The Seven Bulls

Nagnajit, king of Kosala, kept seven bulls. They were enormous and vicious, with sharp horns, and they could not bear even the smell of a man. The king had a daughter, Satya, also called Nagnajiti after her father, and he had made a vow about her.

"My daughter will marry the man who tames my seven bulls," he said. "No one else."

Princes came from every kingdom to try. They went into the bulls' pen one by one, and the bulls tossed them and broke their bones, and they were carried home on litters. After a while nobody came.

Then Krishna heard of it, and drove to Kosala with a great following. The king came out to meet him, seated him on a throne and worshipped him, and Satya, watching from the palace, fell in love at once. "If I have kept my vows," she prayed, "let him be my husband."

Krishna asked the king for her hand. The king was delighted, and embarrassed. "Who could be a better husband for my daughter than you?" he said. "But I made a vow before you came, to test the strength of the men who wanted her. Seven bulls, wild and untamed, have broken the arms and legs of many princes. If you can tame them, she is yours."

Krishna tightened his belt and went into the pen. There he made himself into seven Krishnas, one for each bull, and each of them caught a bull and threw a rope through its nose. The bulls, which had broken so many princes, were tied up as easily as children tie up goats, and their pride was gone. Krishna dragged all seven out on the ropes, like a boy dragging toys.

"Victory!" shouted the people of Kosala. The king gave Krishna his daughter with joy, and with her a dowry of ten thousand cows, nine thousand elephants, chariots and horses and servants without number.

The princes who had failed were waiting on the road home. They had been beaten by the bulls, and now they meant to take the girl by force. Krishna's friend Arjuna was riding with him, and he drew his bow and scattered them, the way a lion scatters smaller animals. Then Krishna brought Satya to Dwaraka, and they were married there, and the city made a festival for her.

In Dwaraka, years later, she told the story herself to Draupadi. "My father set those bulls to test the princes," she said, "and they broke the princes. But for him they were playthings."

In the Tamil country Krishna's bride is not a princess of Kosala. She is Nappinnai, a cowherd girl, the daughter of Yashoda's brother, and so Krishna's own cousin. Her father kept seven bulls, and in the cowherd villages of the Tamils a girl went to the young man who could hold a charging bull.

Nammalvar, the poet saint, sings of Krishna who "tamed all at once the seven bulls for the sake of Pinnai of the fine shoulders". Later commentators added that the seven bulls were seven demons, the sons of Kalanemi, born again to kill Krishna, and that he took seven forms to fight them at once.

Andal's Thiruppavai, sung every morning of the month of Margazhi, wakes Nappinnai in three of its verses. The girls of the village stand at her door before dawn. "Nappinnai, daughter-in-law of Nandagopa, whose hair smells of flowers," they sing, "open the door." They ask her to wake her husband for them, the one who sleeps beside her on the ivory bed.

The Silappatikaram, the old Tamil epic, gives the cowherd women a dance, the Kuravai. Seven girls hold hands and dance in a ring and sing a bull to each girl: "To him who leaps on the black bull, this girl with flowers in her hair. To him who holds the bull with the red forehead, this girl with golden bangles." It is the dance, they say, that Krishna and Balarama once danced with Nappinnai in Ayarpadi, the cowherd village.