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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.
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