As the old legend tells it: Kali of Benares
The ox-driver legend as Ryder recorded it · Benares and Ujjain · 3 min read
He was a Brahmin's son, and he was six months old when both his parents died. An ox-driver took him in. So he grew up with the oxen, with no letters at all, and grew into the handsomest young man anyone on that road had seen.
In Benares there was a princess who was proud of one thing, her learning, and she had a rule.
"I will marry the man who defeats me in debate," she said, "and no one else."
Scholar after scholar came and went away smaller. Among them was her father's own counsellor, and he did not take it well. He went out to find a way to teach her a lesson, and on the road he found a young man sitting on the branch of a tree, sawing through the branch between himself and the trunk.
The counsellor watched him until the branch gave way. Then he helped him up.
"How would you like to marry a princess?" he said.
They dressed the ox-driver in a scholar's clothes and put a ring of learned men around him, and the counsellor gave him one instruction: say nothing. He was presented at the palace as a master so deep in thought that he had taken a vow of silence and spoke only by signs. The princess put her questions in signs, as the vow required. He answered with signs of his own. What he meant by them and what she took them to mean were two different things, and the learned men in the ring read each one aloud as a profound reply.
"He has answered what no one else could," she said. "I will marry him."
They went to the temple for the wedding, and in the temple stood an image of a bull. The ox-driver forgot the vow. He saw the bull and said what a man who has lived with cattle says when he sees a fine one, and the princess understood everything in one sentence. Ujjain, which claims him, tells it a little differently: the morning after, she found that her scholar could not read.
She was angry, and she had a right to be. He did not argue. He begged her, and in the end she gave him, instead of her forgiveness, a direction.
"Go to the goddess Kali," she said. "Ask her for learning. Ask her for poetry. Do not come back without them."
He went to her temple. In the old telling he prayed; in Ujjain's he did more than pray. He stood before the black goddess and offered her the one thing he owned.
"This tongue has done me nothing but harm," he said. "Take it. Cut it out, and let that be my offering."
The goddess answered him. She did not take the tongue. She filled it. Learning came into him, and words, and the gift that is beyond learning, the power to make a line that lasts; and he took a new name, Kalidasa, the servant of Kali, so that no one would ever hear his poems without hearing hers.
Ujjain says the temple was its own, the Gadhkalika, near the caves of Bhartrihari, and that the emperor Harshavardhana rebuilt it in the year 606. Students still go there before an examination and ask the goddess, quietly, for what she gave the ox-driver.
As Vasant Panchami tells it: the goddess at the river
Festival tradition · Bengal and the east · 2 min read
In the east the story belongs to a day, and the princess has a name: Vidyottama.
She had beaten every scholar who came to her, and she had said she would marry only a man cleverer than herself. The scholars she had shamed did not forgive her. They went looking for the biggest fool they could find, and found him in a tree, cutting off the branch he was sitting on, and presented him to her as a sage, and she took him.
When she learned what they had done she banished him from the palace.
He went out of the city in shame, with nowhere to go, and he made up his mind to end his life. Some tellings put him on a riverbank; some have the goddess come up out of the water itself. All of them agree on who came. It was Saraswati, in white, with the veena in her hands.
"Go into the river," she said, "and bathe."
He went in a fool. He came out with every word he would ever need, and the sense of how to put them in order, which is the harder gift. The man who climbed the bank was the poet, and the day it happened, the east says, was Vasant Panchami, the fifth of bright Magha, the day that is hers.
That is why people ask her for the same thing on that morning. Books, pens and pencils are laid in front of her image and not touched, and nobody studies that day. Small children are brought to write their first letters, their hand held in a bigger one, and the first word is often a single syllable, Om, enough to begin with. Yellow is worn, and whoever has a lesson to learn, a song to learn, a line that will not come, says her name first.