Ramayana Simplified: Part 23: Parashurama’s Kshatriya Nigraha (Killing of Kshatriyas)
The ruler Karthaveeryarjuna was ruling the kingdom when the feud between the Heihaya and Bhargavas was at its peak. Once in the midst of hunting, King Karthaveeryarjuna came to Maharishi Jamadagni’s house. His wife welcomed the king and his army and gave them food. The king was surprised and asked how she was able to make food for such a large number of people. She said that it was because of the presence of the holy cow Kamadhenu’s calf, which gave anything as requested. King Karthaveeryarjuna said he wanted to get the cow and thus he forcefully took away the cow to his capital Mahishmati. Parashurama came to know about this. Thus he went to Mahishmati, attacked the army men, and took back the holy cow. King Karthaveeryarjuna and his son Shoorasena, on knowing this, went with their army to Parashurama’s ashram and Shoorasena killed Maharishi Jamadagni. Parashurama found that his father was killed. His mother jumped to his funeral pyre (Note that this was not Sati). Parshurama, as an act of revenge, thus decided to kill the Heiheyas.
King Karthaveeryarjuna and his army came ready to have a war with Parashurama, but the army men found it very difficult to fight against Parashurama due to his powerful Vaishnava Chapa and his ax (Parashu). He killed King Karthaveeryarjuna and his son, but still, his anger knew no bounds and thus he traveled across the kingdom twenty-one times and killed all the Kshatriyas. He took these lands and handed them over to the class of learned people (Brahmanas). He then went to Mahendragiri for his tapas.
Questions
Why did Parashurama kill so many Kshatriyas when he just had to kill Karthaveeryarjuna and his son for taking revenge over his father’s death?
As mentioned in one of the chapters, every avatar takes its birth when adharma begins to increase. The aim of the avatar is to wipe out adharma and restore dharma. Here, we must note that during that time, Kshatriyas who were the ruling class were completely involved in corruption and also got involved in all kinds of adharmic activities. So, Parashurama had to kill these Kshatriyas to restore dharma. Even now, we normally don’t encourage a government to come to power if it gets involved in a lot of corruption. Through the process of democratic elections in India, we are given an opportunity to push away the existing government if it is involved in corruption. We also have embraced a lot of movies whose core theme was to wipe out corruption. So, this is what exactly Parashurama did, to wipe out corruption from the kingdom.
Few Insights…
Here it is important to analyze the behavior of King Karthaveeryarjuna. His army was well fed by Renuka, Maharishi Jamadagni’s wife but the King Karthaverryarjuna didn’t show a drop of gratitude for that and also took away the holy cow forcefully without even asking, and when Parashurama came to take back the cow which was theirs, his father Maharishi Jamadagni got killed in the counterattack which was organized by the king. So, the extent of dictatorship and adharma can be read out from that.
Recently, I saw a spurious claim which said Parashurama was a brutal murderer who even killed pregnant Kshatriya women because of the reason that the baby would be a Kshatriya. Readers should note that there is no such reference to show this. ‘Kshatriyas’ here should be taken as the ruling class of politicians and not as a caste or Kshatriyas by birth.
