The Hundred Daughters of Kushanabha

The sage Vishvamitra was leading the young princes Rama and Lakshmana north to Mithila. On the bank of the river Sone they stopped for the night, and Rama asked whose country this was. Vishvamitra answered with the story of his own family.

There was once a king named Kusha, he said, a son of Brahma. Kusha had four sons, and each of them founded a city. The second son, Kushanabha, built the city of Mahodaya. By the heavenly nymph Ghritachi he had a hundred daughters, and every one of them was beautiful.

One day in the season of the rains the hundred girls went out to the palace garden. They sang and danced and played music, and their laughter carried a long way.

Vayu, the Wind, who goes everywhere, came through the garden and saw them. He stopped.

"I want all of you for my brides," he said. "Leave this mortal life behind. Youth does not last, and in humans it lasts least of all. Come with me and you will be young for ever. You will never die."

The girls looked at one another and laughed. They took it for a joke.

"Great Wind," they said, "you move inside every living thing. We know your power. Why then do you make fun of us? We are the daughters of Kushanabha. May the day never come when we pass over our truthful father and choose husbands for ourselves. He is our lord. The man he gives us to will be our husband."

Vayu had not been joking, and he was not used to being refused. Rage took hold of him. He sent a blast against the girls, every one, and bent them. Their backs were twisted and their limbs were crooked, and all their grace was gone.

They struggled back to the palace and fell on the floor before their father, weeping with shame.

"What is this?" cried the king. "Who has done this to you? Who has so little regard for what is right? Speak to me!"

The hundred girls touched their heads to his feet.

"It was the Wind, Father. He wished to marry us and would not wait. We told him, 'We have a father. We are not our own to give. Go and ask him for us.' He would not listen, and he struck us."

Kushanabha looked at them for a long time.

"Daughters," he said, "you did a great thing. All of you, with one mind, kept your patience and guarded the honour of this house. Forbearance like that is hard even for the gods. It is giving, it is truth, and it is sacrifice. The world itself rests on it."

He sent them to their rooms comforted. That same day he called his ministers and asked them where a husband could be found.

They found him in the city of Kampilya. His name was Brahmadatta, and he was a king born of a holy man's blessing. A sage named Chuli had once been served faithfully in his forest by a Gandharva maiden, Somada, and when he offered her a gift she asked for a son. The son was Brahmadatta.

Kushanabha gave him all hundred daughters. Brahmadatta took their hands one after another, as the marriage rite requires. And as he took each hand, the girl whose hand it was stood up straight. The crookedness left her and her beauty came back. By the end of the rite a hundred brides stood whole before their father.

But the name stayed with the city. Mahodaya has been called Kanyakubja ever since, the city of the crooked maidens.

"Later," said Vishvamitra, "a son was born to Kushanabha, named Gadhi. Gadhi was my father."

In the seventh century the Chinese monk Xuanzang came to Kanyakubja, then the greatest city of northern India. He asked how it had come by its odd name, and he wrote down what he was told. There is no wind in that story at all.

Long ago, the people said, the city was called Kusumapura, and its king was Brahmadatta. He had a thousand sons and a hundred daughters.

On the bank of the Ganga there lived a holy man who had sat in meditation for so many thousands of years that his body looked like a dead tree. Birds perched on him. One of them dropped a fig seed on his shoulder, and it grew into a great banyan that shaded him summer and winter. When he woke at last he would not pull it off, for fear of harming the nests. People called him the Great Tree Sage.

Walking by the river one day, he saw the king's daughters playing, and the wish for a wife rose in him. He went to the palace.

"I have lived in the forest for many years," he told the king. "Now I have seen your daughters. I have come to ask for one of them."

The king was afraid to say no. He asked his daughters one by one, and one by one they refused. He sat in misery until the youngest came to him.

"Father, you have a thousand sons, and the whole world obeys you. Why are you sad?"

He told her.

"Then send me," she said. "Let the fault be ours and not the kingdom's."

The king took her to the hermitage himself. But the sage looked at the child and was displeased.

"You despise my age, to bring me this little thing."

"I asked them all," said the king. "Only this one was willing."

The sage was furious, and he spoke a curse.

"Let the ninety-nine who refused me be bent this moment, and let no man in the world marry them."

The king sent a rider home at once. It had already happened. From that day the town was called the city of the hunchbacked women.