This article analyses the character of the demon found in the Sanskrit Bhadrakālīmāhātmya. This regional Purāṇic text, pertaining to the narrative tradition of the Dārikavadham from Kerala, adopts a specific stance with regard to its main antagonist, the asura king Dārika. While the Bhadrakālīmāhātmya eagerly engages with various Mahāpurāṇas such as the Liṅga and the Mārkaṇḍeya, the demon that it depicts contrasts with the rather rigid image set out by his counterparts in those texts. Instead, the demon's character is carefully drawn and led through an array of emotional states in a way that tempts the audience to empathize. In this article, I explore this strategic empathy. Perusing the narratives of the Bhadrakālīmāhātmya, I identify passages that are activated by strategies of affect and show how they construct the character of the demon. In the second part of the article, I attempt to unravel the motives for this alternative view of the demon, relying on frameworks stemming from contemporary studies of narrative empathy and classical Indian theories of aesthetics.
The asura’s demise at the hands of the goddess is a theme frequently revisited in Hindu myth. It is the chronicle of a death foretold. So too is the Bhadrakāḷīmāhātmya, a sixteenth century regional purāṇa from Kerala, that narrates the tale of fierce goddess Bhadrakāḷī and her predestined triumph over asura king Dārika. Violence is ubiquitous in this narrative, which was designed with one goal in mind: glorifying the ultimate act of defeating the asura enemy. In its course the story exhibits many kinds of violence: self-harm, cosmic warfare, murder, etc. This paper argues that (1) violence comes to serve as a structural aspect in the text. Reappearing consistently at key moments in the narrative, violence both frames and structures the goddess’s tale. Yet, it is not only the violent act that dominates, it is its accompaniment by equal acts of regeneration that dictates the flow of the narrative, creating a pulsating course of endings and beginnings; (2) these cycles, that strategically occur throughout the narrative, come to serve as a Leitmotif referring to the cyclic tandem of destruction and regeneration that has dominated post-Vedic Hindu myth in many forms. The pulsating dynamic of death and revival thus becomes a specific narrative design that aims to embed the regional goddess within a grander framework of Time.
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