Dasa’s Childhood Among the Cowherds

Dasa’s childhood among the cowherds is the beginning of the Indian “Life” written by Joseph Knecht, a fictional autobiography set in another age and culture. A palace intrigue drives the young prince from his expected life into the hills, where he joins herdsmen and learns to live among the sacred cows. The episode gives Dasa a second childhood—one shaped by pastoral work and close attention to the natural world—and shows how the “Life” exercise lets its writer inhabit a different identity rather than merely describe the past.

A childhood invented across time

The episode belongs to one of three “Lives” Joseph Knecht composed during his years of free study. These were not illicit literary experiments like the poems he had written at Waldzell: they answered an official assignment for students who had not yet entered the Order. Each student was asked to write a fictional autobiography, choosing a past period and imagining a life within its culture and intellectual climate. Language specialists might write in the language and style of their chosen era; more broadly, the exercise required a student to try on a historical self.

The custom retained, in playful form, an echo of ancient Asian teaching about reincarnation and the transmigration of souls. It did not require belief in reincarnation as doctrine. Instead, it trained students to imagine themselves under different conditions and to regard the present self as a temporary form. Some students nevertheless invested their “Lives” with personal longing, presenting themselves as the people they wished to become. For Knecht, Dasa’s childhood therefore serves both as narrative and as a deliberate act of imaginative displacement: a Castalian student writes himself into a prince’s life in ancient India.

From palace danger to the cowherds

In the story, Dasa is the firstborn son of Ravana, a prince whose second wife wants her own son, Nala, to inherit the rulership. She works to estrange Dasa’s father from him and intends to remove the boy when the opportunity comes. Vasudeva, one of Ravana’s court Brahmans, discovers the plan. He feels sympathy for Dasa, whom he sees as sharing his mother’s piety and sense of justice, and watches over him until he can arrange for the child to be taken somewhere beyond his stepmother’s reach.

The opening comes through the royal herd’s ordinary movements. Ravana’s cows are dedicated to Brahma, and the herdsmen bring the palace butter while reporting signs of drought where the animals graze. They plan to drive the herd toward mountain pastures, where water and grass remain available even in dry times. Vasudeva trusts one of the herdsmen, a man he has known for years, and confides his plan to him. When Dasa disappears from the palace the next day, only the Brahman and the herdsman know what has happened. The herdsman takes the boy into the hills and joins him to the moving herd.

Dasa enters this new life willingly. He helps guard and drive the cows, learns to milk, and spends time with the calves. He becomes familiar with mountain meadows and woodland plants, including mango, wild fig, and varinga; he gathers lotus roots from forest pools and, on feast days, wears a wreath of flame-of-the-woods blossoms. The narrative makes the transition concrete through work, food, play, and seasonal routine: the prince’s identity gives way, for a time, to the life of a boy among herdsmen.

Learning the wilderness

The hills become not just a hiding place but Dasa’s formative world. He learns the habits of animals and how to avoid the tiger, while making companions of the mongoose and hedgehog. During the rainy season, the boys shelter in a makeshift hut, where they play games, recite verse, and weave baskets and reed mats. These repeated activities give his exile the texture of an upbringing rather than a brief escape: he learns the landscape and the customs of the people among whom he lives.

His past does not vanish entirely. Dasa does not completely forget his former home, but in time his palace life seems to him like a dream. That reversal is central to the episode: the life meant to be temporary becomes immediate and familiar, while the royal world from which he came loses its hold on his imagination. His childhood among the cowherds thus gives him an identity formed outside the court, even as the reader knows that the danger which brought him there began in a contest over inheritance.

Place within the Indian “Life”

The episode establishes a pattern that extends beyond Dasa’s childhood. The Indian “Life” begins with a prince displaced by dynastic ambition and placed among herdsmen; it will later follow Dasa through further changes of fortune and into a confrontation with the word “Maya.” At the outset, however, the story lets the pastoral years stand on their own: Dasa is protected by Vasudeva’s intervention, welcomed into the herdsmen’s daily work, and educated by direct participation in their world.

The episode also clarifies what the student “Lives” make possible. They let youth’s creative impulse find an authorized form, while turning historical study into imaginative participation. Dasa’s invented childhood is not presented as a recovered biography or a literal claim about a former existence. It is a crafted life in which Knecht can explore a different social position, culture, and set of experiences. The prince’s passage from palace threat to mountain childhood therefore carries two linked meanings: within the tale, it is an escape into safety; within the frame of the novel, it is an exercise in becoming someone other than oneself.