Akashvani: And So They Spoke

The city watched on in silent horror. He got out of his chariot and walked up to his sister. She joined her hands in surrender but it did no good.

He knocked her mukut off and held her by the hair, as she screamed in agony.

“Brother, no! I would never do something to hurt you, Kansa!”

But to no avail. If he couldn’t kill her, he would at least cage her, keep her under his nose. And who wouldn’t? Wouldn’t you want to stop the very cause of your death if you knew it to be so?

She would live in a dungeon with her husband and her kids would be his to deal with. He shuddered. The sister he loved so dearly would eventually be his doom.

How dare the skies tempt his fate this way? How dare his destiny be at the mercy of his own nephew? How could his ahankaar be thus crushed by the gods above?

Akashvani — simply put ‘the voice from the skies’ is a very simple phenomenon that one can observe in many stories of mythology. It usually involves a prediction or a message from the skies that usually acts as a pivotal turning point in the story.

It is seen as a powerful intervention from the gods to decide the destiny of a character or situation. One could also go to the extent of perceiving it as a tool in foreshadowing used by the author to hint at the climax of the story.

One can see it in the story of Krishna and how he, the eighth child of Devaki and Vasudev kills his uncle, Kans — as predicted by the akashvani. It is also part of the Ramayana where the very lifting of the bow that causes the marriage of Ram and Sita is spoken of by the skies above.

There are many other smaller instances of akashvani that help dictate the course of many different stories. People have come to believe that akashvani is a voice from an alternate dimension or cosmos. There are natural phenomena like thunder, lightning storms and shower of flowers that sometimes accompany an akashvani too. What story do you relate akashvani to?