Reading section 112

782 A nymph of Paradise.

783 Hanu or Hanú means jaw. Hanumán or Hanúmán means properly one with a large jaw.

784 Vishṇu, the God of the Three Steps.

785 Náráyaṇ, “He who moved upon the waters,” is Vishnu. The allusion is to the famous three steps of that God.

786 The Milky Way.

787 This Book is called Sundar or the Beatiful. To a European taste it is the most intolerably tedious of the whole poem, abounding in repetition, overloaded description, and long and useless speeches which impede the action of the poem. Manifest interpolations of whole Cantos also occur. I have omitted none of the action of the Book, but have occasionally omitted long passages of common-place description, lamentation, and long stories which have been again and again repeated.

788 Brahmá the Self-Existent.

789 Maináka was the son of Himálaya and Mená or Menaká.

790 Thus Milton makes the hills of heaven self-moving at command:

“At his command the uprooted hills retired Each to his place, they heard his voice and went Obsequious”

791 The spirit of the mountain is separable from the mountain. Himalaya has also been represented as standing in human form on one of his own peaks.

792 Ságar or the Sea is said to have derived its name from Sagar. The story is fully told in Book I, Cantos XLII, XLIII, and XLIV.

793 Kritu is the first of the four ages of the world, the golden age, also called Satya.

_ 794 Parvata_ means a mountain and in the Vedas a cloud. Hence in later mythology the mountains have taken the place of the clouds as the objects of the attacks of Indra the Sun-God. The feathered king is Garuḍa.

795 “The children of Surasá were a thousand mighty many-headed serpents, traversing the sky.” WILSON’S _Vishṇu Puráṇa_, Vol. II. p. 73.

796 She means, says the Commentator, pursue thy journey if thou can.

797 If Milton’s spirits are allowed the power of infinite self-extension and compression the same must be conceded to Válmíki’s supernatural beings. Given the power as in Milton the result in Válmíki is perfectly consistent.

798 “Daksha is the son of Brahmá and one of the Prajápatis or divine progenitors. He had sixty daughters, twenty-seven of whom married to Kaśyapa produced, according to one of the Indian cosmogonies, all mundane beings. Does the epithet, Descendant of Daksha, given to Surasá, mean that she is one of those daughters? I think not. This epithet is perhaps an appellation common to all created beings as having sprung from Daksha.” GORRESSIO.

799 Sinhiká is the mother of Ráhu the dragon’s head or ascending node, the chief agent in eclipses.

800 According to De Gubernatis, the author of the very learned, ingenious, and interesting though too fanciful _Zoological Mythology_. Hanumán here represents the sun entering into and escaping from a cloud. The biblical Jonah, according to him, typifies the same phenomenon. Sá’dí, speaking of sunset, says _Yùnas andar-i-dihán-imáhi shud_: Jonas was within the fish’s mouth. See ADDITIONAL NOTES.

801 The Buchanania Latifolia.

802 The Bauhinia Variegata.

803 Through the power that Rávaṇ’s stern mortifications had won for him his trees bore flowers and fruit simultaneously.

804 Viśvakarmá is the architect of the Gods.

805 So in Paradise Lost Satan when he has stealthily entered the garden of Eden assumes the form of a cormorant.

806 Priests who fought only with the weapons of religion, the sacred grass used like the verbena of the Romans at sacred rites and the consecrated fire to consume the offering of ghee.

807 One of the Rákshas lords.

808 The brother Rávaṇ.

809 Indra’s elephant.

810 Rávaṇ’s palace appears to have occupied the whole extent of ground, and to have contained within its outer walls the mansions of all the great Rákshas chiefs. Rávaṇ’s own dwelling seems to have been situated within the enchanted chariot Pushpak: but the description is involved and confused, and it is difficult to say whether the chariot was inside the palace or the palace inside the chariot.

811 Pushpak from _pushpa_ a flower. The car has been mentioned before in Rávaṇ’s expedition to carry off Sítá, Book III, Canto XXXV.

812 Lakshmí is the wife of Vishṇu and the Goddess of Beauty and Felicity. She rose, like Aphrodite, from the foam of the sea. For an account of her birth and beauty, see Book I, Canto XLV.

813 Viśvakarmá is the architect of the Gods, the Hephaestos or Mulciber of the Indian heaven.

814 Rávaṇ in the resistless power which his long austerities had endowed him with, had conquered his brother Kuvera the God of Gold and taken from him his greatest treasure this enchanted car.

