The Berries Shabari Tasted

Shabari was a woman of the forest people, the Bhils. Long ago, the tellers say, she ran away from her home on the night before her wedding, because she could not bear to see the animals that were to be killed for the feast. She went deep into the forest and came to the hermitage of the sage Matanga, near the lake of Pampa.

The sages did not want her at first, since she was not of their kind. So she served them without being asked. Before dawn every morning she swept the path to the lake so that no thorn would hurt their feet, and carried firewood to their huts, and they never saw who did it. When at last they found out, Matanga let her stay.

Years went by. Matanga grew old, and the time came for him to leave his body. Shabari wept. "Who will I serve when you are gone?" she said.

"Wait here," said Matanga. "One day Rama will come to this hermitage. Serve him, and then you can follow us."

So she waited. Every morning she swept the path and scattered flowers on it. Every day she went into the forest and gathered fruit for him, in case he came that day. The years went on, her hair turned white and her back bent, and every day she said, "He will come today."

And one day he came. Two young men walked up the path in bark clothes, with bows on their shoulders. One was dark, and Shabari knew him at once. She ran out with her stick and fell at his feet.

"I have waited so long," she said. "Sit down. I have fruit for you."

She had gathered wild berries, ber, and she wanted to give him only the sweet ones. So she took each one, bit it to taste it, and if it was sweet she put it in his hand, and if it was sour she threw it away.

Lakshmana watched with disgust. "Brother, she is giving you fruit she has bitten," he said quietly. "It is not fit to eat."

Rama ate every berry she gave him. "I have eaten at the tables of kings," he said, "and I have never eaten anything as sweet as these."

Then she told them where to go. "Go to the hill of Rishyamuka," she said. "Sugriva the monkey lives there. He will help you find your wife."

In the Dangs of southern Gujarat, at Shabari Dham near the village of Subir, the forest people say this happened among their hills, and they keep three stones in the temple there on which Rama, Lakshmana and Shabari are said to have sat. The tradition there holds that Rama came to Shabari on the day of Vasant Panchami, and the day is kept with her.

Valmiki tells the meeting more simply. The dying Kabandha told Rama and Lakshmana to go west to the lake of Pampa, where the hermitage of Matanga stood and an old woman ascetic named Shabari still lived. The sages she had served had gone to heaven long ago, and she had stayed behind, as they told her, to see Rama.

When the brothers came, she rose and bowed to them, and washed their feet, and gave them water. Rama asked whether her penance had gone well, whether she had mastered her anger and her hunger, and whether her service of her teachers had borne fruit. "It has borne fruit today," she said, "now that I have seen you." She told him that her teachers had gone up to heaven in shining chariots on the day he came to Chitrakuta. "They told me you would come to this holy place," she said. "I have gathered for you all the forest fruits that grow by the Pampa."

She showed them round the hermitage: the altar where the sages had worshipped, the flowers their hands had placed there, which had not withered, and the seven seas the sages had called to the place so they need not go to bathe. Rama was moved, and praised her.

Then Shabari asked his leave to go after her teachers. She lit a fire, entered it, and rose out of it in a shining body, and went up to the place where the sages had gone. In Valmiki's telling there are no bitten berries. There is only the fruit she had kept for him, and the waiting.