Nala and Damayanti

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Pahari painting on the Nala and Damayanti motif, 18th century

Nala and Damayanti ( Sanskrit title: नलोपाख्यान Nalopākhyāna , ie "Episode of Nala") is an episode from the Indian epic Mahabharata . It is about King Nala (नल Nala ) and his wife Damayanti (दमयन्ती Damayantī ): Nala loses his kingdom in a game of dice and has to go into exile with his faithful wife in the forest, where Damayanti is abandoned by Nala. Separated from each other, the two suffer various adventures before they are finally happily united and Nala regains his kingdom.

Nala and Damayanti is one of the most famous and popular episodes of the Mahabharata . It has been widely received in India and is also regarded as one of the most valuable works of Indian literature in the West .

content

The Mahabharata , a huge work of over 100,000 double verses, contains, in addition to the main plot, which tells of the mythical battle of the Pandavas and Kauravas , two related princely families, numerous secondary episodes, some of which are interwoven. In addition to the religious-philosophical didactic poem Bhagavadgita and the Savitri legend, Nala and Damayanti are among the most famous of these episodes. It occurs in the Aranyakaparvan , the third of 18 books of the epic, and comprises around 1100 double verses ( Shlokas ) in 26 chapters.

On the narrative level of the main storyline, Yudhishthira , the oldest of the five Pandava brothers, has just lost his kingdom to the Kauravas in a game of dice and had to go into exile with his brothers for twelve years. There Yudhishtira meets the seer Brihadashva and asks him if there was ever a more unfortunate man than himself, whereupon Brihadashva tells him the story of Nala, who also lost his empire in the game of dice, but finally regained it.

Table of contents

Nala, the heroic son of Virasena, is king of Nishadha . At the same time, the beautiful Damayanti lives in Vidarbha at the court of her father, King Bhima. Nala and Damayanti hear from each other and fall in love without having seen each other. A wild goose sends Damayanti a message of love from Nala, whereupon she becomes sick with longing. King Bhima realizes that the time has come for his daughter to get married. All kings are called together for the Svayamvara ceremony, during which Damayanti is supposed to choose her husband himself. Even the gods Indra , Agni , Varuna and Yama set out for Vidarbha. On the way they meet Nala and tell him to serve as their messenger. The king of Nishadha has to reluctantly advertise the gods to the damayanti he covets, but she confesses her love to Nala and vows to choose him as her husband. During the self-election ceremony, Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama try to outsmart Bhima's daughter by assuming Nala's form, but she so fervently swears her love for the Nishadha king that the gods understand and reveal themselves. Damayanti chooses Nala, after which their wedding is celebrated. The two move into Vidarbha, where Nala rules as the just king and Damayanti bears him two children.

The gods return to heaven and on the way meet Dvapara and Kali, two demons of the dice game, who are also on the way to Damayanti's self-choice. When Kali learns that he is late and that Damayanti has already chosen Nala, he furiously swears revenge. He waits twelve years for his opportunity before he succeeds in taking possession of Nala. Obsessed by the demon, the king lets himself into a game of dice with his brother Pushkara. Nala can not be dissuaded by anyone's warnings and, in a frenzy of dice, gambled away his kingdom and all of his other possessions to his brother. When Pushkara finally demands Damayanti as an operation, Nala gives up and moves penniless into the forest. His faithful wife follows him. The curse of the dice continues to haunt the king in the form of two birds stealing his robe. Seduced by the demon Kali, who still lives in him, Nala secretly leaves his wife at night with a heavy heart.

Abandoned by her husband, Damayanti wanders alone through the terrible forest in search of Nala. A hunter rescues her from a snake that threatens her life, who in turn pursues her. After surviving many dangers and wailing through the forest, Damayanti joins a caravan and, after further adventures, reaches the land of Chedi , where she is received undetected by the Queen Mother at court. In the meantime, Nala has saved the Naga King Karkotaka from a forest fire in the forest. In gratitude, she gives Nala a new shape and advises him to go to King Rituparna in Ayodhya . Nala poses as the charioteer Vahuka and enters the service of Rituparna. He instructs the king in the art of horse steering and in return learns from him the secret of the dice, so that the curse of the demon Kali disappears from Nala.

