Pradyumna and His Foundation Narrative in the Critical Text Harivaṃśa

Chapter 3 turns to the Harivaṃśa’s foundational episode of Pradyumna’s birth. As soon as Pradyumna is born, the demon Śambara abducts him and gives him to his wife Māyāvatī to raise as her own son. Māyāvatī approaches Pradyumna sexually once he is fully grown, explaining that she is not his mother; Pradyumna slays Śambara, accepts Māyāvatī as a love partner, and returns to his real family, where Kṛṣṇa identifies him as the rebirth of Kāmadeva, the God of Love. The episode is examined through a number of lenses, particularly a set of gendered premises on the nature of women and certain social-sexual dynamics of South Asian families. In sum, it is argued that the Harivaṃśa birth narrative constructs Pradyumna as a vaṃśa-vīra, or “lineage-hero,” a champion whose sexual virility and beauty, military power and resilience against the forces of infant mortality make him a champion of his father’s ancestral line.

Late Developments of the Harivaṃśa and the Prabhāvatī Episode

This chapter examines the Harivaṃśa’s appendices or late additions made roughly over the fifth- to twelfth-century CE period, particularly the elaboration of the Pradyumna-Śambara battle and the introduction of an altogether new and lengthy episode, the Prabhāvatī romance or slaying of Vajranābha, colored by the erotic-aesthetic vocabulary of śṛṅgāra. Here, the driving theme of Pradyumna’s mythic persona is reasserted, namely the audacious appropriation of a feminine figure ostensibly protected by an enemy male, whose violent defeat comes parceled with the emasculating discovery of his failure to protect her from the handsome boy’s virile magnetism. The chapter argues that the Prabhāvatī episode applies as never before the logic of the avatāra system, making of Pradyumna a charming actor upon a stage who, like his father Kṛṣṇa, assumes a temporary guise in a theatrical mode in order to destroy a demonic power threatening the gods and the cosmic order.

The Jain Pradyumnacarita

Chapter 5 examines the Jain rendering of the Pradyumna abduction narrative as it is developed in the Pradyumnacarita, a substantial cycle of tales that formed part of the Jain tradition’s larger recasting of the Kṛṣṇa biography. Central to this rewriting is Pradyumna’s absolute rejection of the mother figure’s sexual advances, as well as a number of sub-episodes entirely without parallel in Brahminical literature. The analysis of these materials identifies certain premises about the nature of women which are in fact shared by Brahmins and Jains. It is argued that Pradyumna models, for Jain as much as for Brahminical authors, a total control over women and the powers they embody, only in two very different ways: in the Jain context this means a total resistance to woman and all that she embodies, and in the Brahminical, a total sexual appropriation bespeaking virility and masculine sexual power.

Introduction

This chapter presents to the reader the initial and rudimentary facts about Kṛṣṇa’s son Pradyumna, and offers a hypothesis on why this figure of Hindu mythology has been so poorly studied. This requires a review of the relationship between the monograph’s two most important sources—the Sanskrit Mahābhārata and its appendix, the Harivaṃśa. Brief synopses of the seven individual body chapters are provided, followed by an articulation of the two dominant thematic patterns discovered by the study: (a) an evolving cooperation in the mythology of Pradyumna between three aspects of his character—as an erotic figure (lover), master of illusory subterfuges (magician), and double of his father Kṛṣṇa (scion of the avatāra); and (b) the social and gender commitments that conspired to produce a masculine ideal of a mutually implicating sexual and violent power, each embodied as a mode of the other in the persona of Pradyumna.

