom I bestow her.' Moved by the intercession of his subjects, the Rājā at last consented to marry Padmāvatī, and carried her to the palace at Cuttack. The end of this lady's history is as romantic as the preceding portion of it. She is said to have conceived and brought forth a son by Mahādeo, and shortly after she disappeared.

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All the circumstances were explained to the husband in a dream, who acknowledged gratefully the honor conferred on him, and declared the child thus mysteriously born his successor in the Rāj."¹⁵ This is stated in the temple records of Puri to have happened at about the close of the 15th century, and, as the fact was written down at the time of the occurrence, there is no doubt as to the historical character of the first part of the princess's story; and knowing how readily the gods have in all ages and everywhere intervened to explain away, or cast a halo, over awkward incidents of birth in high life, we easily overlook the second. Orme takes the story back to a much earlier period, but not sufficiently early to make it anterior to the era when the caves were excavated; and there are so many discrepanices between the story of the frieze and that of the temple records and of Orme, that it is impossible to accept them as the same. The only circumstance common to the three versions is the abduction of a woman; and this, in the annals of the human race, has been so common in all ages and in every clime, that it cannot be accepted as a reliable datum for any historical inference. The case is different as regards the hero of the Hāthi Gumphā inscription to be noticed further on. The cave shown on the second tableau of the Queen's Palace frieze (Plate VII) is, as already stated, most probably a carved representation of the Hāthi Gumphā cave;

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and if so, it would follow that the hero delineated in the frieze should be accepted as a plastic representation of the person decribed in the inscription. Now a marriage of that person with the daughter of a conquered hill chief is mentioned in the monument, and he is repeatedly said to have caused various caves to be bored, and it would not be by any means unreasonable to suppose that he caused the story of his romantic marriage to be sculptured in the frieze. Unfortunately the inscription is so obliterated at the part where the marriage is mentioned, that it is impossible to gather any details of that incident, and the identification of the hero of the inscription with the abductor in the frieze must remain a mere conjecture.