Damayanti's father Bhima sends Brahmins to look for Nala and his daughter. After the Brahmin Sudeva discovered Damayanti in Chedi, she returned to Vidarbha in the father's house. After three years of separation, Damayanti learns of Vahuka from a messenger who was searching for Nala in Ayodhya and suspects that he may be her husband. Damayanti devises a ruse and lets Rituparna tell her that she will hold a new self-election. So the king sets out for Vidarbha and with him Nala as his charioteer. Because Nala believes that Damayanti has cast him out and wants to marry a new man, he does not reveal himself. Damayanti is confused by the strange shape of the Vahuka that Nala has assumed and lets the charioteer investigate. After she has made sure that it is Nala, she calls him over and convinces him of her noble motives. Nala takes on his true form again and is now reunited with Damayanti.

After a month, Nala moves to Nishadha, where he again plays dice against Pushkara and regains his kingdom. Nala generously forgives his brother. He brings Damayanti home and lives happily with her as ruler of Nishadha.

Classification in literary history

Analysis and interpretation

Nala and Damayanti comprises 26 chapters, which show an artistic and deliberate composition: The introduction (chapters 1–5), which tells of Nalas and Damayanti's love and marriage, increases the plot to three main parts: The loss of the kingdom in the dice game and Nala's exile (chapters 6-10), Damayanti's adventures in the forest (chapters 11-13), and the events leading up to the reunification of the spouses (chapters 14-21). The story culminates in the happy union of Nalas and Damayantis, and ends in the final chapters (chapters 22-26).

A turning point in the story is reached at the point where Nala secretly leaves the sleeping Damayanti. By abandoning his wife, who has a right to care and protection, the king violates the precept of “law and custom” ( Dharma ) - a concept that plays a central role in Indian thought. Damayanti rightly complains: “Don't you know what law and custom dictate? How could you leave me in your sleep and go away after you solemnly promised me (you would not leave me)? " Nala's violation of the Dharma gives the poet the opportunity to portray Damayanti as the embodiment of the blameless wife who remains loyal to the husband even if he treats her unfairly. A very similar constellation can be found in the second great Indian epic, the Ramayana : Here is Sita , the wife of the hero Rama , the epitome of the faithful wife. The love motif of separation is very popular in Indian poetry. In addition to Nala and Damayanti and the Ramayana , it is also the subject of the most famous Indian drama, Kalidasa's Shakuntala .

The second main motif - the loss of belongings in the game of dice - occurs several times in Indian literature: Besides the story of Nala, it also occurs and meets in the main plot of the Mahabharata (with which the Nala episode is put in analogy) also in the “dice song” of the Rigveda , the oldest work in Indian literature.

Origin and age

The Mahabharata combines numerous different elements of different origins and ages. The Nala episode clearly proves to be a conscious interpolation due to the way it is embedded - the story of Nala is told to a protagonist of the main plot . The uniformity of content and structure is shown by Nala and Damayanti as originally independent heroic poetry and remnants of an old bard tradition. Only the monologue of the Brahmin Sudeva in the 16th chapter is a later insertion and comes from the Ramayana .

The question of the age of the Nala and Damayanti episode can no more be answered with certainty than that of the age of the Mahabharata . The epic was written in the period between 400 BC. And 400 AD, but the fabrics used can be much older and some of them depict conditions from the Vedic period (approx. 1400-600 BC). The Nala episode is likely to be "one of the older, if not the oldest components" of the Mahabharata . So in the story only gods of the Vedic pantheon such as Indra, Agni, Varuna and Yama appear, but not younger gods such as Vishnu and Shiva .

The Nala material appears for the first time in Indian literature in this episode of the Mahabharata. A “King Nada from Nishidha” ( Naḍa Naiṣidha ), which is certainly identical with “Nala from Nishadha”, already occurs in Shatapatha Brahmana . Nada is reported to be carrying "the (god of death) Yama southwards every day". According to this, he could have been a king who lived at that time and made military expeditions to the south, which in turn points to a great age of the Nala legend.

reception

Further use of the substance

In India, Nala and Damayanti have been widely received . The Indian Kavya art poetry, which experienced its heyday in the 1st millennium AD, resorted to well-known mythological materials in order to decorate them artistically. The episode of Nala and Damayanti also enjoyed some popularity. The most important edits of the material in chronological order are:

  • The collection Kathakosha (“Treasure Chamber of Stories”), a work of Jain literature with an unknown author, contains numerous other fairy tales and legends as well as a Jain version of the Nala and Damayanti material.
  • The art epic Nalodaya (“Success Nalas”) also has the Nala episode as its content. It has been handed down in four chants and was written in the first half of the 9th century. The author is likely Ravideva , possibly Vasudeva . It used to be mistakenly attributed to the famous poet Kalidasa .
  • The Nalachampu ("Champu of Nala") belongs to the Champu genre, a mixture of artistic prose and metrical poetry . The work is also known under the title Damayantikatha ("Story of Damayanti") and comes from Trivikramabhatta (around 900).
  • The Raghavanaishadhiya ("[story] of the descendant of Raghu and the king of Nishadha") of Haradatta Suri represents the genre of the so-called "crooked speech" ( vakrokti ). Using the possibilities of ambiguity available in Sanskrit, the work tells the story of Rama and Nala in an almost acrobatic way .
  • The fairy tale collection Kathasaritsagara ("Sea of Tale Streams "), which was written by Somadeva between 1063 and 1081 , tells a version of the Nala story.
  • The best known arrangement is the Naishadhacharita ("Deeds of the Nishadha King"). The artistic epic describes the events up to Damayanti's self-election in 22 chants in an extremely artificial style. It was written by Shriharsha in Kannauj in the second half of the 12th century .
  • The 15-chant art epic Sahridayananda also deals with Nala and Damayanti material. It was probably written by Krishnananda in the 13th century , who also wrote a commentary on Naishadhacharita .
  • Another processing of the material is the Nalabhyudaya , which Vamanabhattabana wrote in the 15th century.
  • The Tamil literature has two arrangements of Nala history: the Nalavenba the author Pugalendi from the 13/14. Century and the Naidadam of Adivirarama Pandiyan from the second half of the 16th century.
  • The poet Faizi (1547–1595) undertook a Persian adaptation of the Nala material at the instigation of Emperor Akbar I.
  • The story saw numerous film adaptations in all major Indian languages under the title Nala Damayanti , first in 1920 with a silent film by the film company Madan Theaters directed by the Italian Eugenio de Liguoro with Patience Cooper as "Damayanti".
  • Nal'i Damajanti op. 47, opera in three acts by Anton Arenski , libretto by Modest Tchaikovsky (the brother of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ), the Mahabharata in Vasily Schukovsky's translation into Russian, world premiere 9 January July. / January 22,  1904 greg. in Moscow.

Reception in the west

In the West, Nala and Damayanti are held in high regard as "one of the most charming creations of Indian poetry". The German writer and Indologist August Wilhelm Schlegel said of the work as follows:

“Here I just want to say so much that, as I feel, this poem can hardly be surpassed in pathos and ethos, in ravishing violence and delicacy of disposition. It is made entirely to appeal to old and young, noble and low, those who know art and those who just abandon themselves to their natural senses. Also the fairy tale in India is infinitely popular ... there the heroic loyalty and devotion of the Damayantī is as famous as that of the Penelope among us; and in Europe, the collection point for the products of all parts of the world and of all ages, it deserves to be too. "

Nala und Damayanti was one of the first works that the emerging Indology discovered in the early 19th century: In 1819 Franz Bopp published the first edition in London, including a Latin translation, under the title Nalus, carmen sanscritum e Mahābhārato, edidit, latine vertit et adnotationibus illustravit Franciscus Bopp . Since then it has been translated into German and repackaged several times: The first metrical translation into German by Johann Gottfried Ludwig Kosegarten appeared just a year later ( Nala, translated from Sanskrit in the meter of the original and accompanied with notes , Jena 1820). Further German translations are by Friedrich Rückert ( Nal and Damajanti, Eine Indian Geschichte , Frankfurt 1828), Ernst Heinrich Meier ( The Classical Seals of the Indians , Stuttgart 1847, Part I) and Hermann Camillo Kellner ( Nala and Damayantī, Ein Altindisches Fairy tales from the Mahābhārata , 1886). To this day, Nala and Damayanti have traditionally been the preferred starting reading for Sanskrit students at Western universities because of their beauty and the simplicity of the language .

