Although the popularity of the Rāmāyaṇa story beyond India proper, and especially in Southeast Asia, is well known, the popularity of Mahābhārata stories, especially in Pali Buddhist countries, is less so. Indeed, this has even led to the perception that the Rāmāyaṇa has a geographically transcendent quality, while the Mahābhārata was of less universal popularity because it is tied to Bhārat, or India. In this paper, I examine an interesting exception to this perceived tendency, the adoption of the story of Kṛṣṇa’s grandson Aniruddha from the Harivaṃśa into Siamese literature. I show that while it ultimately lost out to the Rāmakian—the Thai version of the Rāmāyaṇa—in popularity, it was at the height of Siamese power and prosperity a coequal partner in the adoption of Hindu mythology into elite Siamese courtly literature.
Thailand, although it has been home to a vibrant Pali Buddhist culture for as far back as historical records exist, has long been a site for the consumption and vernacular reproduction of Hindu epic mythology. This is most noticeable in the Rāmakian, the Thai version of the Rāmāyaṇa, which has been one of the most prolific sources of inspiration for classical literature, art, and drama in Siam going back centuries. Indeed, the old capital of the Siamese kingdom, prior to its sack by the Burmese in 1767, was Ayutthayā, taken from the name of Rāma’s capital Ayodhyā, and its fourteenth-century founder took his name from that hero, as Rāmāthibodī (Skt. Rāmādhipati), while the second most important city in the kingdom for many centuries, where heirs-apparent were sent to reside, was Phitsanulōk (Skt. Viṣṇuloka). The Rāmakian was so important to Siamese cultural life that King Rāma I, founder of the new capital at Bangkok in the late eighteenth century, made the commissioning of a reconstituted version of it one of his top priorities, and its entire plot was painted around the inside wall of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha, the most important temple in his new capital.
Less well known, however, is the role that Mahābhārata-inspired themes once played in Siamese cultural life. This is largely due to the fact that the Rāmakian gained such preeminence in early Bangkok, a result, as Nidhi Eoseewong has shown, of emerging humanistic bourgeois tastes in early Bangkok and the catering of the Rāmakian to those tastes. Themes from the Mahābhārata were in earlier times more prevalent. References to the heroes of the Mahābhārata are found in the Sukhōthai inscriptions, the earliest examples of writing in central Thai, dating to the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. Similar references are found in the Lilit Yuan Phāi, an Ayutthayā-era epic poem about the conquest of the northern kingdom of Lānnā, dating to the late fifteenth century. Most significant, however, is the story of Aniruddha from the Harivaṃśa. A script for dramatic performance of this story, the Anirut Khamchan, was written by Sī Prāt, a poet in the court of King Nārāi in the seventeenth century, and along with the Rāmakian and two stories from Indonesia, it constituted one of the four great masterpieces of courtly dramatic literature in late Ayutthayā. Indeed, it was of such importance that King Rāma I, who founded the new capital at Bangkok after Ayutthayā was sacked by the Burmese, commissioned a new version of it as well, known as the Bot Lakhòn Rǖang Unnarut.
The Anirut Khamchan follows the Harivaṃśa version of the story fairly closely. Uṣā, the daughter of Bāṇa, has a dream in which she sees Aniruddha, the son of Pradyumna and grandson of Kṛṣṇa. Uṣā’s nanny Vicitralekhā then helps her to find this young man by drawing pictures of gods, gandharvas, and princes, and once they identify the young man, she flies to Dvāravatī to abduct him and bring him back to her mistress’s palace. When a servant discovers the two lovers together and informs King Bāṇa, the latter imprisons Aniruddha. The ṛṣi Nārada, having learned of this, flies to Dvāravatī and informs Kṛṣṇa, who in turn raises an army to defeat King Bāṇa. After doing so, he spares his life but makes him a lowly gatekeeper, and the story ends with him performing the marriage of Aniruddha and Uṣā.
The early Bangkok version assimilates the story further into the Siamese literary imaginary. The gods, on a mission to defeat the oppressive yakṣa king Bāṇa, trick Unnarut (the character based on Aniruddha) into meeting Uṣā by luring him into the woods with a golden deer. When he falls asleep, the spirit of a Banyan tree takes him to the chambers of Uṣā but then takes him away again before morning. The two lovers are distraught, and as in the earlier story, Uṣā enlists the help of her nanny (here called Śubhalakṣaṇa) to figure out who the young man is. Śubhalakṣaṇa then flies to fetch Unnarut, bringing Uṣā’s ring and sash as proof. When Bāṇa discovers that Unnarut is living with his daughter, he has a nāga tie Unnarut to the pinnacle of the palace. Unnarut’s grandfather Kṛṣṇa sends Garuḍa to give Unnarut a magic ring, which he uses to himself raise an army and defeat Bāṇa.
I argue that we can contextualize the rise and fall of the Aniruddha story in Siam by understanding the role of Brahmans and Brahmanism in this Buddhist kingdom. In Ayutthayā, Brahmans played an important role as ministers in the government. Sī Prāt, the author of the Anirut Khamchan, is said to have been the precocious son of a court astrologer of King Nārāi. While King Rāma I reconstituted the royal court Brahmans in Bangkok, their influence there quickly waned. Brahmans themselves were reduced in the nineteenth century to mere ritual functionaries, and their system of knowledge, called saiyasāt (Skt. śayyāśāstra) in Thai, was compared to the Western concept of “magic,” with all its negative connotations. Their two most important literary contributions, the Rāmakian and Unnarut, were thus secularized and subjected to the vicissitudes of bourgeois literary taste, in which the latter, with its emphasis on gods and the supernatural, lost.
Although the popularity of the Rāmāyaṇa story beyond India proper, and especially in Southeast Asia, is well known, the popularity of Mahābhārata stories, especially in Pali Buddhist countries, is less so. Indeed, this has even led to the perception that the Rāmāyaṇa has a geographically transcendent quality, while the Mahābhārata was of less universal popularity because it is tied to Bhārat, or India. In this paper, I examine an interesting exception to this perceived tendency, the adoption of the story of Kṛṣṇa’s grandson Aniruddha from the Harivaṃśa into Siamese literature. I show that while it ultimately lost out to the Rāmakian—the Thai version of the Rāmāyaṇa—in popularity, it was at the height of Siamese power and prosperity a coequal partner in the adoption of Hindu mythology into elite Siamese courtly literature.