Pradyumna-Kāmadeva in the Major Vaiṣṇava Purāṇas

Chapter 4 documents Pradyumna’s changing identity and significance in the context of the evolving Vaiṣṇava tradition, chiefly through an analysis of the abduction narrative as it is retold in the Viṣṇu, Bhāgavata, and Brahmavaivarta Purāṇas. Without radically changing the original Harivaṃśa scene, the sources reveal that three characteristics of Pradyumna have begun to emerge through a process of mutual fertilization: he is Kāmadeva, the handsome God of Love incarnate; he is a master of māyā or illusion; and he is a double of his father Kṛṣṇa. Important shifts in the meaning and role of bhakti (devotion) in Kṛṣṇa worship between the fifth and tenth centuries CE are identified as key factors underlying these developments. Particularly, Pradyumna’s identity as both the God of Love reborn and the double of Kṛṣṇa becomes hugely significant for the Bhāgavata Purāṇa, which is deeply invested in a theology of Kṛṣṇa as a magnetic object of desire.

Pradyumna in the Mahābhārata

This chapter introduces the earliest extant textual materials concerning Pradyumna in the Mahābhārata, and examines first the Saubhavadhaparvan of Book 3 and the club battle of the Vṛṣṇis in Book 16. In both of these episodes, Pradyumna doubles or stands in for his father in ways that prefigure later developments of the Pradyumna mythology. Second, the chapter pursues the connection between the physical evidence of the preceding chapter and the emerging Pāñcarātra movement as attested by the Mahābhārata’s Nārāyaṇīyaparvan. Finally and more broadly, certain patterns in the Mahābhārata’s discourses on sex and gender are introduced, which remain key reference points in all subsequent chapters. Most important here are a set of conflicting essentializations regarding the nature of women, and the ideological premises of the Mahābhārata’s universe that conduce to the association of sex with violence.

Conclusion

In this chapter, final reflections on the study are offered, which seek to articulate in comprehensive form the meaning and significance of the person of Pradyumna in Sanskrit literature. Kṛṣṇa’s son can first of all be understood as a figure produced by the cooperation and mutual shaping of three character dimensions: he is Kāmadeva, the handsome God of Love reborn; he is a controller of māyā, or magical illusions and subterfuges; and he is a double of his father Kṛṣṇa, a kind of avatāra of the avatāra. Second and more broadly, it is argued that, more than any other character of South Asian religious and literary culture, Pradyumna conspicuously actualizes a persisting male fantasy of a double and mutually implicating virility, announced through the erotic or kāmic conquest of the auspicious feminine and the resulting violent dharmic conquest of the demonic masculine.

A kāvya Casting for Pradyumna

The Pradyumnābhyudaya—a thirteenth-century Sanskrit play by King Ravivarman—is the focus of Chapter 7. This work, based directly on the Prabhāvatī episode of the late Harivaṃśa, appears to be the first Brahminical kāvya or courtly belles-lettristic work to make Pradyumna its protagonist. Of central importance is Ravivarman’s molding of the story into conformity with common standards and expectations for poetic expression in courtly writing. In particular it is argued that two conventions of the Sanskrit drama, the garbhāṅka or nested play, and the śleṣa or double-meaning verse form, become the means for an underscoring and sharpening the signature double love-and-war geste of Kṛṣṇa’s son. As such, the chapter argues that the recasting of the Prabhāvatī romance into belles-lettristic form, far from hijacking the figure of Pradyumna for new purposes, in fact powerfully restates the persisting appeal of the masculine sex-and-violence triumphalism fundamental to his mythic persona.

Pradyumna, the Vṛṣṇis, and the Bhāgavatas

Chapter 1 establishes the earliest evidence of Pradyumna’s presence and importance in the South Asian landscape, largely on the basis of physical materials from the period of circa 300 BCE–300 CE. These materials reveal a cult of devotion to certain heroes of the Vṛṣṇi clan—that is, the larger family group of Vāsudeva Kṛṣṇa associated with the Mathurā area in North-Central India. Those who venerated the Vṛṣṇi heroes referred to themselves as the Bhāgavatas, and the objects of their devotion included Vāsudeva (Kṛṣṇa), his brother Saṃkarṣaṇa, Vāsudeva's son Pradyumna, as well as other Vṛṣṇi figures. While a later sectarian development would fix upon a set of four particular Vṛṣṇi names, it is noted here that a number of figures appear in various configurations in the earliest phase of Bhāgavata devotion.