The deepfakes of palace gossip

Did you read about the AI-generated video of a tiger drinking liquor, which led the police to issue a notice to the Instagram user who posted it? I was thinking about the trouble of figuring out the truth in this era of deepfakes, and so I remembered the story of Virabhuja.

Once upon a time, there lived a king called Virabhuja. He was a very noble man, and although he had a hundred wives, his chief queen, Gunavara, was dearer to him than all the others. Why did he have to marry the other ninety-nine then? Don’t ask me – I have no clue. Anyway, despite a hundred queens, no male progeny was forthcoming, and so Virabhuja had his physician called and requested some elixir to produce an heir to the throne. The physician agreed, but told him that he would require a wild goat. A goat was promptly brought from the forest, and the elixir was prepared with its meat. All the ninety-nine queens were eating the food with the special elixir, but Gunavara was missing because she was praying with the king. When she came to lunch, the meat was all finished.

The king was displeased. “The whole point of this was for Gunavara to bear me a son,” he said. There was no meat left, but the cooks produced the horns of the goat, and the physician, eager to placate the king, made an extra special elixir with the horns. All the queens gave birth to sons, but of course, Gunavara gave birth to an extra special son who came to be named Shringabhuja. Now the king became all the more partial to Gunavara, since Shringabhuja was the most obedient, handsome, and capable of all his sons.

The other queens, who were understandably less than pleased, decided to exact revenge on her by spreading the fake news that she had a dalliance with the guard of the women’s quarters. The king was suspicious about whether his loving wife and faithful guard would betray his trust, but he tried asking all his other queens about it, and they were all in agreement that Gunavara was cheating on the king. And so, the king decided to take some time away from the two. He told the guard that he had heard that the guard had killed a brahmin and sent him away on a long pilgrimage. The guard was surprised and denied the allegation, but had to go away. Meanwhile, the king told Gunavara that an astrologer had predicted the loss of his kingdom unless he cast her away in a dungeon and lived a life of chastity. The devoted wife, eager to protect her husband’s kingdom at any price, was only too willing to stay in a dungeon as long as necessary.

Meanwhile, the ninety-nine other sons of the king similarly conspired against Shringabhuja and had him sent away, too. At this point, the king’s suspicions heightened, and at night, he went to one of his wives who had initiated the conspiracy. He plied her with large quantities of wine without drinking any himself. Half-asleep and drunk, the wife murmured, delighted, “Would the king ever have visited me this way before, had we not made up those lies about Gunavara?” The king’s suspicions were immediately confirmed, and he had Gunavara released from the dungeon, and he reinstated the guard who had returned from his pilgrimage.

For a moment, forget Virabhuja, and forget the innocent guard and the queen who had to be punished needlessly, you might say. What’s with this goat-horn business to have sons? Aren’t we over these things in this day and age? In a country where some states have a sex ratio of less than 882 female births for a 1,000 males, I would say, wouldn’t it be great if we were?

(The writer is the author of How to Love in Sanskrit and likes writing new things about very old things.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.