A History of Indian Literature v1.c9.s8.14

v1.c9.s8.14

In the town of Mathurā there reigned a bad king *Kaṃsa*. To him Nārada announced that he would meet his death at the hands of the eighth son of *Devakī*, the sister of his father and the wife of *Vasudeva*. Then Kaṃsa determines to kill all Devakī's children. He has Devakī closely guarded by his servants, and six of her children are killed immediately after birth. The seventh child, that brother of Kṛṣṇa who is later known as “*Rāma* with the ploughshare,” “Balarāma,” or “Baladeva,” is rescued by Nidrā,¹ the goddess of sleep, by her transferring the boy, before he is born, from the womb of Devakī to that of *Rohiṇī*, another wife of Vasudeva. The eighth son, however, and this was Kṛṣṇa, was exchanged by Vasudeva himself, immediately after birth, in order to rescue him from Kaṃsa, with the daughter of the cowherd *Nanda* and his wife *Yaśodā*, who was born at the same time. So the little daughter of the latter is dashed against a rock by Kaṃsa, while Kṛṣṇa is regarded as the son of a cowherd and grows up among the cowherds. Rāma, too, is entrusted to the protection of the cowherd family by Vasudeva, and the two boys grow up together in the cowherds' station. Even as a suckling Kṛṣṇa performs wondrous miracles. One day, when his foster-mother Yaśodā, after having laid the sleeping child under a waggon, lets him wait too long for food, he begins to struggle impatiently with hands and feet, and finally overthrows the heavy waggon with one foot. In mad merriment the boys Kṛṣṇa and Rāma later rush through forest and field, and make much trouble for the simple cowherd's wife. On one occasion she hardly knows what to do, so she ties a rope round little Kṛṣṇa's body and fastens him tightly to a heavy mortar, saying angrily: "Now run, if thou canst." But the boy not only drags away the mortar with him, but as the mortar gets caught between two gigantic trees, he tears out the mighty trees by their roots. Horrified, the cowherds and the foster-mother see the boy sitting laughing between the branches of the trees, but he himself is uninjured.