In total, Nala and Damayanti have been translated into at least ten European languages ​​(German, English, French, Italian, Swedish, Czech, Polish, Russian, Modern Greek and Hungarian). The Italian poet and orientalist Angelo De Gubernatis even created a stage adaptation of the material ( Il re Nala , 1869). Even Johann Wolfgang von Goethe showed the great interest in Indian literature, dealt with Nala and Damayanti and expressed in 1821 in the daily and annual booklets :

"I also studied Nala with admiration and only regretted that our feelings, customs and way of thinking have developed so differently from that eastern nation that only a few of us, perhaps only readers of the field, would like to win such an important work."

Stochastic elements

In the second half of the 20th century, mathematicians began to look at references to stochastic ideas in ancient India, particularly the game of dice that appears in many stories. The story of Nala and Damayanti is special; because in it two other stochastic topics are mentioned in addition to dice games: On the one hand, the art of rapid counting, a kind of conclusion from a sample to the totality and a connection between dice games and this method of conclusion, unknown to us today. There are reports of two dice games that Nala plays against his brother Pushkara. In the first he loses his kingdom and has to flee, in the second he wins it back. In the first game of dice, Nala is portrayed as being obsessed with gambling. According to the story, the recovery of his lost kingdom in the second game of dice is due to the fact that he was able to successfully apply the knowledge he had learned from King Rituparna.

Individual evidence

  1. Mahabharata III, 52-79.
  2. Albrecht Wezler: Nala and Damayanti, An episode from the Mahabharata , Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965, p. 84.
  3. Chapter 11 ( Mahabharata III, 60, 4); Translation after Albrecht Wezler
  4. Wezler 1965, p. 85.
  5. Rigveda 10.34 de sa
  6. VS Sukthankar: "The Nala Episode and the Rāmāyaṇa", in: VS Sukthankar Memorial Edition I, Critical Studies in the Mahābhārata , Bombay 1944, pp. 406-415
  7. ^ Moriz Winternitz: History of Indian Literature , Vol. 1, Leipzig: Amelang, 1908, p. 327.
  8. Shatapatha Brahmana II, 3, 2, 1 f .;
  9. Winternitz 1908, p. 326 f.
  10. see Franz F. Schwarz: Die Nala-Legende I and II, Vienna: Gerold & Co., 1966, p. XVI f.
  11. ^ Kamil V. Zvelebil: Lexicon of Tamil Literature, Leiden, New York, Cologne: EJ Brill, 1995, pp. 460 and 464-465.
  12. Alam, Muzaffar: “Faizi's Nal-Daman and Its Long Afterlife”, in: Alam, Muzaffar, and Subrahmanyam, Sanjay: Writing the Mughal World , New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
  13. Winternitz 1908, p. 16.
  14. AW v. Schlegel: Indian Library I , p. 98 f., Quoted from Winternitz 1908, p. 325.
  15. Winternitz 1908, p. 327.
  16. Quoted from Wezler 1965, p. 87.
  17. ^ R. Haller, Zur Geschichte der Stochastik, In: Didaktik der Mathematik 16, pp. 262–277
  18. ^ I. Hacking, The emergence of probability. London: Cambridge Press, 1975, p. 7, ISBN 0-521-31803-3
    R. Ineichen, Würfel und Demokratie, Berlin: Spektrum Verlag 1996, p. 19, ISBN 3-8274-0071-6

literature

  • Hermann Camillo Kellner: The Song of King Nala. Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1885.
  • Charles Rockwell Lanman: A Sanskrit Reader. Text and vocabulary and notes. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1963. Chapters 1–5 by Nala and Damayanti available online at sanskritweb.net (PDF; 2.7 MB)
  • Monier Monier-Williams: Nalopakhyanam: story of Nala. An episode of the Maha-Bharata; the Sanskrit text; with a copious vocabulary, grammatical analysis and introduction. Oxford: University Press, 1860. Available online at archive.org (DjVu) .
  • Friedrich Rückert: Nal and Damajanti. An Indian story. 2. verb. Ed. Frankfurt am Main 1838. Chapters 1–5 from available online at sanskritweb.net (PDF; 1.9 MB)
  • Franz F. Schwarz: The Nala Legend I and II. Text, transcription, translation and commentary. Vienna: Gerold & Co., 1966.
  • Susan S. Wadley (Eds.): Damayanti and Nala. The Many Lives of a Story. New Delhi / Bangalore: Chronicle Books, 2011.
  • Albrecht Wezler: Nala and Damayanti. An episode from the Mahabharata. (Translation) Stuttgart: Reclam, 1965.

Web links

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on April 27, 2008 .