The Inner Conflict of Tradition: Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society c12.s3.3

c12.s3.3

Quite apart from the mythological motif of Varuṇa's disintegration, the ambivalence and danger of the royal ritual and specifically of the rājasūya is in a different but no less telling way documented in the epics. Now the epics—both the *Mahābhārata* and the *Rāmāyaṇa*—show exactly the same paradigm of cyclical alternation between grāma and araṇya. Both the Pāṇḍavas and Rāma are forced to leave throne and realm and go out on a life of adventure in the wilds and return only after they have successfully come out of a long series of dangerous battles and ordeals. In both cases, the departure is connected with the abhiṣeka. Rāma is cheated out of his already arranged unction. In the *Mahābhārata*, Yudhiṣṭhira, the leader of the Pāṇ- ḍava brothers, has the rājasūya performed but is then also cheated out of his realm in a game of dice forced upon him by his opponent, Duryodhana. Though the dicing game follows Yudhiṣṭhira’s rājasūya, it does so without interval, and comparison with the ritual texts makes clear that it actually belongs to the rājasūya. It is not surprising, then, that the rājasūya is considered in the epics to be particularly dangerous. When the deceased father of the Pāṇḍavas has his wish that Yudhiṣṭhira perform the rājasūya transmitted by the sage Nārada, the latter takes the opportunity to point out the dangers of this royal ritual, which will lead to the destruction of the kṣatriyas in the great Mahābhārata war—an idea that is later repeated by the sage Vyāsa, as well as on other occasions.⁹⁰ So the rājasūya is directly linked to the tragic war, or rather, we might say that the war is part and parcel of the rājasūya cycle. We saw already that the *Aitareya Brāhmaṇa* has the abhiṣeka followed by war and conquest, after which another consecratory sacrifice, the horse sacrifice, is performed. Similarly, the Pāṇḍavas as well as Rāma perform on their triumphant return the aśvamedha, which in the case of the *Mahābhārata* is given as an expiation for the catastrophal bloodshed.⁹¹