Mahabharata – Arjun’s Bridge of Arrows – {Ep.264}

Today’s episode is a Mahabharata story featuring Prince Arjun and a construction problem – can he build a bridge of arrows across an ocean? And a monkey for quality control!

Namaskar and welcome to “Stories From India”. This is a podcast that will take you on a journey through the rich mythology, folklore and history of the Indian subcontinent. I am Narada Muni, the celestial storyteller and the original “time lord”. With my ability to travel through space and time, I can bring you fascinating stories from the past, the present, and the future. From the epic tales of the Mahabharata and Ramayana to the folktales of the Panchatantra to stories of Akbar-Birbal and Tenali Raman, I have a story for every occasion.

The purpose of the stories is neither to pass judgment nor to indoctrinate. My goal is only to share these stories with people who may not have heard them before and to make them more entertaining for those who have.

Today’s Story

In this episode, we’re going to do a story that is sort of from the Mahabharata.

And by sort of, I meant that it doesn’t feature in the canonical versions. But this is more of a folktale

If you haven’t heard previous Mahabharata episodes, that is totally fine. I’ll recap the only context you need. There were two sets of cousins, the Kauravas and the Pandavas, and the entire story revolves around a dispute about who got to be the next Emperor. Arjun was the  middle of 5 Pandava brothers. And he was the expert archer, the best of his time. And his teacher, Dronacharya, had worked hard to keep that so, including stifling the competition through extreme means – by literally forcing one of them to cut off his own thumb. The net result was that Arjun was indeed the expert archer of his time. He would use his bow and arrow for everything! For clipping his toenails, to turn on the TV, to turn off the candles, opening a soda can. You know, all the things that ordinary people wouldn’t dream of using archery skills for.

That’s all the context you need about the Mahabharata at least. But you need a bit of context about the Ramayana as well. The tl;dr is that Rama, the crown Prince of Ayodhya was in exile when his wife Sita was abducted by the evil King of Lanka. Rama got some help from the Vanars, including the greatest Vanar of all – Hanuman. With the Vanars help, Rama built a bridge across the ocean, killed Ravana, and rescued Sita.

There is one character who dominates both epics. And that is Vishnu. Vishnu is the preserver of the Universe. Together with Brahma the creator and Shiva the destroyer, the three of them form the holy trinity of Indian mythology.

Vishnu doesn’t appear as himself in either epic, but rather as his avatars. Vishnu is Ram. He’s also part of Ram’s three brothers, but he is Rama more than anyone else. And in the Mahabharata, Vishnu is Krishna. Krishna is Arjun’s bestie, the Pandavas’ cousin, and the one who provided them immense support in their battle.

So that’s all the context you need.

Let’s begin the story with Arjun. He was wandering the countryside. He wasn’t on holiday. Rather, this was exile time for him. For long and complicated reasons, he broke an oath. It was an absolutely silly oath in the first place, but that didn’t matter to Arjun’s elder brother Yudhishthir, who always insisted on following the letter of the law.

So Arjun made the most of it, by touring the country. He missed his wife Draupadi the most. He often wrote letters to her, and described his adventures. Arjun did end up marrying not one, not two but three other women on his travels. But you can bet he didn’t elaborate too much on Uloopi, Chitrangada, and Subhadra in his letters to Draupadi.

You might wonder where all Arjun went. Well, first he started in a spiral around Hastinapur. He visited one neighboring Kingdom after another. Truth be told, he would have liked to just stay the entire year of his exile in the very first Kingdom he visited.

And being a Prince of the much more powerful neighboring Kingdom his hosts had no choice but to let him in. But soon they found out he wasn’t the Crown Prince. He wasn’t even the brother of the current crown prince. Technically, because there were 101 Kaurava brothers, and there were two Pandavas older than Arjun, it meant he was 103rd in line. That’s when the conversation at the dinner table would invariably turn towards the excellent quality of street food in the next Kingdom over and the wonderful new road that led there. 

Arjun could take a hint as much as anyone. But he felt they were really pushing it when his hosts began slipping travel brochures into his newspaper. The final straw came in the form of the crossword clues(which they knew were Arjun’s favorite) that had references to the words road, hotel, ticket, mileage, tourist and many more.

So Arjun moved on to the next kingdom, and then the one after that and so on. And right now, months later, and after having married three Princesses, Arjun was visiting all historic places. Every location where something interesting had happened. Like the crematorium where Raja Vikram caught his Betaal again and again. Or the one where Narasimha emerged from the pillar and crushed Hiranyakashapu, or the one where Vali and Sugreeva had their epic fight. And now he was at the sight that he had been looking forward to most of all.

