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STORIES · THE RĀMĀYAṆA · Bāla
The krauncha birds and the first shloka
Classical
The whole epic begins as a curse spoken in grief that turned out to be poetry.
The Ramayana begins with a poet who does not yet know he is a poet. Valmiki has just listened to the divine sage Narada tell him the story of Rama. He honors Narada, who takes his leave and vanishes toward heaven, and Valmiki walks to the bank of the river Tamasa, not far from the Ganga.
There he finds a bathing ford with no mud in it. He points it out to his disciple Bharadvaja, saying its water is as clear as a good person's mind. He asks Bharadvaja to set down his water pot and hand over his bark garment, because he intends to bathe here. The disciple does as he is told, and Valmiki wanders along the edge of the forest, looking around.
Near the river he sees a pair of krauncha birds, curlews, calling and moving together. And then, while he watches, a hunter with cruel intent kills the male. The female circles her fallen mate on the ground, covered in blood, and cries out in grief.
Valmiki's heart breaks with pity. He judges the killing unjust, and in that moment he curses the hunter, saying that he will find no lasting rest for endless years. Then, almost at once, he stops and wonders what he has just said in his sorrow. After thinking it over, he recognizes that what came out of him has a shape. It has four quarters of equal length, with eight syllables in each, and it can be sung to music. He decides to call this a shloka, a verse form later known as anushtubh. Bharadvaja, hearing it, takes it up with delight, and Valmiki is glad.
He finishes bathing and walks back to the hermitage, still turning the verse over in his mind, with Bharadvaja behind him carrying a full water pot. He teaches his students other things, but his thoughts are on the bird and the verse.
Then Brahma himself arrives, the four-faced creator, uninvited. Valmiki is astonished. He stands with his palms joined, offers water for Brahma's feet, water to drink and a seat, asks after his welfare and bows. Brahma sits and invites Valmiki to sit too. But Valmiki cannot let go of the hunter and the bird, and while the creator of the world sits in front of him, he finds himself singing the same verse again.
Brahma smiles. He tells Valmiki he does not need to puzzle over it. The verse came out by Brahma's own will, and the task now is to compose the whole story of Rama, as Valmiki heard it from Narada: Rama's virtue, wisdom and courage, his deeds with Lakshmana, the wrongs of the demons, Sita's suffering, things known and things hidden. Brahma promises there will be no falsehood in the poem, and that it will last as long as mountains and rivers stand on the earth. Valmiki himself will dwell in the heavens, the lower worlds and Brahma's own abode. Then the god disappears.
The disciples keep singing the verse, repeating it to each other, and through that repetition it becomes established as a shloka. Valmiki resolves to write the entire Ramayana in this meter, and he goes on to compose hundreds of verses on Rama's fame and the destruction of Ravana. The poem, we are told, is well arranged and sweet in its words.
What makes this story matter is how it frames the whole epic: grief comes first, and poetry is what grief turns into. The first verse of Sanskrit literature is, in this telling, a response to a wounded bird.
Who: Valmiki, Brahma, the hunter, krauncha birds
Bound to
Narada briefs Valmiki: the Ramayana in a nutshell causes
Lava and Kusha sing the epic, Rama listens causes
Places: Tamasa river
Where this comes from
- valmiki · Valmiki Ramayana, Bala Kanda (valmikiramayan.net translation) sarga 2
- read for this telling · valmikiramayan.net Valmiki Ramayana Bala Kanda sarga 2