HV 48.2
षड्गर्भान् निःसृतान् कंसस् ताञ् जघान शिलातले । आपन्नं सप्तमं गर्भं सा निनायाथ रोहिणीम् ॥
ṣaḍgarbhān niḥsṛtān kaṃsas tāñ jaghāna śilātale | āpannaṃ saptamaṃ garbhaṃ sā nināyātha rohiṇīm
The six children as they emerged, Kaṃsa killed on the stone floor. The seventh, when it was taken up, she (Yoganidrā) carried to Rohiṇī.
The Living Words
*Ṣaḍ-garbhān*, 'six wombs-worth', names a scale of loss that will sit, unanswered, across the rest of the chapter. *Kaṃsas tāñ jaghāna śilātale*: Kaṃsa dashes them on the stone. The Harivaṃśa does not avert its eye. And then, in the next half-line, the quieter counter-movement begins: *saptamaṃ garbhaṃ sā nināyātha rohiṇīm*, 'the seventh she carried to Rohiṇī.' The pronoun *sā* — 'she' — refers to Yoganidrā. The rescuing goddess has already begun her work. While the tyrant's violence continues visibly, the divine rearrangement is moving in a different register.
The Heart of It
The Harivaṃśa's refusal to pretend the six children were saved is the hardest moral signature of the Viṣṇu-parva. The god does not prevent all harm. The god arranges a response that exceeds the harm. The reader who comes to this scripture wanting bhakti to guarantee that nothing terrible will happen is corrected here. Six infants die. The seventh is moved. The eighth is the Lord himself. Jñāneśvar's opening promise in the Haripāṭh — that a single moment at God's door is enough for all four liberations — is the promise of a god who does not promise that no child will die. The two halves of bhakti sit together in this verse: grief that is real, arrangement that is larger.