Topical is the way to go, for topicality can get you a Booker prize! So here goes.
It’s the major festive season of the year now. Down south (and in the Bengal) Dasara and Deepavali celebrate female power, female gods. For me this is also the time when relatives, close and distant, renew their efforts to dilute my irreverence — “for there are female gods you can worship, you see!”
But look at the pantheon of goddesses that Hindu India worships — Sita, Durga, Saraswathi, Lakshmi. . . . Women whose status derives as much from their being wives of powerful male gods as from their own achievements. I’m not about to anachronistically deconstruct these mythical women/godesses — after all, they were “created” and deified at a time when women were defined in terms of the men in their lives. Today we can choose not to revere them, so I see little point in castigating them.
What intrigues me is that among these mythical/divine ideal wives, some have become more powerful and popular than others. And some stories have gone untold. Take Yashodhara — the wife of the the Buddha. Why is there no cult around her? OK, forget the deification. Why doesn’t she even figure in our collective memory — myths and legends?
In an age when a woman’s status hinged entirely on her husband, what could being deserted have meant to her? How did she cope? What was her story? Why is she not cited as an example of female strength?
There are some stories about her. (Yes, I’ve been researching!) Apparently she chose to follow the rigorous austerity that the Buddha practiced in the first six years of his quest for enlightenment; and refused to let the child in her womb (conceived on the night Siddhartha left her) grow. Consequently she had to endure accusations of infidelity when Rahul was born six years later. There is also a story that years later the Buddha came back to see her. And that she joined the order of his monks. What would she have said to him?
There’s a poem on her by Maithili Sharan Gupt: Sakhi veh mujhse keh kar jaate, which you can read here. It’s a beautiful rendition of Yashodhara’s anguish: she wonders why Siddhartha did not tell her before he left. And I see subtle, ironic indictment of a woman’s lot in the lines where Yashodhara says that she would not have stopped Siddhartha, that like all good wives who willingly sent their men to the wars, she would have let him go.
I’d like to think that Yashodhara was a strong woman, too. And that maybe her voice is not heard enough because she speaks a discomfiting story. Much as I admire the Buddha’s rational attempt to understand human suffering, for me he is also a man who left his wife without so much as a by-your-leave.
Maithili Sharan Gupt wrote another fascinating epic — Saket (which I’m struggling to read with the help of a charming young colleague from the Hindi Department). In Saket you hear another voice silenced by our selective amnesia — Urmilla, Lakshmana’s wife. And she speaks of life in Ayodhya sans Rama and Lakshmana: a little known part of the Ramayana and a perfect example of alternate histories. While plenty has now been written about Sita’s victimization and Rama’s patriarchal role in it, what of Urmilla? Why are there few stories about her? Amidst the glorification of the “ideal son”, the “ideal brother” and the “ideal wife” (who accompanies her husband), what does Urmilla’s story mean?
Yashodhara, Urmilla … forgotten women on the male road to salvation and greatness. Their stories were different from those of the devoted, suffering, self-sacrificing wife. What accounts for their relative obscurity? Is it because separated women — whether by choice or by force — are not ideals that Hindu India is comfortable with?
Speaking of voices — the number of lurkers on this blog has been steadily increasing. Who are these people who come here regularly, (syndicated readers too, mind you) read and go away without a word? More voices I’ll never hear I guess.
Damn. I don’t hear voices.
Smoke Screen 