Vali's Justice

Everyone is familiar with the story of the vanara Vali, who was famous for his might and valour in the Treta Yuga. Many believe that Vali’s story comes to end with his death at the hands of Lord Rama. However, before Vali dies, he raises questions of ethics and morality to Lord Rama, who answers his questions and grants him the boon that he’ll get justice for his unfair death too.

Krishna and Balrama witnessed the destruction of the Yadu clan; Image source- Wikimedia commons

The story of Vali’s justice begins after the end of the Kurukshetra war and can be found in the Stri Parva, the 11th book of Mahabharata. After the conclusion of the war, Lord Krishna visits Gandhari, who is grief-stricken at the loss of her sons and bemoans Krishna for his inaction as she believes he could’ve prevented the war between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. She curses Krishna that just as her family was destroyed by infighting, so would the clan of Krishna i.e. the Yadavas would be destroyed. Krishna who knew that with time Yadavas had grown insolent and unruly, accepts this curse.

The events further pertaining to this curse unfold in the Mausala Parva, the 16th book of Mahabharat and take place 36 years after the Kurukshetra war. Krishna’s empire of Dwarka is prosperous and the youth of the Yadu clan has grown mischievous and hedonistic. Once when great sages like Vishwamitra, Durvasa, Narada etc., visited Dwarka to meet Krishna, Samba thought of playing a prank on them. He dressed up as a pregnant woman and asked the sages to guess the gender of his child. One of the sages saw through this prank and angered by this humiliation, cursed Samba that he will give birth to an iron bolt that will destroy the entire race of the Yadavas.

The curse of the sage came true and the very next day Samba gave birth to an iron bolt. Afraid of Sage’s curse, Ugrasen one of the Yadava kings asks the club to be grounded in a paste and cast out into the Prabhas sea. However, with waves, these iron particles come to the shore and turned into Eraka grass.

Krishna advises the members of the Yadava clan to take a pilgrimage. On their way to the pilgrimage when they reach the shores of the Prabhas sea, they indulge in intoxication and merrymaking. Inebriated, an argument breaks out between Satyaki and Kirtivarman and in anger, they start hitting each other with the Eraka grass which is as hard as an iron club.

Soon the entire Yadu clan is destroyed and Krishan witnesses the destruction of his clans just as Gandhari’s curse foretold. Balrama leaves this realm through meditation, however, Krishna has yet to pay one last karmic debt, his debt to Vali.

When the particles of the iron bolt were cast out into a sea, one of the pieces were ingested by fish. This fish is later caught by Jara, a hunter and reincarnation of Vali in the Dwapar Yuga. Finding the iron particle to be sharp and sturdy, he fashions it into an arrowhead. After the destruction of the Yadavas and the ascension of Balrama, Krishna was meditating in a forest. At the same time, Jara was out hunting, and he mistakes the red mark in Krishna’s foot for a deer’s eye and shoots it, just as Lord Rama shot Vali from hiding. When Jara realises the mistakes he has made, Krishna comforts him and tells him how this is justice for the unfair means by which he as Lord Rama killed Jara in his previous life as Vali. After that Krishna ascends to his abode, fulfilling the karmic cycle.

Thus the interconnectedness of two great epics is not only evidence of a shared cultural paradigm but also how themes like karma, ethics and morality lie at the basis of all these epic stories, which seek to answer such complex questions of morality and philosophy by employing tales of sages, curses, gods and demons.

The sages cursed Samba when he played a prank on them dressed as a woman. Image source; Wikimedia commons