Two Harishchandras

Two very different stories about a king with the same name — one that unfolds on a Vedic sacrificial ground, and one that ends at a cremation ghat in Kashi — and the old rivalry standing behind both of them

One king, one name

Harishchandra was a king of the Ikshvaku line — the same line Rama would later be born into. In the Puranic genealogies his name sits a few generations above Sagara.

Two distinct narrative traditions are associated with Harishchandra. Treating them as small variations of one story is not right: the Aitareya Brahmana centres on a vow to Varuna and a son offered in sacrifice, while the Markandeya Purana centres on Vishvamitra's test and Harishchandra's commitment to truth. Later tradition, above all the Devi Bhagavata, brings the two into one long Harishchandra story.

The first story is the older one. It is found in the Aitareya Brahmana, a text that explains the procedures of Vedic sacrifices, dated to the Vedic layer of the first millennium BCE. In it Harishchandra is a father who vowed to give his own son to Varuna, and then kept trying to get out of it.

The second is the one everyone remembers. It is in the Markandeya Purana, and told at greater length still in the Devi Bhagavata — texts written centuries after the first story. In it Harishchandra is the king who gives up his kingdom, his wife, his son and his status rather than abandon truth, and ends up working as a cremation-ground servant to an outcaste in Kashi.

An assembly of birds

The Markandeya Purana tells the second story in an unusual setting. The sage Jaimini had four questions about the Mahabharata. The ones who answered him were four wise birds who lived on Mount Vindhya and had been brahmins in an earlier life.

The fourth question was about Draupadi's five sons: how, with the Pandavas and Krishna alive, were they killed the way they were, and why were they never married and left no children?

In answer, the birds told the story of Harishchandra. Within the Markandeya Purana this story does not begin on its own; it arrives as the answer to Jaimini's fourth question — and that is exactly how its thread reaches all the way into the Mahabharata.

Two sages

Behind this story stand two sages whose rivalry runs through the whole of Puranic literature: Vasishtha and Vishvamitra. Vasishtha is held to have been a brahmarshi by birth. Vishvamitra was a kshatriya king who became a sage through his own austerities.

In the Devi Bhagavata this rivalry becomes the direct cause of the story. It keeps both stories together, and tells Harishchandra's tale in two parts: first the old Shunahshepa story, in which Vishvamitra also appears, and then Vishvamitra's quarrel with Harishchandra, which runs from the loss of the kingdom to the cremation ground.

The whole story can also be read this way: an old argument between two sages, fought out on the body of a king.

Note: Harishchandra's older story is in the Aitareya Brahmana (7.13–18); the second, the one everyone knows, is in the Markandeya Purana (chapters seven and eight, sometimes nine as well) and told at greater length in the Devi Bhagavata (canto 7, chapters 14–27). These are two very different story threads; treating them as small variations of one story is not right — and this chapter has kept them apart. Within the Markandeya Purana this story is told by the birds in answer to Jaimini's fourth question; the Devi Bhagavata sets both stories in one continuous thread. This site has deliberately not repeated the passage at the end of the first story where the text names the peoples descended from Vishvamitra's cursed sons; readers can find it in the Aitareya Brahmana itself, and later readers have found this origin story uncomfortable. The story's dates are scholarly estimates. The English dialogue lines are flowing paraphrases of the Sanskrit verses, not word-for-word translations.

Source: from the Aitareya Brahmana, the Markandeya Purana and the Devi Bhagavata, Two Harishchandras