Svarāshṭra and Utpalāvatī

This is the narrative of King Svarāshṭra and his queen Utpalāvatī, as the Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa tells it in Chapter 71. It is the background to the fourth manvantara (the age ruled by one Manu). Svarāshṭra lived so long that he outlived all one hundred of his queens, all his ministers and all his friends. After he lost his kingdom, he went to the Vitastā river to do tapas (austerity). There he met Utpalāvatī, who had been born again as a doe. Through their tapas together, Svarāshṭra became the fourth Manu, Tāmasa Manu.

The gift of long life

Svarāshṭra was a king of great virtue and fame. Bhagavān Sūrya, the deva of the sun, gave him a vara (a boon) of very long life, far longer than any ordinary person can live. In the beginning this gift set him apart as one specially favoured.

But a life without end is not a happiness without end. As decades and centuries passed, Svarāshṭra watched everyone he loved leave the world. He had one hundred queens, each dear to him. One by one they grew old and died, until none was left. His ministers, who had ruled beside him, his counsellors, and the friends who had shared his days were all gone. The world filled with new faces and new generations while Svarāshṭra stayed on among strangers. The blessing of Bhagavān Sūrya had become a loneliness that nothing could cure.

Fall and renunciation

Time had taken his people. Then the rival king Vimarda took his kingdom. Vimarda marched against Svarāshṭra with his armies and won the kingdom from him by force. Svarāshṭra had already lost every bond of the heart. Now he lost his throne and his realm as well. He had no queen, no court, no kingdom and no friend.

Svarāshṭra turned away from the world of kings. He went to the holy banks of the Vitastā river and settled there. He began deep and hard tapas, giving up all attachment to what had been, and offered the rest of his life as austerity. The river and the forest were his only companions.

The flood and the doe

The monsoon came with rain of great force. The Vitastā, fed by the rain and by mountain streams, swelled far beyond its banks. The raging water reached the place where Svarāshṭra sat in tapas and swept him away. A king who had ruled for centuries was now helpless in the flood.

In the dark and the rush of the current, Svarāshṭra reached out and caught hold of the tail of a doe who was also caught in the flood. He held on. The doe carried him along as the two were swept down the river together.

Utpalāvatī is recognised

Then, in the darkness of the flood, the doe spoke. She told Svarāshṭra who she was. She was his own queen Utpalāvatī. She was not one of the hundred queens who had died over the long centuries. She was a queen he had known and loved, now born again in the form of a deer.

She had come to this birth through a śāpa (a curse) from her childhood. As a young girl, she had seen two deer mating and had laughed at them. A ṛshi (seer) who saw this cursed her to be born as a deer herself.

She had lived in that form ever since, a deer in the forests, unable to return to the human birth she had known, and parted from the husband she had left behind. Now, in a dark monsoon flood, in a river in spate, they had found each other.

Svarāshṭra heard every word and knew her. Her voice, her way of speaking, her memories of their life together, and every detail that only Utpalāvatī could know showed him that this doe was his queen. Joy rose in him, and grief rose with it. He was glad to find her and sad for the form she had been made to wear. Utpalāvatī wept in the same way, and her long parting from her husband ended in this sudden meeting.

Tapas together and the fourth manvantara

After they knew each other, Svarāshṭra did not leave Utpalāvatī in the forest and go back to his lonely tapas. They stayed together on the banks of the Vitastā and did austerities as one, the king and the doe, husband and wife in whatever form they had, joined in devotion and tapas on the holy riverbank.

The joint tapas they gathered in that time, together with the puṇya (merit) of Svarāshṭra’s long life of dharma, brought him to the highest station open to a mortal. His centuries of just rule, his patience in every loss and his tapas all counted. He was raised to the post of Manu. He became the fourth Manu of the present cycle, known as Tāmasa Manu. The age ruled in his name is the Tāmasa Manvantara.

Sources

• Mārkaṇḍeya Purāṇa, Chapter 71