The place where Rama and the Vanars built the bridge across the ocean to Lanka. Arjun looked at the raging sea ahead of him, and the massive waves crashing against the remnants of the colossal stone bridge which was quite in ruins now. That is a sight that would have left an ordinary person awestruck.

But Arjun wasn’t ordinary. “Meh” is all he could say.

“You seem oddly unimpressed,” a voice spoke up from behind him.

Arjun, ever the cautious warrior, pulled his bow and arrow swiftly and aimed it at his interlocutor.

And then relaxed. This was no threat. It was just a monkey. Correction: An old monkey. Correction: A very, very old monkey. He was no threat, but more of a curiosity.

“You can talk!” Arjun said, with obvious surprise in his voice.

“Of course I can talk, why does that surprise you? You seem to have accepted the Ramayana as canon. Surely there are many monkeys in there that can talk and do much more.”

Yeah, but all those monkeys in the Ramayana had obviously been superheroes. Not frail and old like this one, Arjun thought, but did not say. Ordinary monkeys doing ordinary human things gave him Planet of the Apes scares. To sort of change the topic, Arjun asked why the monkey cared?

“I don’t really. You can be impressed or not. I just found it curious that every tourist who comes here to visit has a jaw dropping moment, and so far you’re the only exception here”

Arjun didn’t know what this monkey’s game was. Probably had some souvenirs to sell, since he said he’d been observing tourists. He’d get into a casual conversation, establish some sort of camaraderie and then boom – monkey business. Suddenly, the monkey would pull out a catalog and offer Arjun a Rama setu snow globe, or a shell necklace, or a miniature floating rock. If he wasn’t careful, he’d end up on the wrong end of the sale here. Arjun said, “Look I don’t mean to offend all of monkeykind. I know this was an engineering marvel for that time and day when this bridge was constructed, but it seems like such a waste of effort when there’s a much simpler way”

“A boat?” anticipated the monkey. But Arjun shook his head. “People jump to that conclusion, but boats are not practical when you need hundreds and thousands of them to transport all the Vanars across. You’d only do a small fraction at a time, and that would have allowed the Lankans to quickly crush whoever did make it. Not a practical way. And neither could they ask Hanuman to become Super-size and simply be the bridge from here to Lanka. Hanuman could certainly grow that large, but that might cause a tsunami somewhere else. Too much of a risk”

The Vanar nodded. “What then was your simpler, yet practical solution to this problem?”

“I can’t believe I have to spell it to you. Rama was the most skillful archer! He had more powerful and complex arrows than anyone can imagine. Why couldn’t he have simply created a network of arrows and formed them into a bridge?”

The monkey looked skeptical. “This is a howler!” he said, though he was clearly not laughing. “You actually believe that a bridge made of arrows could have transported the Vanar army across? You’re being ridiculous!”

That was all that Arjun could handle. He had to prove this insolent monkey wrong. And the only way was a quick demonstration. Before long, this monkey would be begging for Arjun’s forgiveness for having misjudged the incredibly powerful skill of archery. 

Arjun got out his bow, took three arrows, one was a multiplier, another a land seeking one, and the third was a spiral one. He integrated the arrows with a special spell and fired it in the direction of Lanka. It was a beautiful sight to see. The complex arrow spread out and increased in volume because of the multiplier function. Soon there was a solid bridge made of arrows that extended as far as the eye could see.

The monkey nodded, but didn’t seem all that impressed himself. “I’ll take your word for it, that it’s gone all the way to Lanka, and the bridge doesn’t just abruptly end in the middle of this ocean. But even then, this doesn’t seem like it might work at all. It’s such a narrow path, were the Vanars supposed to walk single file here? But that isn’t even the most problematic thing about this bridge. This is a very flimsy bridge. I bet it couldn’t even hold my weight, let alone that of the entire Vanar army”

Deeply offended, Arjun invited the monkey to walk across. The Monkey stepped forward to the shore and placed just his tail on the bridge. The entire bridge immediately collapsed.

Arjun turned a bright shade of red. “I must have missed adding some load bearing arrows at regular intervals. Sorry, let me give it another shot”

He didn’t wait for a go-ahead. He quickly integrated 4 arrows and then built another bridge. “Give it a try now, monkey. And if this bridge collapses, I swear I’ll jump into a fire!”

“Be careful what you wish for,” the monkey muttered. And then proceeded towards the bridge again. He put one foot on it, and the bridge held. Arjun smiled. But that immediately changed when the monkey stepped onto the bridge. It collapsed again. Luckily the old monkey managed to jump off of it. Arjun was thankful for that at least. He wasn’t sure that he would be able to swim.