815 Like Milton’s heavenly car, “Itself instinct with spirit.”

816 Women, says Válmíki. But the Commentator says that automatic figures only are meant. Women would have seen Hanumán and given the alarm.

817 Rávaṇ had fought against Indra and the Gods, and his body was still scarred by the wounds inflicted by the tusks of Indra’s elephant and by the fiery bolts of the Thunderer.

818 The Vasus are a class of eight deities, originally personifications of natural phenomena.

819 The Maruts are the winds or Storm-Gods.

820 The Ádityas originally seven deities of the heavenly sphere of whom Varuṇa is the chief. The name Áditya was afterwards given to any God, specially to Súrya the Sun.

821 The Aśvins are the Heavenly Twins, the Castor and Pollux of the Hindus.

822 The poet forgets that Hanumán has reduced himself to the size of a cat.

823 Sítá “not of woman born,” was found by King Janak as he was turning up the ground in preparation for a sacrifice. See Book II, Canto CXVIII.

824 The six _Angas_ or subordinate branches of the Vedas are 1. _Sikshá_, the science of proper articulation and pronunciation: 2. _Chhandas_, metre: 3. _Vyákarana_, linguistic analysis or grammar: 4. _Nirukta_, explanation of difficult Vedic words: 5. _Jyotishṭom_, Astronomy, or rather the Vedic Calendar: 6. _Kalpa_, ceremonial.

825 There appears to be some confusion of time here. It was already morning when Hanumán entered the grove, and the torches would be needless.

826 Rávaṇ is one of those beings who can “climb them as they will,” and can of course assume the loveliest form to please human eyes as well as the terrific shape that suits the king of the Rákshases.

827 White and lovely as the Arant or nectar recovered from the depths of the Milky Sea when churned by the assembled Gods. See Book I, Canto XLV.

828 Rávaṇ in his magic car carrying off the most beautiful women reminds us of the magician in _Orlando Furioso_, possesor of the flying horse.

“Volando talor s’alza ne le stelle, E poi quasi talor la terra rade; E ne porta con lui tutte le belle Donne che trova per quelle contrade.”

829 Indian women twisted their long hair in a single braid as a sign of mourning for their absent husbands.

830 Janak, king of Míthilá, was Sítá’s father.

831 Hiraṇyakaśipu was a king of the Daityas celebrated for his blasphemous impieties. When his pious son Prahlada praised Vishṇu the Daitya tried to kill him, when the God appeared in the incarnation of the man-lion and tore the tyrant to pieces.

832 Do unto others as thou wouldst they should do unto thee, is a precept frequently occurring in the old Indian poems. This charity is to embrace not human beings only, but bird and beast as well: “He prayeth best who loveth best all things both great and small.”

833 It was the custom of Indian warriors to mark their arrows with their ciphers or names, and it seems to have been regarded as a point of honour to give an enemy the satisfaction of knowing who had shot at him. This passage however contains, if my memory serves me well, the first mention in the poem of this practice, and as arrows have been so frequently mentioned and described with almost every conceivable epithet, its occurrence here seems suspicious. No mention of, or allusion to writing has hitherto occurred in the poem.

834 This threat in the same words occurs in Book III, Canto LVI.

835 Rávaṇ carried off and kept in his palace not only earthly princesses but the daughters of Gods and Gandharvas.

836 The wife of Indra.

837 These four lines have occurred before. Book III, Canto LVI.

838 Prajápatis are the ten lords of created beings first created by Brahmá; somewhat like the Demiurgi of the Gnostics.

839 “This is the number of the Vedic divinities mentioned in the Rig-veda. In Ashṭaka I. Súkta XXXIV, the Rishi Hiraṇyastúpa invoking the Aśvins says: Á Násatyá tribhirekádaśairiha devebniryátam: ‘O Násatyas (Aśvins) come hither with the thrice eleven Gods.’ And in Súkta XLV, the Rishi Praskanva addressing his hymn to Agni (ignis, fire), thus invokes him: ‘Lord of the red steeds, propitiated by our prayers lead hither the thirty-three Gods.’ This number must certainly have been the actual number in the early days of the Vedic religion: although it appears probable enough that the thirty-three Vedic divinities could not then be found co-ordinated in so systematic a way as they were arranged more recently by the authors of the Upanishads. In the later ages of Bramanism the number went on increasing without measure by successive mythical and religious creations which peopled the Indian Olympus with abstract beings of every kind. But through lasting veneration of the word of the Veda the custom regained of giving the name of ‘the thirty-three Gods’ to the immense phalanx of the multiplied deities.” GORRESIO.