Thus ended the first important passage of the life of Parashurama. He had finally gained his parents' approval, when a disaster struck the happy family. The King of the Haiyahayas, Kartivirarjuna, coveted a sacrificial calf belonging to Jamadagni. When the sage expressed his disinclination to part with it, he just carried the calf away. He thought he had to deal with the usual intellectual Brahman, but this was the action that called his death to him. Kartivirarjuna was a thousand armed king who had once humbled the great Ravana, but had now become somewhat of a demon himself. Parashurama assaulted his palace, massacred everybody within, and cut off all the arms of the king before sweeping off his head.

As to whether this was not overkill, for the sake of a calf, he had no time for such subtleties. He was appallingly direct and devastatingly simple in his solutions to all problems, an early version of the queen of hearts in the Alice Stories. Everything was "Off with his head". So limited was his comprehension and so sure was he that he had right and justice on his side, that he never seems to have consciously contemplated retaliation on the part of the king's sons. He actually left his father alone while he went to cut firewood and obviously the king's sons slaughtered the poor old sage. This absence of the axe man is curious and very significant. Perhaps he got the approval he wanted, but subconsciously he still had some resentment against his father. Nothing else will explain this breathtaking confidence at leaving the old man alone and unprotected. It was an act of immense stupidity, the consequences of which could have been foretold by any fool, and Parashurama was no fool.

He launched his famous Kshatriya-cleansing campaign, an action that is so gratuitously violent that it could only be indicative of deep seated and eternally smoldering caste animosity, which a too-imaginative brahmin writer inserted into his life-story as some sort of vicarious revenge against a despised caste. He filled up seven lakes with the blood of his foes, as always he had no sense of limits. Then he repented!

He gave back the kingdoms to the princes and retired to do penance for his actions. He was told that he would have to make land grants to brahmins as part of this purification, but there was not a piece of earth that he had not soaked with blood. His greatest feat came next, in an attempt to provide land that was untainted. He reclaimed land from the ocean, to the extent that was covered by the hurling of his Parashu. That is the modern state of Kerala in India and its Sanskrit name is still Parushurama-shetra, the land of Parashurama. Geologically, too there is some truth to this myth, Kerela being one of the last land areas in India to surface from the ocean.

Even though the axe-bearer is acknowledged as the creator of Kerala, there is only one or at best two temples to him in his own country! Parashurama is like the Vedas, nominally respected and actually neglected. Once he had gifted away the new land, and expiated himself of his sins, he wanted to gift the brahmans settled there his supreme gift - knowledge of the martial arts. They were properly horrified whereupon he angrily sought out their children born out of marriages with non-brahman women, (the present day Nair community) and he taught them the world's oldest martial art, Kalaripayyattu. As is inevitable by now, not a single Kalari school in Kerala has him as the presiding deity, they are all goddess shrines, though he is given the credit for introducing the art, if not inventing it. There is a curious double-process of acknowledgement and respect along with denial and rejection that always dogs Parashurama.

Parashurama had unique powers of locomotion and could cover many hundreds of miles in a few minutes, always preceded by dust-clouds and storm winds. As a metaphor for his personality, nothing could be more apt. His being immortal led to many curious adventures in times that were not really his own. He was an aspect of godhead that had outlived its own natural span and created trouble in changed times. He met the next avatar of Vishnu, Rama, and acknowledged him as his superior in a trail of strength that involved stringing Vishnu's bow. Scholars are of the opinion that this story was interpolated into the Ramayana, when Rama was changing from a great hero to an aspect of god in the popular mind. If the great Parashurama acknowledged him as god then the metamorphosis was complete. Parashurama was obviously once a popular god, but the forces of social conservationism were never quite at ease until more acceptable aspects of divinity subsumed this chaotic element.

He appears in the Mahabharahta too and seems to have set aside his eternal disdain for Kshatriyas for a while. For he trains Gangeya, the later Bhisma, and makes him an invincible warrior. This he learns to his own cost, because he goes up against his former pupil and has the mortification of not being able to best him, and even being in some danger of defeat before the gods intervene and stop this planet threatening combat. (He has a similar tiff with Ganesha too, and is credited with knocking off one of the tusks of that god, but the issue remained inconclusive in that instance also). His fighting Bhisma was actually something pretty remarkable, for he was fighting on behalf of a Kshatriya princess who felt she had some claim to becoming Bhisma's wife. Bhisma was like Parashurama, a lifelong celibate, and he flatly refused to imitate his guru's obedience. The important part of this story is that Parashurama could actually unbend enough to become a mentor to a hated Kshatriya and champion the cause of a girl from the same caste. The many long years he had lived had obviously softened him somewhat.

This defeat at the hands of Bhishma seems to have soured him once more, for he again refused to teach anybody but brahmins. Karna, one of the great heroes of the Mahabharatha, was of too low a Kshatriya caste to be taken notice of by Kshatriya martial arts masters. So he lied to the axe-man that he was an unfortunate brahman boy cursed with a talent for fighting and unable to get anybody to take him seriously. This lie must have gone to the soul of Parashurama, for he had been there. He immediately set about making the boy into a great warrior. Unfortunately for him, Karna had too much of his caste fortitude. Once, while his irascible guru was sleeping with his head on the boy's lap, a flesh-eating ant attacked Karna's thigh. His hands were not free as they were cradling the guru's head and rather than disturb the guru, he bore the pain. On waking up and seeing the blood, his guru instantly understood that the boy was a true Kshatriya, for only they could bear pain on behalf of others. Instead of admiring the boy for this fortitude and self-sacrifice, the angry avatar cursed him that he would lose his knowledge at the supreme crisis of his life and fall ignominiously in battle as a consequence. This was the authentic Parashurama note being sounded once again, relentless, furious and implacable in anger.

It has been theorized that the axe-man was perhaps a forest god who was gradually absorbed into Hinduism and given the status of an avatar of Vishnu. I doubt it. Forest gods are never so ferocious and perpetually in a bad mood. This is the Raudra Rasa incarnate, pure anger, the wrath of god in no uncertain terms. It has also been theorized that the story is an unconscious understanding of the process of evolution. The dwarfish human is succeeded by the brutal and hasty type before it is superceded by the more refined and elegant modern man. That is reasoning backwards and forcibly applying a theory to explain away what is uncomfortable to modern sensibilities. In any case, traditional Hindu theories of evolution speak of the devolution of man and his ages, not of his evolution, so Parashurama should be a modern, not an ancient type of god.

Whatever be the reasons, real and imagined, behind this fascinating aspect of the concept to avatars, there is no doubt that Parashurama is a real puzzle. It is perhaps in recognition of this perplexity that the ancient commentators called him both Khanda-parashu, he-who-strikes-with-an-axe as well as Nyaksha - the inferior (avatar). This incarnation is definitely a bit too strong for the average stomach and hence the respectful neglect he is held in.