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STORIES · THE MAHĀBHĀRATA · Vana
Nala
Classical
Nala, son of Virasena, was king of the Nishadhas: handsome, truthful, skilled with horses, devoted to Brahmins, and fond of gambling. Damayanti was the daughter of King Bhima of Vidarbha, born through a boon from the sage Damana, who gave Bhima three sons as well. Heralds kept praising each of them to the other until they were in love without ever having met. The sage Vrihadaswa tells this story. Nala, restless, wandered alone in his palace gardens and caught a golden-winged swan. The swan begged to be freed and promised to speak of him to Damayanti so that she would want no other husband. Nala let it go. The swans flew to Vidarbha, one led Damayanti off from her friends, spoke to her in a human voice, and praised Nala. She asked it to carry back her answer.
At her svayamvara she faced five men who looked exactly alike. She could not tell which was Nala, and prayed to the gods: she had chosen Nala at the swan's word, had never wavered from him in thought or speech, and the gods had meant him to be her husband, so would they show themselves. They did. She saw that the gods did not sweat, did not blink, wore fresh garlands, and stood above the ground, while one man was dusty, sweating, blinking and standing on the floor, with a wilted garland. She took the hem of his garment and put the garland round his neck.
The gods, going home from the ceremony, met Kali and Dwapara on the road. Kali was on his way to win Damayanti and was furious that she had chosen a mortal in front of the gods. The gods told him that the choice had their blessing and warned him that anyone who cursed such a man harms only himself. Kali brooded. Alone with Dwapara he resolved to possess Nala, take his kingdom and part him from his wife, and he asked Dwapara to enter the dice.
He waited twelve years. Then Nala said his evening prayers without having washed his feet, and Kali slipped in. Nala went to his brother Pushkara and told him to challenge him to dice, and Dwapara became a lucky die for Pushkara. Nala lost gold, silver, chariots and robes. The citizens came to the gate to stop him, Damayanti begged him to meet them, and he said nothing, and they went home as if the king were dead. In the end Pushkara won the kingdom, and mockingly offered Damayanti as the last stake. Nala took off his ornaments and walked out of the city in one cloth, and Damayanti followed in one garment. Pushkara forbade anyone to shelter them, and they lived three nights outside the walls on water. When Nala tried to catch some golden-feathered birds for food and threw his cloth over them, they flew off with it. They were the dice, and they had come to leave him nothing.
Nala kept naming the roads south to Vidarbha, and Damayanti feared what that meant. He said, "I can forsake myself but thee I cannot forsake," but he would not go to her father in misery. That night in a travellers' shelter, sharing one garment, they lay on the bare ground. Kali's hold on him said that leaving her would be best. He found a sword, cut away half her cloth, and left. He came back weeping, but left for good.
Damayanti woke alone and went through the forest lamenting. Ascetics told her she would find Nala again, then vanished. Nala, meanwhile, heard a voice in a forest fire and found the serpent Karkotaka trapped there. He carried the snake out, and at the tenth step it bit him. The bite changed his looks so no one would know him, and the venom, Karkotaka said, would torment the one who had wronged him. He told Nala to go to Ayodhya as the charioteer Vahuka, serve Rituparna, trade his horse-lore for the secret of dice, and so win everything back, and he gave him two celestial garments to restore his form.
The tale's last page that I read is the return. After a month at Bhima's court, Nala marched to the Nishadha country, challenged Pushkara again, staking everything, and won it all back in a single throw. He blamed Kali, not his brother, and let Pushkara go, with a share of the kingdom.
Told by Bṛhadaśva → Yudhiṣṭhira
Who: Yudhiṣṭhira
Bound to
Sāvitrī twin
Nala, Kali's possession and Karkotaka's disguise same-story-other-version
Where this comes from
- CE · Mahabharata, Critical Edition 3.50-78 3.50-78
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LIII as labelled on page (Nala, Damayanti, the swans)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LVII (Damayanti's svayamvara)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LVIII (gods meet Kali and Dwapara)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LIX (the dice begin)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LXI (the loss; the birds and the cloth)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LXII (Nala leaves Damayanti)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LXIV (Damayanti in the forest)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LXVI (Karkotaka)
- read for this telling · Mahabharata, Ganguli translation (mahabharataonline.com) Section LXXVIII (Nala recovers the kingdom)