Behula

Champaknagar’s richest merchant built his son a bedroom out of iron. No windows, no joins, no gap wide enough to take a blade, because an astrologer had told Chand Sadagar exactly how the boy would die and on which night. Vishwakarma himself did the work, which should have settled it. Somewhere in that black shell, no wider than a thumbnail, was the single hole the divine architect had been persuaded to leave.

The bride brought into that room had a horoscope of her own, and it said she could never be widowed. Two readings, flatly contradicting each other, and the wedding went ahead regardless. Behula was the daughter of a merchant of Ujaninagar, though the tellings cannot agree on his name or his town; some call him Sayven, some Saya, and one village recension puts her parents in a place called Madhuri and her father in the business of feeding sixteen hundred guests badly. Neither she nor the boy was quite what they appeared. Under a curse, Usha and Aniruddha had been sent down out of heaven to live as Behula and Lakhindar, and the whole arrangement was Manasa’s.

The quarrel behind it had been running for years. Manasa wanted worship, and specifically she wanted it from Chand Sadagar, because a merchant’s offering carried weight that a cowherd’s did not. Chand belonged to Shiva and had no intention of sharing. He called her a frog eater. He called her a one eyed hag with a face like a bottom feeding fish, and the poems put those insults in his mouth without softening them, because the goddess of snakes came up from the marshes and the sij hedges rather than down from any respectable heaven. She sank seven of his ships. She killed six of his sons. His wife Sanaka went on worshipping her quietly inside the house, which tells you what the marriage was like.

The iron room was the last argument he had. On the wedding night, in one of the oldest surviving village versions, the snake in the rafters made Lakhindar hungry rather than simply killing him in his sleep. He woke and asked his wife for rice. She told him she had no rice, no water and no fire in there. He pointed out that the wedding rice and the wedding water were sitting right beside them and that three coconuts would make a stove. The snake, helpful, suggested she burn her own clothing for fuel. So she squatted over three coconut shells in a sealed iron box in the dark and cooked her husband a meal, feeding her sari into the flame a strip at a time, and while she cooked she understood what was going to happen.

Kalnagini came through the hole drawn out as fine as a hair. Before she struck she is said to have run her tail through the oil of the lamp and drawn it along the parting of Behula’s hair, marking her as a widow while her husband was still breathing. Then she bit him. He cried out, Behula woke properly, and she threw the areca nutcracker at the snake as it went, cutting it half through. It made no difference at all.

The dead of snakebite are not burned in Bengal. They are laid on a raft and put on the water, on the chance that whatever took them might give them back. Chand’s household made up a float of banana trunk, laid Lakhindar on it, and pushed it out. Behula stepped on beside him and would not be argued off.

They were on the river for six months. The body did what bodies do in a hot wet country, and she stayed with it, and the villages she drifted past made up their minds about her early. Boatmen shouted. Children followed along the bank. She kept praying, and the only thing the goddess did in all that time was refuse to let the raft go under. That is a strange kind of mercy and the poems know it.

The raft finally grounded where a woman was beating wet cloth against a stone at the water’s edge. This is Neta, and the sources cannot place her: Manasa’s elder sister in one account, her foster mother in another, simply her attendant in a third, a washerwoman of the Dhopani caste in the scholarship. Whoever she was, she heard what Behula was still saying to herself after half a year of it, and took her up to the assembly of the gods.

There Behula danced. In the version most Bengalis know she went in disguised as a domni, a low caste dancing woman, and performed in front of Indra and Shiva and the whole court until they were on her side. The terms were simple and they were not generous. Her husband could have his life if she could deliver her father in law’s worship, and she agreed on the spot.

The repair was done by hand. Manasa gave the bones to the architect and he fitted them back together, ribcage and sinew and every nerve, using a coconut for the skull and the buds of the champa flower for the fingers. One little finger was missing. They never found it.

Behula went home with a living husband and a promise to keep, and Chand Sadagar, cornered by his own household, finally offered Manasa flowers. He did it with his left hand, the hand kept for unclean work, and he is generally shown looking somewhere else while he did it. It was enough. His six other sons stood up, his ships came back up out of the sea, and the goddess got what she had spent the entire poem chasing. Behula and Lakhindar eventually went back to being Usha and Aniruddha.

Something of it stayed on the ground. Two kilometres from the old citadel at Mahasthan in Bogra there is a mound the local people call Behula and Lakhindar’s bridal chamber, and when N. G. Majumdar dug it out between 1934 and 1936 he found a terraced plinth of 172 blind cells packed with earth, holding up a shrine of the sixth or seventh century with a Sena period temple built over it later, and a stone slab at the heart of it with a gold leaf showing a recumbent bull. It is a Shiva temple, which is nobody’s idea of a bedroom. The neighbouring mounds are named for Neta the washerwoman and for Chand’s house. Further west, in the Anga country around Bhagalpur, the same story runs every Shravan as the Bihula Bishari festival, painted in sequence on bamboo and paper boxes in the style called Manjusha, and in the Bengali villages the goddess is sent away at the end of her worship on a little float of shola pith set on a banana leaf, which is the raft again, smaller.

What Behula has is nothing. No weapon, no lineage that helps her, no power over the snakes that killed her husband, and no way to make Chand Sadagar kneel except by going through his fear of losing the last son he has. She cannot raise Lakhindar herself; she can only ask, and she has to reach the right room to do it. What she has instead is refusal, and half a year of it in the company of a body. The gods bargain with her because she leaves them nothing else to do.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Behula?

Behula is the human heroine of the Manasamangal, a cycle of Bengali devotional poems written between the thirteenth and eighteenth centuries in honour of the snake goddess Manasa. She is the bride of Lakhindar, the youngest son of the merchant Chand Sadagar, and the story turns on her refusal to accept her husband’s death on their wedding night. She is remembered in Bengal, Assam and the Anga region of Bihar, where her name is given as Bihula.

How did Lakhindar die?

Lakhindar was killed by a snake on his wedding night, inside an iron chamber his father had built specifically to prevent it. The goddess Manasa persuaded the divine architect Vishwakarma to leave one small hole in the structure, and the serpent Kalnagini went through it drawn out as thin as a hair. Behula threw a nutcracker at the snake as it escaped, but her husband was already dying.

Why did Manasa kill Chand Sadagar’s sons?

Manasa wanted Chand Sadagar to worship her, and he refused, because he was a devotee of Shiva and did not accept her as a goddess at all. To force him, she destroyed seven of his trading ships and killed six of his sons before Lakhindar. In the poems Chand insults her repeatedly as a one eyed frog eater, which reflects Manasa’s origin as a village and marshland deity rather than an established figure of the Hindu pantheon.

What happened on Behula’s raft journey?

Because the dead of snakebite are set adrift rather than cremated in Bengal, Lakhindar’s body was placed on a raft of banana trunk, and Behula insisted on travelling with it. They drifted for six months while the corpse decayed and the villages they passed took her for a madwoman. The raft finally landed where Neta, a washerwoman connected to Manasa, was working, and Neta carried Behula up to the court of the gods.

Is Behula’s bridal chamber a real place?

There is a real mound at Gokul near Mahasthan in Bogra, Bangladesh, that local tradition calls Behula and Lakhindar’s bridal chamber. Excavations by N. G. Majumdar in 1934 to 1936 showed it to be a terraced plinth of 172 blind cells supporting a shrine of the sixth or seventh century, with a Shiva temple built above it in the Sena period. The building is genuine and old, but it was never a bedroom.

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