Arjun couldn’t understand why this bridge had collapsed. He had put in enough load bearing support to be able to take the weight of a mountain. But he had given his word, and as Prince and representative of the most powerful empire in India, he could not simply go back on his word. He began collecting firewood. Pretty soon he had lit a massive fire going. He wrote his will, wrote a last letter to Draupadi, and then got ready to enter the fire.

Throughout all this the monkey was coolly observing all this from the side, unperturbed. 

Arjun got ready to step into the fire. But he was interrupted. Not by the monkey, but by a complete stranger.

“What’s going on here?” the stranger asked. He was a young man, who had a radiant aura about him, and a friendly face. A face that said, “I’ll help you with any problem you have”

Arjun and the monkey explained the story. The young stranger appeared skeptical. “First I’m not calling you liars, please understand that. But there might be a mistake here. Without a witness how can I believe that A) you could construct a bridge like that and B) that it couldn’t handle the monkey’s weight”

Arjun and the monkey both protested. Yes it had happened, they weren’t delusional or anything. 

But what they all agreed on was to provide a live demonstration, a reenactment if you will.

So Arjun took up his bow again, and made the bridge just as he had made it the second time. This time the small difference was that he was focused on something else. The last time had been all about the arrows and how to launch them. This time, his archery skills took a backseat, he was content to fire the arrows on muscle memory alone, maybe because he already knew the outcome. This time his thoughts dwelled on the stranger. Who was this guy? It reminded him strangely of Krishna. Yeah, he had just visited Krishna in Dwarka, and Krishna had the same calm peaceful expression of this stranger. Bring me any problem and I can help you. There might be a tornado carrying sharks and alligators that was headed their way, and Krishna would have remained calm. “It’s just a shark-nado-gator, we’ll get through this” he imagined Krishna saying. He wished Krishna were here, the guy was fantastic in any situation. 

He completed the bridge. Arjun knew it was going to collapse again. So he wasn’t really hoping for anything different here. And that’s why he was shocked when the bridge held. It didn’t budge even a bit, even when the monkey hopped on it. The monkey grew in size and became a giant. 

If you haven’t guessed it yet, the monkey was Hanuman. Hanuman jumped up and down, but the bridge helped. “Yup, this one’s good,” Hanuman said, nodding to the stranger. “I think he’s learned his lesson”

The stranger removed his disguise and then Arjun understood. It was Vishnu. Vishnu as Rama, Vishnu as Krishna, this was the preserver of the Universe.

And apparently he had learned some kind of a lesson. What was it? He wondered to himself. Always have a witness? Don’t make a reckless remark? Like jumping into a fire.

Vishnu seemed to have sensed his thoughts. “Don’t make a reckless remark, like being too judgmental of the past. Don’t overestimate your own abilities as an archer. You are remarkable, there is no question, but remember being the best archer doesn’t make you the best person”

Arjun bowed his head humbly and thanked the two of them for the lesson. That was something he was going to keep in mind for sure. He definitely relied on his bow and arrow after that, but after that he did use his fingers to open a soda can, and a nail clipper for his toenails.

He got more than just a lesson out of it. Hanuman promised to ride on the flag of Arjun’s chariot whenever he rode into battle. If Arjun had Krishna by his side, he really didn’t need any help. But every little bit might help. Sure Hanuman could by himself have simply crushed all of Arjun’s enemies, but that wouldn’t be very fair to the enemies, and it would only make Arjun more complacent. So he’d provide just a little bit of help to Arjun, a gentle nudge really everytime he looked up at the flag on his own chariot. 

That’s all for now

Some notes on the show

Like I said this isn’t an original Mahabharat story. This one was a later addition featuring the same characters. One variation of this story shows that Vishnu meant to humble both Arjun and Hanuman, but I don’t believe that version at all. Hanuman is already one of the most unselfish, one of the most humble characters in any of these stories. There just wasn’t any need at all.

The version where Hanuman and Vishnu had planned this together is a lot more believable.

Other Mahabharata Episodes are linked in the show notes and on the site sfipodcast.com if you want to check those out:

https://sfipodcast.com/category/mahabharata

That’s all for now. 

Next Time

In the next episode, we’ll do a folktale. This one is part of a collection of stories told by the 19th century Guru – Ramakrishna Paramhams. It features a scholar who tries to school an uneducated milkmaid, only to end up in the soup. Or rather, water.

Feedback

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The music is from Purple Planet.

Thanks for listening and I’ll see you next time!